Who's guarding the gate?
Rethinking the idea of "maternal gatekeeping" (best of)
While I’m out on parental leave, I’m dipping into the TDD archives and revisiting posts from a more innocent time. This one (edited lightly) comes to us from May 2021. Cue time machine sound effects!
In the majority of different-gender couples, Dad does less of the housework and childcare. But is it really his fault? According to the theory of “maternal gatekeeping,” Mom may share some of the responsibility.
Specific definitions of maternal gatekeeping vary from study to study, but the main idea is that some women behave in ways that limit their partner’s ability to share in childcare. Perhaps she criticizes the way he loads the dishwasher. Maybe she never lets him dress the toddler for family gatherings. Perhaps she unilaterally decides to sign the preschooler up for ballet. Through interactions like these, Mom confirms her position as the one in charge and subtly (or not-so-subtly) discourages Dad from even trying to help. If he’ll just be criticized, or if it’s clear his help isn’t wanted, why bother?
At this point, I imagine your hackles may be up. Isn’t this whole gatekeeping thing just a form of blaming the victim? How is it fair that women get stuck doing more of the housework AND held responsible for men’s lack of involvement?
It’s but a short hop from the image of a woman standing at the threshold, refusing the helping hand offered by a well-meaning man, to the old trope of the controlling wife who drives her henpecked husband crazy. Even men’s rights groups have latched onto the idea of maternal gatekeeping to bolster their arguments about fathers’ marginalization—never a good sign.
The most-cited academic paper on this topic is called “Maternal Gatekeeping: Mothers’ Beliefs and Behaviors that Inhibit Greater Father Involvement in Family Work.” If you read it closely, you’ll see that authors Allen and Hawkins are making a far more nuanced argument than their title might suggest. They are careful to note, for instance, that maternal gatekeeping is not the only reason women do the majority of housework and childcare. They remind us that we don’t know whether gatekeeping causes low father involvement or is a response to it. And they identify the source of maternal gatekeeping as a broader gender structure in which women are expected to manage domestic life and penalized for not doing so. But that nuance is easily lost to the splashier finding that men might help more, if only women would let them.
In short, the maternal gatekeeping concept could use a ~rebrand~. I’m no marketer, but here’s the brief I’d pass on to the ad agency:
It’s got to be gender-neutral, rather than pitting mothers against fathers. After all, men are capable of gatekeeping, too. (Just ask the man who won’t let his wife touch the lawnmower, or the guy who insists on managing the retirement accounts himself.) I’ve seen some use of the term “parental gatekeeping,” but I’m not sure it’s fully caught on.
It has to take motivations into account. In my own research, I’ve talked to plenty of women who would likely qualify as gatekeepers under Allen and Hawkins’ rubric. But most of these women are clear that their goal is not to prevent their partner from helping. Amanda put it this way: “Would I have loved if [my husband] found five summer camps that were amazing that I didn’t have to think about? Yeah!” But based on years of experience, Amanda doubted her spouse would put in the legwork necessary to come up with plausible options and get the paperwork in on time. Like many women, Amanda’s aim was to avoid a suboptimal outcome rather than to maintain control for control’s sake. She was willing to tolerate her husband’s different way of doing laundry, say, but with the kids’ happiness at stake she didn’t want to take any risks.
It has to emphasize the flaws in the system rather than demonize women’s attempts to navigate within that system. One measure of maternal gatekeeping is how much a woman sees the state of her home/family as a reflection on her personally. Does she think a visitor would judge her for a messy house? Does she worry about what her family and friends think of her parenting choices? Here’s the rub, though: women’s belief that they will be judged for how their children look in public or how cluttered their house is are not just idle fears. Women are held accountable for many domestic outcomes - and they do more often end up having to pick up the pieces when something goes awry. “Gatekeeping” is thus in some ways an adaptive response to an unfortunate reality. The problem is not that gatekeeping isn’t real, but rather that its current framing makes it about individual women’s actions rather than the broader system that constrains those actions.
I’d love to hear your ideas about what we could call the concept formerly known as maternal gatekeeping. Do you see a way to acknowledge the reality that women are often seen as/see themselves as the lead parent, without placing responsibility for managing men’s involvement on their shoulders, too?