About That Mother’s Day Breakfast

Nowhere was the degeneration of the gender-equality movement as evident as Facebook on Mother’s Day. A slew of posts cascaded down my feed, mothers sharing various tableaus of husbands (fathers) cooking up breakfast. “Once, for a change!” seemed to be the recurring theme.

Women were overjoyed, appreciative. Even proud.

A few weeks ago, a BBC interview with a political scientist who was interrupted by his children lasted less than a minute and garnered hundreds of millions of views.

Swiftly on its heels came a spoof. A video in which a woman is being interviewed instead. A woman, of course, would handle it very differently. She would answer complex political questions while feeding her child, cleaning a toilet, cooking dinner, ironing a shirt and, well, defusing a bomb.

She would also find her husband’s other sock because, you know, that’s what we do.

The spoof video, which quickly amassed more than 20 million views, was shared with the same collective sense of amour-propre. Sure, it was meant to be humorous, but it also brought to light the fundamental flaw in the gender ecosystem: women can’t have it all because they do it all.

“Feminism.” Regardless of how one defines the term, can it really be about the glorification of the woman who does it all?

Isn’t that counterintuitive to the concept of gender equality?

Should we be glorifying the woman who has a job outside of housework but also manages the bulk of responsibilities that involve kitchens and children? Should we be holding her up as an example for younger women and their aspirations, for younger men seeking to sort out their place in an increasingly changing worldview?

Or should we be pointing to it and saying, “This, this right here, is the problem?”

In a recent op-ed titled “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?”, The New York Times cited a study that showed that the number of young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships has fallen since the 1990s.

In 2014, 58 percent of high-school seniors said they preferred a relationship in which the man is the main income earner and the woman took care of the home.

I recently asked an accomplished female friend who works in high finance and is a mother of two, why she worked from home one day a week. “When else will I do the laundry, the cleaning and the organizing?” she asked me in earnestness.

She is one of many women I know who works from home once a week.

This, in large part, is because we make excuses for the men in our lives. Oh, he never learned to cook. Oh, I’m just better with the kids. Oh, his job pays more. Oh, his job has less flexibility. Oh, women are natural caregivers.

The New York Times in May cited a report, from the medical journal JAMA Neurology, which highlighted a looming crisis for women and their employers: a growing rank of dementia patients will end up relying on daughters for healthcare.

Most of the care for older adults in the United States falls on unpaid caregivers, and most of them are women, said the authors, all at Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center.

More women are seen caring not only for their parents, but also for their in-laws. Employed women who are caregivers are seven times more likely than men to cut down from full-time to part-time employment, and are usually penalized for accommodating any sort of caregiving (even for their own children) in their lives.

We do it, which is why we get penalized for doing it. If we all (men and women) did it, we could normalize the concept of caregiving, and along with that, the work-life balance it demands.

There was a time when we were viewed and valued only as daughters, wives, and mothers. Many of today’s socially sanctioned traditions are rooted in those times.

(Or perhaps we are still viewed and valued only as daughters, wives and mothers?)

We have been conditioned to believe in those gender-biased traditions as “romance.” Waiting for the man to propose is not “romantic.” It is sexist, couched in the bubble-gummy, confetti-filled movies fed to us in our formative years.

Getting us to believe that bagging a proposal — and a ring — is “romantic” is one of the greatest tricks pulled off by the patriarchy.

(Call me guilty of having done all this myself, when I was younger and my thoughts on gender had not evolved. I wish they had. Instead, I showed off my ring to all my friends, who provided the obligatory approving exclamations.)

Women in generations not so far from ours worked hard to get us rights we didn’t have, to fight the idea that we are not any better suited to take care of kitchens and children, to fight the patriarchy that did us the favor of letting us in while managing to still keep us out.

So we got out of our corsets and got into the workforce, but we remained responsible for the “duties” we were charged with before our newfound sense of empowerment. “It’s okay for you to work outside the home as long as you continue taking care of the home,” thought the magnanimous men.

So what is feminism? And why are so many self-proclaimed feminists settling for gender inequality?

Someone recently told me feminism “is about respecting the various choices other women make.” That sounds like basic human decency to me. We don’t need a movement to respect each other’s choices. We need a movement to challenge the status quo.

We need a movement to point out all the choices we are conditioned to make, and how they are hurting the larger battle for equality.

At a dinner party conversation around “maiden” names, a man told me he would feel “emasculated” if his wife didn’t take his name. I have since been seeking a feminine equivalent of this word.

Think of all the times we could use it. When our husbands refuse to tag on their last name to ours to facilitate the sharing of a name without a gender-based sacrifice. (I.e., when we are turned into Offreds and Ofglens.)

When our husbands (or in-laws) don’t “allow” our babies — babies we have carried in our wombs for nine months — to have our name.

When we are pushed into the role of primary kitchen-and-children people, just when we are in middle-management offices with a clear path to the corner ones, despite our intelligence and ambition and potential to reach that office in our chosen fields of profession.

When we have worked relentlessly through our most fertile years, not caring about work-life balance, only to be told (when we finally realize that we have to rush along other life decisions), that we no longer have the biological ability to bear a child.

When we realize we are valued mainly for our childbearing abilities, and just as quickly disregarded for not having children.

The woman-equivalent of emasculate. A word that glorifies our essence, connotes strength, relays virility (another word typically used as a masculine) and conveys the gut-punch of the theft of our personhood.

It usually isn’t true that one desk job has more flexibility than another. If we’re both working at a desk, neither of us has to be in the office for every hour of work. But invariably, we end up saying his job offers less flexibility. That’s just social code for “he can’t risk being penalized.”

Men aren’t granted flexibility because not enough men ask for it.

We short-circuit our path to the corner office, we stagnate in middle management, while he moves up.

Across industries that have as many women as men at the entry level, men far outnumber women in senior management. This is a vicious cycle. Until there are enough of us in senior management, we cannot make the systemic changes need to achieve gender parity. And therein lies the Catch-22.

(This skewed sex ratio also applies to professional kitchens. As Addie Broyles points out, “When done in the home, cooking is associated more with women than men, but professional, high-status cooking has remained the domain of men.”

Vice asked male chefs why there are so few females in professional Dutch kitchens. Read the Q&A. Regardless of whether you are male or female, the answers will (should) embarrass you.

The tone of equal caregiving needs to be set early on. We need to be viewed and valued as equals in the workplace and equals at home. These are not mutually exclusive; one cannot happen without the other.

I recently saw this on Facebook. “My husband is a great dad. But I swear, if it weren’t for me, I don’t think my kids would get food or water.”

The problem with our generation — those of us born just this way and that of 1980 — is a general acceptance of the status quo. The gender movement stagnated with us.

There is a sense that we have come far enough, reflected in a bunch of social media posts on International Women’s Day this year. “Why do we need this day any more,” asked so many women.

I recently learned that women weren’t allowed in the Olympics marathon until 1984.

For many of us, that is in our lifetime.

We still don’t get paid equally for equal work. Just last month, a federal appeals court ruled that employers can legally pay women less than men for the same work based on differences in the workers’ previous salaries.

To achieve real gender parity, we need to challenge the status quo. We need to shout for equal parental leave, set the tone of equal caregiving in the early stages of parenthood, and put the men in our lives equally in charge of kitchens and children, ageing parents, and caregiving in general.

Above all, we must band together, Wives and Aunts and Handmaids, and question every gender-biased tradition that is handed down to us in the guise of “choice.”

Fathers making breakfast on Mother’s Day is really sweet, as long as (home) kitchens aren’t entirely our territory the rest of the year.