Are women and men finally equal? Ask your two year old.
In this recent New York Times Magazine article, “Calling Mr. Mom?” author Lisa Belkin problematizes the claim that women in America have achieved gender equality. It all comes back, as usual, to that tricky divide between the public and private sphere. But this time, it’s not women who are confined to one sphere and forbidden from the other, it is men. Belkin includes a heap of positive statistics for women’s advancement; numbers indicate that women have widely achieved success in both higher education and the workforce. Two of my favorite statistics were that more than half of all managerial and professional jobs are held by women, and that 60 percent of all master’s degrees are awarded to women.
That’s just great, but success in the first shift doesn’t mean parity in the second. According to Belkin, “women still perform twice the housework and three times the child care that men do, even in homes where women are the primary breadwinners.” As a result, women are more likely to take flextime provided by their companies to spend time raising children, despite the fact that the optional time off is also available to men. Women are also more likely to take pauses in their career path to focus on raising young children.
In other words, even though the glass ceiling has been largely shattered, the glass ball-and-chain of housework and child care is still holding women back. Perhaps that’s partially to blame for the fact that only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
What’s the solution? Men have to start sharing the second shift. Traditional arguments against male parenting and housework are almost universally rooted in false assumptions about gender roles and what women are supposed to be “good” at. Most women can think of at least one man who seems to be feigning ignorance about how to do the dishes, but some genuinely missed out on domestic skills because of the gendered assumptions of their parents.
Housework is not difficult. Childcare is, but there’s lots of literature and people to learn from. In order to truly achieve gender equality, it is not enough to say that women have access to the public sphere. Men must also have equal obligation to the private sphere.
Yes, exactly!