A New Vision for Fatherhood
A Father’s Day reflection on masculinity rooted in care, presence, and love.
The loudest voices in the virtual room of the manosphere would have you believe that men are fed up with gender equality. They want to go back to a time when men were men who provided for their families and weren’t expected to do dishes or change diapers.
But I don’t believe that is really what many men want. I think today’s men want something different from a bunch of recycled nostalgia. They want the financial and economic security that comes from supporting their wives in their careers. They want the marital harmony that comes when husbands and wives share domestic labor equitably. They want the meaning they derive from engaging in the work of care for their children.
The nonsense of the #tradwife trend aside, most men, even relatively affluent men, find the idea of being the sole source of income very stressful. On the positive side, they see the benefit of having a wife who works for pay.
At Women Back to Work we did a series of interviews in May with men leaders called #BeHerAlly. Akraya’s CEO, Amar Panchal, talked movingly about his wife’s struggle to return to the workforce after taking time to care for their daughter. He then noted how her return to a corporate job, with benefits, allowed him to take advantage of a recent layoff to start Akraya.
He noted that a woman’s return to paid work isn’t just about her – the benefits ripple out to the family, the community. In their specific case, it led to a company that just celebrated 24 years in business, has created a #1 best workplace for more than 100 employees around the world, and, as a staffing firm, has enabled the employment of thousands of people. That’s a lot of impact from one woman’s job!
But finances aside, many men want the relationship benefits that come from being involved and engaged with their children, their extended families, and their communities. In our same #BeHerAlly series, Jeetu Patel, the President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, spoke with real emotion about spending 8 weeks with his mother at the end of her life. He had a very big job at Cisco at that time. But his boss told him to turn off the computer and the phone and to focus on his Mom. The world of Cisco kept turning, as it so often does, but he got to savor extremely precious moments with a woman who had given him everything.
In 2022 I wrote about how Bernard Shaw, the late anchor of CNN, said at the time of his retirement, that his regret in his life was how much of his family life he’d sacrificed to his career. Working mothers have been bashed, for decades now, with the tsk-tsk that they are missing moments they will never get back. (Despite the fact that working moms today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did in the 70s! We ain’t missing a thing.) But for decades many men missed too many moments and realized, too late, how much those missed moments matter in the later phases of our lives.
In that article I wrote:
And yet, at the very heart of human experience, people of all genders want a lot of the same things. We want to be surrounded by the people we love and to have the time and energy to enjoy their company. We want to be challenged by work that has meaning and purpose and provides us with the resources to live a good life. We want financial security and stability. We want to be there for the births of our children and hold the hands of our dying loved ones. We want to celebrate closing the deal, winning the case, winning the game. We want to ring in holidays by eating delicious foods and exchanging thoughtful gifts.
When we shove these needs and desires into weird gender constructs we do a disservice to ourselves as humans. Too many men take the promotion they don’t really want, pursue a career they don’t really love, say yes to the high-profile but overly demanding project, because they are “supposed” to. Too many women leave jobs they love — or get passed over for a promotion they want — because of their own and others expectations about what they are meant to prioritize.
I’ve thought, for a long time now, that there is a very different conversation to be had about gender equality at home and at work. Men benefit from working with smart and capable women and they benefit from having a real and engaged relationship with their families.
And I think more and more men are waking up to the idea that they want to find meaning and purpose in something that is bigger and more enduring than a paycheck, or, worse, a crappy boss. They are realizing that while their company can easily find a new VP of Gobbledygook, their children have only one Dad. They are learning, as women have known for a long time, that the only irreplaceable roles in this life are the relationships we have with other people.
As we celebrate the dads in our life this weekend I hope we all take a few moments to think about how we all can support them in connecting with that higher purpose and be present in the lives of the people who love them.