Delusions of Gender (15 page)

If you are somehow sceptical of the notion that high-earning women do more housework because of an internal drive to maintain the highest possible oxytocin levels, while unemployed husbands carefully protect their own physiological state by giving the laundry pile a wide berth, or are simply neurally less capable of sensing it, then sociologists have an alternative explanation that you may find more satisfying. They refer to this curious phenomenon as ‘gender deviance neutralisation’.
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Spouses work together to counteract the discomfort created when a woman breaks the traditional marital contract by taking on the primary breadwinning role. A fascinating interview study conducted by sociologist Veronica Tichenor revealed the psychological work that both husbands and their higher-earning wives perform to continue to ‘do gender’ more conventionally within their marriage, despite their unconventional situations.
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For example, as predicted by the quantitative surveys, most of the higher-earning wives also reported doing the ‘vast majority’ of both domestic labour and childrearing. Sometimes this was resented and a point of contention. But others seemed to ‘embrace domestic labour as a way of presenting themselves as good wives.’ As Tichenor points out, what this means is that ‘cultural expectations of what it means to be a good wife shape the domestic negotiations of unconventional earners and produce arrangements that privilege husbands and further burden wives.’

Tichenor also surmised that in decision making the women were deferring to their husbands in ‘very self-conscious ways’ because they didn’t want to be seen as powerful, dominating, or emasculating. The couples also redefined the meaning of ‘provider’ so that the men could still fall within the definition. While in the conventional couples the provider was the person who brought home the biggest paycheque, among the other couples the men’s management of the family finances, and other noneconomic
contributions, were considered part of providing. Thus it was that Bonnie, earning $114,000 a year and married to a man earning $3000, could nonetheless argue that they were ‘both providers’. Interestingly, these women were often very aware that their greater income didn’t bring them the same power within the relationship as it would a man in a more conventional marriage.
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These psychological scrambles reveal the strength of the push to maintain gendered roles, Victorian-style, within marriage. As Michael Selmi has pointed out, even though more than 80 percent of people born between 1965 and 1981 support the idea of equal caregiving, actual progress towards this goal has been ‘glacial’.
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Why is it still so hard, and so rare? Mabel Ulrich had a suggestion:

A man, it seems, may be intellectually in complete sympathy with a woman’s aims. But only about ten per cent of him is his intellect – the other ninety is emotions. And S.’s emotional pattern was set by his mother when he was a baby. It can’t be so easy being the husband of a ‘modern’ woman. She is everything his mother wasn’t – and nothing she was.
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Dr. Ulrich’s suggestion dovetails beautifully with the curious split often seen between the gender-equal values people consciously endorse and the automatic gender associations that, through their influence on thought and act, can undermine those beliefs.
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For example, one study found that a group of childless female college students reported that they valued a college education more than motherhood. Yet on the IAT, they found it easier to link self words (like
I, me
, and
self
) with pictures of the paraphernalia of motherhood (such as cribs and strollers) than with images of college (like graduation gowns and binders).
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These automatic attitudes have an impact on our behaviour, over and above that of the values we consciously report.
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One study even found that only these were correlated with women’s career goals. Laurie Rudman and Jessica Heppen measured how strongly a sample of young women implicitly linked romantic partners with the sort of shining
knight heroism of fairy tales, and also asked them directly what they thought of such sugar-coated fantasies. Remarkably, it was the strength of a woman’s implicit romantic fantasy associations, rather than any no-nonsense views that she personally endorsed, that correlated (negatively) with her level of interest in achieving high-status and educationally demanding occupations.
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Research into the development of automatic associations is still in its early stages, but preliminary findings suggest that, just as Ulrich proposed, they may be most strongly impacted by early childhood experiences.
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In which case, as we’ll see in the third part of this book, it is hardly surprising that implicit gender associations are so traditional.

People can and do act against the implicit mind and more in line with their consciously endorsed values. But if
her
implicit mind, or her social identity as a mother or wife, triggers her to load the washing machine, unload the dishwasher and put away the children’s clothes – while
his
implicit mind is not so helpful on such matters – then before you know it you are engaged in what sociologists describe as ‘actively negotiating and continually challenging prevailing gendered assumptions about work and family roles’ and the rest of us call ‘plain old arguing’.
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Or perhaps it is not even as subtle as this. Powerful social norms still regard home and children as primarily
her
responsibility, even if he is now expected to help. A marvellous poster, put out by the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage in the UK, depicts a husband returning to ‘a suffragette’s home’. The room is in cheerless disarray, the weeping children have holes in their socks, and a fuel-less lamp emits not light, but smoke. The only evidence of the errant wife and mother is a ‘votes for women’ poster on the wall, on which is pinned a note bearing the callous words, ‘back in an hour or so’. Just substitute the words ‘working mother’ for ‘suffragette’ and the poster could still be used today to great effect. While there are entire chapters – books, even – devoted to the issues of being a working mother, rare indeed is it to come across even a paragraph in a child-rearing manual that
addresses the conflicts of time and responsibility that arise from being a working father.

This social norm puts women in a weak negotiating position. Anecdotally, many mothers I have spoken to have already eliminated from their mental decision-space – as if they simply did not exist – any work choices that would require their husband to take more (or even any) responsibility for the children. Needless to say, this immediately sweeps a number of options off the table. Sometimes there might be genuine practical or financial reasons for this. However, the head begins to swim when you start to look into the circularity behind such impasses.
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One legacy of the neat breadwinner/caregiver division of labour is an expectation of the ‘zero drag’ worker who, because home and children are taken care of by someone else, can commit himself fully to his job. This expectation will not change, so long as women continue to cover family responsibilities. Of course, some jobs really aren’t flexible. But it
is
curious just how bendy and stretchy a woman can make a job that appears a good deal more rigid and inflexible when pursued by a male.
Halving It All
author Francine Deutsch describes two couples she encountered. In one couple, he was a college professor and she was a physician, and in the other couple she was the college professor and he the physician. But in both cases, ‘both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.’
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Then, there’s the motherhood penalty (in addition to other gender-based pay inequalities) that increases the financial clout of his salary relative to hers.
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Finally, the more a woman adapts her career to family commitments, and the longer the accommodation goes on, the wider the gap between his and her salary and career potential becomes. And so it becomes increasingly rational to sacrifice her career to his.

We begin to see how any hazy notions of an equal partnership that couples might once have held begin to seem like nothing but youthful folly.
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Mabel Ulrich spent several years trying to juggle a private medical practice (which she eventually gave up), family, and children. Having turned down a job offer to save her husband
the inconvenience of having to move his medical practice, she wrote, ‘I don’t believe a woman’s work is ever so important to her as a man’s is to him.’
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Was this merely a psychological Band-Aid that Ulrich applied to the wound of her disappointingly unequal marriage? Or, as proponents of hardwired sex differences would suggest, had her abstract feminist ideals been dislodged by biological reality? Louann Brizendine, for example, suggests that the female brain responds to breadwinning versus family conflict ‘with increased stress, increased anxiety, and reduced brainpower for the mother’s work and her children’, and that combining motherhood with career gives rise to a neurological ‘tug-of-war because of overloaded brain circuits.’
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Overloaded brain circuits
… or overloaded to-do list? Brizendine’s claim that ‘understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future’
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is not one I found especially compelling. I suspect most working mothers find other things more helpful: such as workplaces that are family friendly, and fathers who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby wakes up, cook dinner, help with homework and call the paediatrician on their lunch hour. In fact, these turn out to be important absences in the lives of the so-called new traditionalist women who opt out of their often prestigious, lucrative and hard-earned careers to devote themselves to home and family. Their choice is usually attributed to the pull of women’s different internal drivers. And yet sociologist Pamela Stone’s detailed interview study of fifty-four such women, reported in her book
Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home
, reveals a fascinating and complex picture, and one in which gender inequality at home (alongside all-or-nothing workplaces) was a major factor in most interviewees’ decisions to trade in the very successful careers that they loved. Their husbands, who also had demanding careers, were often described by their wives as being ‘supportive’ and giving their wives a ‘choice’. But none provided a
real
choice to their wives by offering to adapt their own careers to family demands:

Women and their husbands appeared to perceive the latter’s responsibility as limited to providing the monetary support to make it possible for their wives to quit,
not
to helping wives shoulder family obligations that would facilitate the continuation of their careers. ‘It’s your choice’ was code for ‘It’s your problem’.… Veiled behind the seemingly egalitarian rhetoric of ‘support’ and ‘choice,’ husbands were in effect giving their wives permission to quit their careers, and signaling at the same time that women’s careers were not worthwhile enough to merit any behavioral changes on their (the husbands’) part.
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And although we tend to think that, perhaps because of hormones, there is something natural about fathers being more hands-off, biology offers us a lot more flexibility than we might think. Hormones are not simply internal drivers that pull us towards particular sorts of environments and behaviour: the influence works in the other direction, too. Stimuli in the environment – whether it is a baby, a success at work or a touching and moving segment on
Oprah
– can trigger hormonal changes.
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Our hormones respond to the life we lead, breaking down the false division between internal biology and our external environment. And so, it should be little surprise to learn that it is not just mothers’ hormones that change during the transition to parenthood, but fathers’, too. (Although there is rather little research in this area, testosterone levels, for example, seem to be suppressed around the time of birth, while prolactin – which as the name suggests is a hormone implicated in lactation – increases.)
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In her study of equal sharers – that is, mothers and fathers who equally share the responsibilities and pleasures of homelife – Francine Deutsch found that equally sharing fathers had developed the kind of closeness to their children we normally associate with mothers. Said one father of teenage girls, who ‘expressed what many [equally sharing fathers] felt: “A lot of things I would change in my life. (Parenting) I wouldn’t consider changing. It’s the best thing I’ve done in my life.”’
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And if this fails to convince, consider the rat. Male rats don’t experience the hormonal changes that trigger maternal behaviour in female rats. They
never
normally participate in infant care. Yet put a baby rat in a cage with a male adult and after a few days he will be caring for the baby almost as if he were its mother. He’ll pick it up, nestle it close to him as a nursing female would, keep the baby rat clean and comforted and even build a comfy nest for it.
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The parenting circuits are there in the male brain, even in a species in which paternal care doesn’t normally exist.
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If a male
rat
, without even the aid of a William Sears baby-care manual, can be inspired to parent then I would suggest that the prospects for human fathers are pretty good.

Contrary to the idea of shared care as a modern, misguided fad, contemporary fathers may be less involved with their children than they were two to three hundred years ago. From the few available historical scraps of information about fatherhood in early America, historian John Demos has suggested ‘a picture, above all, of active, encompassing fatherhood, woven into the whole fabric of domestic and productive life.… Fathering was thus an extension, if not a part, of much routine activity’.
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When in the nineteenth century men’s work increasingly moved outside the home, stories of the time ‘picked up the tension’ between career and home life. Demos describes a fictional father from the 1842 edition of
Parents’ Magazine
(even the name is more progressive than the majority of titles today) who is so busy that he can no longer get home in time to conduct the family prayers. In the end, the father is brought ‘back to his senses and his duty: “Better to lose a few shillings,” he concludes, “than to become the deliberate murderer of my family, and the instrument of ruin to my soul.”’
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The question of the most appropriate care of the soul is well beyond the scope of this book. But hardwired accounts of gender that regard almost all men as single-mindedly career focused ignore gathering signs that some men no longer wish to be that instrument of ruin and would enjoy more time for family, friends and community.
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