Some people still see it as “career suicide” for men to take paternity leave, an employers’ conference heard this week. It is a mistake to assume that “straight white men” all enjoy the same privileges in the workplace and are getting to do “everything they want to”, Ibec’s head of skills and social policy Kara McGann said.
A generation of young men believe their voices are not being heard in conversations about workplace culture, and fear they may lose out where diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies are pursued by employers, McGann warned.
Forgive me if my heart doesn’t bleed for the plight of straight white men in the workforce.
Let me state the obvious first: of course we should be doing more to ensure that all fathers – and not just wealthy ones – feel able to take their family leave entitlements. Uttering the words “I am taking time off to be with my kids” should not be regarded as an act as incendiary as marching down to the HR department and dousing your cv in petrol. Yet data published recently by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Economic and Social Research Institute found that only half of fathers avail of paternity leave in the first six months after their child is born, while just one in four takes parent’s leave, which is the nine weeks of paid leave available to parents of children under two.
Sorry if my heart doesn’t bleed for straight white men at work
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This suggests many organisations are still labouring under the impression that single-income families are the norm, instead of a species as rare as a unicorn hotfooting it down O’Connell Street.
Men taking time off to be with their children helps society as a whole. It’s good for fathers. It’s good for mothers, who are the ones left to carry the entire burden of caring when men don’t or can’t step up. European Commission research shows that when working men take their leave, women can go back to work earlier, and the gender pay gap inches closer. And it’s good for their children, who will carry the benefits early and strong caregiving bonds with their dads through their lives. McGann was right when she said that unless we start to fix this for men, we won’t fix it for women either.
But while the first generation of young men entitled to relatively generous leave might be getting a nasty land when they discover that their employer doesn’t expect them to actually avail of it, few women will be shocked by the revelation. Mothers have been paying a price for parenthood for decades – and not just in terms of optics. We’ve been paying it in cold, hard cash; in the decisions we take to step back at critical moments because our family needs us to be more available, knowing we might never get this chance again and in all the opportunities we won’t even know we missed out on.
Here’s the thing, men: women have been dealing with this so long we even have a name for it. “The motherhood penalty” is the gap which starts to open between men and women after women give birth, and continues to widen, so that by the time a child is 12 years old the pay differential is around 33 per cent and women are left floored by sheer exhaustion and the effort of pretending that everything is fine, despite the fact that they’re actually holding down two full-time jobs.
We can tell you all about the non-financial penalties you’ll face for leaning into your parenthood responsibilities too. We can advise you about how to style it out amid the disdainful glances as you clock out not a minute later than 5.37pm every day, so you can make it to the creche just in time. We can tell you about the knot of dread in your stomach when yet another brilliant childminder breaks the news that they are moving on. We can list the many excuses you can use to stay home when you have a sick child again (basically, say anything except “I have a sick child again.”)
It is way past time we did something to normalise the idea that a large proportion of employees - men and women - now go home to do a second shift every evening. But it will be a bitter pill to swallow if we only decide to take action now that men are feeling the parenthood pinch too.
More worryingly, the comments from Ibec about men “feeling their voices are not being heard” risk feeding into a dangerous new narrative, which suggests that the gains made by women have left men behind, or even come at a cost to them.
In its more extreme form, this fuels the sense of grievance and victimhood that Donald Trump has been crudely exploiting, like the drunk uncle leading the singsong at a family wedding. His administration’s position that DEI initiatives are “immoral”, “wasteful” and responsible for helicopter crashes has led to an unseemly rush by the corporate world to ditch them wholesale – as though equality itself was just an ill-advised phase, like the frosted tips you briefly sported as a teen.
But this isn’t just happening in the US. It is evident in the political divide opening up across Europe, which sees young men leaning right as young women lean left. And we see it here in the intergenerational divides that have opened up between younger and older men in terms of attitudes to sexual violence. Research published this week by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre found that men under 24 were up to seven times more likely than older men to display victim-blaming attitudes.
So yes, we need to make sure that everyone feels they can take their family leave entitlements. But it can’t come at the price of feeding into the myth that equality is bad for straight white men.
