Can men ‘have it all’?
No one ever asks that question, do they? We assume men can be fathers AND work because that has always been the case.
So why is something that’s a given for men, something so complex and unattainable for women that it has triggered copious books, columns, blogs and conferences? That is the very conversation we need to having.
I have devoted the past few years to the complex and unwieldy topic of gender inequality in Australia and I have reached a simple conclusion. It is time to put the role of men at home under the spotlight.
Because we can talk about women at work until we are blue in the face, but until we talk about men at home, we’ll get nowhere. Without recognising the intersection of men and women – at work but mostly at home – nothing will change.
Can you picture for a moment a power point, loaded with a double adapter and a few international adapters loaded on top of each other? That is the image that comes to my mind when I think about women trying to work and have a family.
The problem is we are inhabiting an old house set to analog, two decades after digital came in. We have the digital equipment – women are educated, qualified and willing to work in the masses – but our power points are mostly set to analog so we can’t plug them in.
We don’t have sufficient childcare or adequate paid parental leave. We don’t have sufficiently enlightened employers or employment policies that are implemented sufficiently. We don’t have partners sufficiently sharing the load at home. Until these things change we will struggle to plug our sufficiently capable women in to work.
Top Comments
Ah, but how do you decide which men fill the quota?
My wife has always earned way more than me so it was always a no-brainer that she'd be the career parent and I'd be the homemaker. It's given me some of the best times (and worst times e.g. school holidays, am I right?!) of my life and her career has been able to skyrocket. No intentional political or ideological statement, just pure financial pragmatism, but it works great for our family :D