Guest Editorial:

Reworking Work and Family Issues for

Fathers
KERRY DALY ROB PALKOVITZ
University of Guelph, Ontario University of Delaware

R esearchers who focus their attention on some facet of the gender puzzle are faced
with the challenge of making visible a set of dynamics that are often so obvious and
embedded in our taken-for-granted lives that they are almost impossible to see. For
example, in a simple turn of phrase, Levine and Pitt made the invisible glaringly
apparent when they coined the phrase working fathers in their 1995 landmark
book. Our preoccupation with the work-family conflicts experienced by women as
they moved into the paid labour force had blinded us to the emerging conflicts expe-
rienced by men as they sought to navigate their work and family lives. With this
declaration, Levine and Pitt helped us to see what we had overlooked: that there was
an important struggle for men that we needed to address. Although there has been an
explosion of research on fatherhood in the past two decades, the story line in the
work and family literature continues to be dominated by the challenges faced by
women and mothers as they seek to reconcile the demands of paid work and their
responsibilities to provide care to the family.
Devoting a special issue of Fathering to the challenges of work and family for
men is part of the effort to make these challenges more salient, understandable, and
part of an emerging agenda for change. In the same way that the conditions of paid
work were and continue to be a political issue for women, the conditions under
which men provide care within the context of their working lives must be a political
issue. Only when we have a better understanding of the dynamics, constraints, and
opportunities that affect the ways men provide care to their children, parents, and
partners can we participate fully in a social agenda of change designed to enhance
gender equity at home and at work.
Comparing contemporary families to recent cohorts, we see decreases in gender
role specialization in achieving overall levels of waged and non-waged family work.
Contemporary men and women are providing less than previous cohorts in areas of
traditional gendered exclusivity and experiencing similar kinds of pressures as they
tread in opposite directions toward egalitarianism. Men and women have begun to
embrace greater responsibility in realms where prior generations practiced a greater
degree of gender segregation. However, if egalitarianism is a benchmark, there are
still significant changes ahead for both men and women in balancing work and family.

Fathering, Vol. 2, No. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 211-213.

2004 by the Mens Studies Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

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There are several conditions of culture that make the work and family issue dif-
ferent for men. First, work and family for men have not been steeped in a discourse
of choice. Work and family became an important political issue for women because
they were choosing to work after decades of either being deliberately excluded from
the paid labour force or told that their proper place was in the home. By contrast, it
is culturally assumed that men will work and pay attention to their families (in that
order). There has been a continuity in the expectation of paid work for men, with the
result being that women have tended to experience more guilt, stress, and conflict by
virtue of choosing to add work to their family responsibilities. For men, it has been a
rise in the expectations to provide carein a reactive fashionthat has heightened
attention to work and family issues.
Second, the reactive positioning of men to womens entry into the labour force
has been shrouded in a discourse of deficiency. The battle cry, as William Goode so
succinctly phrased it is, Why do men resist? Women were moving into the labour
force at the speed of light, and men were picking up the slack at home at the speed
of a glacier. Hence, one of the dominant ways that the discussion about work and
family conflict has been framed has been to emphasize mens failure to carry their
fair share at home. Not only was there an invisibility about work-family conflict for
men, but men were seen as adding to the problem for women. The main story line
was that men didnt have a direct problem with work-family conflict but they sure
added to the problem being experienced by women.
Third, although women and men work side-by-side in similar kinds of jobs,
their workplace practices continue to be shaped by a deeply gendered workplace
culture. This is manifest in the expectation that women need flexibility strategies
more than men because they carry a greater sense of responsibility for care. It is
manifest in the expectation that men take leave only when they really have to (why
isnt your partner doing this?), that men are at greater risk of compromising loyalty
when they choose family over work, or that men use parental leaves as a way of
increasing their leisure time. With these residues of traditional gender expectations
actively playing out in the workplace, it is not an environment that encourages men
to confidently take advantage of workplace flexibility strategies.
These conditions of culture play a powerful role in shaping the way men seek to
balance their work and family lives. They give rise to a number of contradictions
and tensions that make change difficult on the work and family frontier. Neverthe-
less change is underway. Though not steeped in the same pattern of making choices
about work and family, men are increasingly aware that choices are available.
Although discrepancies still exist between the family work that women and men do,
the pattern is one of convergence with women doing less and men doing more.
While workplace cultures are resistant to change, men are increasingly demanding
flexibility strategies that open pathways for their greater involvement as fathers and
caregivers.
In the issue that follows, we are pleased to present five papers dealing with very
different aspects of the work-family puzzle. Using the metaphor of edges, the
Palkovitz and Daly paper seeks to lay out a conceptual groundwork for examining
work-family issues for men at midlife. McDonald and Almeida explore the inter-
weave of work and family life for fathers, demonstrating the interconnections

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between the daily conditions of their work and their ability to provide emotional
support to their children. Based on life history interviews with low-income fathers,
Roy explores how precarious employment conditions affect fathers perspectives on
providing and caregiving. Doucet examines the way stay-at-home fathers manage
the masculine identity issues of provider, worker, and caregiver when these are
blurred in the experience of being at home. Barrah, Schultz, Baltes, and Stolz use
data from the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce to examine the
antecedents and outcomes of work-family conflict as it relates to the provision of
eldercare. Together these papers provide multiple vantage points on the many-lay-
ered, complex, and dynamic relationships involved as fathers rework work and fam-
ily issues.

REFERENCE

Levine, J., & Pitt, E.W. (1995). New expectations: Community strategies for respon-
sible fatherhood. New York: Families and Work Institute.

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