Bringing men into the conversation

A Q&A with Kate Mangino

Over the past few years, a mini-genre we might call household labor self-help has sprung up. There’s Fair Play and All the Rage and How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids and Fed Up. I’ve read—and recommended—several of these titles, but I wasn’t convinced we needed another one. But I’m a sucker for *early access*, so when Kate Mangino reached out with an advanced copy of her forthcoming book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, I dug right in.

And I’m very glad I did. Mangino’s book stands out from comparable titles in two big ways. First, it’s not addressed, implicitly or explicitly, to women. No pink cover, no ranting about male shortcomings, no from-one-woman-to-another tone. Second, the meat of the book is devoted to couples who are achieving equity. Mangino interviewed 40 men (“the EP40”), as well as many of their partners, who share the load at home in hopes of figuring out how they do it.

Mangino and I spoke last week about these bold choices, how her work in international development gives her a unique perspective on domestic inequality, and how hard it was to find the EP40 in the first place. If you’re intrigued, I’d highly encourage you to preorder Equal Partners (it comes out next month) here!  

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AD: Tell me about who you are, professionally speaking.

KM: My professional background is in international development. Whether it’s full-time work or consulting work, I’ve always worked with nonprofit organizations overseas. And I’m always hired for projects that revolve around gender. Sometimes it’s gender and HIV prevention, sometimes it’s gender and prevention of early childhood marriage, sometimes it’s women’s empowerment. All the projects look a little different, but what it boils down to is it’s people talking through norms, having honest conversations with each other about which norms they want to change and how changing those norms will make things better for women and girls in their community. And actually better for everyone, because let’s be honest, gender norms can be a deficit for all humans.

The way this book came about is that my oldest child just turned 11. So for the last 11 years, I’ve had a disconnect between what I do professionally and my personal life. I was having very sophisticated conversations in Zambia and Indonesia and Nepal, and I would come home and have very antiquated conversations on the playground a couple blocks away from my DC apartment. And I realized, every country is grappling with gender inequality, but it looks different from country to country. And one of the biggest issues that the US—and I’ll put Canada in there too—is grappling with is household equality.

AD: I think we’re often guilty of thinking about what we in the US can teach the developing world, and so I love that you open the book with a story from Indonesia. What can we in North America learn about combating gender inequality from your work abroad?

KM: What I appreciate most about a non-US/UK/Canada-centric model is just a sense of community and family. I think we’ve become extremely independent, which means we handle our relationships and our families very much on our own, and when we need help it’s hard to find. We’re all working so hard just to keep our own lives together, and that’s hardest for single parents. I see a sense of community elsewhere that I see lacking in the US, and that’s something we could definitely borrow.  And as the world continues to globalize, and people emigrate and move and interact, it does seem like a time when we could share best practices and take advantage of them.

AD: Let’s hope so! One of the things you write about early on in the book is wanting to make sure you weren’t just speaking to working moms. From a tactical perspective, what choices did you make to try and bring men into your readership?

KM: Number one, I interviewed more men than women to collect the stories. The themes are actually heavier on the masculinity side than anything else, because that’s sometimes underrepresented in what’s been written so far. I also wanted to use an appreciative approach, to pick men that were doing a great job, instead of villainizing men. To say, look, there’s plenty of good guys out there! I had several male early readers and I asked, could you please read this and highlight any paragraphs that make you feel defensive? I’m realistic and know that I will probably have more female than male readers. What I was hoping for is that any woman could read a paragraph out loud to her partner or brother or dad or friend and he wouldn’t get defensive. That he would be like, “oh, yeah, you totally have a point.” And the last tactic is we chose a cover that wasn’t pink! We didn’t want a cover that would be kryptonite to a guy.

I’ve found that there are actually a lot of men having this conversation [about equality in the household], but because there aren’t networks of men having this conversation, it’s hard to find them. It’s not like there’s a PTA of equal partner men, you know, so it’s hard to know how many are out there or how to reach them.

AD: One of the things I’ve found in my own work is that some portion of the gender gap around parenting seems to be reinforced by social networks. Gender-segregated social networks give women access to a lot of parenting-related information and leave men kind of in the dark. How do you get men together to share best practices, or to share information about the T-ball league that’s coming up, and things like that?

KM: There’s a guy in Vermont named Keegan Albaugh who started a group in the Burlington area. He found a huge need, that dads really wanted to connect to other dads. When a dad has a question about parenting, he has his partner, and he has Google. And so you lean on your wife to do more cognitive labor, or you start from scratch. I’m a part of 10-15 WhatsApp and chat groups with other women. I can get answers to so many questions in two minutes, simply because of the networks that I have. I didn’t build those networks. Your kid moves into a new school, and you’re asked to join the moms network. They now call them parent networks, which is a great step, but let’s be honest, they’re 95% women still.

AD: Speaking of involved fathers, I was really interested in the group of men you call the EP40. Because as you mentioned, there’s not enough writing about men who are managing to achieve equality. From a process perspective, I’m curious about how you found these men. How many did you lose along the way, who initially looked like equal partners but turned out to be less than equal?

KM: So many! I started by giving people in my professional networks a protocol where I defined an equal partner, and I asked them if they could recommend people. And I feel like I probably had a 40-50% dropoff just after initial contact. Someone would say, “Oh, that describes my brother!” And I would contact the brother and he would be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s not me. I’m a hands-on husband.” [Ed. note: Hands-on Husband is the term Mangino applies to a man who “helps with tasks. He (usually) does what he is asked to do, but these are mere steps in a larger process. The Hands-On is not responsible for the process, which means he does not partake in cognitive labor.” By contrast, the Equal Partner “shares in the management of the household. He acknowledges that tasks are but a small indication of a larger system, and he takes responsibility for half the processes of that whole system.”]

So a lot of men would self-edit, because they knew they didn’t match what my description was. Then I’d have a bunch of men say, “yeah, that’s totally me!” And I would say, okay, can you please introduce me to your spouse, because I want to make sure they agree. And I would talk to the spouse and the spouse would be like, “No way.”

AD: I love the distinction you draw between Equal Partner and Hands-on Husband, because I think there are a lot of men in the Hands-On stage who sort of feel like they’ve achieved the highest level of feminism and good partnership. Among men who dropped off at various stages, was there any self-reflection on their part?

KM: I had great conversations with the dropouts, because they were like, “Thank you. I didn’t really get that I wasn’t doing enough until now. And I’m excited to read your book, but I can’t be in your research sample. But I’ve had this great dialogue with my partner, because I realized I’ve been letting her down all these years, and I didn’t get that.”

AD: Among the EP40, were the couples pretty much Equal Partners from the start, or did they get there over time? And in that latter group, was it usually female-initiated or male-initiated?

KM: It was a bit of both. I asked the question explicitly, would you be an equal partner if your partner didn’t care either way? There were men who said, “Yeah, this is really important to me.” And I had men who said, “No, I fully admit that I’d probably be a lazy guy who would do less. She helps keep me accountable.” The younger couples I talked to were more likely to have been sharing since the beginning, because I just think our conversation around gender has changed dramatically over the last 10 to 20 years.

But I can’t think of any couple that didn’t talk about a struggle, or a challenge, or a hard time. Or when one partner had to say to the other, “You’re slipping.” I’ve heard people say, if you’re an alcoholic, you’re always a recovering alcoholic. It’s just something that you live with. And I kind of feel like we’re all recovering from gender socialization. I just think it’s something we have to work on forever. It’s not a switch you can flip. It’s sort of these constant conversations, and holding each other accountable.

AD: On some level, that’s a disappointing answer. You want to be able to advertise equality as, like, just find it, and it’ll solve all your problems! And the reality, of course, is that’s it’s hard work. Okay, last question for you: how has the process of writing the book changed your own personal life?

KM: This research has made me realize that everyone struggles with this. It’s not just me, and it’s not just my friends. It’s everyone. My research has helped me be a better parent more than it’s helped me be a better partner, because I’m now so careful with the words I use around my kids. I tell my son all the time, caregiving is important and it’s valid and we appreciate it. I use language like, “Make sure we take care of so-and-so, because they’re a little guy.” I want him to be one of those guys that could be in the EP40. He’s eight and he tells me he’s never going to get married, but if he chooses to have a partner someday, I want him to be open to sharing cognitive labor.

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Amen to that! For much more on all of the above, pre-order Equal Partners here.