Leveling up at home to level up at work
Post-lockdown dads are owning their newfound roles at home - so take that, motherhood penalty.
Amidst the chaos of the global pandemic, a beautiful thing happened in family households up and down the country. While working from home might have blurred lines between the professional and personal, it also helped chip away at the breadwinner/homemaker dichotomy that still divides men and women.
Because with commutes out of the equation, and companies recognising that your worth doesn’t have to be defined by being chained to your desk all day, the previously unquestioned daily routine of dad rushing out the door to the office while mum does breakfast and school run - inadvertently signalling whose job meant more and whose career came first - started to unravel.
That “domestic load” that is said to hold working mums back in a way that it somehow doesn’t for working dads became much easier to break down. Just take a look at these stats from parenting website DaddiLife’s “Dads in Lockdown” survey (read on for my Q&A with founder and CEO, Han-Son Lee).
76% of the 116 dad respondents felt they were more involved dads now than they were before the Covid crisis, with 70% doing more cleaning, 67% more cooking and 51% involved in homeschooling (I won’t judge without knowing what the other 49% were busy doing).
When asked what they would change post-lockdown, 32% of respondents said they wanted to spend more quality time with family, followed by 25% citing more flexible working and 19% remote working.
Amazing. Because for every working dad (or so-called secondary carer) that levels up at home and as a parent, there’s a working mum that is now more liberated to excel professionally. It means that dashing off to pick up your kid that hit their head in the playground doesn’t have to default to one person, and that “motherhood penalty” that has working mums trapped behind a glass ceiling can become less of a handicap.
But these numbers and the desires behind them are at odds with the Prime Minister and his colleagues doing their best to scaremonger people back to the office. Because if you keep working from home you’ll get gossiped about, won’t get promoted and, worst of all, your local Pret will shut down. I guess they have better things to do than even out the gender pay gap, which still stands at 15.4% in the UK and gets worse in the over 40s demographic.
That’s why it lifts my spirits to see dads working flexibly, prioritising family, and owning it. Like this LinkedIn post from Dan Reed, a senior digital strategist at Adobe, who also hosts The Career Dad podcast.
“‘Dan, why are you such an advocate of flexible working?’” he wrote. “Let’s take this morning as an example. I woke up at 6.45am to go hang out with my son before school. I got his packed lunch ready, made his breakfast, and talked about Minecraft. I set up the work laptop, ready for a 9am call. I tidied the house in preparation for my wife’s friends coming over with their kids.
“Don’t get me wrong: I still love the office! But I’ll never give this up. It’s too important for everyone.”
I am also kind of in love with the statement he has pictured on his profile: “I want to have a rewarding, successful career, but not at the expense of my family. They’re not mutually exclusive.”
There it is - that famed juggle women have been tasked with, and that mutual exclusivity that has somehow been acceptable for men.
Not any longer I hope, if the likes of the DaddiLife crowd, Dan, and the other working dads that identify with that statement, keep leveling up at home, to level that playing field at work.
One of those is Han-Son Lee, founder and CEO of DaddiLife, and the subject of this edition’s Q&A. Giving men a voice and a community in a parenting landscape that is always skewed towards women was the big driver to launching DaddiLife - empowering working dads to own it, just like Dan.
Read on after Han-Son’s Q&A for more of my stories on men, flexible working and family.
“Working mums can't realise their full potential until working dads become part of that conversation”: Q&A with Han-Son Lee, founder and CEO, DaddiLife
What inspired you to start DaddiLife?
Han-Son Lee (HSL): I knew I wanted to be a much more active father than what I had experienced growing up, and set up DaddiLife just over five years ago. There were some brilliant websites that talked to mums and mums alone, and there were some great dad bloggers that were talking about their own personal lives, which was great, and good to learn from, but there wasn’t a collective voice of fatherhood. That’s more important than ever, because we're going through a huge generational shift when it comes to parenting, where dads are very quickly shaking off those labels of a secondary parent, or that stereotypical lazy father.
What we're seeing en masse is this attitude of dads being far more involved and far more equal around their day to day parenting. But not everyone is there yet. There is still an awakening for many. Overall, I think we're seeing more and more modern day fathers embracing that attitude more openly. That was all part of the catalyst for the platform itself.
Tell me more about your audience’s attitude to fatherhood and the insights you’ve uncovered.
HSL: The big thing we found from the first big piece of research we did in 2018 was that there’s this road towards equalization happening in the home. But actually a lot of dads at work are still feeling a lot of pressure to be a very different sort of person at work. And that's what led us to the Millennial Dad at Work research where we partnered with Deloitte, which started a different conversation around fatherhood at work.
Two thirds of the just over 2,000 dads we interviewed had either left their job to become a dad, or were actively looking for a new job, to try and improve their balance of work and family life. That’s a really telling statistic for younger generations of fathers, because it's not that well talked about, actually. The struggles and barriers of young fathers are very different to that of more Millennial and older fathers. It’s important for us to shine a light on those issues as well.
How is this translating into changing work patterns for working dads?
HSL: Pre-pandemic, we were seeing a lot of modern day fathers ready to take action in terms of their flexible working desires, but actually getting knocked back a lot by organisations. The big headline UK-wide is that two thirds of fathers had actually requested flexible working, since becoming a father. That might be changing hours, reducing days, or job sharing.
But what we found is that there was a huge discrepancy in the amount of fathers applying and where it was being granted. That’s changed with the pandemic and in many ways lock down for dads has accelerated this change as we’ve seen dads across all age ranges over the pandemic talking about being more involved as a parent and the opportunities they’ve had to reflect on what work/life balance looks like ahead.
However as we start to embrace what the next normal might look like, there's still very much a cultural stigma that we see for a lot of dads, which is this tension that we see between modern day dads and previous generations of fathers who maybe can't empathise with the new fathers coming through. Those are massive organisational barriers.
That’s why we developed a mentoring program to support new dads in the workplace. The results can be really transformative in terms of having positive role models at work to normalise a better family balance. The thing we saw was that the barrier was so often internal within the organisation, in terms of a perception of how dads should be at work.
How do you think this is changing beyond the pandemic?
HSL: You can see that older and newer generations of fathers are now getting a much broader sense of quality time with their family, things that they weren't able to do before because of either their own perception, or that of the organisation, or their team. I think we're going to see a world where flexible working won’t be a thing, you'll just be working. Because everyone has had a taste of what it's like to work a bit more flexibly.
If we get this right, if we can have more and more conversations about true equality, that lead to actions and policies around how we enable thriving families, in particular, the fathers who are wanting to be more of a role model and making that identity work for them, so they can be seen. And that’s important to women and mothers too, as a strong enabler of true gender equality.
It’s something we also cover in our new pregnancy book for men - You’re Going To Be A Dad - that features a diverse range of insights from over 50 new dads and dads to be across, and focussed on how mum and dad can be one team.
How does flexibility and empowering working dads impact working mums?
HSL: Working mums can't realise their full potential until working dads become part of that conversation. That's what I think is the opportunity of this pandemic. If we can get a true partnership between mum and dad, or dad and dad, or mum and mum, we can get to a more equal base of experience. If we can find a way to work through those barriers, we can really unleash the true power of modern day fatherhood at work, and we would be in a better place.
For instance, we did a huge video series on why people weren't taking shared parental leave. So much of it was that people just weren't even having the conversation in the first place with their partners, assuming that mothers wouldn’t want to “give up” their maternity leave. But there was so much assumption rather than actual conversation.
Until couples and families can start having a conversation about what would work for them as a whole and as individuals, we're not going to get anywhere very fast, but if we can open up space for these conversations, we can get somewhere so great, so quickly.
More on men, flexible work and family:
“There’s a huge cultural stigma around the role of dads”: why more men are requesting flexible working”: While evidence around how the pandemic has impacted women’s careers should be taken seriously, there’s also a growing conversation around the increasingly active role of men in family life, how that contributes to gender equality and what that could look like in the workplace.
Flexi-schooling’s rise: Flexible working and flexi-schooling are converging in some families so dads can take the time in the week to bond with their children.
The co-CEO - can two heads be better than one?: “Aligning with Dave as my co-CEO has given me the courage to pursue this type of endeavour. It’s the same in previous roles I’ve had, where perhaps I didn’t apply for a more senior position that seemed really interesting, but I was too hard on myself about whether I could do it, even though I had most of the skills they were looking for.” Sophie Smallwood, co-founder and co-CEO of job share matching platform Roleshare, talks about how her business partnership with her husband has helped her excel professionally.