Men’s family involvement across industrial nations: introduction to special section

This special issue draws upon theoretical work outlining two halves of the ongoing gender revolution {Goldscheider et al. 2014). In the 1970s women, particularly mothers, began to move from primary involvement in the private sphere at home to greater involvement in the public sphere through paid employment. This first half of the process was completed in many countries by the mid-1990s, with a leveling off of the increase in married mother's labor force participation in many countries (OECD 2004). Men are expected to complete the revolution through greater involvement in the private sphere at home, but this part is ongoing. The second half of the gender revolution is the focus of this special issue. The United States, the home of one of the editors of this special issue, has a romantic picture of how gender roles in the family have changed in Europe. We imagine fathers taking several weeks of parental leave after childbirth and thereafter sharing childrearing. In fact, as our third editor could tell us, across Europe there is substantial variation in the participation of women in the work force and, similarly, father involvement varies dramatically from country to country and even within country. One example is that, until a little more than two decades ago, Germany had been split into East and West for more than 40 years. In terms of gender roles, today the two regions remain distinct; the legacy of different political and economic systems and social expectations is not instantly erased. As another example, Switzerland's cultural heterogeneity – German, French, and Italian – makes for an intriguing set of contexts for variation in gender roles and public policies from canton to canton. This special issue sheds light on how different political, economic, and social system variations and conditions are linked to father involvement with children. Testing the hypothesis of the second half of the gender revolution, several authors ask whether, as mothers engage more in the labor force across industrial nations, fathers respond with greater involvement at home, particularly regarding care for children? Several of the papers in this volume examine how the father's total time spent engaged with his children varies with the labor force participation of his partner. Absolute level of involvement is a good indicator, but a better indicator for measuring gender role equality is the proportion of total child care time the father contributes. A relative measure adjusts for the absolute amount of time spent by mothers in caring for children and, therefore, equalizes countries with different levels of maternal childcare time. Several of the studies take advantage of time diaries that were collected from both husbands and wives to classify their joint caregiving and to identify times when fathers are solo primary caregivers rather than joint caregivers. Two papers focus their analyses on the association of maternal and paternal employment with the absolute and relative degree to which fathers are involved in caring for their children. Besides the contribution it makes in sorting out variation in the total time fathers spend caring for children, this volume adds a focus on different types of father involvement with children – all the papers divide involvement at least into routine physical care, and developmental (also called play, educational, or interactive) care, with some including managerial care. The issue is whether fathers who increase time spend more time in play, which has been their bailiwick all along, or do they spend more time in the basic care and management of children. The latter implies a later stage in the second half of the gender revolution. Most of the empirical papers utilize high quality data from time diary studies collected in each nation and which today are archived and available for research use at the Centre for Time Use Research, the University of Oxford (Fisher & Gershuny, et al., 2013). A web-based extract builder is available to facilitate researcher access to the American Time Use Survey (Hofferth, Flood, and Sobek, 2013). Third, the volume contributes through examining how characteristics of the fathers themselves, such as their education, family living arrangements, or age of children, contribute to their involvement with children.