The Fostering Caring Masculinities project (FOCUS) is a collaboration between researchers in five European countries to investigate and improve men’s balancing of family life and work. The researchers studied two organisations in each of the five countries to see how men are managing to spend time away from work to care for their children. On 20-22 October, they presented their findings at the Fostering Caring Masculinities Conference in Girona, Spain.
Researchers from Germany, Iceland, Norway, Slovenia and Spain all told the conference that their countries would like to see fathers spending more time caring for their children, and replacing the distant authoritarian fathers of the past with intimate and loving fathers in the future. By doing this fathers can present male role models to their children that not only better equip them for today’s society, but will also help them to mature into contented adults. The teams are now drawing up best practice guidelines which they will present to companies in their respective countries and argue for their adoption in company policy.
The Norwegian Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud has led this project on men’s work/life balance since its beginning in November 2005. The traditional pattern of family life has been changing for at least the last two generations, to one where women on average are now nearly as active as men in the workplace. But now the time has come to focus attention on men and determine whether the equality of responsibilities and duties in the workplace between the sexes is reflected by an equality of responsibilities in the home.
Parenting roles lag behind changing gender roles
In each of these countries the last three decades have seen a great deal of change in men’s and women’s responsibilities in relation to the private domestic life of the family and the family’s public life of work and securing its income. From a largely gender segregated model of the man as the breadwinner, responsible for securing the family’s income through paid work and for running the family as its head, and the woman as responsible for care of the children and running the home, all of the societies involved have been moving towards a model in which the woman is equally active in the workplace outside of the home.
Only Slovenia has experienced a dramatically different pattern, due to the end of the Yugoslavian model in which both sexes were included in all aspects of public life, to a model of liberal capitalism where commerce has come first, and society, welfare and families have struggled along behind it.
Although men have gradually been taking more responsibility inside the home traditional patterns of behaviour and culture, not least the culture of the workplace, have meant that changes in men’s practices have lagged behind changes in women’s practices. The work place studies in the five countries have aimed at analysing the experiences of men’s relations to work and family, in order to be able to suggest practical measures for business and industry. The goal, in the last stage of the project, is to return to business and industry with a range of suggestions for organisational measures that can improve men’s options for balancing work and family life.
In his opening address Arnfinn Andersen of the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud in Norway explained that, in recent years, Norway has been learning how men can best combine their jobs and the care of their children. Nordic countries are often seen as having achieved the greatest advances in equality between the sexes, whether it is women’s equality in public life or men’s participation in domestic life.
Pressure of work
One of the greatest challenges caring masculinities faces, however, is the pressure men face to perform at work. Victor Seidler, professor in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, London, said that achieving gender equality both in the workplace and at home and balancing these two spheres is complicated by the contemporary working ethic of always being on duty, of not being able to let go at the end of the working day. This problem seems to be particularly true for workers in northern Europe where both men and women have difficulty in evaluating when they have done enough work. This has remained a barrier to many men who want to spend more time with their children.
The culture of the workplace and the pressure they are often under to over-perform makes it very difficult for men, even when family-friendly legislation is in place, to actually take a step back from work responsibilities in order to take up family responsibilities. As women have been gaining equality in the workplace they have discovered that these pressures affect them too, and for them to step back from their career while parental responsibilities are prioritised can mean they are penalised at work, professor Seidler explained.
Best Practice
Ingrid Rusnes, Sociologist and Project Coordinator of FOCUS, talked on the issue of men not taking the parental leave they are entitled to. Microsoft Norway, one of two Norwegian companies studied in Norway’s contribution to the project, has realised that from a business point of view it is a problem that their female employees are away from work for a year on parental leave while their male employees are barely away for a few weeks. They have found that when an employee is away from work for a whole year they are likely to lose skills and their working network is likely to have broken down. Rusnes explained that Microsoft has therefore introduced a “daddy package” specifically to encourage fathers to take more leave, and the company has set as a target that its male and female employees alike will take six months of parental leave. Rusnes told the conference that this aim is a worthy one, because if men and women achieve similar balances between their working life and their family life then it is more likely that gender equality can be achieved both in the workplace and in the home.
Although Microsoft Norway have introduced flexible working hours and working from home for their employees, Rusnes pointed out that a negative aspect is that this has also led somewhat to a breakdown in the boundary between work and private lives – what Victor Seidler described as “the colonisation of family life by the corporation”. This measure to help people better organise their work and family life turns out to simultaneously be a potential threat to the quality of family life, as some workers let work occupy more and more of the time they are at home.
Hegemonic masculinity
Mari Teigen, Research Director at the Institute for Social Research in Norway, presented the European Dimension, and told the conference how much the different countries have in common with respect to these issues. She said that despite different histories and widely varying practices and legislation in every country, they each faced the same challenges and had the same parallel goals of men’s full equality of participation in parenting and general domestic duties and women’s full equality in all aspects of public life.
Teigen pointed out that one of the main barriers to change was the resilience of the dominant hegemonic masculinity, which is often the driving force behind over work, and which prevents parents spending enough time with their children. Data from each of the countries show that in families with young children the mother tends to reduce her working hours while the father tends to increase his.
The studies across the five countries show that although parental leave is being expanded to give parents the opportunity to spend more time caring for their very young children there is very little focus within companies on men and on the fostering of caring masculinities, with the notable exception of Microsoft Norway.
The teams from the five countries had several suggestions for improving the situation. Firstly, strengthening paternity leave should be a central tool in getting men to become close intimate parents to their children from the start. This is necessary, they said, for fathers to forge close relationships with their children right from birth, and so that children have two close parents that are involved in every stage of their development.
Secondly, the overwork, over-achievement culture in companies needs to be changed so that parents do not neglect their families to pursue career goals. This affects both men and women, although the traditional hegemonic masculine culture puts more pressure on men to conform to this culture. Targeting high achieving men in senior and middle management positions, who are often the role models for men working for a company, and persuading them to make use of paternity leave measures can be an effective strategy for changing the culture of a workplace.
Gender Equality
The partners in the FOCUS project have now moved into the final stage of the project. They are developing guidelines for organisational measures for companies to encourage men to achieve a good balance between work and private life. The conclusion of the project will be to present these guidelines at an event held for the media, businesses and industry, with the intention that they will be adopted to improve men’s life/work balance. Ingrid Rusnes said that the media and industry in Norway have already shown considerable interest in the project, and she is optimistic that the guidelines will have a positive reception.
According to Ingrid Rusnes, achieving gender equality is not just about achieving equality for women, but it is also about achieving equality for men. If men’s caring does not achieve equal status to women’s caring then the burden of childcare will continue to fall upon women, and gender equality in the workplace is not likely to be fully achieved.