Feminism needs fathers
by Richard Reeves
It is extraordinary how little it takes to splash the Daily Mail. This morning, the testimony of one woman to one parliamentary enquiry made for the headline 'Equality Law Nightmare' - the sort of front page Mail sub-editors have on a pre-saved button on their keyboards, to save the effort of typing it out every time. The woman in question is Nicola Pease, Deputy Chairman of JO Hambro capital management. She told the enquiry into gender inequality in financial services that increasingly generous maternity leave provision could perversely damage women, by increasing the cost and risk of hiring women, relative to men. 'We have got to be realistic and make sure the protection around women doesn't end up backfiring,' she said. 'That is actually one of my greatest worries.'
The Mail's hijacking of her thoughtful evidence to rail against the idea of equality is to be expected. But the difficulty is this: Pease makes a powerful point. Many passionate advocates of equality have come to realise that improving the rights of mothers, while leaving the role of fathers largely untouched, runs the risk of reinforcing the impression that raising children is women's work. Labour ministers ended up in an incoherent position, arguing on the one hand that men and women should be treated as equals in the workplace, while passing laws entrenching the gender divide for childrearing. Only fairly recently has the Government woken up to the important of paternity leave, and parental leave for men, for gender equality.
If women are expected to do the vital work of raising children, they will inevitable face higher hurdles in the workplace. Only when employers look at men and women as equally likely to want to take time off, or work part-time, or refuse overseas engagements because of their responsibilities to their children, will we approach genuine equality. The long-term goal should be the equalisation of maternity and paternity provision. We will know we've succeeded when the language used not only by The Daily Mail but the rest of us has changed - when the terms 'working father' and 'career man' are in general use. Equality at work requires equality at home. There has been a big push to recognise that 'families need fathers'. Now feminism needs fathers too.
Realist
What is needed is hormone replacement therapy for men to artificially induce the maternal instinct. I also propose removal of the bladder in men of childbearing age and using an external apparatus for processing urine, whilst using the internal space created to fit a prosthetic womb.
These measures would greatly help men bond with their babies and ensure that equality, as it pertains to childrearing, is finally achieved.
We shape our own reality. Biology and human nature are just inconvenient hurdles to be jumped.
Mona
It's time proponents of equality looked at the oppression which both genders suffer from their socially created roles. I couldn't agree more that we need new policy on parental leave but we also need new policies in the criminal justice system (where men often suffer far harsher punishments than women for identical crimes) in marriage, divorce and child custody law (where men are 10x more likely to commit suicide after a divorce), men's health issues (where the gap between men's and women's life expectancies is growing at a fast rate in Britain and America), education bias (where boys are just as career syphoned as girls are) and to look again at sexism towards men in our popular culture.
Paternity leave is just the start.
Paul
To Mona:
The reason that women are the ones most concerned about gender stereotyping of men ('sexism', as you call it) is that the vast majority of men are quite happy in their gender roles.
If these roles are indeed social constructs, how do you explain the fact that the many thousands of human societies - a great deal of them having evolved with little to no contact with other societies - almost all have nearly identical gender roles? Clearly the vast majority of gender roles are a product of human biology.
Your goal is much more underhanded than you try to let on. You are part of a movement to feminise men by suggesting that they should be held to the same standards as women. In feminising men, you believe women will be empowered.
You will never realise your aberrant conception of equality by naïvely believing that men and women can be rendered similar and interchangeable, nor by believing that most women and men would actually want to live under such an outrageous pretence.
Michael
'Only when employers look at men and women as equally likely to want to take time off, or work part-time, or refuse overseas engagements because of their responsibilities to their children, will we approach genuine equality'
No we won't, we'll have reached homogeneity, something which the left tends to treat as synonymous with 'equality'. Such is the nature of liberalism.