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Thoughts on the future of gender equality (1)

September 5th, 2009
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imagesOver the next few weeks I will reflect on the future of the campaign to achieve equal pay for men and women and I want to relate this directly to the needs of children.  Unequal pay is not good for children - it restricts how their parents can look after them and it presents boys and girls with different future opportunities, irrespective of the effort they have invested in their education and training.  The decades long campaign has fallen into a rut, with pay becoming more unequal since 2007, despite years of effort and high level Government commitment.   I will consider why this has happened and what must be different in the future to restart progress.

The Equal Opportunities Commission examined the pay gap and determined that the main cause (not the only cause, but by far the biggest) is the unequal sharing of caring roles between women and men.  There has been a revolution in the expectations in how roles will be shared, but the reality has been much slower: disillusionment within families and in the public domain between aspirations and realities is a sign of our times.   The focus of this disillusionment is the amount of caring and domestic work that working fathers actually do, compared to what they are now expected to do.

There has been no analysis in UK about what makes sharing of caring roles possible within individual families.  The best material is on the Equally Shared Parenting website in USA and they are producing a book next January based on interviews with 50 couples in US who are striving for a real sharing of roles.  Some essential ingredients have immediately emerged:

  • Both parents must actively let go of their own traditional ‘primary’ earning or caring role and let the other in; this can be more difficult than stepping up to the non-traditional role.
  • Sharing is obstructed by external factors, particularly how work is structured and paid.

The key to understanding the dynamic of a family is interdependence - the role of each parent is defined by the other.  Where families are happy with the balance they have achieved, they have achieved it through the active dedication of both mother and father.  Trying to fix things for one parent without engaging with the situation of the other will achieve only very limited success.

Such interdependence exists externally to individual families also.  If it is the norm for women alone to look after children, then men will be free to and expected to commit time to work that no person with caring responsibilities could, so creating a two-tier workforce that imposes itself on everyone.

My basic proposition is that policies to tackle these problems must be achieved by active partnership between women and men - women and men managing workplaces and women and men in politics.  This is not how the current campaign for equal pay is configured, not even remotely.  I believe this is why the campaign has fallen on hard times.

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    Couples who share care of children do so without even thinking that what they are doing is sharing care. What they are doing is being mum and dad in an easy and unconscious way. They are able to do this because they have between them, been able to address the anxieties and issues around their gendered identity and have overcome them. Those couples who do this, in a relaxed and manner however, are likely to be those who do not have to engage with structures and agencies outside of the home such as employers, the welfare benefits system etc. All of these agencies act to reinforce gendered ideas about who cares and who provides for children.

    I believe that the block that you are looking for is the gendered assumptions that we all still live with in the UK. Despite years of efforts to liberate women from the role of carer, the pressure to care and to be seen to care for women is immense. Conversely, the pressure to earn the money and provide for the family, continues to constrain and confine men, both in real terms and psychologically, to that of the role of bread winner. These gendered messages pervade every aspect of our world, from the magazines for boys and girls (take a quick look next time you pass the news stand, the pink and fluffy ones are for the girls and the ones about taking things apart or building things are for the boys) to the provision for leave on the birth of a baby.

    Our Family Policy and the way that we formulate support for parents is also steeply gendered in that it lacks any analysis of the outcomes it seeks to deliver. Put simply, we continue to frame policy and practice around the family based upon the assumption that mothers are natural carers and fathers natural providers.

    The original women's liberation movement sought to free women and men from the strait jacket of gender roles so that they were free to make choices about how they took up caring and providing roles in family life. Somewhere along the line this got translated into women succeeding in a man's world and the focus turned to enabling women to continue to care as well as succeed outside of the home. Which is why the question of childcare is so central to ongoing debates about women's economic wellbeing and the arguments around child poverty.

    My vision for the world is for every couple to achieve the kind of partnership that Suzie's stepson and his wife have succeeded in creating. For that to happen either everyone must go freelance or we must work to liberate politicians and practitioners from their gendered views of the world.

    Its not rocket science, these outcomes are being achieved every day in other EU countries, where there is far less family separation, teenage pregnancy or other symptoms of crisis in community that we experience here in the UK.

    Its time for a change, I don't want another generation of children to grow up within the confines of ideals that properly belong to the last century. Perhaps with a change of government and the opportunity to help shape new family policies, we can push this project forward. I believe, as you do, that the power to create long lasting change lies in the hands of men and women working together for the creation of a world that is better, not for one or the other but for us all and for our children.
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    Amen to that! The thing that really intrigues me is how come we ended up in the UK with the biggest difference in leave entitlements between women and men in the world - 2 weeks versus 39 weeks, and the 2 weeks badly paid on top of everything. What kind of politics delivered such a thing? Also, why has no-one ever asked how couples who do share care actually manage it? If we are so concerned about who does what in the home, why don't we ask the obvious questions? I think deep down somewhere there is a block, and I would like to find out what it is, so that we can dismantle it.
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    You have to begin at the beginning - by not only offering equal parental leave immediately before and after the birth of a child, but encouraging it to be not just an aspiration but an expectation in our society. This has practical effects on how men and women are viewed in the market place and, far more important, it builds bonds between father and child. Take my stepson. He managed to schedule leave from work - at the time, in further education - so he had far more than the measly, weasly two weeks when his daughter was born. He hated going back to work after that - he really enjoyed having significant time with her but at least had more time than many, thanks to his profession. But at the end of a year's maternity leave, his wife went back to work and he went freelance; in reality, he assumed full time care of their child. She's now at nursery and they swap care - his wife works around the child's needs as does he. Theirs is a totally equal relationship in which everyone gains - both parents and the child. And society as a whole - a strong, happy family enriches us all. I strongly believe that if more men had the opportunity to spend significant time with their children in the early years, you'd end up with not only happier families but a far more equal and happy society.
 

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