New Observations on How Fathers Work and Care: Introduction to the Special Issue—-Men, Work and Parenting—-Part I

Abstract

This special issue highlights an area that is getting increased research attention-men, work and parenting. Once mothers entered the labor market in record numbers in industrialized societies in the 1960s, a substantial number of scholars began to study mothers' labor force participation--a phenomenon widely considered to be one of the most significant social developments of the 20th century. Important research topics have included work-family conflict, workplace and government policies that support working mothers, the division of labor for housework and child care among dual-earner couples, and the motherhood wage penalty. This research has been pioneering because it has dared to examine the linkages between two primary social institutions--the family and the labor market--that have usually been studied as separate rather than interlinked social systems. To a large extent, however, our knowledge about mothers' employment, its determinants and consequences, has stalled. This is because men's relationship to work and family life has been much less investigated. A basic tenet of gender theory is that gender is relational; that is, social definitions of femininity and masculinity are so intertwined that one cannot change much without the other changing at the same time. We therefore cannot really understand or improve the position of women in the family and in the labor market unless men's relation to work and family life is also well-researched and understood. The papers in this special issue contribute to that important goal. The papers in this special issue contribute to our understanding of men, work and parenting in several specific ways. First, the papers in this issue draw our attention to the contributions research can make when researchers analyze men, work and parenting in different social settings. Four nations get coverage in these papers--Canada, Norway, the UK, and the U.S. These nations vary considerably in how much they support working fathers. For example, Norway and Canada offer the most paid parental leave to fathers, while the UK offers little and the U.S. offers none at all. Kaufman and colleagues directly compare fathers' experience with taking leave at childbirth in the UK, where men have a modest statutory right to paternity leave, with men's experiences in the U.S., where men have no such right. Research makes a major contribution when it aims to be comparative; we learn substantially more about a particular social setting when we can compare and contrast it to another. The second contribution to scholarship that these papers make relates to methodology. While many areas of social science are dominated by one type of methodology, the new research stream on fatherhood tends to provide us with information that has been collected in various ways, and this is true for the papers in this issue. Four of the six studies rely upon analysis of in-depth interviews, a qualitative method that offers us rich description. McKay and Doucet conducted joint interviews with couples, instead of just fathers, in order to study more closely how couples negotiate the amount of parental leave fathers should take. Kaufman and colleagues describe for us how men without strong statutory rights to parental leave piece together a short but meaningful time off from work in order to be with their newborns. Two of the qualitative studies were also longitudinal in nature, a method that offers unique insight into the process of men's reconciliation of work and parenthood. Miller's study of UK fathers analyzes men's adaptation to fatherhood before and after childbirth. She found that time at home after childbirth helped men to gain important care-giving skills, but because UK paternity leave is so short (two weeks), men are forced to quickly return to paid work which reinforced gendered family practices. Bj0rnholt's paper analyzes the results of a unique follow-up study of Norwegian fathers who shared childcare with mothers in the 1970s. …