Finally, some attention to working fathers– hurrah! Some good, some bad… let me know what you think! (Thanks, HA, for assembling these and for the pithy commentaries.)
Report recognises that fathers might want to spend more time with their
children, but are unable to because of work.Comment on above article.
‘Why don’t more fathers work part-time?’ The answer is in the first sentence –
we need debate no longer.
Feminist Philosophers 
Women will not get equal pay until men get equal parenting.
Feminists make the valid point that businesses, organisations, etc are better off if they equally attract and use the talents of both women and men in the workplace.
Surely the same goes for the business of raising the next generation? It is equally vital to bring into that process the talents of both men and women.
Just as women bring useful different attributes/skills to the workplace, so men have somethinmg different and valuable to bring to child-raising. Child-raising can be equally shared. Many already try their hardest, even in our work-warped-world, to do so.
This is no way implies that the nuclear mom+dad+two-point-four-kids family is the best social structure in which to raise the next generation. It does say we need more male primary school teachers, more male child-miders, more flexible workplaces, more choice about who might be the primary’ ‘parent either full time or change-and-about.
We must have less prejudice against dad’s being part-time, having time off for their kids school plays, visits to denticts, etc. We also need to stop seeing children as the personal choice of one/two individuals whose choice (and its work-‘disruptive’ consequences) is frowned on by those who choose not to have children. Having children is the essential and only way in which we replicate our society/workforce.
Statistics which end up with the statement “at this rate it will take until the year **** for women to be 50% of the whatever” are a distracting kind of utter nonsense. If we keep doing what we’re doing now we will never close the equal pay gap. We need to do something different – and that is we need to re-arrange how we produce the next generation.
Feminist journalist Beatrix Campbell said “We now know that women can do anything, but we don’t know that men can do parenting.”
Does that mean we haven’t yet found out, or that we don’t want to attempt to find out?
One of the great spin-offs of lesbians and gay men having Civil Partnerships is that we see more man+man families raising kids, and just like woman+woman families these families naturally have links with role models of the other gender. Men can parent. Who and/or what is stopping them?
Apologies for long and jumbled rant.
“Feminists make the valid point that businesses, organisations, etc are better off if they equally attract and use the talents of both women and men in the workplace.”
Definitely agree, especially in the workplace. I know in Iceland 2 of their top banks were on the verge of collapse. They replaced the 2 men that were in charge of the banks with women in order to get the banks moving in the right direction again. It was proven that the banks were taking too many risks with men running them. So women needed to be brought in to keep those risks in check since women are known to be more conservative. One thing that was learned is that a bank that is run by all men is not good. In fact, it didn’t work. With women leading the banks more rational decisions are being made. The men in the positions directly below the women are still able to provide advice and input…but the women have the final say after reviewing their input in order to make rational decisions. Definitely a good system of checks and balances in my opinion. It’s a good example of how both men and women are needed in the workplace to balance each other.