KA-BOOM!

If you aren’t waking up to the reality that “gender neutral” policy isn’t working for your working fathers, check out this bomb dropped by a study out of the UK.

I ran into an old college friend at a barbecue the other day.  He has done well for himself in life: a great job in the financial sector, an amazing wife who works for a high end law firm, and three beautiful young children.  Naturally, our conversation gravitated toward fatherhood.  I asked him if he’d taken any time off for the birth of his kids.

“I took three months of parental leave for the first one,” he said.*

There was a fascinating story of a survey done at the University of Nebraska last fall which appeared in Forbes earlier this week.  The survey found that “75 percent of men consider being a parent very important, while only 48 percent had the same opinion about having a successful career.”  The author analyzing the data had valid questions about the number and wondered if they weren’t skewed by a growing movement of people frowning upon those who are overly preoccupied with financial success, or simply the human condition of responding to surveys as our “ideal” selves rather than our real selves.

One can argue a percentage point here and there, but these findings are none the less very significant for business.   Men clearly have different views of themselves as fathers than perhaps even only a decade ago.  However, my own research of a year ago showed that full time working dads place "breadwinner" as their top priority than full time working moms (51% to less than 1%.)  It also demonstrated that, unwittingly, the workplace still largely clings to the antiquated notion that men are willing and happy to sacrifice time with family for career.  Clearly, there is still a gap between what working dads want for themselves and their families and what is expected of them in the workplace.

 There are numerous “Women in Leadership” initiatives at various corporations, all with the same important goal—to increase the number of women in upper management positions.  Not surprisingly, the many surveys and reports produced by such programs point to “a woman’s responsibility to the family” as the number one hindrance to career advancement.   The ensuing solutions proposed by reports like a recent release from the Conference Board of Canada are usually similar—woman-to-woman mentorship programs, gender quotas for upper management interviews and talent identification initiatives. Astonishingly, however, while they seem to have the problem figured out, none of the reports recognizes the most obvious solution.

We need to change our expectations of working fathers.

 I’ve spent the past few months interviewing working fathers and surveying both working fathers and mothers at two of Vancouver’s most forward thinking companies. I think most of us would agree that there are some dinosaurs out there who still feel that having staff work 70 hours a week is better than 40 hours, and that it stands to reason that no one will have a happy work life balance for such an employer.  But I wanted to see if the pressures that men feel and the attitudes they have are any different when they work for truly progressive employers. 

Both Vancity and Clearly Contacts are Top 100 employers.  Vancity, for example, offers a wage top up to 85% for all new parents for the duration of their parental leave (which is one year in Canada.)  Clearly Contacts, though the world’s largest on-line distributor of glasses and contact lenses, still considers itself a young start up with progressive ideas.  So what would I find at these two places of employment?