The job I was applying for was three days a week. It was a backwards step, career-wise, but the hours were attractive. By that I mean that the role’s part-time nature would allow me to continue meeting my KPIs as majority parent.
I could keep up with all that important driving and shouting that comprises a career as primary caregiver – the constant shuttling from school to ballet to football to dentist and, more generally, the endless forcing of kids to do things that they will really enjoy.
I rang HR to discuss flexibility – could I do the role over four days to allow me to do the school pick ups? He mumbled something about the workplace being “family friendly”, but confessed that the woman currently in the position worked “most days until at least 6pm”.
I suggested that didn’t sound very part-time.
I didn’t get an interview.
Most mums are probably wondering what the news is here. It’s common knowledge in mum networks that companies – and particularly underfunded organisations such as schools – rely on women working over and above their paid and allotted hours in part-time work. Try being a mum and a public school teacher working three days a week. Chances are you’ll still be paying for five days of childcare.
My wife and I swapped roles when we moved from Melbourne to Perth, largely because she was the first to find work.
As a bloke, I have found myself met with a mixture of disbelief and suspicion when I’ve applied for part-time work. Didn’t I realise this was women’s work? There is a sense that part-time work is an extension of the unpaid caregiving that comes with being a mum. It is little wonder that so-called “feminised” industries tend to be centred around care (early childhood education, health support services, veterinary care and disability home care) and are historically underpaid.
To be a man looking for part-time work is, it seems, to be someone who clearly lacks commitment to their career. I have heard stories of men in corporate gigs being sent for counselling when they asked to spend more time with their family.
I suspect there is a kind of defensiveness behind this reluctance to let men embrace part-time work. A wariness about what might happen if we allow men to discover there is more to life than their career. And, perhaps, there is a tacit acknowledgment that men are still expected to prune themselves of the kind of rich emotional response that caregiving demands.
These gender stereotypes remain potent, within and beyond the workplace. In a 2022 study, dads reported feeling relatively disconnected from parental “networks” and finding it difficult to engage at pick up or via parents’ WhatsApp groups, which have become important sources of information but rarely involve any dads.
I do often feel conspicuous. I’ve tried to throw myself – however awkwardly – into the school community by taking on class parent and P&C roles, but do sometimes wonder if my kids are missing out on playdates because I’m not playing tennis or drinking coffee with the school mums. (If any school mums are reading this, please don’t ask me to play tennis.) It’s telling that many primary schools continue to run an annual “dad’s camp”, to allow fathers the unusual experience of spending an uninterrupted couple of days as primary caregiver.
Money is a key factor, of course. Men still tend to be the bigger earners. It’s encouraging to see governments trying to address the gender pay gap, but while there is an understandable focus on getting women back to full-time work, it’s hard to see how that can happen when it remains so difficult to get men out of it. Someone has to do the parenting. It may as well be blokes.
The past three years have been some of the most rewarding of my life (not financially, obviously). Even in the midst of all that driving and shouting, I am grateful to have been so present and so available when the kids have needed a parent. I hope that our girls will grow up expecting more of the men in their lives (and hope that I am not setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment). Maybe it will be easier for the next generation to share the load.
For now, I’d like men and women to be able to embrace majority parenting without all the sleepless nights. Not those inevitable child-with-a-mystery-virus sleepless nights, but the ones lying awake in the early hours, wondering if your career will ever recover.
