It's Father Time

When you think "childcare" what do you picture? A mother? A female teacher? The image of childcare is overwhelmingly centered around the mother and mother-like presences, which unsurprisingly is female.

A recent study led by nonprofit organization Equimundo showed that while men are willing to do childcare work, they are faced with barriers such as lack of structural support and abrasive gender stereotypes. Nearly 12,000 people were surveyed across 17 counties, of course including the United States. The study's results showed that globally, 53% of the fathers interviewed felt that gender equality is positive for both men and women and that men have been increasingly found to do childcare work in recent years. The study also found that most care work and domestic work is still more widely done by females. Another result from the study that was interesting was that balancing caregiving with both emotional and financial support saw more positive results than having financial or emotional support alone. Parents who felt that they lacked financial support were more likely to find child care more exhausting than enjoyable.

The report also found that 122 countries give some level of paid leave to fathers and of these only 81 have paternity leave that is paid at 100% of earnings and of those only 45 allow 14 weeks or more of paid parental leave for fathers. Other than lack of leave and support, what else is causing men to be less likely to be the caregiver for their children? Society at a structural level is one. If there is limited or short paternity leave, it is difficult for the father to feel comfortable in stepping away from his role in whatever company he may be working in. And if he is someone in a position of power or in a role in which taking extended time off is not supported by the company, of course getting the time off and feeling comfortable with said time off would be difficult.

In fact, a big takeaway from the study was that if the social norms of a country make the father feel uncomfortable for wanting to take care of their children, they will not do it. Like with any other study, something to keep in mind is the sample size, how the data was collected, and the diversity of the sample. We were not able to find much information on the spread of data nor how it was collected, but we can say that 12,000 people over 17 countries is a small amount that may or may not yield statistically significant results depending on how diverse the spread of samples was.

Arbitrage is your source for business, finance, and tech info. Don't miss the podcast at https://www.arbitragetrade.com/podcasts