Yes, what about the men? The statistics are becoming sadly familiar -- men are lagging behind women college graduation rates, the overall health of men is declining while women's health is not, men's work-family conflict is rising while women's is staying the same, and men lost more jobs early in the recession than women.
In response, there have been cover stories on national magazines, proclaiming The End of Men and The Beached White Male, and even a photo in Newsweek of a suited man, captioned "Sorry, He's Toast."
To address the question of what about the men, particularly about their rising work-family conflict, three national organizations -- my organization, Families and Work Institute, WFD Consulting in collaboration with WorldatWork's Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP), and Boston College's Center for Work & Family -- launched studies and on October 19th, we gathered at a Congressional Hearing to share our findings.
The three studies focus on somewhat different groups of men -- ours is drawn from our ongoing nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce, and was restricted to employed men who live with family members. The Boston College study is of white collar fathers with a child 18 or younger who work for one of four Fortune 500 companies, and the WFD-AWLP study is of men in six countries who work for for-profit companies with 500 plus employees.
If I had to pick just one "headline" finding from all three studies, it would be this: men -- not just women -- want to be both nurturers and breadwinners.
Yes, there are differences of course. Women take more responsibility for the care of children but men now derive their sense of identity from their family as well as their work roles. According to Brad Harrington of Boston College and an author of The New Dad: Caring, Committed and Conflicted "despite the fact that most of these fathers are ambitious, they don't view their work as the center of their existence."
The study probed to see how fathers define their responsibility to their children. According to Brad Harrington, very few fathers define their responsibilities in either/or terms -- either as the breadwinner or nurturer. Perhaps surprisingly, the largest majority sees their responsibility in both/and terms -- as both caring for their children and meeting their financial needs. Fathers further define caring as "providing love and emotional support" and "being involved and present in their children's lives."
Kathie Lingle of AWLP described the finding from their study, Men and Work-Life Integration: A Global Study as "myth busters." One of the main myths is the stereotype of the work-identified male and the home-identified woman. In her words, "this stereotype was simply not borne out by our study. Men and women in the U.S. are equally likely to see their identities in the same way. And both are more home-identified than work-identified!"
Our study reinforces these conclusions. In The New Male Mystique, we find that 71% of men are either family centric (putting their family life first) or dual-centric (putting an equivalent priority on their work and their family lives). And they are increasingly walking the talk. Overall, men's time with their children on workdays has increased by more than an hour (from 2 hours a day in 1977 to 3.1 hours in 2008) while women's has stayed the same (from 3.8 hours in 1977 to 4 hours in 2008, not a statistically significant difference). In fact, this trend is most pronounced among younger men. Millennial fathers now spend 4.1 hours with their children, up from 2.4 hours in 1977.
An obvious conclusion from these studies is that men's and women's roles are blurring.
So, why, we were asked at the hearing, is the national media story so focused on the decline of men?
I immediately flashed back to a parallel time, not too many years ago, that I personally experienced. When women began to enter the workforce in record numbers in the 1970s and 1980s, the story was about the decline of women. The media joked about the woman in the masculine suit and the little string tie and women were urged to wear sexy clothes in greeting their husbands returning home from the travails of work. Children were portrayed as suffering, as being raised by strangers, not their families.
As families have come to depend more of the income of women (45% of family income comes from women in dual-earner households, according to our data) and as family income has largely kept pace with inflation because of women's employment, those media stories seem to have declined.
There is no question that there are significant problems that both men and women face. Women's stalled advancement and men's lowered educational attainment must be dealt with, for example. The workplace has not truly kept pace with the changes in families' lives. And the way we raise boys and girls today needs much deeper scrutiny and change.
But is it the decline of men? As my co-presenters, Brad Harrington, Kathie Lingle and I said at the hearing: we prefer to see this as a new beginning.
What could be more wonderful than the fact that both women and men want fulfilling family lives and fulfilling work! Does that mean that men and women are the same? NO. Different individuals -- men and women alike -- have many differences and always will.
Written for National Work & Family Month
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I am only sad that we still have a problem of too many men in Congress - and the Presidency as well, so that they structural reforms are not happening as fast as they needed to.
I am an early Gen-Xer, female, and I have no doubt that the reason I and 30% of the college educated women in Gen-X have not had children is because of the failure to put these reforms in place.
Our men’s groups often focus on this issue. Men struggle with how to balance their passions and responsibilities as a father and breadwinner. It was a challenge for women; but they were more likely to have support from their own sex to move through this challenge.
Traditionally men have not looked for other men for emotional support. Doing it without that support at best is difficult. Doing it with that support can actually make it fun – men enjoy supporting other men. As the roles for men and fathers change men need support that isn’t therapeutic. We don’t need psychotherapy. We just need to speak about our emotions to other men who are dealing with similar issues.
Thank you for championing how both men and women are in this together and if we are going to succeed we need to work together.
This is the era of sefl-actualization.... for men and women. The stereo-types are crumbling, and person by person, we are asking and answering the question: what am I here for? Change is coming in tiny increments.
And as the individual confronts the gap between their deeply held values and how their real life is playing out, and then moves to put the two better in line, our society is changing, healing and growing.... one person at a time.
What is still missing here, however, and what both employers and “women in leadership” equity seeking programs need to recognize is this: while my mother’s generation stormed the work front demanding to be taken seriously as professionals, men never had a reverse mass divesting of the breadwinning role. In the research I’ve done, like with Dr. Harrington’s great work, men don’t say that they are their work. However, men still feel the burden of breadwinning more than moms, and we’ve done little as a society to help change that. When a working mom goes back to work, we understand her life has altered drastically. When a man does the same, we expect a swift return to “business as usual.”
Until we start expecting more of men as fathers in the workplace and make it “safe” for men to visibly take a more active role as a parent, men will continue to be trapped between paradigms. Men will fight twice as hard for the promotion and continue to work longer hours because we still reinforce the antiquated notion that a man’s greatest value to his family can be measured by the girth of his wallet.
I run a unique business out of Vancouver called Bettermen Solutions (www.bettermensolutions.com.) I help companies with recruitment, retention and workplace equity issues by recognizing the changing needs of working fathers. Until we adapt to the plight of dads, families, men, women and employers will all continue to suffer.