“I’m a man,” Tom said. “Therefore I work. Therefore I don’t do childcare, or at least not much. That’s what my wife does.”
Tom, 37, is one of those unreconstructed fathers whose world-view flies in the face of last week’s report from the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that suggests the majority of working fathers in Britain are unhappy with their work-life balance. The Fathers, Family and Work report found that that 62 percent of fathers thought that dads should spend more time caring for their children.
Tom, a shoe salesman from Birmingham, in central England, who spends most of his working life on the English motorway system in a Skoda Octavia car, is married with a three-year-old daughter and an 11-month-old son. He didn’t take the two weeks’ paternity leave to which he was entitled and has never sought to go part-time. His wife, Sue, who was a shop assistant before their first child was born, is now a full-time mother.
Don’t you miss spending time with your children, I asked Tom.
“I can’t afford to think that way. Sue can’t make the money that I can, we can’t afford childcare, so I wind up working 50-plus hours a week, often six days. Otherwise the family doesn’t function,” he said.
But aren’t you rationalizing the fact that you don’t want to do childcare?
“Well, I certainly don’t want to be in a woman’s world — hanging out at playgroups and coffee mornings. That’s my nightmare. I like being a weekend dad, taking kids swimming and doing the fun stuff,” he said.
Would if make any difference if you were able to go to part-time working?
“I can’t imagine that, working in my business. You go part-time and you risk not being taken seriously — whether you’re a man or a woman. I have to say I like being the man, bringing home the bacon. I get a kick out of that,” he said.
But maybe working fathers — and their employers — would benefit from reducing their hours. The EHRC report found that six out of 10 fathers work more than 40 hours a week. Yet a recent survey of US human resources directors by researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah, found that where city employees had been offered flextime or part-time contracts, 64 percent said the new working patterns improved morale and 41 percent said they improved productivity.
But do fathers really want to reduce their working hours to spend more time with their kids?
“Yes, they do,” said Duncan Fisher, the founder of Fathers Direct, who gave up a job in international development to raise his two daughters and runs the dad.info Web site. “It’s a very slow process because there are lots of things blocking them — workplace cultures and pay — but the impulse is definitely there.”
Fisher argues that the process will only be accelerated when there is a mechanism that gives working fathers incentives to spend more time doing childcare. That mechanism seemed, at least, to be offered last month when the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, announced a reform whereby mothers would be able to choose to transfer the last six months of their maternity leave to the father, three months of which would be paid.
“This gives families radically more choice and flexibility in how they balance work and care of children, and enables fathers to play a bigger part in bringing up their children,” said Harman, the minister for women and equality.
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