Now that House Republican men have led the effort to restrict women’s access to birth control, abortion, and essential health services, the question is whether men on the other side of the issue can weigh in as forcefully. After all, if men want sex and have a strong interest in not having to support unwanted children (and all evidence is that both issues are very important to them), why are they relatively absent in movements that support women and their right to choose? Certainly, a few good men do stand up on this, but the numbers are still very small.
This reminds me of a phenomenon I’ve seen over and over again. It turns out that this question is one I have struggled with during most of my career as a leader in the work/family movement. In the twenty years or so that I helped to develop the work/life “field,” we worked very hard to urge businesses to adapt their work practices and benefits to a growing new reality: more women in the workforce, more two career families, and more fathers who wanted more involvement with their children.
Our proposition was that if you wanted to attract and keep the best employees, it was imperative to move away from the work practices and benefits structures that were designed with the assumption of a male in the work place and a wife at home. We conducted endless research proving that changing practices, such as increasing workplace flexibility and supporting childcare, led to a more committed and productive workforce. There were also numerous studies, replicated year after year, showing that men wanted these changes almost as much as women did.
We always understood that the changes we saw as needed were ultimately structural. With hours escalating, we knew that looking at how work was done and respecting the time of a new generation of busy parents was not a small ask. Companies adopted many of our suggestions, but change was very slow. For example, benefits such as flex-time, part time employment, and help with finding dependent care were introduced widely but progress slowed; how work was done and how people were judged was ignored.
Throughout this period those of us in the work/family field asked over and over again how we could accelerate workplace change. The work/family field–people working on this within and out of companies–was nearly ninety percent female. When an audience was more than ten percent men at a conference, some considered it a triumph and praised those attending as heroes. And despite the studies that showed men wanted these workplace changes and more time with families, it was overwhelmingly women who took advantage of part-time employment, accepted parental leave of any length, and accessed a new generation of family-related benefits.
Many of my colleagues thought that we would achieve our goals more quickly and be taken more seriously if more men were involved in our efforts. Considerable time was spent trying to find male spokespeople and encouraging more male involvement. Personally, I felt very torn and even angry about this effort and struggled with myself and with my colleagues. After all, women were certainly not a small minority of the workforce. So, I reasoned, if something is really important to fifty percent of the workforce, isn’t that significant enough to address without a few male spokespeople to add legitimacy? Did we really have to drag a few men out and cater to them just to be taken more seriously? I found the whole effort demeaning to the strength and contribution of women. My doubts were confirmed because the effort to get any significant number of men to stand up never worked anyway.
Why did men stay on the sidelines? The reasons are many. As sociologist Arlie Hochchild has pointed out in The Second Shift, men and women both care about family and work but when couples sit down to figure out how to manage their careers, it is almost always the women who back off work as men continue to proceed in their profession. In many cases this is because the man earns more money, but it is also because couples are more comfortable reverting to traditional roles. This defines any family-related issue as a “woman’s issue,” primarily because men rely on women to solve it.
What about now? Do we think that Congress would attack women less if there were more men fighting back? Is that more effective than women banding together to protect their rights? And perhaps the huge shift in gender dynamics will also change how we define “women’s issues.” Now that men are becoming less educated than women and women are increasingly likely to earn more than their husbands, will the issues become more gender neutral?
I do not know the answers to these questions but I know that women and children’s issues are fundamental to the society as a whole and that no reasonable analysis can discount them. But I also know that for now, we’d better face the facts: if women don’t lead in protecting our rights (including the protection of poor women and children) we are in for a very bad time.
Fortunately, there are more than a few good men standing with us now and they will continue to grow in numbers. But women are a mighty force and we must hang together.