Duncan Fisher

My last post was about the FAMILIES who protested for better maternity services in London at the weekend. I took lots of photos, particularly of the men. This is the headline in The Independent. A different picture entirely.

My family once arranged a family photo and the photographer asked me to hand the baby to Clare “because it does not look right” with me holding the baby.

Does it matter that editors and photographers change the reality and tell a lie? So what if men who care for children are airbrushed out of the picture “because it does not look right”? Is not the important thing that they are doing it?

I think it does matter. Because a false picture underpins inadequate policies and services. There are striking statistics from the former Equal Opportunities Commission about how much more caring of children is shared these days. But people don’t believe these statistics - “they don’t look right”. And so policies and institutions remain unchanged. This affects the vulnerable families much more than the well-resourced, because it is the vulnerable who need services more.

It also matters in families. When one parent, the mother, finds that her role as a parent is persistently elevated and impossibly idealised, whilst the other sees that his role is persistently unrepresented, it has an impact on family dynamics. Take a debate about parenting methods between a mother and father - in most couples both parents will feel the mother is more entitled to assert an opinion than the father.

The new debate about families is all about relationships. This is good because a relationship implies more than one person; the word itself changes the picture. But to understand relationships, we still need to understand how differently messages are conveyed to mothers and fathers and how much this affects how they see themselves and each other and how they negotiate with each other.

Personal family, Fatherhood, gender equality, media, motherhood, parental relationships, parenting

One of the first things I noticed when going out with our new puppy, Lottie, is how people respond to her just like they do to a baby.  But with one big difference – boys and men respond just as much as girls and women.  I was quite taken aback by a teenage boy describing Lottie as “adorable” in front of his peers.  Only girls and women respond in public to human babies in this way.

I had occasion to reflect on this further during last week’s Horizon on BBC2, which was about the human-dog relationship.  I learned that dogs, unlike any other animal, look at and read our faces (like babies do), and that we have bred dogs to select for characteristics that we find childlike or “cute”.  Dogs trigger in us the same hormonal changes that babies do, for example, a cuddle with a dog stimulates oxytocin in both human and dog.  The idea is that we have bred dogs as pets in response to our instinct to nurture.

The Horizon programme described this, but something very odd suddenly happened.  Having presented oxytocin as a hormone that increases in mothers - with no mention of men, in whom oxytocin also rises when handling a baby - suddenly all the dog-owners presented on camera were women.  Male dog owners simply disappeared the moment there was a comparison between our nurture of babies and our nurture of dogs.  This resulted in a short but bizarre episode of stereotyping the love of dogs as a female activity, completely in contrast to the normal narrative about dog-loving, which, if anything, goes the other way – “one man and his dog”.

That led me back to the teenage boy who described Lottie as adorable.  It seems that boys and men are socialised to suppress any public demonstration of their nurturing instincts in relation to human babies. We know from experimentation that women and men respond similarly to babies - when they are wired up to measure physiological reactions - but that their subsequent external reaction is entirely different, defined by restrictive social norms.  Lottie liberated the teenage boy by allowing him to express his natural nurturing instinct in a way that is socially normative.  Perhaps all men who have dogs are liberated in this way.

I never thought I would gain a new insight into gender from a dog!  But at least it gave me an excuse to put a picture of Lottie in a blog post!

Gender gender equality

This blog comes with a new challenge.  I have a very small puppy on my lap.  Animals now outnumber humans in this house!

I watched Mumsnet last week giving David Cameron a hard time.  It was all over the news.  I suddenly saw something I had not seen so clearly before.  Mothers, through their massive national networking on Mumsnet and Netmums, have become powerful.  So powerful they are a force that the political parties are truly engaging with as they enter a general election.  It is magnificent to behold - what a turnaround in 100 years!

And then it was clear to me: fathers, in contrast, are weak.

I don’t buy into the popular belief in the uselessness of individual men in the home, a flourishing topic of debate in both national and local networks of mothers, and something that some men proclaim as a virtue (and the media give them a megaphone each time they do).  If you take account of the burden of being a main earner in uncertain employment, and the numerous cultural and economic pressures on both mothers and fathers to live in different domains, I think what comes out is the strength of many fathers who step up despite the pressures and the lack of social support.  (What comes through also is the strength of the mothers who share their territory with them.)  I think a lot of the finger pointing arises because the system puts heavy burdens on mothers in the domestic domain and they are often angry and unhappy.  Pointing the finger at fathers is easy because there is a readily available narrative to explain things - men grunt and hunt like cavemen (why do we always think so little of cavemen?), they cannot multi-task, they lack the ‘maternal instinct’, and so on.

No, what I am talking about is an overwhelming collective weakness.  In the public debate about parenting and about family and children services, particularly relating to young children, fathers are extraordinarily invisible.

Fathers just don’t talk to each other; usually the only person whom a father confides in is the mother of his children.   Whilst the social networks for mothers are bursting at the seams, every attempt at a social network for fathers has resulted in an embarrassing absence of any reaction at all.  Men gathering together in order to talk about parenting is regarded as downright weird.  (Men are in fact just as adept at talking to each other when the opportunity is socially normative - e.g. workplace discussions about parenting - but there are almost no such opportunities.)

Men’s public silence as fathers is reinforced by women who manage the media debate about parenting and equality issues.  I loved the debate recently about the young men in universities setting up men’s groups.  Jenni Murray’s article in The Daily Mail was a tour de force.  But see what happened: some men made a stand, and the female editors of the women’s pages of the newspapers commissioned women to write about these men.  Why not actually talk to the men and let them have their say?

I am a man who has stepped up to the mark in public on these issues.  In theory this is what women have been waiting for and indeed, some women have embraced this initiative.  But that is not the dominant response, sad to say.  Men who do step up to this mark also meet hostility.  Some years ago a Minister (a woman) used to go round privately describing me as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” - a man asserting himself in this domain and professing to be in favour of gender equality just must have a hidden, self-centred agenda.  More common, though, is condescension - women who realise that men stepping up is what is needed in theory, but who are unwilling really to share the family/equality agenda with them.

Does it matter if men are silent and let women lead on these issues?  I think yes.

• Improvements in public services for families and children need fathers to join the lobby.  Yes, mothers are now powerful, but in many cases not powerful enough.  Take continued investment in adequate maternity services.  I was saddened when the Royal College of Midwives recently only asked mothers about their opinion of maternity services - if they had asked fathers too, they would have marshaled more strength.

• The division of mothers and fathers into different roles by cultural, social and economic factors makes many parents miserable.  Only 20% of couples say their relationship gets better after a baby.  Two thirds say it gets worse.  Couples with babies are much more likely to split up than those without.  The key reason is division of roles.  In an EHRC survey this year, 34% of mothers and 23% of fathers said the mother should be in charge of caring.  But 86% of mothers and 69% of fathers say the mother is actually in charge.  That is a very big gap between aspiration and reality.

• Fathers say they want to be more available to their children than their fathers were to them.  They are.  But not enough - too many children still say they feel their father is too distant.

• When fathers separate from the mother of their children, they often become disconnected from their only channel of access to the world of their children - the mother.  This is a situation of absolute misery and fear.  Not surprisingly, in this position of extreme weakness with such enormous cost, men do join together, just like women have done since the beginning of the last century.

• A serious myth has emerged and is informing a series of policies - that things can be fixed for women without the involvement of men.  Most spectacular was the extension of maternity leave to a year with only two weeks for fathers - this immediately reversed progress in tackling the pay gap, as women were made an even more risky employment prospect compared to men.  Similarly, we have among the lowest breastfeeding rates in Europe, and the evidence shows that fathers are the main influence on mothers; but our breastfeeding strategies don’t want to go there.  An articulate fathers’ lobby working closely with women would result in more balanced approaches with better outcomes for everyone, including for women.

• The absence of a strong fathers’ lobby gives an easy ride to those men who shirk domestic responsibilities and those women who control the domestic domain and exclude men from it.

The trouble with all of this is that the idea of women being strong and men being weak goes right against the doctrine of gender equality that is predicated on the opposite.  Men are terrified of appearing weak and women do not like weak men: opting for silent isolation in the garden shed is a good protection for men.  When weak men organise themselves in protest, they are reviled - they are seen as powerful individuals wanting to reimpose patriarchy.

Nor can we handle the idea of the complexities of role - that one can be powerful and weak at the same time.  A rich man can be bankrupt when it comes to the relationship he has with his children.  A man who is violent in the home is usually simultaneously disempowered.  We panic when these ideas are put forward because we think it means excusing the abuse.

So, along with Jenni Murray, I celebrated when I heard the news of young men in universities talking to each other.  (See Mancollective at Oxford University.)  Is this a tip of an iceberg of men admitting their vulnerabilities to each other?  And we see them being embraced by young women who are outraged at shortcomings in our efforts to address equality, particularly how we have divided parental leave (see Jennie Agg in the Guardian).

Can we dare to hope that this social networking generation will cast aside our hang-ups about male weakness?   Will this generation have the strength to withstand the pressures that parenthood puts on mothers and fathers to live different lives?  Will we finally get a generation of children who don’t complain about the lack of intimacy with their fathers?

I am now off to find the men starting these groups to talk to them.

Fatherhood Fatherhood, gender equality

I was busy writing my second blog on shared parenting when the debate about maternity and paternity leave took off.  Here is what I said to the journalists and policy people who have phoned me in the last two days.

The two changes - transferability of maternity leave to fathers and extension of paid maternity leave from 9 to 12 months - were firm commitments five years ago when nine months of paid maternity leave were put in place for mothers and two weeks for fathers.  The actual news is that one of the commitments has been dropped and the other has been kicked forward to be dealt with by the next Government.  The desk has been cleared.

Good, I am pleased.

The extension of leave for mothers, without an extension of leave for fathers, immediately precedes the increase in the pay gap starting in 2007, after years of progress towards equality.  This was predicted beforehand and I believe the connection is causal.  The currrent leave system has legitimised the idea that men have an entitlement to unblemished work and career prospects when they become a father and has legitimised the idea that the sole responsibility for nurturing children rests with the mother.  This is one of the biggest differences in paid leave entitlements between women and men in the world.  So I am happy that further extension of paid maternity leave has been stopped.  I do not think that stopping this extension will reverse the damage to women from this legislation, but at least we have stopped digging deeper.  We can start introducing more leave for mothers only when we have adequate leave for fathers; then, quite apart from the benefits that accrue from fathers being more active in caring for children, women will avoid the penalties of being the only parent expected to take time off work.

As for transferability, I am, frankly, rather bored by the debate.  It is a debate about empty gestures.  Government knows the system is not going to work anyway; it published its analysis of why not in 2004 (see paragraph 28).  Only 4-8% of families where the mother is eligible for maternity leave, are predicted to use transferability.  Partners of women who are not eligible for maternity leave will have no entitlement, whatever their employment status.

It is obvious why it won’t work.  What mother and father, after six months, want complete role reversal?  Very, very few.  But if the leave were flexible, then you would see something very different.  Take one conservative possibility of the millions that flexibility would make possible - perhaps mum on 2 days/week of work with 3 days maternity leave, and dad on 4 days/week of work and 1 day of leave.    In that arrangement, baby is only out of parental care 1 day a week, and the smallest amount of work flexibility could remove even that.  We need the leave system to be amenable to the boxing and coxing that is the stuff of life for parents of babies.

And why the transferability?  This is a nightmare to administer - someone has to track what both parents are doing.  Just let each parent have a period of leave, and then each can negotiate individually with their employer.

Then there is the problem of pay.  The leave is not well enough paid to be affordable by many families.  The unpaid component of the maternity leave is purely hypothetical - there is already three months of unpaid parental leave for each parent, but hardly anyone knows it exists because it is not affordable and not worth knowing about.  In the example above, the family might even decide that one day off a week for the father is not affordable, given all the other penalties he is likely to face by declaring to his employer that he is prepared to compromise work for something else.  I would rather see, for a specified sum of public money, less leave and more pay.

I also question the six month rule - that any mother wishing to return to work, even part-time, before the child is six months, is not allowed to use her leave to let her partner take care of the baby.  Human beings are distinct in the degree to which the care of infants is shared with kin; six months alone at home all day is a pretty tough call for mothers, going against how we humans are hard-wired to share this work.  Breastfeeding is often used to justify six months, but going back to work for short periods does not stop breastfeeding, and a father who has been well prepared to support breastfeeding can be the best person to look after the baby while the mother is at work.  I am not presenting this as the way to do things; I am just asking how it helps mothers to withhold this choice? (And, of course, there is the problem that most fathers are not well prepared to support breastfeeding, even though, in terms of bang for buck, this would be the cheapest way to increase the UK’s amazingly low breastfeeding rates.)

The shelving of changes to the leave system till the new Government means there is the opportunity for a real re-think.  If we introduce the currently proposed changes in 2011, it will take about five years to ascertain they do not work, then three years to introduce a change.  So by 2020, we will be starting to introduce a workable system.  Let’s save ourselves a decade and start the incremental process of building a rational system, starting with a sound foundation, based on what real families really need.

Fatherhood breastfeeding, gender equality, paternity leave, work

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