For the past few months there has been some major focus on the whole “Women: Can They Have it All?” question. From Anne-Marie Slaughter to Leaning In to Marissa Mayer being criticized for building a nursery at Yahoo, the focus has really been on women… as it should be.
We ladies have to deal with quite a lot and are often pulled in many different directions and held to different standards than—well, men. But I do not think we should overlook the fact that men also struggle to have it all too.
This week Esquire writer Richard Dorment wrote a piece titled “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All.” Cue the eyerolls. Come on, Richard. The whole work-life balance thing belongs to women. But then I remembered something this guy said to me at a bar once: “It is assumed that you will either be an executive or a great father. It is really an either/or. It is just not talked about as much.” Sometimes people in bars are so wise. Sometimes they are not.
But this got me thinking. Men feel pressure to be good parents and be good at their jobs as well; they just aren’t criticized for it in the same way women are. In fact, they are commended if they leave work early to go to their daughter’s soccer game, but a woman is said to be not caring about her job. But the pressure is still there.
A new article from Bloomberg Businessweek cited a March 2013 Pew Research study about modern parenthood that found that nearly equal proportions of parents were twisted up in knots trying to “do it all.” Fifty percent of working fathers and 56 percent of working mothers found it “very” or “somewhat” difficult to balance work and family, according to Pew, while 48 percent of working fathers and 52 percent of working mothers responded that they’d prefer to be home with their children, but needed to work for the income.
Basically women’s struggles, though more difficult, I think, gets a lot more exposure and therefore more champions. We absolutely need these champions, but men tend to fall by the wayside. Susan Jacoby wrote in the New York Times that “the cost to men—in terms of stress, time lost with the families they were trying so hard to support, and lack of freedom to pursue personal interests—has not been nearly as well documented.”
I am absolutely not saying that men need more help when it comes to attaining power, but think of what a great role model and mentor women have in Sheryl Sandberg. That kind of relationship doesn’t exist for men. Kurt Soller of NY Mag’s The Cut wrote on the subject:
“When men ‘mentor’ other men, I can tell you it’s mostly about making money, feeling or looking awesome, or getting away with something scandalous. There aren’t exactly Lean In groups for late-twenties dudes with solid careers who want to figure out how adoption or child care works over a few beers. Let alone whether paternity leave feels emasculating or unfulfilling. Or how to deal with aging parents. Or who does the hypothetical laundry if your partner makes more money. Men simply aren’t talking about these things in any regard—even those who already have children. As Dorment explains, ‘Chalk this up to social conditioning (men are raised to be the providers, so it’s easier for them to be absent) or genetic predisposition (men are not naturally nurturing) or emotional shallowness (men aren’t as in touch with their feelings), but there is the sense, down to the man, that missing their kids is the price of doing business.’”
It really comes down to the fact that, just like corporations don’t recognize that if they support women more they will retain more talented people and help them get into the C-suite, they also don’t recognize that fathers are more involved with parenting now. Men spend three times as much time with their children as their grandfathers did. In fact, working dads want to spend more time with their kids than moms, according to recent data. Marissa Mayer, who was criticized so heavily after banning working from home at Yahoo and then building a nursery in her office, was praised when she extended maternity and paternity leave a few weeks later. Her new policies were called “revolutionary.” We are trying to get there, but it is taking a while. For every Sheryl Sandberg (well, there is no one quite like Sheryl Sandberg), there seems to be three Paul Tudor Joneses (the billionaire hedge fund manager who said that having babies pulls away women’s focus and therefore makes them bad traders).
Perhaps the main thing we should take away from this is that everyone struggles with work-life balance, so selecting a good partner is of the utmost importance. In Lean In, Sandberg wrote, “The single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is,” and her observation that “I don’t know of a single woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career.” And men should look for that too. I have a feeling their search will be a little easier.