It is time to give men as much choice in how they want to balance care and career across their lives as we are trying to give women. This isn’t just about toxic masculinity, but the more conventional good-provider kind.
We must begin with a radical shift in social norms, which, while it will not be enough, will be a necessary beginning and a step all of us can take in our daily lives.
Everyone involved in raising, educating, mentoring and shaping children must prepare that child for care roles as well as career roles. We must assume that boys are likely to be fathers as much as girls are likely to be mothers (regardless of the configuration of their ultimate families) and that fathering will involve just as much responsibility for daily care and nurture as mothering.
We should begin with siblings. Older brothers should be given as much responsibility for looking after younger members of the family as older sisters, from changing nappies to feeding, bathing and playing. Boys should be expected to babysit as much as girls, increasing their adolescent earning potential. For every effort we make to convince girls to strive for jobs formerly reserved for men, we must equally encourage boys to value and master the work traditionally done by women.
That work is less important, you say? By what measure? It is easier? Only those who have not tried it could possibly think so. Requires less training? With automated algorithms, managing money can be done with almost no training at all. Is care work less valuable to society? Without it, civilisation itself would rapidly come to an end.
In the workplace, we should observe a policy of radical equality for parents and indeed all caregivers. Parental leave should be equal for mothers and fathers. Employers should expect that their male and female employees will be equally involved in childcare and eldercare, and set their rules accordingly. Mentors should ask young men how they are managing to combine work and family just as often as they ask women. And, once children are out of the house, managers should expect men and women to ramp up or re-enter the workforce ready for new challenges.
Women around the world who face gender-based violence, denial of education, patriarchal control of their lives, child marriage and deep social and economic discrimination will need more dramatic legal, economic and social interventions to begin the march toward gender parity than an equal sharing of care. But a norm shift that sees the work of caring for others as both valuable and hard would make a difference in every woman’s life in every culture in the world.
This kind of a norm shift can make a difference with regard to equality more generally: equality of race, ethnicity and national origin; religious equality; class equality; equality of sexual orientation; moral equality premised on our common humanity. Equality of outcomes may well be impossible to achieve and dangerous to attempt. But equality of opportunity can and should be our human birthright.
A long agenda of policy measures awaits. Law, economics, education, health, housing, energy, food and resource security: the full panoply of human efforts to try to remedy the inequities of history, geography, politics and fate.
But culture change is essential, shifting the norms of how we think, treat and value each other. As with gender equality, all of us can make universal equality part of our daily practice, interrogating and changing deeply ingrained assumptions. Socialisation, after all, is the practice of a society; a society made up of members who wield the power of peer pressure. What we esteem and reward in one another is up to us.
In 2015, Care, the global humanitarian organisation, placed a set of ads in airports and on billboards around the world featuring women and girls from countries around the world – the people we are most accustomed to see in pictures of the needy, the victimised, and the dispossessed – with the caption: “I am powerful.” The organisation deliberately took an image of the least powerful member of global society – a woman of colour – and coupled it with the idea of power, of a trajectory of strength and success.
We can change the posters in our minds just the same way. If we can look at men and imagine people whom we esteem as much for their caregiving as for their providing, for their ability to invest in those they love as much as in money and career, so too can we look at people of other colours, cultures and countries and reimagine what we see.
Look at an Ethiopian, a Pakistani, a Chilean, a Korean, a Malaysian, an Armenian, a Jordanian, a Mexican, an Angolan, a Norwegian and so many more and think: here is life experience I don’t have, knowledge I don’t know, talent that will well serve my community, my country, my team.
Trite as it may seem to say, the stereotyping that always accompanies inequality, particularly inequality of opportunity, always rest on mental constructs that we can deconstruct. In the next ten years, let’s blow them up.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of the think and action tank New America
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
