The future is now

A new parenting project takes shape

Last week I mentioned that I had a post all cued up but decided to shelve it in favor of attempting to sort through my post-election grief. It still feels too soon to talk about much else. My heart breaks for my queer and trans friends, many of whom no longer feel safe in their communities, and for the immigrant families facing the specter of deportation and family separation – to name just two groups. And yet I also keep returning to the idea I shared at the end of my last post: research on gender issues is more important than ever, both to help us make sense of what just happened and to find a better way forward. So I’m sharing that shelved post below and doing my best to keep my research moving forward.  If this is work you value, consider showing your support with a like, share, or by upgrading your subscription.

Back in September I promised to bring you along on the journey of researching and writing a book from as close to the start as possible. Alas, I have to confess: that journey actually began several years ago.

Part of the academic job application process entails writing up a “research statement” that gives hiring committees an overview of your scholarly output. There’s a formula to these documents: an opening paragraph that summarizes your core research focus and accomplishments to date, followed by a deeper dive into each current or completed project. Then you close with one final paragraph in which you pitch “future work”—stuff you almost certainly haven’t started yet but hope is clear enough, and exciting enough, to convince hiring committees that you are a scholar with a bright future rather than a one-hit dissertation wonder.

When I sat down to write that final paragraph back in 2021, I really had no idea what I wanted to do next. It was hard enough keeping my existing projects going alongside the stress of applying for jobs, and now I was supposed to project myself several years into the future?! Something had to be written, though, so I looked to my dissertation for ideas: what questions were still unanswered? How could I build on my existing findings? (Part of what hiring committees, and eventually tenure committees, look for is evidence of a coherent scholarly identity. Whatever came next thus had to have a plausible connection to my existing work.)

I ended up fixating on a quote from an interviewee I call Kendra in the dissertation and book. She, like many of my respondents, attributed her role as cognitive laborer-in-chief to her personality: she is highly organized, type-A, and planful, in contrast to her more laidback husband. What stood out to me from Kendra’s story was that she insisted she’d been like that as long as she could remember:

My dad tells a story from when we were kids. My parents were divorced when I was little and my mom is a lot like me. She is very [snaps fingers], “This is the only way it’s going to work.” My dad is not like that, and on a random Sunday afternoon, I was like, “I did my homework, did this, and I have the rest of my day to myself.” My dad was like, “Guys, it’s raining out, let’s go see a movie.” My brother was like, “Awesome, what movie?” I was like, “No, I’m not going to do this.” He was like, “It’s a movie, why?” Nope. Too big of a course correction. I feel like [my husband] is much more able to be like, “Guys, let’s go do this!” I can’t change gears that fast.

I was skeptical that these tendencies were fully hardwired in Kendra, in large part because I kept hearing from women who had suspiciously similar personalities. But I very much believed the skills Kendra brought to her adult life had been inculcated decades earlier. The problem was that the interviews I’d done with adults, mostly about their lives in the present, didn’t really give me the data to show how, exactly, those childhood processes unfolded.

Scholars talk a lot about “gender socialization”—basically, the ways that children come to understand how gender works in our society, and what it means for them to be a gendered being. Yet it always seemed to me like a bit of a black box, trotted out as a ready alternative to the theory that biological sex differences were the cause of gender differences, but lacking in the specificity I wanted.

What precisely were the childhood origins of the adult gender archetypes I was writing about: how and why were girls trained to be always looking ahead, attuned to the needs of those around them, etc.? And how were boys trained to be the opposite, at least when it came to their private life? Further, I wondered whether the adults I was interviewing were handling these issues differently with their own children. Had shifting ideas about what gender is translated into shifts in the way we parent our kids?

I brainstormed these questions, wrote them up as “future work” in my research statement, and then more or less forgot about them for a couple years while I was writing the cognitive labor book. (There are scholars who seem able to work on more than one major project at a time, but I am not one of them.)

But, the future is, somehow, now. I dusted that statement off again a few months ago and discovered I was still very interested in the topic of gender socialization (hooray!) but less keen about the narrow framing I’d originally conceived re: how kids were socialized into their eventual adult cognitive labor roles.

What struck me as more interesting was a related but somewhat broader set of questions. Specifically, the past five to ten-ish years (hard to date precisely) have seen what feels like a seismic shift in the way everyday people—not just gender scholars and LGBTQ+ activists, but my parents and neighbors and many of my students—think and talk about gender.¹ The idea that sex and gender are two distinct things, for example, or that someone might identify as neither man nor woman, had become mainstream talking points seemingly overnight.

Of course, not everyone likes these developments. The increased visibility of trans and nonbinary folks, and the backlash against “traditional” masculinity sparked by the #MeToo movement, has made many people very unhappy, to understate the case. (See, for example, the “Kamala is for they/them” ads, and related messaging in state races, the Trump team trotted out in the final stretch of the campaign.) And much of the resulting controversy has centered on young people: What books can they read? What bathrooms can they use? What sports teams can they play on? What can they be taught about gender in schools?

This combination of rapid change and extreme polarization is a lot to process, and I wondered how parents—particularly the ones who weren’t necessarily standing up in school board meetings, or filing lawsuits—were making sense of all this. What were they attempting to teach their kids about gender, both their own and others’? How were they deciding which battles to fight and which to surrender? How were they managing contradictions between their personal beliefs and the norms of their communities?

I wrote up these questions in an informal research proposal of sorts and shopped it around to colleagues for feedback. Encouraged by their enthusiasm, I’ve spent the last couple months doing an extensive review of the existing literature, keen to make sure I’m not inadvertently setting myself up to redo something that’s already been done.

My notes document is now roughly 50 pages, and I’m getting closer to figuring out exactly what I hope to add to the existing conversation. Because of course there’s tons of interesting research, in both psychology and sociology, that speaks to the question of what gender socialization is and how it operates in families.² (If you’re looking for a “classic” text, I recommend Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play. If you want a more recent take, check out the work of sociologist Elizabeth Rahilly or psychologist Kristina Olson.)

Fortunately, there are still many unanswered questions and underexplored topics, and I’m excited to try my hand at filling in a few of the gaps in our knowledge. More on how I plan to do that coming soon…

1. Abigail Saguy and collaborators have done some really interesting work on this topic.

2. You might think that I’d already know this literature, given that I’m supposedly a scholar of gender and families. And it’s true that I studied some of the most seminal texts in grad school and teach some of them in my undergrad lectures. Yet scholars today are operating in a context of extreme specialization, and there’s less overlap than you might expect between the literature on housework and the literature on gender socialization. Because of my background, it takes far less time for me to become a relative expert on the topic than it would for someone starting from zero. But it’s still a time-consuming process.