Rethinking fatherhood: Investigating fathers’ family engagement between individual will and social constraints

Abstract

In the last 50 years the role of fathers in western societies as considerably changed, as demonstrated by an increasing body of research in social, human and psychological sciences. Although fathers are increasingly involved in family life, gender equality in both family and working life is still far from being achieved, and socially stressful situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic are exacerbating them. While the female burden of unpaid work within families has been widely studied in the literature, to date little is still known about fathers’ perception of their engagement in the family routine. Through the analysis of seven in-depth interviews of fathers with children aged 0-7, the present case-study investigates how and to what extent sharing parental responsibilities, i.e. childcare and household tasks, affects a variety of gender-equality related variables, such as the return to work of the partner, the fathers’ working career, and difficulties they have to address. By adopting text-mining analytical techniques, our findings suggest that, on the one hand, fathers’ higher family engagement facilitate and support the mothers’ returning to work;on the other hand, such commitment is recognised by fathers as slowing down their careers, especially in the case of self-employees. Broadly, whilst fathers recognise their parenting role and experience as a positive change compared to past generations, due to their family engagement they also point out how they have been victims of prejudices linked to gender stereotypes both at the workplace and among relatives or acquaintances. Importantly, the present study sheds (preliminary) light on the difficulties and obstacles experienced by fathers as a consequence of their closer engagement in family life-a rather unexplored aspect in literature so far. Indeed, if such behaviours will be sustained at a quantitative level as well, it might have important consequences for future gender-oriented strategies and policies, in terms of reshaping the productive system, overcoming gender stereotypes for both females and males, and mainstreaming approach to gender issues. © The Authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.