Voices
bility of advancement.
Their patchwork of teachers
and caregivers all know “to call
ME,” Charles says, on the theory
that his wife “can’t be getting kid
calls at work. She is really setting
her reputation right now and you
don’t want that reputation to be
someone who drops the ball because of children.”
But what about his reputation? Data suggest that a man
who admits his attention is not
100 percent at work pays a higher
penalty than the one women have
complained about all these years.
The reason, explains Harrington,
is that a woman is assumed to
give less of herself at work once
she has children, so if she ratchets down or seeks flexibility she’s
simply doing what everyone expects. (Insulting, yes, but I’m just
the messenger here.) A man, on
the other hand, is expected to
work even harder, because “he is
now the breadwinner.” So as men
become increasingly likely to put
“breadwinner” well down on the
list of ways they see themselves, it
creates a circular tension between
what they want and what society
wants them to be.
And that, in turn, leads to much
of the musing, philosophizing and
LISA
BELKIN
HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
longing that so many researchers are hearing lately from men
— conversations that sound like
echoes of yesteryear, but with a
baritone twist.
It also leads Charles to ask that
I tweak his name a bit in this article, so that a future employer
doesn’t Google him and question
his work ethic.
Fathers today are where
mothers were 20 years ago.’”
—Brad Harrington
Executive Director of the Center
for Work & Family at the Carroll School
of Management at Boston College
“It all boils down to having to
conceptualize trade-offs,” Charles
says, “and realizing that all my
hopes and wants were not going to be met at the same time. If
two things are mutually incompatible it comes down to ‘if this,
then not this.’”
Quite a few frazzled working
mothers could have told him that
a long time ago — though it is
nice, if sobering, to have
him onboard.