Why don’t more dads work part-time?
October 20, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
‘I’m a man,” says Tom, “therefore I work. Therefore I don’t do childcare, or at least not much. That’s what my wife does.”
Tom, 37, is one of those unreconstructed fathers whose world-view flies in the face of today’s report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) which suggests the majority of working fathers are unhappy with their work-life balance. The Fathers, Family and Work report found that that 62% of fathers thought that dads should spend more time caring for their children.
Tom, a shoe salesman from Birmingham who spends most of his working life on the English motorway system in a Skoda Octavia estate, is married with a three-year-old daughter and an 11-month-old son. He didn’t take the two weeks’ paternity leave to which he was entitled and has never sought to go part-time. His wife, Sue, who was a shop assistant before their first child was born, is now a full-time mother.
Don’t you miss spending time with your children, I ask Tom? “I can’t afford to think that way. Sue can’t make the money that I can, we can’t afford childcare, so I wind up working 50-plus hours a week, often six days. Otherwise the family doesn’t function.”
But aren’t you rationalising the fact that you don’t want to do childcare? “Well, I certainly don’t want to be in a woman’s world – hanging out at playgroups and coffee mornings. That’s my nightmare. I like being weekend dad, taking kids swimming and doing the fun stuff.”
Would if make any difference if you were able to go to part-time working? “I can’t imagine that, working in my business. You go part-time and you risk not being taken seriously – whether you’re a man or a woman. I have to say I like being the man, bringing home the bacon. I get a kick out of that.”
But maybe working fathers – and their employers – would benefit from reducing their hours. The EHRC report found that six out of 10 fathers work more than 40 hours a week. Yet a recent survey of American human resources directors by researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah, found that where city [ie local authority] employees had been offered flexitime or part-time contracts, 64% said the new working patterns improved morale, and 41% said they improved productivity.
But do fathers really want to reduce their working hours to spend more time with their kids? “Yes, they do,” says Duncan Fisher, the founder of Fathers Direct, who gave up a job in international development to raise his two daughters and runs the dad.info website. “It’s a very slow process because there are lots of things blocking them – workplace cultures and pay – but the impulse is definitely there.”
Fisher argues that the process will only be accelerated when there is a mechanism that incentivises working fathers to spend more time doing childcare. That mechanism seemed, at least, to be offered last month when Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman announced a reform whereby mothers would be able to choose to transfer the last six months of their maternity leave to the father, three months of which would be paid. “This gives families radically more choice and flexibility in how they balance work and care of children, and enables fathers to play a bigger part in bringing up their children,” said Harman, the minister for women and equality.
“I’d love it if that happened,” says David, 31, a website editor who has just returned to full-time work after taking two weeks’ paternity leave to which he added a week of annual leave. “While I was on paternity leave, I felt as though my partner and I were sharing the childcare equally and that felt great. Now I’ve gone back to work I feel I’m missing out. I can’t afford to do anything but work full-time now my partner is raising our daughter and, anyway, my employers wouldn’t allow me to go part-time.”
Harman’s announcement, though, was greeted with less enthusiasm by David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce. A recession, he said, was not a good time to introduce this reform. “It is a huge burden to plan for both a male and a female employee being away.”
Many employers are hostile to the idea of making fathers take more paternity leave. “It’s not said out loud, but lots of companies, especially small ones, don’t employ women they think are going to be pregnant and who will take leave,” says the manager of a fruit-and-veg wholesaler in London, who employs 10 people. “If men start taking larger chunks of paternity leave, then fathers-to-be will be regarded …
Read the original article at Guardian