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Does achieving gender equality only benefit women? Are gender quotas thwarting meritocracy? Are women more risk averse than men? If you think you know the answers to these questions, then think again! Busted is an audio podcast series that busts prominent myths surrounding gender and the economy by teaming up with leading experts in the field. We uncover the origins of each myth and give you the tools to bust each myth yourself!
Busted is a GATE audio series production from the Institute for Gender and the Economy.
Everybody does some form of care or the other. People are caring for their children, but also their spouses. Many, many houses all over the world, they live in, like, multigenerational households. So they're caring for elderly parents, relatives who are not well, children with disabilities. So caring for others and also caring for yourself is such a bedrock of our daily lives that it's surprising that we don't give care that kind of attention.
Carmina Ravanera:Care work is foundational to societies and to humanity. But even though everyone needs care, care work and those who provide it are often ignored, trivialized, or devalued. Why would something so central to human existence be denigrated this way? Part of the reason why care work isn't given the respect, resources, and compensation it deserves is because care work, like many things in our society, is gendered. Specifically, there's a myth that care work is women's work.
Carmina Ravanera:Today, we're going to be busting this myth. I'm Carmina Ravanera, senior research associate at GATE.
Dr. Sonia Kang:And I'm doctor Sonia Kang, Canada research chair in identity, diversity, and inclusion and academic director of GATE. So before we bust the myth that care work is women's work, we need to start by asking, what exactly is care work?
Carmina Ravanera:When people think of care, they often think of childcare, which is a huge part of it. But care is so much broader than that. Like I said in the intro, everyone needs care at some point in their lives and really at many points in their lives. Care means providing services that develop people's capabilities and skills and support their physical and mental health and wellness, often when people can't meet those needs by themselves. So that can involve cooking, doing laundry, helping with homework, or just keeping someone company.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Okay. So in addition to childcare, it also includes things like elder care, caring for people with disabilities, people who are ill, and anyone else who might need that support.
Carmina Ravanera:Right. And the COVID 19 pandemic brought the importance of good systems of care to the forefront of everyone's minds, especially in times of crisis. Caring for others is fundamental to humanity, society and the economy. No other economic sector can exist without care.
Dr. Sonia Kang:And it's overwhelmingly women and girls who do this work. Stats from the OECD show that women and girls are responsible for 3 quarters of all unpaid care work around the world. And even though women are in the paid workforce now more than ever before, they're still doing most of the unpaid care work at home. A recent Statistics Canada study shows that in Canada, women do over 60% of all unpaid housework, and they do most of the paid care work as well. In jobs like personal support work, nursing, and teaching.
Dr. Sonia Kang:All of this contributes to the gender wage gap since women tend to do more unpaid work as well as take on lower paying care jobs.
Carmina Ravanera:Paid care work makes up some of the lowest paying jobs too. In Canada, personal support workers and early childhood educators make very low salaries for performing extremely important jobs, arguably a lot more important to society than many higher paying jobs.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. And race plays a role too. Low paid and precarious care jobs are disproportionately filled by women of color and immigrants.
Carmina Ravanera:Yep. And, unfortunately, there's a general idea that care work is, quote unquote, naturally women's work, that girls and women are born to be carers.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Okay. So basically, the idea is that if they're born with the skills they need to do it, it's unskilled work, and each of those workers can be easily replaced with other naturally talented female caregivers, which justifies low pay and lack of support for caregivers. So let's bust this myth that care work is women's work. What does the research have to say?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, first I spoke to Dr. Darby Saxbe, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. She's also the director of clinical training in their clinical psychology PhD program. She's done some interesting work that shows what happens when men participate in care.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:My whole program of research has really tried to challenge the myth that care work is women's work by trying to understand the way in which our brains and bodies are plastic and can be reshaped by caregiving both for men and for women. So I've looked at fathers in a number of different ways, looking at father's psychological experience of the transition to parenthood, looking at father's hormones shift when they become fathers. So, for example, we see changes in hormones like testosterone and prolactin that are linked up with social behavior, and then also looking at how men's brains change when they become fathers. So I published a few studies specifically looking at brain change. We scanned men who were expecting their first child during their partner's pregnancy, about midway through the pregnancy, and then we scanned them again when their babies were about 6 months old.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:And what we found was that men showed brain changes that are really similar to the changes that we've seen in other studies of mothers. So it tells me that becoming a parent is more about being made rather than born to care. I think what's really interesting about men and fathers is they're not experiencing pregnancy, so they're not experiencing all of those hormonal and physical changes that go into sustaining a pregnancy, but they're still taking an active role in taking care of the new baby. So it suggests that caregiving experience can rewire the brain and body. It doesn't necessarily require pregnancy, birth, or lactation to see some of those changes coming online.
Dr. Sonia Kang:This is such a cool study. So these so called caregiving instincts don't have to be natural. They can be developed and can be developed by anyone, even men. They just need to do the caring.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So, obviously, it's not natural instincts that make people caregivers. But if that's the case, what is stopping men from participating in care?
Carmina Ravanera:So I spoke to Dr. Taveeshi Gupta, the director of research, evaluation, and learning at Equimundo Center For Masculinities and Social Justice. Equimundo does research on caregiving across 17 countries and releases yearly reports called the State of the World's Fathers. Dr. Gupta told me what the research shows in terms of why men tend to do much less care work than women.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:So you will hear a lot of this, you know, women are nurturers and men are hunter gatherers, and that sort of become the phrase that we use and we identify with. And we say women are the caregivers and men are the providers, but the bottom line is that that's not the truth at all. So a lot of the social like biological evolutionary theorists say that the reason why homo sapiens have survived as a species is because of their ability to care for each other, because of something called empathy. And that essentially means that care is the very reason, and it's the it's the the reason why we've survived. And so it's only over the years that we have, you know, as part of the ways in which the world looks at men and women's roles, we have made this into a women's role.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:So gender attitudes and the ways in which we see men and women's roles at home have often, acted as barriers for men to be caregivers. In addition to that, that, you know, has multiple effects. So in addition to that, in the workplace, we already know there's a huge gender gap in, women's earnings and men's earnings. Now in the workplace, when it comes time to take even sort of parental leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, right, often these are not 100% paid for the entire duration of the leave. And so when in an household, you have to make a decision about who takes the leave, often, it's the women who end up taking the leave because they are being paid less in the workforce.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:So having kind of parental leave that's not fully paid, that's not, something called nontransferable. You know, often men are allowed to give their leave to their spouse. That's called transferable leaves. Those kind of, like, policies are also acting as barriers for men to take leave. We did a study in 2019, the state of the world's fathers, where we looked at workplace settings.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:So not just the policy, but what about the workplace environment? Are there norms in that kind of in a workplace setting? And men across the world showed that they're worried about not being promoted if they take time off to care for their child. They're worried about what their manager will think about them. They're you know?
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:So not having a culture that encourages or fosters that you should be there to take, you know, be there for your child will then act as a barrier to being able to kind of provide for your child, certainly. So these are the big things that come out often. The socioeconomic realities of many different countries are very different, but the bottom line is that if you do not have the financial security, right, to be able to then take time out to care for your child, then, of course, all these things are gonna come together and act as barriers to to taking care of your child. So creating a sort of context, whether it's child care systems, health systems, what you know, what whether it's workplace systems, and then a societal kind of gender norm systems that are promoting care are going to be helpful in removing those barriers for men's participation and equal caregiving.
Dr. Sonia Kang:It's really about our culture, norms, and attitudes around gender and care. Men may want to care more, but the way our systems are set up don't encourage it. And this happens globally.
Carmina Ravanera:Right. Thankfully, Taveeshi noted that these attitudes towards men doing care work are changing.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:And, yes, attitudes towards men's caregiving is changing. Often we see that more so in some of the higher income countries than we do see them in kind of, you know, lower and middle income countries, reflecting a lot of the realities around parental leave, policies and how much of those are available and, things like that. But at the same time, there is a shift where we're seeing more men participating in caregiving than we've ever seen before. In our current state of the world's fathers, we're also seeing this, you know, this change, not just in men's caregiving and attitudes, but also what they're teaching their children. So this idea, we often ask this question, you know, is, you know, men should boys should not be taught how to cook or changing diapers is a is a mother's responsibility or, you know, those quite kind of these very kind of, gender equality questions that are very simple but very gender stereotypical.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:And we are seeing an increasing number of people who are disagreeing with these statements more and more. Right? So it's not just about sort of what they think about men's caregiving, but also how what they wanna teach their boys and girls as they're growing up. And that's a generational shift that we would then hopefully be able to see and kind of in enacted in people's day to day. Because if boys and girls are taught that care is something that everybody does, it's not just a woman's job, then we can see those shifts happening when they kind of become caregivers themselves.
Dr. Sonia Kang:That sounds hopeful. And if these attitudes change, if care becomes a central part of our social and political priorities, our societies would be so different.
Carmina Ravanera:Absolutely. There's a large body of research that has found so many benefits when care is shared more evenly. Not just for families but for societies as a whole. Let's hear what Taveeshi and Darby had to say about what happens when everyone participates in care.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Our research and other really seminal work in the world has shown that first right off the bat, there are more positive physical, mental, cognitive, outcomes for children. So children who grow up with more involved fathers tend to do better in many, many aspects of life. And this is kind of across the board, across social class, across, family types, and as well as, across countries. Right? So this is just something it's a it's a universal trend.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Obviously, let me sort of caveat by saying that, you know, we're talking about men who are empathic, kind, caregivers. I'm not talking about households where there can be some, serious, you know, kind of issues going on around violence, etcetera. But, so right off the bat, we see positive outcomes for children. We see a lot of positive outcomes for women and and so the and the partners that men have, because often women can go back to work much more quickly after childbirth if men are equal participants in caregiving. Often, women are, they have better mental health, better physical health.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:They recover faster from childbirth with men as being more equal caregivers. And then there's also benefits to men themselves. Men have better mental health and better physical health when they are more equal partners in caregiving to the child. So we see this kind of, you know, holistic benefit to the family unit, right, as itself. In addition to that, we are exploring these links, but we're beginning to see some of the, you know, findings and other research where when we're talking about care, right now we're talking about men being caregivers to their children, right, more specifically.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:But it is really about fostering and creating that care for for everybody, whether it's the community, whether it's the planet, whether it's, you know so it could be even in the context of health, where we say men who are better caregivers are also more likely to care about other people's health. They're more willing to mask up during COVID, for instance. We're we're creating more caring individuals at the end of the day, And that's what we are so so we see benefits for that kind of becoming a lot more, you know, permeating across many other kind of dimensions beyond just the family unit. And I think that's the that's the kind of message we wanna get across, that it's not it certainly benefits the children, the the spouse, or partner and men themselves. But, ultimately, we're trying to create societies that care, and that can have implications for for so many other things.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:So my lab actually did a study on this. So, this was led by my grad student, Sofia Cardenas. And, we looked at men in our sample who had access to paid paternity leave, and we compared them with men who didn't take any paid paternity leave. And, we compared mental health prenatally to postpartum in both of those groups. And what we found actually was that fathers reported, better sleep quality, less daytime sleepiness if they had taken paid leave, but most of the benefits were actually to the partners.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:So the partners of men who took paid leave reported fewer increases in depressive symptoms, so they were kind of buffered from postpartum depression, and they reported less stress in the postpartum period. So it looked like dads taking leave was actually protective for their partners and then kind of in turn protective for the babies and for the families as well. So we already know that taking leave is great for infants. There's a lot of data suggesting, for example, that when parents take leave, infants are more likely to, be healthier, they have better school outcomes, they're more likely to breastfeed, Lots of things that we know are good for babies. But there are also benefits to the families, to the parents.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:So for example, just the sleep piece. We know that, sleep is really disrupted in the early postpartum period, and men actually have some of the worst sleep quality because often they're less able to take time off from work, so they're getting up with the baby and then still having to wake up and work in the morning. So if we can build in a little more leave for dads in those 1st few months, they can actually have better quality sleep, which in turn we know is linked with heart disease risk, depression risk, you know, all kinds of downstream health consequences. So I think there's a public health argument to be made. There's also an economic argument to be made.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:And it's interesting, you know, companies have often resisted changes to federal policy around family leave, because I think there's a fear that these policies will be expensive. But once, you know, if you look state by state when leave programs are implemented, companies are often the first to say they're really happy with the results, which is to say that they see better retention, better employee satisfaction, more employee loyalty. So when you really respect that kind of caregiving time as really integral to an employee's quality of life, I think that actually does redound to more consequences, more positive consequences for the workplace as well as for the workers. So I think if we agree that parenting and caregiving can change us, and can change us not just mentally, but also physically, can change our brain architecture, can change the hormones in our body, then I think the next question becomes, how do we support everybody's ability to participate in care. And it looks like some of the changes that happen in the brain are changes that link up with social cognition, with empathy, with understanding how other people are thinking and feeling, and those are actually really great skills to develop no matter what kind of setting you're in.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:So it's really valuable in the workplace to be able to understand what other people are thinking, for example. So I think rather than thinking of caregiving as something that sort of takes us away from our kind of economic productivity, I think we can think of caregiving as something that really enhances society and makes us better people, better partners, better friends, better workers. And what we're seeing right now is this crisis of social disconnection where people are reporting more isolation, more loneliness, saying that they have fewer social ties. And I think the promise of kind of caregiving as transformative is that it can also transform our society. And, finding ways that we connect with other humans is one of the most important goals of any society.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Wow. So if men participated more in care work, it could lead to stronger relationships, more empathy and care for others, healthier kids and families, better mental health, and positive economic outcomes. When you think of it that way, it's such a missed opportunity that care work isn't taken more seriously. It needs to be centered and valued across society.
Carmina Ravanera:Yeah. The problem is that there's often a lack of political will around care because it's seen as something natural that women just do regardless of external forces. And people often ignore or simply don't even think about how public policy can strengthen our systems for caring. Taveeshi shared a lot of great ideas for policy changes that would better support the needs of carers and make it more of a norm for men to be involved in care.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Right off the bat, you know, parental leave where it can be implemented, should be implemented, but it is more than just being implemented. So for example, you know, first of all, like, United States is one of the few countries. It's one of the few developed countries in the world, or it's hard to say developed, high income countries in the world, which does not have any mandated paternity and maternity leave. So right off the bat, we need that. But in countries where it does exist, we've actually had a chance to do those research in the in the Nordic countries, for example.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Why is uptake even in the countries where it is provided not a 100%? By uptake, it just means men are not taking the 100% of the leave that they are allocated. Right? And so the question is why not? And and, really, it's because of those 2 or 3 things that I mentioned earlier.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:One is often they're not fully paid. And so the minute, you know, the leave becomes 70% paid or 80% paid, expecting households, especially with a new child newborn child to function on a 70 or 80% income is is an impossible ask of anybody. And then on addition to that, often they become transferable. Right? They're they're sort of said, okay.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Your spouse can take it if you don't take it. And inevitably, it's the female partner who ends up taking that leave. So having nontransferable fully paid paternity leave is important. Extending it into the 1st 2 years of life is also very important. So most of these paternity leave policies, they end as soon as the child is born.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:They'll say whatever, whether it's 2 weeks or 1 month, whatever is the duration of the leave. But we know that, the first two years of a child's life, because often they are either at in home care, that's when you actually really need to meet have that kind of flexibility to be able to take leave because, again, it ends up being the female spouse who takes that leave. So extending that care, care leave into 2 years is really important as well. And then alongside that, again, depends on the context, but providing kind of subsidized childcare is an incredibly important concept too. And it's not just having access to it.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:One is quality, but also oftentimes, I we know that, you know, you can have access to, subsidized good quality child care, but then there's too many people who are competing for the same resources. And so kind of having this, you know, sort of research that's kind of periodically checking in to see whether gaps are still existing in just in terms of the number of, childcare facilities, right, and and daycare facilities. And so those kind of things are really important. In Canada, for example, right, we know that these kind of these these exist. However, in good good contexts, good provinces, good, setup setups, the wait list is so long to get in that at the end of the day, the child has outgrown that age to even kind of by the time, the time comes.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Right? So that's, so the policies have to be put into place, but they have to really be thought through. So it's not just kind of providing it, but it's also looking at what has worked globally and then kind of distilling down the best of it. And the last one that's really important is the piece I talked about where, you know, we need to think about how do we change the next generation of boys and girls to think about care. And so having school based programs mandated where we do teach about caring and empathy as part of a human trait, not just a not a gender trait is so critical and crucial.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:And so, yes, in Canada, we do have the roots of empathy program, which is doing very well and is a is a fantastic social emotional learning program and beyond. And that's the kind of stuff we need to build on and mandate so that children understand that this is just part of growing up and being an adult. Right? We provide good care to the people in our lives around us, the community, for instance, etcetera. So all these things have to kinda come together, to support basically good policies.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:And the last piece I will say is that often, we know this not just in care, but everywhere else is that it must be intersectional. So what that means is essentially, you know, different socioeconomic groups, different racial groups, different geographical groups have different needs. So making sure that the policies are fitting those needs are really important as well. So it's in certain cases, for example, you know, informal sectors, informal job workers, they do not have access to paternity leave even when the country offers paternity leave. Right?
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:So in those kind of settings, what do we do? So making sure that, like, all those intersectional groups are not ignored in those policies becomes an important factor as well.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Parental leave that empowers fathers to care for their children, affordable childcare, better education about care starting from childhood, and intersectionality are all really important, especially the piece on intersectionality. One example is that racialized and low income communities often don't have easy access to affordable childcare even though these communities may need it most. So any policy making around caregiving needs to address the unique and intersectional needs of diverse groups.
Carmina Ravanera:Right. And organizations really need to be supportive of caregiving and implement strong caregiving leave policies. And they need to ensure that their organizational norms reflect uptake of these leaves across genders and that taking these leaves doesn't lead to penalties for employees who need to care for someone.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. So to cap off this myth busting, if someone were to say to me that care work is women's work, what could I say to help debunk this myth?
Carmina Ravanera:I think Darby and Taveeshi both had some really good suggestions.
Dr. Darby Saxbe:They could say when men spend more time caring for infants, their brains change. So we know that experience shapes us, It makes us who we are, and caregiving experience is transformative for everyone.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:I often tell people that when we talk to men in our interviews and in our study, what is incredible is that men want to care. Men want to be involved caregivers. Men want to be there for their children. Right? And so the myth that men don't want to is not real.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:It's not true. And that if we flip the starting point by saying that it's not that men don't want to, but there are social structures in place like gender norms or workplace norms or policies. Right? Exactly what we've what we've been talking about. Then we actually can go in with a solution focused, sort of, you know, approach as opposed to saying, well, men just don't want to.
Dr. Taveeshi Gupta:Boys, when they're born, when they're young, they are equally emotional, equally sensitive, equally empathic as girls. And it is through socializing, socialization over time that they learn to embody this very kind of stoic, you know, emotionally closed off kind of form of masculinity, which is not who they're supposed to be and who they actually are. So if we keep that in mind and if we see men as actually wanting to care and having those close relationships with their spouse, with their children, I think we can really kind of think about shifting the world in a much more positive non deficit solution oriented way.
Carmina Ravanera:In short, none of us are born caregivers. We are shaped by socialization. And really, we're all shaped by the experiences of care that we've received from others. So people of all genders can and should do care work. And in doing so, we could have healthier and more supportive societies for everyone because all of humanity needs care.
Dr. Sonia Kang:With that, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode of Busted. We'll be busting the myth that accessibility is optional. Don't miss it.
Carmina Ravanera:Until next time, happy myth busting. GATE's busted podcast is made possible by generous support from BMO. If you like this episode, please rate and subscribe to Busted. You can also find more of our interesting podcast series by searching GATE audio wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in.