This is a linkpost for https://juliawise.net/some-hardworking-dads-in-ea/
It’s hard to divide anything 50/50. In many families, even if both parents have paid jobs, one parent will lean into parenting more, and the other will lean harder into paid work.
In male/female couples it’s usually the woman who owns more of the parenting work, and that can feel unfair if the arrangement comes from assumptions rather than a willing choice.
I want to highlight some counter-examples from the effective altruism space, to show it’s really possible to make an intentional choice about who does what.
- @Jeff Kaufman and I both travel for work, but he’s more fearless than I am about having the kids solo. Once while I was at an EA conference during the annual vacation with his side of the family, he took our four-year-old and two-year-old to the beach, and also took his sister’s two-year-old because she was working. Then, during this trip where he was responsible for three preschoolers, he potty-trained our toddler.
- My friend has pursued jobs focused on impact, while her husband has a normal job he’s not pursuing for altruistic impact. He does more of the childcare while she commutes part of the week to another city for her work. He’s also taken on more of the planning work involved in parenting, like choosing a school for their child and coming up with a reward system for behavior they’re trying to encourage.
- My coworker’s story from the recent EA New Zealand summit: Two of the women attending had babies. Their male partners came along as childcare support with the babies in carriers and stood at the back of the lecture theatre during the talks, ready to take the babies out when needed. (New Zealand president Jacinda Ardern, her partner, and their baby used a similar method in 2018.)
- You wouldn’t know from most writing about philosopher Hilary Greaves that she has children, because she’s been busy being an Oxford professor and directing the Global Priorities Institute. She mentioned in a 2018 podcast that she had 4 children at that time, and she now has 7. My understanding is that her partner has covered more of the parenting work, and that his doing so allowed her to spend more time on her career. (I’m so impressed with the amount of work that both of them must have done!)
- Not parenting, but in one couple I know through EA, the wife is a medical resident. She works 80 hour weeks, and he has a more normal work week, so he views it as his role to be sure she gets meals when she comes home. He said he’s not saving people’s health in his daily work, but he’s supporting her to do that.
Related:
- Jeff’s Equal parenting advice for dads
- My Dividing responsibilities at home
- Michelle Hutchinson’s My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career
Thanks for thinking to write this, Julia! I appreciate reading how other couples navigate this and can think of a number of other strong examples.
For my part: my beloved career at GiveWell is enabled by my husband, who is a stay-at-home-dad. He also brought our kid(s) along on my work trips (2-4 per year) for over two years when our baby-feeding configuration made it impossible for me to travel without them.
This warms my heart, thanks for writing Julia! A note from a dad trying to be supportive: I also want to acknowledge the mothers that let dads take care of the kids their own way. While it is not possible to generalize, having observed dads with children, at least here in Scandinavia, they might do things differently. Letting fathers parent their own way and trusting them makes it much easier for dads to care for children. Someone mentioned interest in taking care of kids - this interest can be increased, in my experience drastically, by letting fathers take care of the kids in their own particular way (while somewhat anecdotal I am reminded of this article, in a society where dads take on more of a role and bring the kids to the pub equivalent).
What inspiring and practical examples!
Maybe a commitment to impact causes EA parents to cooperate at maximizing it, which means optimally distributing the parenting workload whatever society thinks. In EA with lots of conferences and hardworking impactful women, it makes sense that the man's op cost is often lower. Elsewhere couples cooperate to maximize income, but men tend to have higher earning potential so maybe the woman would often do more childcare anyway.
My sense is that parenting falls on the woman due not only to gender norms, but also higher average interest in childcare and other confounders-- so I wonder how much is caused by other effects like EAs leaning liberal, questioning social expectations in general, or EA dads somehow being more keen on parenting. Also it's unclear if EA men even contribute more than non-EA men.
I'm reminded a bit of the gender equality paradox where in the USSR, and maybe also countries with restrictive gender roles [1] there are higher rates of women in STEM and other male-dominated fields. The idea is that in liberal societies, there would be a disparity due to difference in interest, and some kinds of external factor can reduce disparities on net-- in the Soviet case because equality was enforced by the state, in other cases if there is economic interest or a lack of Western stereotypes. So EA mindset is maybe one of these external factors-- not to imply it's like Soviet central planning or anything.
[1] the research seems disputed here
I don't have reason to think that prioritizing women's careers is more common in EA than in other similarly educated groups. And within EA, I definitely think it's still most common that women are doing more of the parenting work. But I wanted to highlight some examples to show that multiple configurations really are possible!
As an ambitious woman reading this is so uplifting!! I live in San Francisco and many of my friends have husbands who don't do as much parenting even if they are both working. In my household we have 3 kids and we spend most of our childcare time with one parent taking care of all the kids and that's both been very egalitarian as well as given us more free time.
I wrote more about it here: https://joyfulparentingsf.com/p/outnumbered-how-to-parent-multiple
Mom here - 2 year old and one on the way. My husband regularly takes on more parenting responsibilities so I can work on my EA aligned non-profit. He came to EAGx Austin and took full responsibility for our 3 month old so I could present and connect with others. I just came back from a weekend a EAG NYC, where he did the same. His support single-handedly allows me run Yield & Spread. Without him, I couldn't do it. Let's celebrate the dads.
Great writeup and cool the dads at the back of the lecture theatre story made it worldwide!