Over 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.
Fatherhood
Add new tag, family, gender equality, parental relationships, USA, work
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