Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 33

Voices LISA BELKIN HUFFINGTON 06.17.12 CARIN BAER/EVERETT COLLECTION survey found that 53 percent of men would like to be stay-at-homedads if their wives could earn enough to make that possible and two-thirds of fathers agreed with the statement “To me, my work is only a small part of who I am.” SO, PROBLEM SOLVED, right? After all, women have always vaguely assumed that if men just “got” it — if they felt the helplessness of wanting to be at home and at work at the same time — then that would “fix” it, or, at least, make it a badge of honor. As Gloria Steinem famously jabbed,  “if men could menstruate (they) would brag about how long and how much.”  But while there is some reason to believe empathy from men will bring attention to women’s problems (gender pay gaps tend to close at companies where the CEO has a daughter, for instance) it’s not looking like this new yearning by men will topple the old paradigm any time soon. In fact, rather than being able to bring balance where women could not, it’s looking like men might paradoxically have less success. To wit, take Charles and his wife, Sonia. The couple married two weeks after her college graduation and the first of their four children was born less than a year later. That’s when Sonia shelved a full scholarship to law school in order to spend the next seven years either pregnant or nursing while Charles got his PhD and entered academia. This year they decided it was her turn. She nabbed a prestigious, demanding fellowship at a Midwestern statehouse while he works as a visiting professor, which provides needed income but no real possi- Man Men’s Don Draper has few qualms about leaving the house.