Can men really have it all? It’s a ridiculous question, obviously; a loaded assumption that women spent years clambering out from under. Mothers have worked long and hard to dispel the myth that anyone should be able to single-handedly juggle a job, children, a happy relationship and a meaningful life without ever breaking sweat or (more pertinently) needing help.
And to some extent we have succeeded, judging by a survey of 5,000 UK fathers published this week by the charity Working Families which found three-quarters now say they genuinely want to share the parenting load equally with their partners. Except, it seems, the outside world has yet to catch up.
One in five men said they had been asked, when requesting time off work for family reasons, where their wife or partner was. Translation: isn’t that her job? And perhaps, sotto voce: if in your house it’s not her job, what kind of man does that make you? Most of the other hurdles men reported – such as being challenged on whether the family crisis was really so urgent, or worrying that their boss would think less of them for asking – will be wearily familiar to most working mothers. But I’ve never been asked why I can’t just get my husband to do it all, in a way that implies there must be something wrong with me if not.
Working fathers’ battles are both the same and also subtly different from those of working mothers, and therein lies the faint air of suspicion lingering between two camps essentially fighting the same war. (The lazy assumption that mothers are the default parents, the ones who just have to down tools if a child is sick or the school calls, is toxic for both sexes because it undermines women’s careers and also men’s attempts to be good fathers.) Yet it can be hard to see the similarities at work when you’re fighting each other at home, locked in competition over who is most exhausted, or whose turn it is to trudge off to soft play. Where were you when we were doing the hard yards?, women think grimly to themselves, when they hear a certain kind of man talking loudly about how he prides himself on being really present for the kids. Oh now men are interested in flexible working: now the pandemic has completely normalised working rather agreeably from home, and it’s just a matter of actually using the legal rights that women once fought like tigers for? When some of the new intake of male Labour MPs started campaigning vigorously for better paid paternity leave and being upfront about taking it themselves, they didn’t always endear themselves to female colleagues who’d been on those barricades for years, though fathers stepping up was always the last piece of the equality jigsaw.
But someone has to show men it can be done. The lesson from the introduction of shared parental leave – which means couples can in theory split up to 50 weeks of leave between them in their child’s first year – is that many fathers don’t feel comfortable taking up new rights they’re given because they still feel pressure to be the main breadwinner. The government has already pledged a review of parental leave more broadly, and this summer the cross-party Commons equalities committee argued in a report that more generously paid paternity leave should be a priority (currently many men are stuck with the statutory minimum, frozen in time at less than half the national living wage). But even that won’t be a gamechanger unless men feel they can take it without being punished.
One solution offered at this week’s Equal Parenting conference in London, where the Working Families research was discussed, was a campaign for men to “parent out loud” by taking their full whack of leave and openly putting nursery pickups in their office calendars, instead of pretending to be leaving early for some mysteriously important meeting. If nothing else, that might open a conversation about the stresses some men appear to be bottling up.
For the dads are not, it seems, necessarily all right. An in-depth survey of British men’s attitudes to masculinity published this week by YouGov paints a heartening picture in many ways, noting that – contrary to popular belief – young men are not all angry misogynists radicalised online. (Only 13% of Gen Z now holds a positive view of notorious influencer Andrew Tate, though arguably that’s 13% too many.) But it suggests a surprising streak of bitterness in millennial men, the group now well into their 30s and 40s who are most likely to be in the knackered toddler-wrangling years. They’re the age group now most liable to say that women have it easier in society than men, or that women’s gains in recent decades have been at men’s expense. Though these are still minority views, embraced by less than a quarter of millennials, YouGov finds a widespread belief across generations that life was better for men 25 years ago.
Perhaps these are just the voices of the romantically left behind, scarred by years of dating-app rejection. (Millennials were also the age group most likely to say that women are only interested in high-status men.) But could at least some of them be men caught between partners furious that they’re not pulling their weight – which frankly some still aren’t, judging by statistics showing men still spend only two-thirds of the time women spend on unpaid childcare – and the fear of professional failure?
The Working Families survey certainly suggests many young fathers feel torn, to an extent their own fathers may not have been. They worry about missing milestones in their children’s lives, but also about being a burden to their colleagues if they take time off. A third hadn’t taken as much paternity leave as they would have liked, and almost two-thirds regularly felt judged at work for putting family commitments first. Almost eight in 10 thought the resulting tensions were putting strain on either them, their partner or their child’s welfare.
And yes, of course it’s nothing working mothers haven’t been dealing with for decades: in that sense, welcome to the club. But it’s precisely because we know what that was like – how angry and exhausted and guilty and resentful it sometimes made us feel – that women should be capable of feeling solidarity. That’s the thing about having kids: after that, you really are in the trenches together.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
