De-Feminizing the Decision to Work

Posted by: Lauren Young on July 09

This guest blog was written by Amy Vachon, who is co-author of the Equally Shared Parenting blog with her husband, Marc. (Both are pictured here.) Their book, Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents, will be published in January.

In these tough economic times, the news headlines are filled with stories of laid-off men returning home to care for the children as their wives take on new breadwinner roles or are suddenly their families’ sole breadwinners (often with a job previously considered the less “important” of the two). Some men tell of difficulty making this transition – of losing their identities and scrambling to learn skills they had not honed – and others write of new-found joy in their Daddy focus. Some women enjoy their new work status and others speak of resenting the shift in responsibility and loss of time with their kids.

It’s a brave new gender-bending world!

But yet, it isn’t. Even with these role switches becoming more common, the questions our culture asks women are still built on old assumptions. Will she work or stay home? Does she work because she wants to or because she has to? Can she find a job that gives her enough flexibility now that she’s a mother? We don’t ask these questions of men – still. Even as men are being laid off at rates far exceeding women’s lay-offs, our culture still considers the work/life puzzle to be mainly one that a woman must try to solve - either by finding a way to stay in the workforce full-time, downsizing her career, or staying home. All while society expects a man to march on in his usual breadwinning mission…until some outside force (maybe a lay-off, or perhaps the overwhelming logic of a wife with a far bigger paycheck) stops him.

And it’s not only the burden of ‘balancing it all’ that is still given primarily to women. The privilege of opting out of paid work – for those of us who aren’t forced out and can afford this option – also goes to women in our culture. We’ve all heard stories of new mothers who had planned to go back to work after their maternity leaves but then decided to stay home because they couldn’t bear to be away from their babies. While this may sound sweet, can you imagine a new father announcing to his wife that he will be quitting work to stay home, especially if his proclamation goes against their plans? Society gives this option to women, but not to men.

On either side of the issue, the work decision (with all its possible and imperfect results) is still very gendered. While we are beginning to play in earnest with the surface roles that men and women can take on at home – a wonderful step toward full gender equality – the underlying gender assignments are still forceful.

I hope someday that the decision to work or not work, to work part-time or full-time, or to find a flexible career or not, are automatically taken up by both partners as equals. Whether any family’s ultimate decision is traditional, reverse traditional, equally shared parenting, or dual-earner, I hope that it can be made by two people thinking together as a team about what makes both of them – and their children – happiest. That unilateral burden and privilege are not assumed. And that gender is taken out of the equation.

Are we ready for that?

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