Equality shouldn't vanish at home

Women in the workplace have come a long way in terms of opportunities, respect and equality in the last 50 years. Heck, up until 1974 a woman couldn’t get a credit card in her own name without a husband’s signature. But a new study recently released by sociology professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that Americans’ are far more likely to believe in gender equality at work than they are at home.

The study, based on national survey data from 1977 to 2016, is set to be published in the journal “Gender and Society” and analyzed responses from 27,000 people over the span of four decades.

It found that more than half of Americans overall and about three-quarters of millennials believe that men and women should be equal in both the public and private spheres. But it also found that about 25 percent of people think that while work environments should offer the same opportunities and expectations regardless of gender, women should still do the majority of the homemaking and child-rearing.

It’s an interesting dichotomy — that in the minds of nearly a quarter of the country women have free reign to join the work force and climb the corporate ladder, but are still expected to shoulder the majority of the load at home.

One is forced to wonder where that expectation originated. Was it influenced by regional norms or due to cultural or religious differences? Could it be chalked up to a generation gap?

The study found strong information pointing to the latter, finding that one-fifth of men born between 1946 and 1980 said women should be more equal at work than at home. It’s important to note that in that scenario, men would be like the cat that ate the canary, enjoying the additional funds from a second household income without adding to their responsibilities at home or doing any extra chores.

This can also have a negative effect on men of all ages, who feel unfair pressure to be breadwinners or may be stigmatized for wanting to be stay-at-home dads.

I’ll be the first to admit that gender roles have been thoroughly and aggressively tossed out the window in my household. My husband does almost all of the cooking and is the impetus behind our cleaning schedule. Often I work in my office while he makes dinner and he chuckles about his unparalleled domestic prowess.

More and more young families are like ours, but there is still a large subset of millennials that fall automatically into the traditional family structure, particularly after they have children. Of course, that’s not inherently a bad thing, but it must be noted that these societally–enforced stereotypes can lead to an unfair distribution of physical and emotional labor and can impact and shape behaviors as both adults and children strive to fit within the widely-accepted norm.

Unfortunately, nonconforming has consequences, and our family as experienced some criticism of its own, from relatives questioning why I don’t man the stove at family gatherings to friends wondering how it is that I don’t join them in commiserating over cleaning up after sloppy spouses.

I think we have to not only be careful of but actively resist consigning people to behavioral boxes based on their gender regardless of the setting, particularly since objective data and historical context indicate there’s very little difference — at work or at home — in the duties that men and women can fulfill. That way, we can make sure that when a person is committing to a role in the office or in their own living room, it’s because they want to, not because they feel like they must.

Shannen Talbot can be reached at shannen@cheneyfreepress.com.