Re-entering Workforce Harder for Stay-At-Home Dads
Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 02:44:53 PM PDT
I originally spotted this piece at MomsRising.org. Thanks to father Dana Glazer for the tip!
MSN contributor Eve Tahmincioglu wrote how it is more difficult for stay-at-home dads than stay-at-home moms to re-enter the workforce due to cultural biases against fathers who abandon the traditional “hunting” role to care for their children. Tahmincioglu previously touched on the subject when she recently doled out advice to SAHMs on how to explain a resume gap. Instead, she received these e-mails from stay-at-home dads:
Victor Gonzalez of Marietta, Georgia, wrote:
"I'm 41 and had been an at-home-dad for the last 8 years. When we got married both of us had very successful careers. When our daughter came along in 1999 we decided that the best for her and our family was for me to stay at home with her.
"Now that my daughter is more independent I am looking to go back to work, first on a part-time basis. Well, forget it. There is no way that anyone understands that a man can take time off his professional career to take care of the little ones.
"While indeed it's extremely tough for women to get back to work after a long time away, it gets even tougher for a man to do the same. Society has unwritten rules for dads that decide that their family is more important than corporate America."
It does, agrees Scott Haltzman, MD Clinical Assistant Professor, Brown University Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.
"How does the workplace view a man that takes time off of his career to raise children? They tend to look at him as not having the kind of drive or seriousness of purpose that they would want in leadership positions," he says about what he sees as a pervasive stereotype.
Then again, I read a stat in the book Mothers on the Fast Track that mothers in the workforce are seen as lazy or too distracted by their children to work. Meanwhile fathers are seen as mature and responsible. Hmm.
But I don’t doubt that our macho capitalist culture sends men a message that they must earn tons of money or they will have failed their families. As the MSN article pointed out, today’s stay-at-home father will hardly find anyone to relate to once he does return to the workplace since there are way more SAHMs than SAHFs. If anything, other men in the office will question why he would forego a paycheck to stay home with his kids, or even worse, what he did all day.
(To this question, experts suggest men hold their heads high and not try to justify their existence with how many diapers they changed or how many dishes they washed. They suggested presenting their time off in the most positive light.)
Just to show you that encouraging men to take family leave would level the playing field for all parents, I thought this fact about who is taking family leave was interesting:
”Men face more prejudice when they decide to return to the workplace than women do. In fact, some companies have a lot of prejudice, so many men simply take vacation leave instead of Family Leave when a new baby comes. They know it would effect their career promotional path to advertise loudly 'family is first' in many companies," says Robin Ryan, career coach and author of "What to Do With the Rest of Your Life".
The number of stay-at-home dads still pales in comparison to women who make that choice, but the numbers are growing.
Nearly 160,000 men stay home with their kids today, almost three times the number that were staying at home just ten years ago, according to the U.S. Census. And many more men would take on the role, experts say, if there wasn't so much macho baggage out there.
Hang your heads high, papas. You are in unchartered -- but important -- territory both inside and outside the home.
