This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenthood, sent every Wednesday at 6 p.m. To receive it, you can register for free here.
Yesterday I read the report of a parenting and work study which has just been published, when a number jumped out at me. In parallel with the survey conducted by YouGov for this study, the consulting firm The Boson Project, which coordinated this work, had offered its subscribers on the networks to answer the same questions. Of the 365 respondents, 77.8% were women. However, the survey is not specifically aimed at them. These are questions about the relationship between family life and professional life. Why have more women than men taken the time to think about these topics? Why did they spontaneously feel concerned, and them less so?
This brought me back to the very beginnings of this “Darons daronnes” newsletter, in December 2022. Since the first week, I have been asking you to share your thoughts and questions about parenting. And from the first weeks, you wrote to me… or rather, some of you. For quite a while, I received emails exclusively from mothers. I also reported to the “first father” his status, which amused him: “I am delighted to be the first “daron” to come forward, and moreover not unhappy to contribute to sharing, at my level, the burden that too often weighs on the “daronnes””Hichem had written to me.
“Men in nurseries”
Why are fathers so little present in the field of parenthood? I phoned Benoît Hachet, a sociologist at the EHESS, who made the same observation in his own work. “In all the post-lockdown surveys on family life, it was 90% of the mothers who answered”, he told me. Fathers are not represented in this area. The vast majority of parenting specialists are women, as are early childhood leaders. “The day when there will be men in nurseries, we will have already made progress. »
Another bias, he explains to me, comes from the public research institutes themselves. Benoît Hachet took part in theElf investigationa long-term study conducted in France with 18,000 children since 2011. “From the start, the choice was made to recruit mothers as the main parent”, he explains to me. That is to say that the mothers would mainly be the referents for the survey. For what ? “Because we know from experience that fathers are more evasive in their answers and less available. They have “important meetings”. With mothers, less time, energy and money are wasted. » And this is how the system is perpetuated: disinvested fathers, who feel incompetent, and mothers who retain the domestic mental load, says the sociologist.
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