“Is your mom dead?” This was what my five year-old classmate asked me in the playground one day. I was, understandably, rather upset by the question. I, like any self-respecting five-year old, did not think that this was an invitation to discuss the gender politics of parenting, but assumed that my mother must have been eaten by the monster under my bed. Or something.
You see, my father was the only man at the school gates for the entirety of my young school life. The other mothers assumed, like my playground pal, that he was a widower (and hee was like catnip for single mothers). No one seemed to entertain the notion that my father was happily married to a busy working woman and had elected to take on the responsibility of parenting full time. Indeed, my teachers would often ask questions like: “what does mommy cook for dinner?” and “when will mommy pick you up from school?” As a rather blunt, no nonsense kind of child, I found this slightly ridiculous. “Why would mommy cook?” She once tried to make me chocolate chip cookies and the result was one giant burnt biscuit that would have been more use as a weapon should we have been burgled. The notion that I couldn’t entertain was why mommy would pick me up, when it was quite clearly daddy’s job.
My father gave up a very lucrative and high-powered position in his native Paris, not only to relocate to London, but to be a full time parent as well. This was a mutual decision on the part of my parents who knew that, besides the costs involved, they did not want me to be brought up by a nanny. My father, thrilled at the prospect of becoming a father at the relatively late age of 39, happily made the decision to swap his career for me with no dent to his ego. Yet he fought an uphill battle as a full time male parent in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when he was a rarity. Baby changing facilities were only available in the female toilets, he would get odd looks at the playgrounds and my mother’s less enlightened male friends would often find it a source of comedy. He has no regrets, he tells me, but one: that he had to sell his beloved motorbike because he “couldn’t fit a baby seat on it.”
My parent’s decision meant that I was raised in an environment where traditional gender roles were utterly reversed and I cannot thank them enough for this. Situations such as these make a mockery of the ingrained assumptions in our society that childcare is the primary concern of the mother. Frankly, one would think that fathers have a lot of catching up to do once the baby arrives, after nine months in the womb.
Motherhood is oft cited as the number one career killer for women. Much is said about the impossibility of juggling motherhood and your career, whether women really can ‘have it all.’ Louise Mensch recently gave up her high profile political position in order to focus on her family and sparked a continuation of this debate. Fellow Tory MP Nadine Dorries accused her of tarring the reputation of female MPs when she left a select committee hearing, questioning James Murdoch, in order to pick her children up from school. Dorries remarked: “This was stomach-turning for female MPs, who act in a professional manner in order not to be judged lacking against our male peers, knowing that hell would freeze over before any male MP would behave in the same way.” Whilst many would admire Mensch’s decision to direct her attention to her children, there is some validity in Dorries’ observation that no male MP has ever made a similar sacrifice.
There is an appalling double standard when it comes to our collective view of parenting. Motherhood should no more stand in the way of a successful career than fatherhood should. No interview I have ever read with a male CEO has ever praised his ability to have children and a career, but an interview with a female CEO will be highly likely to make this the crux of the article. The glass ceiling for women is not the fact that the biological lottery puts them out of the office for nine months, but that the general consensus on parental responsibility is outdated and unfair.
Times are, thankfully, changing. Female earning power is such that roughly 2.7 million women in the UK are the sole or main breadwinners for their family. It is therefore vastly becoming economically prudent for men to become stay at home dads and househusbands. A new hit show in Australia, entitled Househusbands and depicting four stay at home dads, is causing a media stir and threatens to make househusbands a cultural trend.
But say you do chose to be a ‘modern’ man and stay home and look after the kids? Chances are you will face ridicule and the general assumption that you have been emasculated. The Telegraph recently observed the growing trend in househusbands and noted that, whilst most women were happy to discuss their stay-at-home partner, few men wanted to be named and shamed. If taking responsibility for your family or merely household is emasculating, then perhaps we need a new definition of masculinity. With this in mind, I suspect that the final frontier of gender equality is not women in the boardroom, but men in the kitchen, holding their heads up with pride. After all, it takes balls to be a househusband.