The optimistic tale of the modern involved husband/dad/boyfriend has been greatly exaggerated.

Despite a number of social and political advancements in the last few decades, women still find themselves holding the short straw when it comes to work-life or work-family balance.

Studies have shown that women do 65% of the child-care and housework. Women who live with their partners, but don’t have children, face a similar unequal division of household upkeep.

In other words, the division of labour in the home is still one of the most important equity issues of our time.

Here’s Dr Darcy Lockman, author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, writing for the New York Times:

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.

While it often becomes blatantly obvious when children are brought into the equation, these patterns of behaviour start with childless cohabitation.

At the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.

Although many men will deny this, their resistance to equal partnership communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labour.

Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”

In conversations with study participants, Lockman found that women were often angry, while men didn’t seem to realise that there was a problem.

Gendered socialisation and a lack of exposure to domestic duties also often place adult men in a situation where they lack basic knowledge about housework. That same socialisation encourages them to resist the need to listen to or learn from their partners.

In this sense, labelling a partner as “over the top” when it comes to maintaining the household is simpler than acknowledging shortcomings. This leads to an “it doesn’t bother me, it bothers you, so you do it” attitude. Men then reap the benefits of a well-run home without having to do any of the work.

The effects of this are particularly negative when domestic labour, includes childcare.

All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.

In short, until men stop resisting, nothing is going to change.

And until something changes, we can’t call our society equal.

[source:newyorktimes]