Male call



They fret that work ambitions compromise their role as nurturers. They worry about whether they’re meeting gender-assigned expectations. They fear family commitments will marginalize them on the career track.

Pity the modern career man.

That’s not a misprint. While women have spent the last few decades publicly wrestling with the challenges of balancing motherhood with their determination to have the careers their mothers gave up, it’s now men’s turn to feel the pinch.

That’s the message of a new report from Boston College’s Center for Work and Family, based on a survey of nearly 1,000 working fathers. Entitled “The New Dad: Caring, Committed and Conflicted,” the report paints a picture of today’s men struggling to balance their expanded roles as hands-on fathers with their traditional roles as nose-to-the-grindstone breadwinners.

In fact, the report cites one study, by the Families and Work Institute, that found that fathers in two-career couples now experience significantly more work-life conflict than their wives do.

To get a line on the changing paradigms, @work spoke to Brad Harrington, the director of the center and lead author of the report. A former corporate executive and a working father himself — whose duties as we spoke included preparing for his daughter’s 16th birthday party — Harrington discussed why men are increasingly feeling work-career stress, what companies can do to help them and how assumptions about working dads need to keep pace with the times.

How did working fathers become a focus for you?

One thing you’ll find if you look at this field is that I’m one of the very few men who heads a research center focused on work and family issues. For the last 30 years, women have been at the forefront when it comes to the conversation about work and family.

But the more I became immersed in the field, the more clear it became that men are increasingly dealing with many of the same issues, and I realized that this was a very underresearched area.

You cite one study saying not just that men are coping with the same issues around work-life balance, but that they’re actually hit harder than women.

My initial surprise when I saw that was, how can men feel more conflict? They don’t do as much at home. But there are a number of reasons men might feel this conflict more keenly.

First, most men didn’t expect that work-family tension would be a significant part of their lives. They looked at their role models — their dads — and for the most part, when it came to taking care of the kids, that was Mom’s job. So the first part is the surprise element that this is a big part of their life.

The second part is that women have likely become more skilled at multitasking and shifting between one world and another. Since they’ve been in the workplace, they’ve had to learn to do things like going from a work conference call to a call from home. Men are used to being more singular in their focus, especially at work.

The third thing is that the demands on men in terms of the workplace are more significant. If you look at the dads in the study, most are working significantly more hours than their spouses.

Finally, a great many men say that in their work organizations, there’s still an ethos that says real men don’t worry about caregiving.

Do you think the pressure working men feel is applied internally or externally?

One of the questions we asked is, what do you think you should be doing versus what you are doing. And 65 percent of fathers said they thought both partners should do equal amounts as caregivers, but only 30 percent said they did as much as their wives. So that divide is a pretty good indicator of internal pressure.

But as to whether there’s pressure coming from their spouses, when you look at new college graduates, 60 percent are women, and women in general are entering the workforce with better preparation than men have, and are landing jobs as good or better than the ones their future husbands may have. So under those conditions, it’s not hard to imagine that in terms of child care, they may be saying, “Hey, you have to pick up the slack here.”

Working women have long been concerned that if they have children, they’ll be marginalizing themselves at work, and seen as less serious. Your research suggests men don’t have that problem.

That’s true, but let me tell you what the dark side of that is. It’s true that women can be penalized for having children, and have their commitment questioned. By contrast, when men have children, it’s embraced at work, and they’re congratulated and seen as more mature. So you could say this is another case where women lose and men win.

But part of the problem is that the reason men are given that positive feedback is that they’re viewed first and foremost as the breadwinner, and that’s only heightened now that they have kids. The expectation is that men are going to refocus and be re-energized in their careers, because their role is to bring home the money.

One thing that I believe strongly reinforces this stereotype is that after the birth of the child, nothing changes for most men. Women take an average of 12 weeks off, but the vast majority of men in our study took a week or less.

Would it be accurate to say that things like flexible work arrangements and other work-life accommodations are the result of women’s efforts over the last 30 years?

That’s been the primary catalyst. A secondary catalyst is that nowadays, organizations are talking more about flexibility in terms of cost-effectiveness, and realizing it can offer benefits that go beyond making workers happy. For instance, organizations once thought allowing people to work from home was an employee-centric perk, where they could say, how nice of us, we’re letting people work from home. Now they’re saying, if we could get people to work from home, we could stop paying for all that expensive office space.

You point out that men are much less likely to take advantage of flexibility programs. Is that because they’re concerned about how it would be perceived?

There are two data points that help us think that may be the case. The first is the fact that they’re doing it informally but declining to do it formally. The second is that when we asked the guys who didn’t use those programs why they didn’t, many said it was because they didn’t think their company would approve it. So there’s reason to believe that perceived management expectations may be keeping men from feeling like they have the opportunity to say, I want to do more on the home front.

What should workplaces be doing to accommodate those men?

The first thing is, offer flexibility. Talk about it more, make it more readily available, realize that it is in line with business objectives and make clear to employees that if they take advantage of flexibility programs, that it’s not going to negatively impact their careers.

The second thing is, there are supports you can provide that would give direct care-giving incentives. Paternity leave is one thing that is helpful, but still rarely offered.

The third thing is, get to know what fathers’ lives are really like. Employers make assumptions about what dads do when they go home every day. As one of our respondents said, “People think I go home and do the Ward Cleaver thing, sitting back in a chair with my newspaper, and that’s got nothing to do with my life experience.” So make sure you’re not operating on outdated assumptions.

What’s an example of employers operating on outdated assumptions?

The policies around work-family balance for the most part are gender-neutral. But if you look at the way they’re marketed and communicated, they signal in 100 different ways that this is about women. Companies do these nice video vignettes, and you just don’t see male role models, except for the occasional guy thrown up there, like, let’s have a token male.

If the perception that these programs are for women is so entrenched, you need to take extra measures to counter that mental model. Companies have to strongly convey the message that this is a men’s and women’s issue.

Is there a conversation taking place among employers about these issues?

Absolutely. I spoke recently at a very well-known investment group in Boston; they had me come in to give a speech on fathers. When I arrived I found out it was the kickoff meeting for their parenting network, and I have to say, a lot of the people — men and women — told me they were pleasantly surprised that the first keynote speech focused on dads.

What are the most progressive companies doing to implement the kinds of policies you’re talking about?

There are companies that have established men’s groups. There are some that are offering paternity leave. It may only be one or two weeks, but two weeks is a lot, compared to what men have typically taken. A few companies have established a point person on men’s issues in the work-family arena.

Another really important thing is, there are companies that have senior male executives who are willing to stand up and talk about their own challenges and successes balancing work and family. Like, “Here’s what I’ve tried to do, here are the issues I’ve had to cope with, here are the trade-offs I’ve made.” When those people speak publicly about these things, it carries a lot of weight.

So these things suggest that change is taking hold, but slowly. It’s a slow process to get companies — and society at large — to realize that this is not a gender-bound issue.

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