Esquire why men cant have it all

My wife makes more money than I do. We majored in the same thing at the same college at the same time, and when I chose to go into journalism, she chose to go to law school. She works longer hours, shoulders weightier responsibilities, and faces greater or at least more reliable prospects for long-term success, all of which are direct results of choices that we made in our early twenties.

She does more of the heavy lifting with our young son than I do, but I do as much as I can. Someone else watches him while we are at work. I do a lot of cooking and cleaning around our house. So does she. I don't keep score and she says she doesn't , and it's hard to imagine how our life would work if we weren't both giving every day our all.

According to a study released in March by the Pew Research Center, household setups like ours are increasingly the norm: 60 percent of two-parent homes with kids under the age of eighteen are made up of dual-earning couples i.

On any given week in such a home, women put in more time than men doing housework sixteen hours to nine and more time with child care twelve to seven. These statistics provoke outrage among the "fair share" crowd, and there is a sense, even among the most privileged women, that they are getting a raw deal. In April, Michelle Obama referred to herself as a "single mother" before clarifying: "I shouldn't say single — as a busy mother, sometimes, you know, when you've got a husband who is president, it can feel a little single.

Men in dual-income couples work outside the home eleven more hours a week than their working wives or partners do forty-two to thirty-one , and when you look at the total weekly workload, including paid work outside the home and unpaid work inside the home, men and women are putting in roughly the same number of hours: fifty-eight hours for men and fifty-nine for women.

How you view those numbers depends in large part on your definition of work, but it's not quite as easy as saying men aren't pulling their weight around the house. Spending eleven fewer hours at home and with the kids doesn't mean working dads are freeloaders any more than spending eleven fewer hours at work makes working moms slackers.

These are practical accommodations that reflect real-time conditions on the ground, and rather than castigate men, one might consider whether those extra hours on the job provide the financial cover the family needs so that women can spend more time with the kids. Also, according to women in the Pew study, it seems to be working out well. Working mothers in dual-earning couples are more likely to say they're very or pretty happy with life right now than their male partners are 93 percent to 87 percent ; if anything, it's men who are twice as likely to say they're unhappy.

Pew supplied Esquire with data specific to dual-income couples that is not part of its published report. There is plenty of data relating to other household arrangements — working father and stay-at-home mom; working mother and stay-at-home dad; same-sex households — but since the focus of Slaughter, Sandberg, et al. Ellen Galinsky has been studying the American workplace for more than thirty years.

A married mother of two grown kids with a background in child education and zero tolerance for bullshit, she cofounded the Families and Work Institute in part to chart how the influx of women in American offices and factories would affect family dynamics.

I would go into meetings with business leaders and report the fact that men's work-family conflict was higher than women's, and people in the room — who were so used to being worried about women's advancement — couldn't believe it. What they couldn't believe was decades of conventional wisdom — men secure and confident in the workplace, women somewhat less so — crumbling away as more and more fathers began to invest more of their time and energy into their home lives. Though they still lag behind women in hours clocked at the kitchen sink, men do more than twice as much cooking and cleaning as they did fifty years ago, which probably comes as a shock to older women who would famously come home from work to a "second shift" of housework.

In reporting her book, Big Girls Don't Cry, a study of women's roles in the election, Rebecca Traister interviewed dozens of high-achieving women who were in the thick of second-wave feminism and encountered the generation gap for herself. For people [in their thirties], isn't it totally normal for guys to do a lot of cooking? In fact it's one of the things about today — dudes love food, right? But it was so foreign to her.

In speaking with a variety of men for this article, I found that most men say they share responsibilities as much as circumstances allow. One of the men who spoke with me, Dave from Atherton, California, runs a successful business, and both he and his wife a fellow technology executive say that they split their family duties Yet Dave still considers himself an anomaly.

You have to try and make sure that you're doing the other stuff around the house in a way that's fair and equal. However, I will try. The validation of one's feelings is the language of therapy, which is to say that it is how we all talk now. This is not to denigrate the language or the feelings; it is only to say that to use one's feelings as evidence of an injury is no way to advance a serious cause.

And to imply that one has been made to feel any way at all — well, no grown man has ever won that argument before. A final point about housework: It is not always as simple as men volunteering to do what needs to be done. To give a small, vaguely pitiful example from my own life: We share laundry duty in my house, and yet whenever I'm through folding a pile of clothes, my wife will then refold everything, quietly and without comment. This used to annoy me — why do I even bother?

When I press her on it, she tells me that I'm doing it wrong, and this too used to annoy me, until I realized that it wasn't really about me. What you're about to read is a passage from "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," and though it's long and windy, I feel the need to quote from as much of it as possible. You will understand why:. From years of conversations and observations I've come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help.

I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job. Slaughter, you had me at "I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do Since Slaughter doesn't provide any evidence to support her claim, it's impossible to say whether the men she's referring to are the sole breadwinners in the family meaning: the ones who feel the intense weight and pressure of being what one writer described as "one job away from poverty" or are in two-income households, or what, but it's worth keeping in mind that this comes from a person whose husband, by her own admission, sacrificed much in his own academic career to do the heavy lifting with their children, all so she could pursue her dream job and then complain about it, bitterly, in the pages of a national magazine.

The trouble with probing men's and women's emotional relationships with their children is that the subject is fraught with stereotypes and prone to specious generalities see above , but here goes: In my own experience as both son and father, I've learned that one parent's relationship with a child and vice versa isn't inherently richer or deeper than the other parent's. It's just different, and with more and more fathers spending more and more time with their kids today — nearly three times as much as they did in — that has become more true than ever.

Men want a different relationship with their children than men have had in the past They don't want to be stick figures in their children's lives. They don't want it on their tombstone how many hours they billed. That 'Cat's Cradle' song is very much alive and well in the male psyche. Not only do working fathers from dual-income homes spend just as much time at work as their fathers and grandfathers did all while putting in many, many more hours with kids and chores , they also spend more time at work than non-fathers.

Seven hours more a week, according to Pew, a trend that Galinsky has noticed in her own research and that she attributes to the unshakable, if often illusory, sense of being the breadwinner. There is the matter of guilt and whether women find it harder than men to be away from their children — which, if that's the case, would mean that women looking to advance in the workplace would have heavier emotional baggage than their male peers.

Any husband who's watched his wife cry before taking a business trip and wondering — silently, I hope — to himself, why? There's no question. Chalk this up to social conditioning men are raised to be the providers, so it's easier for them to be absent or genetic predisposition men are not naturally nurturing or emotional shallowness men aren't as in touch with their feelings , but there is the sense, down to the man, that missing their kids is the price of doing business.

And so we all do the best we can. Dave and his wife make weekends sacrosanct and family dinners a priority. Dave's last name, by the way, is Goldberg, and his wife is Sheryl Sandberg, and thanks to Lean In, she is famous.

All while splitting parenting responsibilities with a really busy wife. They have the means, certainly, but more importantly, the will. Speaking of: In her commencement speech for Harvard Business School in , Sandberg addressed an issue that comes up often — men need to do more to support women in the workplace. When they hear a woman is really great at her job but not liked, take a deep breath and ask why.

We need to start talking openly about the flexibility all of us need to have both a job and a life. It's worth noting that the statistical revelations presented in Dorment's piece are enlightening if not compelling. He lays out his argument systematically, painting the picture of a rapidly disappearing opportunity gap between the sexes and immediately acknowledging the nagging presence of an achievement gap.

Why don't women hold more than 15 percent of Fortune executive-officer positions in America? Why are they stalled below 20 percent of Congress? Why does the average woman earn only seventy-seven pennies for every dollar made by the average man? Childbirth plays a role, knocking ambitious women off their professional stride for months if not years at a time while their male peers go chug-chug-chugging along, but then why do some women still make it to the top while others fall by the wayside?

Institutional sexism and pay discrimination are still ugly realities, but with the millions in annual penalties levied on offending businesses and the attendant PR shitstorms , they have become increasingly, and thankfully, uncommon. College majors count women still dominate education, men engineering , as do career choices, yet none of these on their own explains why the opportunity gap between the sexes has all but closed yet a stark achievement gap persists.

He uses a tired personal anecdote about his wife re-folding their laundry to emphasize the difference between men and women. His reference to Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" to explain the paradox of fatherhood feels obligatory and the quote on workforce dynamics from Don Draper, a fictional, upper class, white, male advertising executive who lives in the '60s, is gratuitous. Dorment goes on to remind everyone that life is, like, really hard for men too, you guys.

Allow me to paint another picture. One in which women are asked to make the same personal sacrifices as men past and present — too much time away from home, too many weekends at the computer, too much inconvenient travel — but then claim some special privilege in their hardship.

One in which universal preschool and after-school programs would be a boon to all parents and not, as Collins suggests, simply to women. In which men spend more time with their children, and are more involved with their home lives, than ever before.

Boy doing dishes. Nationaal Archieef, Netherlands. What I found perplexed me. I knew I was awake, thanks to 4. The only solution seemed to be outlining his piece from start to finish I did, and it is included at the end of this post.

Those seeking life at the top, being hard and rewarding, should not complain. Dorment faces an issue fraught with complications, some he thankfully acknowledges and others, like codified power structures and brazened gender hierarchies, that he does not. In the essay collection Are Women Human? What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether…. That a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. Mike Quinn, Wikimedia Commons. When it comes to discussing matters of individual choice, especially in the domain of careers, Sayers was frustrated by both masculine and feminist attempts to group women as a uniform collective.

I should note that Sayers is not talking about historical trends or historical grounds for inequality in job opportunities for women. In a similar fashion, I think I think!

By focusing on individuals rather than men vs. Again, neither is Dorment addressing fundamental or historical grounds for inequality; in this summary of his argument, he is focused on the contemporary conversation on advising women and men how best to balance life and work.

There are times and places for having gender-specific conversations about balancing work and family, ensuing from shared threads of commonality and widespread patterns of discrimination or hierarchy. Writing for the Harvard Business Review blog , he argued:. If men have taken the C-suite hostage, then Lean In presents with underlying symptoms of Stockholm syndrome. Like Sandberg and Slaughter, Allworth accepts the idea that men and women make different choices along a general line; however, like Dorment, he examines those choices as a collective movement.

Allworth probes the wider philosophical consideration of what, collectively, they are striving towards. What are we choosing to have, and should we choose to have it? The second is that, by considering the object of the debate and of our social strivings, he contextualizes the debate within a social narrative.