Come September, Mahesh Rao, 29, a PR professional, will become a father for the first time in his life. Last month, he brought it up with his superiors, to ask for leave around the due date. “My boss asked me how many days,” recalls Mr. Rao. “I said 10 to 15. Instantly his expression changed — as if I’d said something outrageous. Before I knew it, I was telling him I’d take just two-three days off and work from home for a week.”
Jaideep Bhatia, 41, a sports consultant, became a father ten months ago. “I converted my full-time job into a part-time one, even though it meant a pay cut,” says Mr. Bhatia, “because it’s not possible to be employed full-time and participate equally in the child’s upbringing.”
“My wife, who works in the insurance sector, turned down at least three promotions over a six-year period in order to take care of our first child,” says Philip Chacko, 51, a media professional and father of two. “As a journalist, I worked late hours. My wife taking up those promotions would have meant more travel, and longer hours for her as well.”
In the case of Vinay Bhan, 50, an editorial consultant, his wife quit her media job to look after their son, who was frequently sick in his early years. Ask him why he didn’t give up his job instead to care of the kid, and he says, “I was earning more. We would not have been able to manage on my wife’s salary alone. So it was her career that took the hit.”
As for Peter Jeyaprakash, 42, a lawyer and father of four, the gender lines of parenting are fairly clear — his wife and extended family shoulder most of the care work. His own responsibilities are largely confined to playing with the children, mentoring them, and so on. “Matters like giving the child a bath, combing hair, etc., I leave to my wife as she is naturally the best one for them,” says Mr. Jeyaprakash.
If there is one common theme implicit in the experiences of these four fathers and one father-to-be, not to mention the millions of fathers around the world, it can be summed up thus: the father does the (paid) work outside the home and brings the income needed to raise a kid; the mother does the (unpaid) work inside the home needed to care for the child. This has been the paradigmatic division of labour in all patriarchal cultures around the world.
This is the reason Mr. Rao’s boss — and almost any organisation in India for that matter — would not dream of giving a male employee paternity leave on a par with what’s offered to female employees. This is the reason Mr. Bhatia’s only option — as an involved father — was to de-prioritise his career. This was the reason Mr. Bhan, Mr. Chacko and Mr. Jeyaprakash, as fathers, all looked to their wives for child care work, while their own responsibility remained primarily financial.
Such a lopsided division of care work has several adverse consequences. Highlighting them and advocating a more equitable division of care work is the avowed mandate of the State of the World’s Fathers Report 2015, released last month by MenCare, a global fatherhood campaign.
The advent of modernity, capitalism, and globalisation has seen ever greater numbers of women leave the confines of domesticity and find paid employment. Today they comprise 40 per cent of the global workforce. Despite this, the report points out that there was no compensatory increase in men’s participation in the unpaid care work at home.
As a result, women bear a ‘double burden’ of paid work and unpaid care work. What do we mean by ‘unpaid care work’? Taking its cue from the UN, this report defines it as “including ‘domestic work (meal preparation, cleaning, washing clothes, water and fuel collection) and direct care of persons (including children, older persons and persons with disabilities, as well as able-bodied adults) carried out in homes and communities’, with no financial recompense.”
The report points out that women do 2.5 times more unpaid care work than men. Indian women do 10 times more. One might argue that this shouldn’t matter where men and women spend the same number of hours working — men in paid and women in unpaid work — if both contribute to the same household. But it does, “given the greater societal value assigned to paid work, and the reduced access to social contact, play, education, and financial resources that girls and women experience as a result of their care-giving roles.”
All this translates into a competitive professional advantage for men, who are not weighed down by the same ‘baggage’, so to speak. As a result, women continue to face pay and other disparities at the workplace. Mothers earn less than childless women. A study conducted across 28 countries found that 88 per cent of women aged 30-39 saw their earnings decline when they had children. Put simply, real gender equality is impossible so long as we have unequal distribution of care responsibilities.
Correcting this disparity through men’s equitable participation in care-giving — that is, ‘involved fatherhood’ — would yield a multitude of social, cultural, health, and economic benefits, at both the family and the national level.
The report marshals data from a number of studies which show, for instance, that men’s involvement speeds up women’s recovery after pregnancy and contributes to lower rates of post-partum depression. Involved fathers are also less likely to be violent with their children and partners. Given that cycles of violence against women are often inter-generational, this breaks the cycle, as the sons don’t grow up with a violent father.
Other benefits of involved fatherhood include improvements in reproductive and mental health for both men and women, better relationship between the partners, and positive impact on the cognitive development of the child. Coming to the economy, the report calculates that “India’s GDP would be $1.7 trillion higher if women worked outside the home at the same rate as men do.” Given such a strong case for involved fatherhood, why does this remain an exception rather than the rule? The report identifies three obstacles: social norms that reinforce the idea that care-giving is women’s work; economic and workplace realities that drive household decision-making and maintain a traditional division of labour; and policies that reinforce the unequal distribution of care-giving.”
For instance, the report cites a study which found that 85 per cent of Indian men agreed with the statement, “Changing diapers, giving kids a bath and feeding are the mother’s responsibility.” On the other hand, many women feel that “the home is traditionally the one space where they exert some power and … are reluctant to relinquish this.” Given these entrenched social norms, the status quo cannot be changed overnight. But a beginning can be made, as this report does, by bringing men’s role in care-giving to the centre of public and policy discourse.
Havovi Wadia, a child rights researcher and advocacy expert, believes that this report’s first implication is “to have policies in work places that respond to men as parents just as they do to women.” She calls specifically for three policy measures: paid paternity leave, maternal and childcare training for fathers-to-be, and “monetising child care and housework, to be included in household accounting, all the way up to calculating the country’s GDP.”
Mr. Wadia may be on the right track here, for it’s presumably easier to change policies than mindsets. But that doesn’t mean it would be easy. As Mr. Rao points out, “PR and HR are two domains where women dominate. But are women HR heads making a difference? Despite the fact that women benefit from paternity leave, women-dominated sectors and women-led organisations are yet to come up with paternity leave policies.” Mr. Bhatia points to another problem. “Even if organisations change policies, they won’t affect a vast majority of India’s fathers, who work in the informal sector. Poverty forces them into economic migration away from their families for long periods. How do we help them become involved fathers?”
Interestingly, the fathers this writer spoke to — all well-to-do, middle-class, educated men — reported that they could not spend as much time with their kids as they would have liked. The father-to-be, Mr. Rao, when asked how he felt about impending fatherhood, had a one-word answer: “Fear.” He explained, “Mostly financial fear, but also a moral fear: will I be able to bring up my kid as a good human in a cut-throat, materialistic society?”
Perhaps the answer to Mr. Rao’s conundrum lies beyond modernity, and requires revisiting our ideas of parental responsibility. Interestingly, the report, which includes interviews with adivasi fathers, quotes Gangadharan, who lives in the forests of the Nilgiri Hills: “I felt anxious when my son was born a month ago. I know that it is not just my responsibility, or my wife’s, or even the extended family’s, to bring him up. An adivasi child is brought up by the whole community, and everyone is part of what is going on.”
Urban Indians typically dismisses adivasi wisdom as primitive humbug. But are children the responsibility of the biological parents’ alone? Does society not have a stake in them, in reproducing itself? If yes, then public support for child care could be the most powerful means of restoring gender equity in care work.
Some fathers’ names have been changed on request.
