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Towards Equality on the Home Front: Are Women Ready to “Let Men In?”
“Women learned to become more like men. Now men need to become more like women,” according to Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, writing in the New York Times (“Men’s Lib!” 15 November 2015).
Parsing the changes in our economy and in our families over the past generation or so, Sawhill and Reeves argue that, as a society, we need to do more to facilitate men taking a more active role at home and taking more traditionally “pink collar” jobs.
Agreed.
I quarrel neither with their goals nor their methods — which include, taking a page from the Swedish “social policy playbook,” paid family leave designed particularly to entice men.
But there is a core assumption at the root of Sawhill and Reeves’ argument that requires some interrogation.
“Women have shown they are ready for this transition,” they claim at the end. “But what about men?”
Some women are indeed “ready.” Others . . . rather less so.
And — particularly in the sphere of parenting — the landscape that confronts men who are moving in the direction that Sawhill and Reeves (and I) favor is indifferent at best, often hostile.