Conclusion

“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a 2001 address

We set out in this report to better understand men who give care—who they are, what they do, how they think about care, and their experience of care—by comparing High-Intensity Caregivers and/or Parents, HICP, (men who have ever provided care to adults or fathers who have ever cared for a child under 18 with a medical, behavioral or other condition or disability), Other Fathers (who have never cared for a child with such special needs), and men who are Non-Caregivers.

As a reminder, in analyzing our survey data, we found that many people who provide high-intensity care do so in more than one capacity. That is, over half of parents who had ever cared for a child with special needs had also provided care for an adult, and almost a third of those who had ever cared for an adult were also parents who had cared for a child with special needs. Those who fell into one or both of these categories were also more similar than different in the caregiving attitudes measured by our survey. For these reasons, we grouped those who had ever cared for an adult and parents who had ever cared for a child with special needs together as High-Intensity Caregivers and /or Parents, HICP, and compared them to Other Parents—those who have not cared for children with special needs—and to Non-Caregivers. The HICP group warrants further research in its own right, with more detailed measures of attitudes and experience to increase our understanding of how men who care for adults compare to fathers who care for children with special needs, and how these men compare to men who do both types of high-intensity caregiving.

For this report, we initially sought to explore a central question: whether men’s experience of providing care influenced their attitudes about the value of caregiving. We were curious to explore whether men valuing care would be associated with men actually doing more of it.

It’s a critical question. Over the past year, the Better Life Lab’s Men and Care report series, including this one, has found, again and again, a vast disconnect between what men say they want or believe is ideal and what they do. In this report, we found that men overwhelmingly say they value care, that care should be equally shared with women, and that they want to be more engaged and active in care work. But they are unable to embody that ideal of shared care in what they actually do or feel they can do. Understanding what stops men from taking on more care responsibilities and, when they do, what encourages or enables them to continue is key to creating not only more gender equity but better health and wellbeing for people of all genders, children, and families.

We found that men overwhelmingly say they value care, with large majorities saying unpaid care work is just as important as paid work. And yet we found that the belief that care is valuable did not necessarily translate into men taking on more care responsibilities or shape their attitudes about who could or should be responsible for taking those duties on.

Instead, what became clear in analyzing the quantitative, focus group, and interview data is that experience itself is the best teacher. The very experience of providing care can shape men’s attitudes and beliefs and transform men’s lives. Men, contrary to cultural stereotypes, also perform many of the same caring tasks that women do. And men who are High-Intensity Caregivers and/or Parents, HICP, in particular, perform many of the intimate, hands-on tasks, like bathing and dressing, more typically associated with women, and experience more work-life conflict than other men. Employed HICP men report missing work or leaving the workforce entirely because of care responsibilities at the same rate as HICP women.

Focus group discussions held before the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent interviews after the pandemic hit to capture men’s care experiences in the crisis showed a nuanced picture of gendered beliefs around care. Men who had experience parenting or caregiving were more likely than men in the general population group to say that men, not just women, have a natural instinct to care, that providing care is a skill that can be learned, and that society’s expectations are often what keep men from giving care. Further, when we asked men to share photographs of what came to mind when they thought of the word “caregiver,” men in the general population group thought of nurses or female home health aides caring for the elderly or ill. Men who cared for another adult, in sharp contrast, shared more intimate and immediate photos of themselves and their families.

So the real question, then, is what are the factors that need to change to enable men to have the potentially transformative experience of providing care and living up to their ideal of equally sharing it?

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her lifelong fight for gender equity, understood that real gender equity for women would only come when workplaces and public policies changed to recognize that all workers have care responsibilities and lives outside of work and require flexibility, schedule control, and support in order to effectively combine work and care. But she also recognized that men would have to change and that the cultural expectations would need to shift for shared care to become an ordinary fact of everyday life. “My plan,” Ginsburg wrote, "would give men encouragement and incentives to share more evenly with women the joys, responsibilities, worries, upsets, and sometimes tedium of raising children from infancy to adulthood. (This, I admit, is the most challenging part of the plan to make concrete and implement.)”

Real gender equity for women would only come when workplaces and public policies changed to recognize that all workers have care responsibilities.

Traditional gendered beliefs that women, not men, are natural carers still have a powerful hold in America. Yet we found that men and their gendered attitudes toward breadwinning and caregiving are not the only nor the greatest obstacle to men being able to equally share care. Instead, structural barriers, too, keep them from embodying the ideal of equal sharing of care that they espouse. For men to share equally in care work, as they say they aspire to, workplaces, public policies, and cultural attitudes are what must change:

• Workplace policies and cultures must change to recognize that all workers, across the gender spectrum, have care responsibilities, not just women. Managers and leaders must provide flexible and remote work options and schedule control. Leaders must rethink and redesign performance management, recruiting, hiring, retention, pay equity, and promotion practices so that these systems no longer disadvantage workers with care responsibilities.
• Family-supportive public policies, including paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, paid annual leave, pay equity, and investments in child and elder care must exist. They must be gender-neutral and must be designed to help all workers combine work and care responsibilities, including men.
• The cultural narrative, unconscious bias, and gendered beliefs that men are providers and women naturally suited to care must continue to shift to recognize, support, and normalize the fact that those with care responsibilities exist across the gender spectrum. This shift is urgent, as elder care demands become more acute as U.S. society ages, and as the child care crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic has made so brutally apparent continues to strain family health, wellbeing, and financial stability and threatens to set gender equity back a generation.

As Ginsburg said, the challenges to overcome to enable men to equally share care are, indeed, immense. But, as our survey, focus group discussions, and interviews with so many men who provide care make clear, so are the rewards.