Janine is the mom of a little boy who goes to my son’s preschool. She’s also a talented artist working on a beautiful children’s book with a lofty and lovely goal: to create a culture shift in the way we see the role of fathers.

I can’t agree with her more. Every problem that I write about on this blog—the pay gap between men and mothers, the psychic burden mothers carry, the health problems we suffer as a result—all these things would look very different if we lived in a society that valued the hard work of caregiving, where men were equal partners at home.

What I just wrote sounds preachy. But there’s nothing preachy about how Janine is approaching this book. It’s celebratory. Just watch the video. It got me all teary:

You can donate to Janine’s Kickstarter campaign, which will pay for the first edition print run of 2,000 full-color, hardcover books. Go Janine! Go dads! Donate here!

Father’s Day tomorrow. And a gazillion new surveys to tell us how the dads are doing…

I found this one by the Pew Research Center most intriguing: “A Tale of Two Dads. More Are Active, but More Are Absent.”

The fathers who live with their children, it seems, are becoming more actively involved in their children’s lives. But fewer fathers are living with their children.

Whether dads live with their kids is strongly related to socio-economic status. So, to put it bluntly, the study would suggest that poor dads are less involved with their kids than well-off dads.

Which flies in the face of a different study I read last year, that says that working class dads are making far greater progress on the kids n’ chores frontier than professional dads:

Between 1965 and 2003, college-educated husbands, on average, increased the time they spent doing housework by 33 percent. Husbands who graduated from high school but not college increased theirs by 52 percent. And husbands who were not high school graduates doubled the amount of housework they did. Despite starting from a lower level in the 1960s, these men are now taking on at least as much responsibility for housework as husbands with a college education and more than those who graduated from high school.

The Pew study also found that most fathers say being a dad is harder than it was a generation ago. Which is a great segue into Monday’s post, so stay tuned.

What about the dads in your life? How involved are they with their kids?

I get a lot of emails from women about what it’s like for them to try to work and be mothers. Every once in a while I post them with the author’s permission, like this one from Tennessee, and this one from Baltimore.

I think it’s important to share these stories, because it shines a light on the problem so many of us are grappling with. As a bonus, readers often leave kind, thoughtful comments, which I hope might provide a little bit of comfort.

Today I want to share letters from two dads. It’s easy to talk about work-family conflict as a “women’s issue” but as you’ll see, it affects dads, too.

I’ll call the first dad Scott. Scott asked that I not share where he works or the specifics of what he does, so I’ll just say he has a white collar job on the East Coast.

From Scott:

I came across your website and read your section on “What’s the problem?” I could go on and on about our situation but I’ll just give you a short summary:

I am the dad. I have two children (ages 2 and 4).

My wife was hospitalized twice after our second child was born (my daughter). It’s not clear if it was untreated postpartum depression or something else. In any case, she cannot fully function because of the meds she has been given. She has no marketable skills, so I am the sole bread winner.

I am on salary and on-call every 3 weeks. [My employer] has no mercy for their staff and their staff’s family lives.

We are one crisis away from living on the street. We have very little to no family support (my parents have both passed away). My wife’s family doesn’t live near us.

We are both burned out, and have been for months and months. Childcare is outrageously expensive even for a modest daycare/preschool.

I am scared every day of either losing my job or having a crisis (especially medical, etc.) because we have no real safety net to cover us.

I will add we don’t spend money on anything but what we need.

The second letter is from a dad I’ll call “Jason.” He actually left this as a comment on the blog ages ago, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. His story shows how gender stereotypes can be just as harmful to men as they are to women.

From Jason:

When my daughter turned one, my wife went back to work after taking the year off to get our daughter off to a good start. I had been doing interactive design from home, which worked out great in that first year. I have precious video of us from that euphoric time. When my wife went back to work, she went into aggressive “career” mode, and I became part-time, because as you discovered, it’s extremely difficult to give the love every child needs, while meeting the demands of American work life.

I went through many of the same struggles that women go through, the same bouts of anxiety and depression, medication, and then the medication causing more problems. Antidepressants made me feel really weird, and getting off them created incredible anxiety. I just recently weened myself off Ambien after being dependent on it for two years.

So yes, I’ve been there in a slightly different way–in my case, it was more struggling with the expectations of being a traditional male breadwinner in a situation where I had taken on the role of stay at home dad and part time worker. I think I would have been fine with that perception, except that my wife was not supportive at all. She failed to recognize that the contribution I was making gave her the flexibility to go on business trips and work late and allow her career to take off. Ironically, she seemed to embrace the old male perspective of entitlement in being the “provider” and didn’t see equal value in our switched roles.

So my daughter is nine and I’m putting my life back together, now that I understand what was happening to me. Thanks for sharing your experiences! I look forward to hearing about how you strike a balance and where life takes you.

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Got a story to share? Leave a comment on the blog, or send me an email: katrina AT workingmomsbreak DOT com.

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A quiet revolution has been taking place in Sweden for 15 years, affecting everything from the gender pay gap to workplace culture to relationships between parents and children. It all started at home.

Here’s a link to the fascinating New York Times story about this phenomenon. Now here’s my distilled version—with original illustrations!

Note: The dad should be holding a Swedish kronor instead of a dollar sign, but most of us wouldn't know what "kr" meant.

This Swedish family doesn’t look very happy. That’s because for decades Sweden has had the same problems we have in the U.S., with men and women seemingly confined to traditional roles when it came to working and raising kids.

Although the country had paid parental leave, mothers were the ones who stayed home with the baby. Women made less money than men, and the few men who did take time off were stigmatized at work. (They were called “velvet dads,” which is maybe like telling a guy he’s a “woos.” Any Swedish readers care to translate?)

In 1995, in what turned out to be a bureaucratic stroke of genius, the Swedish government created financial incentives for paternity leave. If the father didn’t take time off, the family lost one month of subsidies.

Suddenly it was like, Who cares if they call me a “velvet dad?” I’m not giving up free money!

Soon it became the norm for dads to take off a month, two months, maybe longer. They got a taste of what it was like to be the primary parent and they became more confident in their role at home, assuming responsibilities traditionally left to the moms, such as clipping the nails. (I did not make that up.)

Dads started craving more time with their kids. Today, 8 in 10 fathers now take a third of the total 13 months of leave.

As it became the norm for dads to take time off, the culture at work began to change, with flex-time becoming more common. The pay gap between men and women started to close. One study showed a mother’s future earnings increased about 7 percent for every month the father took off.

And that’s not all. Divorce rates started to go down in Sweden at a time when they were rising in other countries. For the couples who did divorce, shared custody became more common. This is from the same Times story:

In perhaps the most striking example of social engineering, a new definition of masculinity is emerging.

“Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs,” said Bengt Westerberg, who long opposed quotas but as deputy prime minister phased in a first month of paternity leave in 1995. “Many women now expect their husbands to take at least some time off with the children.”

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” Ms. Ohlsson, who has lobbied European Union governments to pay more attention to fathers, is eight months pregnant, and her husband, a law professor, will take the leave when their child is born.

“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

See how happy they are?

So this simple little change—giving dads incentives to take parental leave—had a profound effect on employees, employers, husbands, wives, and families.

And lest you think this is something that could only happen in a little Scandinavian country, Germany (population 82 million) decided to try a similar experiment in 2007. In just two years, the number of fathers taking parental leave jumped from 3 percent to more than 20 percent.

Here in the U.S. we have a long way to go, of course. American families work longer hours and have less public policy support than just about any developed nation in the world. We seem to have a life-threatening allergy to taxes—many Americans choke and turn red in the face when the word is mentioned, even though our taxes are low compared to most developed countries. We don’t even have paid maternity leave for mothers. We scoff at comparisons to countries like Sweden, presumably preferring the company of places like Papua New Guinea and Swaziland, which are among the few countries that do not provide some type of national paid parental leave.

The list goes on. Here at home, women still make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Mothers make 73 cents on the dollar. Single mothers make far less. Experts say the pay gap between mothers and non-mothers is actually growing worse. And the last few decades of “family values” have done nothing to create economic stability for families.

But the Swedish revolution gave me hope that change is possible, and solutions to these intractable problems may not be nearly as complicated as we expect.

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This is part of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar chores that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of raising children. Be sure to read these parts first:

Part I. Survey results

Part II. Why it’s fair

My last post looked at why half of the parents surveyed felt they had divided responsibilities pretty fairly, even though moms were still doing far more than half of the work. In this post, I want to look at the other half of the story—if both parents are working outside the home, why aren’t we doing a better job of dividing up responsibilities within the home?

As one of you asked, is it “patriarchal social bias? [Is it that] I’m a workaholic? He’s a bit selfish? I’m naturally more social, organized, and future-thinking? Hard to say… ”

Several moms said they were simply better at clipping nails, multi-tasking, cleaning, and childcare:

“He’s just not responsible enough to deal with the details.”

“He says he doesn’t know how to it or just takes too long.”

“The first week of bringing home our baby, my husband cut my son’s nails and the tip of his finger. He’s been scared to do it ever since.”

“Maybe (probably?) its a gender thing but I can multi-task like crazy and he simply cannot to save his life so I handle more things that he does. Other times, the kids just prefer me over him (for example, give baths/wash hair).”

Some of you said you didn’t realize how uneven the roles really were.

“I am better at keeping up with everything that needs to get done—it’s often easier for me to just do something than to remind my husband (over and over again) to do it. This survey made me realize just how much I do!

“Ugh! This survey made me feel like things are not fair. I think most of the time, I just do things, and don’t think about how fair it is.”

Here’s what one dad had to say about why his wife does more of the things on the survey:

“To the extent we actively chose this arrangement, it’s because I work full time and my partner works half time. That said, I think it has more to do with gender conditioning and personality than anything else. Evidence: 1.) There are a lot of other, similar things she does (like coordinating visits with my parents (!), or maintaining social engagements, or our personal finances). 2.) She also did more of this stuff when we were both working full-time. I don’t think this is purely a parenting issue. I think there is general who-does-what inequality that gets magnified with kids because there’s so much more to do.”

Some of you said you know it’s not fair, but you’re willing to make compromises.

“To ensure our marriage survives, I can handle more. I would love it if my husband participated more in the complicated logistics—finding camps, scheduling, doctor’s appts, etc. I DO resent that part when I find that I am busy at work (as busy or busier than he is) but it still falls to me. “

“It evolved over several kids. In the beginning we split everything equally, then with subsequent kids it slid. Having things evenly divided is not as important as I used to think it was.”

Some of you consoled yourselves with the idea that it could be worse.

“It isn’t totally fair but close, and I have it better than most women married to a man.”

We all love our children, and many of us take great joy in organizing birthday parties, buying clothes, and even the more mundane things like clipping nails. But when we feel we’re doing it all, and also working, it’s hard not to get resentful.

“It’s not ideal. We argue a lot, too much, and he feels nagged by me, and I feel like I’m married to a middle-aged slacker. Can we say, ‘COUPLE’S COUNSELING’???”

“I grew up being told, I can do anything if I want to. And yes, I have a high profile job, but guess what. Nobody taught me how to combine career with motherhood without failing or feeling utterly overwhelmed. Truth is:  You can’t do it all, because a decent career sure as hell does NOT combine well with satisfying motherhood. “

“The only reason he does the few things he does is because he is unemployed and I am working.”

“I think our division of labor is clear when my partner sees nothing wrong in regularly carving out his personal time at home, but sans responsibilities, whereas I am always the primary person for the kids, even at my own birthday party, even when ill. Who’s to blame? I think we are equally at fault.”

In my next post, I’ll share some of reasons people felt they didn’t do a better job of sharing the load.

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This is part of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar chores that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of raising a family. Part. I is here.

Working moms are bearing more (sometimes much more) of the “psychic burden” of parenting than working dads. Yet, when asked in my recent survey, “How do you feel about how you and your partner divide household and parenting responsibilities?”

Among working moms with working husbands (who made up the bulk of the survey):

• 51% marked “I think it’s pretty fair”
• 38% marked “I don’t think it’s fair, but I’m willing to live with it.”
• 11% marked “Totally unfair. It drives me crazy!”

Of the 15 working dads, 12 said, it was fair.

Of the 16 moms in 2-working mom families, 13 said it was fair although they also divided the chores more evenly than heterosexual couples did.

Here’s what some of the moms had to say about their egalitarian husbands:

“I feel very fortunate to have a husband who is full partner in parenting. He also cooks dinner every night and is in charge of the laundry. I don’t know what I’d do without him. “

“My husband describes himself as a feminist. He bends over backwards to make sure he is very involved with our daughter. I would consider our situation very unusual.”

“I think a lot of it has to do with the person you are with…if you get someone who is “macho” and feels it’s the woman’s duty [to be in charge of the] household…then you will have inequality in the chores. I grew up with that and made the decision to marry someone who would share in the duties!”

“[We divide things up] based on who is available, who is realistically better at it, and who knows the situation better. In major schedule decisions/planning we always touch base and make those decisions/plans together. Normally, I do the preliminary work on it but we come together to make things final.”

And here’s what one dad said about his hard-working wife:

“My wife’s job is more demanding, so I’ve become the one to stay home when our daughter is sick, to volunteer in her art class, etc. I’d like to think that if her job were less intense, she would enjoy these activities. But it’s simply not possible right now.”

Fairness is a funny concept. It doesn’t mean diving all tasks evenly, and in fact, for many of us this probably isn’t realistic. Fairness just means we feel good about how things are divided up.

Some of you said that even if your husbands didn’t do the chores in the survey, they did other things.

“I do this grooming stuff, but dad does 100% of the children’s cooking, bathing, and bedtime routine.  I feel like I checked off a lot of “I do this” when really in other more thorough checklists we’ve done, neither of us comes off as the primary parent.

“Based on your survey questions it looks like I do a lot of the work–but my husband stays home one day a week with our daughter. And while I may have scheduled all of the appointments, he has been at every one (and I haven’t due to work scheduling). In addition, the rest of the household chores (such as making dinner, which used to be soley my responsibility but now is more of a collaborative activity) are now more evenly split. So while I seem to have picked up a lot of child care duties, he has compensated by picking up more household duties. The questions and answer choices really don’t describe our household!”

Some people said they split their responsibilities in fairly traditional ways, but the arrangement worked fine for them.

“I feel like I am much more in tune with my kids them my husband. Which is not ideal, but works for us.”

“I enjoy organizing the kids birthday parties and do NOT consider that a “responsibility,” but a joy!”

“He takes care of stuff I have no interest in—financial things, house maintenance things. It’s pretty gender stereotyped but it great for us!”

“We’ve divided jobs up to align with natural aptitudes and abilities. My husband is a shy person who needs considerable “me time”. Always has been—so I went into motherhood with eyes wide open in that respect. Anything that requires organizational and people skills—coordinating play dates, birthday parties, pick up and drop off at two different schools, getting kids to after school activities is my purview. My husband would probably do most of these things himself (and be miserable) if he had no other choice. On the other hand, he is perfectly happy to be the designated fingernail clipper and he is pickier about messy hair than I am. So that kind of thing he is happy to pitch in on.”

A lot of women said they thought felt the division of responsibilities was “fair” even though they did more of the parenting, because their husbands either had less flexibility in their schedules, traveled more for work, or worked longer hours.

And whether or not it’s fair, when two parents are doing the work of three, it’s still a struggle.

“Sometimes I do get pissed off about the state of the house and feel burdened by my responsibilities caring for the baby/house. But then I realize that there just isn’t enough time in the day for me to get everything done that I want to get done and that my husband feels the same way. We’re doing the best we can.”

That’s exactly how Brian and I used to feel when we were both working full time. Once in awhile we would argue about who should do what, but we always ended in the same place. We were both running as fast as we could. If one of us wasn’t “doing enough” it usually meant there was just too much to do.

In my next post, I’ll share what moms and dads had to say about unfairness.

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This is the first of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar tasks that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of parenting.

Even though studies show fathers are changing more diapers and folding more laundry than ever, mothers are still bearing most of the “psychic burden” of parenting—the scheduling, organizing, and myriad little tasks that fall to the primary caregiver.

A month ago, I put together a survey asking parents how they divide certain responsibilities at home, and linked to it here. In the first week, more than 300 parents—moms, dads, gay, straight—filled out the survey.

The results*

According to the survey, even in households where both parents work outside the home, mom is still in charge of things like clipping the kids’ nails, researching daycare options, scheduling doctor appointments, and buying and sorting the kids’ clothes.

Is this fair? About half of you said yes, and half said no. But fairness is a complicated concept, one I will explore in more depth next week.

Please note, all anonymous quotes are from comments people left at the end of the survey.

Here’s who responded to the survey

• 338 total respondents
• 302 identified as “a working parent in a household where both parents work”
• 95% female; 5% male
• 94% households = 1 mom + 1 dad
• 5% households = 2 moms or 2 dads
• 1% other (divorced but co-parenting, or 2 parents + grandma)

Detailed results

To keep the survey short, I picked 10 chores (more about how I chose those 10 in a moment) and asked who did them. Parents could choose one of three answers:

• “I usually do this”
• “My partner usually does this”
• “We split it pretty evenly”

The majority of the respondents (262 out of 338) were working mothers whose husbands also work. This is how many of these moms say they are primarily responsible for these tasks:

• 92% Buying and sorting clothes
• 88% Scheduling dentist and doctor appointments
• 84% Organizing kid birthday parties
• 80% Research daycare/schools
• 75% Clipping nails
• 69% Checking for lice
• 68% School communication, volunteering, etc.
• 47% Stay home with sick kids
• 46% Brushing kids’ hair and teeth
• 35% Drop off and pick up kids

Here’s how many people said they split those same tasks evenly:

• 54% Drop off and pick up kids
• 49% Brushing kids’ hair and teeth
• 43% Stay home with sick kids
• 29% School communication, volunteering, etc.
• 18% Research daycare/schools
• 13% Organizing kid birthday parties
• 13% Buying and sorting clothes
• 13% Clipping nails
• 11% Checking for lice
• 10% Scheduling dentist and doctor appointments

Here’s how many dads are primarily responsible:

• 13% Clipping nails
• 11% Drop off and pick up kids
• 10% Stay home with sick kids
• 6% Brushing kids’ hair and teeth
• 3% School communication, volunteering, etc.
• 3% Scheduling dentist and doctor appointments
• 2% Research daycare/schools
• 2% Organizing kid birthday parties
• 2% Buying and sorting clothes
• 2% Checking for lice

There were no tasks in the survey where the majority of dads were primarily responsible, although I suspect if I’d asked who did the yard work or household maintenance, they would have scored some points there.

Here’s a pdf of all the survey questions in case you haven’t seen them.

This pdf file shows the full breakdown of responses by working mothers whose husbands also work.

About the survey

The questions in the survey were geared toward parents with very young children. I didn’t ask things like ‘Who stays up until the teenager gets home?’ or ‘Who teaches the kid to drive?’ That’s partly because my children are between the ages of 3 and 9, so that’s where my head is, but it’s also because the early years of parenting are particularly demanding and tend to really mess with our ability to work.

The majority of you also included detailed comments about your situations. I’m sorry to say there would have been far more responses, but due to a technical glitch, the survey crashed the day I left for vacation; I didn’t find out until a week later. Argh! I’m also sorry to say there weren’t enough responses from gay and lesbian families to make any meaningful comparisons between the dynamics of straight versus same-sex couples.

However, there were plenty of fascinating data to pore over, and I used up a ream of paper printing out the responses.

Why should we care who clips the nails?

Social scientists have long known about the housework gap between husbands and wives, as described in Arlie Hochschild’s book “The Second Shift.” Lately there have been many stories in the media saying this trend is changing. One study went so far as to say men’s growing contributions to household tasks are “substantially lessening the burden on women.”

I’m skeptical. Most of these studies focus on the obvious daily household and childcare responsibilities, but they leave out something very important. Are dads actually taking on their share of the thinking and planning of family life, or are they simply taking orders from mom? How much are these dads really lessening our “burden?”

Someone has to remember to do it

Although this certainly isn’t true in all families, we know that in general dads are doing more laundry and dishes. So I didn’t ask about those types of chores in the survey.

With a few exceptions, such as picking up and dropping off kids at school or daycare, I asked about things that don’t need to be done every day. It doesn’t take that long to schedule a doctor’s appointment. Sorting through outgrown clothes only happens a few times a year. But someone has to do it. And more than that, someone has to remember to do it. These little details have a way of piling up in our brains and taking up a lot more space than one might expect. Taken together, they represent what I think of as the psychic burden of parenting.

As several of you pointed out, there are plenty of other questions I could have included:

“Other Mom-duties-by-default in our household: meal planning and nutritional oversight (variety, vegetables, vitamins); extra-curricular/summer plans/daycare coverage research and planning; carpool planning and coordinating (with other moms, of course); babysitter finding and scheduling; parenting research (e.g., figuring out how to deal with sleep and potty issues thru BPN/internet/books); making basic hygiene happen (washing hands, wiping mouths, making sure baths happen and that hair gets shampooed).”

When we carry these details of family life alone, the effect can be isolating. Here’s how a few of you described it:

“In rereading my responses, it would seem that we are doing a pretty good job splitting tasks and my husband IS very active and involved. Yet, I still feel that the burden of parenthood falls more heavily on me. So why is that?  I think it is because even though he totally steps up, I am still the one doing most of the directing/thinking ahead. For instance, he will happily give the kids a bath, but defers to me to decide whether they need one. That is a small example, but extend that out to what the kids wear each day, what we need to bring whenever we leave the house, what we should be looking for in a new daycare. He is doing the grunt work in these instances, for sure, but it would feel more fairly divided up if there were tasks he did without any input from me, just there are tons that I do without input from him. ”

“I think my husband would say we split things evenly but your questions point out things I typically do alone that often go unnoticed.”

“I think it’s not necessarily that women are doing more (though, this survey makes me think perhaps it’s not as egalitarian as I thought!), it’s that they are running the show. In terms of actual time spent with the kids I think it’s about evenly split. I’m always saying, “Hey, can you do this or that” and my husband is totally delightful and helpful and follows through.  But he’s not delegating responsibilities to me because I’m the one with the master plan.  Even though he goes to the store about 50% of the time to do our shopping, I always send him with a list.  He never sends me with a list when I go, just might mention that he needs something. If I asked him to cut the kids nails, he most certainly would, but he doesn’t notice on his own that they need cutting (or his threshold for “long” is about 2 weeks past mine). I think that today’s women with extremely engaged husbands are still the family CEOs.”

What if I like to clip the nails?

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that we don’t want to do these things. Many of you were quick to point out that you get joy from taking care of your family. It can be fun to buy our kids clothes. Clipping the nails can be an opportunity for quiet intimacy (unless you have a 3-year-old who screams every time she sees the nail clippers). However, when we’re working and trying to juggle all the details of home life, these seemingly invisible tasks can feel like a burden.

Full disclosure

One dad who filled out the survey wanted to know if I have an axe to grind with men. Let me tell you a little bit about how things work in our house.

I have an embarrassingly supportive husband. I say ‘embarrassing’ because I know a lot of women don’t feel this way about the men they married, and some of them might be annoyed with how pleased I am with mine.

My husband is competent in house work, work-work, and childcare. He organizes closets with zeal, packs a mean lunch, and instinctively knows when it’s “hair wash” night. On my many business trips, I never had to worry about whether the kids were OK, and when I came home, the house was always clean, because he knows how stressful it is for me to come home to a dirty house. He respects my contribution whether I make more money or less than he does, and whether I make any at all.

And yet, Brian would freely admit that I’m the one who carries the psychic burden of parenting. (I know this to be true because he also edits my blog posts, and he just added the word “freely” to the previous sentence.)

Even when I was working full time and we shared drop-offs and pick ups, sick day coverage, and standard household chores like laundry and dishes, I made sure the kids were immunized (after researching the possible dangers of early immunization), bought and wrapped birthday presents for their friends’ parties, and fought nightly to get them to eat their veggies. Once in a while, Brian would buy the girls dresses, but I was the one who went through their closets, weeding out things they’d outgrown and distributing the hand-me-downs (or “hand-it-overs” as Martha called them) to friends. To this day, Brian has never once clipped the kids’ nails. He says their shoes would have to stop fitting before he noticed that their nails were too long.

I don’t know why things are this way. Mostly it works, but when I had a full time job, it was a lot to keep track of. Could we have divided things more evenly? If so, would that have made it easier to stay at my job? Would Brian have had the nervous breakdown instead of me? Would I have wanted to give up the things I did? I don’t know.

Was it fair? Read Part II.

*A brief disclaimer: The survey participants were self-selected. The results of this survey would probably not pass scientific scrutiny. However, they do reflect what other more serious studies show over and over again: the looming “housework gap” between men and women.

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The other day I saw Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the First Lady of San Francisco, speak at the Commonwealth Club about women and the media. She’s producing a very ambitious documentary called “Miss Representation,” about how the media under-represents women in positions of power and influence. She showed a short clip of the film, which included snippets of a impressive line up of women, from Nancy Pelosi and Condoleezza Rice to Katie Couric, Margaret Cho and Jane Fonda.

Throughout the talk, a sweet 10-year-old girl wearing fuzzy pink and green legwarmers sat with her aunt on my left, sewing contentedly.

‘How cool,’ I thought. ‘Maybe I can start taking my kids to stuff like this soon instead of stupid Disney movies.’

The only woman in the Fantastic Four, and what's her super power? She can become invisible.

I admit, I am shielded from many of the negative images of women in the media, because I’ve mostly opted out of pop culture (except for those Disney princess movies we can’t seem to escape…Well, at least that last one wasn’t so bad). Sometimes I watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report while I fold the laundry, but that’s about it for TV. My husband and I love movies but we’ve all but given up trying to watch them after the kids go to bed, because we can’t stay awake long enough. And I’m one of those obnoxious snobs who actually prefers reading The New Yorker to reading People. Outside of music, my knowledge of pop culture is embarrassingly paltry.

“Do you know who LeBron James is?” my husband asked me the other day. (He likes to plumb the depths of my ignorance every once in a while.)

“Some kind of sports guy?”

“He’s the most famous basketball player in the world.”

“See? A sports guy!”

“Don’t ever change, Katrina…”

So how could the media possibly affect me? Because millions of other people are watching it, and it’s profoundly affecting them. Newsom said it best:

“If you can see it, you can be it. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.”

The media is our society’s muse. It attends to our collective consciousness. Whether we watch it or not, like it or not, it propels (or limits) our collective imagination. So when our society is bombarded with images of madonnas and primadonnas, princesses and whores, these images worm their way into our understanding of what a woman is.

More Erin Brockovich's would be a good start.

Where do working moms fit in here?

I asked that question and Newsom had a couple really interesting things to say.

She told us about an interview she did with a big network executive (a woman) who said that the network had to be very careful about integrating working moms into television story lines, because every time they did, the viewers would flood the network with complaints.

Complaints? Yes.

Despite the fact that half of all U.S. workers are women, despite the fact that more than 70% of mothers in America work outside the home, there are still a lot of people out there who find the concept of a mother working distasteful. They don’t believe we can adequately take care of our children if we work.

Who’s running the show here? Is the problem that the public doesn’t see strong, compelling, likable working mom characters, and this limits their imagination? Are viewers truly so resistant to the idea of mothers working that the network’s hands are tied? Or is it the network executives who are resistant? Are the working mothers too busy to watch television, let alone lodge a complaint, so the networks only hear from the small minority of people who can’t relate?

Newsom also said we need stories of capable fathers. Fathers who once knew best are now invariably hapless, incapable, comical characters who can’t hold a job, be faithful to their wives, or take care of children.  Homer Simpson is funny, but surely there’s room for other kinds of dads, too. (Yes, even I know who Homer Simpson is.)

Certainly we can do better than this guy for the iconic dad.

This trend to infantilize fathers hurts women; it reinforces the idea that the burden of parenting belongs with the mother alone. And it hurts fathers, too. I know so many fathers (my husband, my cousin Eliot, all those wonderful dads at my kids’ schools) who are loving, capable, thoughtful, reliable parents. They do housework, handle many kid logistics, make compromises in their work schedules to accommodate their families, and do just fine with the kids when mom has to go away on a business trip. A few of them stay at home with their young kids while mom works. The hapless daddy stereotype is a stigma they don’t deserve.

These dads aren’t an anomaly. A recent Newsweek column described how male behavior and attitudes are shifting in surprising ways. For example, they’re spending more time with their children:

…Millennial fathers—those under 29—spend an average of 4.3 hours per workday with their kids, which is almost double that of their counterparts in 1977. A Families and Work Institute report found that these young dads are actually now spending more time each day with children under 13 than mothers between the ages of 29 and 42 are with their own.

They’re doing more housework:

…while women still do most of the housework, men are becoming far more familiar with the sponge and vacuum cleaner, particularly less educated men. Between 1965 and 2003, college-educated men did 33 percent more housework than they did before, and men who never completed high school did 100 percent more, according to research from Oxford University.

And they’re deeply conflicted about working long hours. Studies show married men are now feeling more torn over balancing work and family than their wives are.

Detective Kima might not be the best mom, but her conflict is real.

We need more stories, better ones, about real women and men raising real families, doing the best they can with what they have, genuinely struggling to do their best as parents, as workers, as citizens, and sometimes all three at once.

I turned to my 10-year-old seat partner when Newsom’s talk was over.

“So what did you think?” I said. “Did you learn anything?”

“Nah, I wasn’t listening,” she said. “But look, I made this.” Then she stood up and show me the new fuzzy pink tube skirt she’d just finished.

What do you think? What stories do you want to see?

"Horace, I've been meaning to ask you...At what age do you stop cutting up their grapes?" *

Studies show that men at the top of the org chart are more likely than their colleagues to have a stay-at-home wife. These same men, according to a report by the Center for WorkLife Law, lead a workforce where “both women and men have very real day-to-day responsibilities for family care.” [1]

Could this be why today’s workplace is so out of sync with today’s workers? The guys in charge don’t have to race out of the office to get to preschool before it closes, take the kids to their dentist appointments, buy the groceries, fold the laundry, or cook dinner. They have never organized a birthday party, researched summer camps, combed lice from a child’s head, stayed home when little Jared came down with chicken pox, got up with Suzy at 2am when she had a nightmare, or cut up 16 apples for the class snack.

It’s not that these titans of industry don’t have children. Most of them do. But the majority of these CEOs, VPs, senators, and executive directors simply have no understanding of what it takes to run a household.

* Photo from Library of Congress

[1] Joan C. Williams of the Center for WorkLife Law and Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress called “The Three Faces of Work-family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle.” Published January 2010.