Men at Work, Fathers at Home: Uncovering the Masculine Face of Caregiver Discrimination

Abstract

Abstract Despite their many workplace advances, women remain constrained by an enduring social expectation that they will manage their families' domestic lives. Women will not achieve full workplace equality until men do more at home, and men will not enter domestic sphere if they face employment retaliation for doing so. at Work, Fathers at Home addresses this problem by critically evaluating legal challenges that fathers and other male caregivers face in proving claims of workplace discrimination. Drawing from Supreme Court precedent and gender theory, Article explains how masculine norms deter men from asserting their caregiving needs at work, while undermining their ability to prosecute discrimination claims in court. By examining how these men can combat biases against male caregiving, Article seeks to advance goal of gender equality for both sexes. INTRODUCTION Women are quickly closing some of most glaring gaps that have divided sexes for generations. For example, they now earn more college degrees than men (1) and constitute a majority of professionals and managers in U.S. labor force. (2) Although women still lag behind men in many important areas such as income, executive control, and political representation, (3) their ascendance in other sectors has given rise to a number of bold predictions that End of Men (24) is upon us and that we will soon witness the Big Flip (5) when women overtake men in wages, wealth, and social power. However, one enormous barrier still stands in way of women's workplace advancement: enduring expectation that they will manage their families' domestic lives. Rooted in cultural mores and social practices, care work remains highly feminized work that most men are reluctant to perform. (6) The notion that fathers would partially relieve women of this burden remains mostly an unrealized hope. Although second-wave feminists assumed that by enabling women to engage in wage work, men's proportional share of household contributions would increase significantly, (7) that goal has not yet been achieved. Women today continue to work second shift of unpaid domestic chores that Arlie Hochschild famously identified more than twenty years ago. (8) Thus, despite some gains in men's contributions, women still assume eighty percent of childcare responsibilities and perform more than seventy percent of household work. (9) These obsolete modes of domestic behavior have profound consequences for women. More than eighty percent of working women will become mothers in course of their careers, and when they do their workplace advancement will end abruptly. (10) While young, childless women earn roughly same wages as men, their earnings plunge to sixty percent of fathers' wages once they have children. (11) Although discrimination explains part of this motherhood penalty, (12) fact remains that parenthood causes women to work dramatically fewer hours outside home, while men increase their wage work after having children. (13) Thus, men remain bound by, and largely conform to, historical expectation that they will provide for their families, avoid caregiving, and rely on their wives and partners to attend to domestic work. (14) Women will not attain full equality at work until men do more at home. Today we hear descriptions of modern, involved fathers who want to trade wages for family time to play more active roles in their children's lives. (15) In reality, though, most men pay mere lip service to such ideals, talking talk about equal caregiving but failing to alter their work patterns in ways that actually create more time for childcare. (16) Nevertheless, a few men have begun to offer an alternative model. These fathers resist cultural expectations that result in uninvolved fathering. (17) They spend more time with their children than fathers have at any time since experts began measuring male caregiving. …