Introduction

Parental roles surely play a prominent part in determining gender inequalities across the life course, such as the gender pay gap, which still stands at 17% in the UK (ONS, 2007). If we want to understand such mechanisms underpinning gender inequality, then we need to look at both paternal and maternal roles. The importance of considering fathers, as distinct from mothers, when thinking about the division between paid and unpaid work is often given less weight in social policy than it deserves. We may, or we may not, envisage a future of equal parenting roles, where work and care are shared evenly between men and women. Empirically, such a vision of shared parenting remains highly unusual throughout the European Union (EU). And, because the majority of care is still carried out by mothers, the majority of research on families also continues to focus on mothers. Indeed, the wealth of feminist research into mothering, caring and working has perhaps served to mask the issue of the paternal role. It is thus important to also consider fathers, in the context of the realisation that gender does not just equal women.

We need to look not only at how women might manage (or not) to combine employment with care, but also at how men might manage (or not) to combine employment with care. Only with a thorough understanding of the circumstances of the minority of fathers who do spend substantial amounts of time caring for their children can we hope to better support, through social policy or otherwise, those fathers who do want to actively care for their children. And, by supporting those fathers who do want to actively care for their children, we will in turn support mothers. A certain balance between parental employment and parental care has also been shown to be linked to positive child outcomes, particularly for younger children, with evidence that the gender of the parent matters little (Esping-Andersen, 2005).

A common conception of current fatherhood is that there has to be a trade-off between being either a financial provider or an active carer. As a man becomes a father we might expect to see changes in his ability and willingness to do paid work as well as changes to the effort and time he devotes to domestic work.