Millennial Dads Want to Parent Equally. Will the Office Let Them?

One Wednesday in mid-April, Tom frantically tidied up his apartment before a video call with a prospective investor. The 35-year-old tech founder in New York didn’t want anything within his camera’s frame to imperil his chances of his pitch going well. He really needed the cash.

Tom was especially careful to move all of the children’s books and toys out of shot. He briskly bundled away an armful of Bluey and Pikachu stuffies — evidence of his almost 2-year-old son’s existence. Seconds before logging on, he hastily pushed a crib into the next room.

It wasn’t that Tom was ashamed of being a father; he just didn’t want to risk the investor jumping to conclusions about how committed he was to his job. “It’s unfortunate, but you just never know if the person you’re speaking to is going to be biased against dads,” he says.

In the end, the call went well, and Tom secured the investment. But he faces this sort of balancing act all the time. Unlike most generations of dads before him, Tom is devoted to splitting the job of parenting his son as close to 50/50 with his wife as possible. She also works full time, meaning both of their days get immensely busy. To complicate this further, the hustle-and-grind world of Silicon Valley that Tom operates in leaves little room, at least from Monday to Friday, for being a dad — something that could signal to an investor that he isn’t all in.

This is a situation women have been grappling with for decades as more have climbed the corporate ladder. But many millennial men are finding themselves in it for the first time. Pew Research found that in 2016, dads to kids aged 18 and below in the US, of which a large proportion were millennial, reported spending triple the amount of time on childcare as fathers did in 1965. Academics interviewed said that this trend has likely intensified in the last ten years. Research published a few years ago also found that some 85% of dads say that being a parent is the most or one of the most important aspects of who they are as a person.

At the same time, bosses are expecting more out of their employees, amplified by return-to-office mandates and the recent talk among executives about bringing more “masculine energy” to work. One survey conducted last year across 50 countries found that almost half of workers said their workload had increased significantly in the past year, while nearly two-thirds said that the pace of change in their workplace had accelerated. Millennial dads are navigating the push and pull of work and family with plenty of social constraints and without a road map — and they are terrified of talking about it publicly.

You just never know if the person you’re speaking to is going to be biased against dads.Tom, a tech founder in New York

For this story, I spoke with dozens of millennial dads about the challenges of charting a new course through parenthood in a business world that isn’t fully on board. Almost none of them were comfortable sharing their stories on the record, fearing backlash or judgment from their bosses, family, and friends for breaking an unspoken taboo. They are afraid that speaking openly about struggling to have it all will hurt their chances of having it all.

Despite taking on more than previous generations, dads are still way behind moms when it comes to their share of household chores and time spent with the kids. Over these conversations, I found a culture clash between a generation intent on co-parenting and a society still built around the male breadwinner, with millennial dads caught in the middle.

Heejung Chung, a professor of work and employment at King’s Business School in London, says the shift in fatherhood norms has been immense and rapid. “A few decades ago, fathers were basically there for breadwinning and disciplining — or scolding — kids,” she says. “That’s absolutely not the case anymore. Many really want to be equals with their partners when it comes to parenting.”

Dozens of new dads I spoke with said that before they had a child, they expected to be “progressive” and “hands-on” parents — they were determined to share childcare duties equally or almost equally with their partner. To some extent, that’s been the case. The Institute for Family Studies found that in 2021 and 2022, college-educated fathers of children under 18 were, on average, spending 10 hours and 12 minutes a week with their kids — over two hours more than a decade prior.

But frequently, reality hasn’t aligned with expectations. Many fathers say the stress and expectations that come with their job often take precedence over the care work that comes with having a child.

“When we talk about the double shift, we often talk about women,” says Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who’s also the president of the nonprofit American Institute for Boys and Men. “What we don’t talk about enough is that it’s true of men as well.”

As far back as 2015, a New York Times headline declared that “Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be,” and that’s exactly what Scott, a 39-year-old living on the West Coast who has a 3-year-old son and works for a Big Tech company, tells me he’s found. “I really thought that I’d be able to create boundaries and draw lines, but it’s really hard, especially in an industry like tech,” he says. “I feel like the standards to which workers are held are just incompatible with wanting to be a really present parent, and that’s especially true for dads.”

A 2016 paper on “The Paradox of Today’s Fathers” from Boston College’s Center for Work and Family also speaks to this. “It is clear,” the authors wrote, that most young men face a “conflict in trying to rectify their desire to be engaged fathers and spend more time with their children and their desire to ‘climb the corporate ladder’ — advancing in the organization, seeking jobs with greater responsibility, and pursuing a career in senior management.” The result of all of this, they concluded, was the same dilemma that women had faced for years: “Can one really ‘have it all?'” The response to that question for many dads seems pretty unequivocal: Absolutely not. Or at least not all at the same time.

We’ve allowed women to do as much as men. But we have not allowed fathers to be as involved in childcare as women have been.Heejung Chung

One 41-year-old dad who works in consulting says that despite him and his wife, an accountant, explicitly agreeing before they had their daughter two years ago that they were going to try as hard as possible to split childcare responsibilities equally, it didn’t work. “My wife took five months off work. I took two weeks,” he says. “That established a sort of default: She’s the primary parent, and I’m not,” he adds. “It’s frustrating, but it’s also really hard to change, especially because I’m constantly traveling for work.”

Reeves agrees that defaults can be hard to change once they’re set during those early year — and advocates deliberately challenging them. “What’s critical,” he says, “is that you can’t allow the gender division to get solidified. It can’t get set in stone.”

Jessica Calarco, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison whose research focuses on inequalities in family structures, says the disconnect between millennial dads’ intention and reality can be attributed to two things: “A mismatch of socialization and a mismatch in structure.”

As a society, we haven’t socialized fathers to be caregivers, she says. “We’ve only allowed gender to bend one way. We’ve told young girls they can be anything they want to be. But we’re not encouraging boys to embrace care identities. We’re not giving them baby boys dolls and tea sets.” As a result, “dads can feel underprepared or crowded out, like they don’t belong in caring roles.”

“We’ve allowed women to do as much as men,” Chung says, “but we have not allowed fathers to be as involved in childcare as women have been.” James Millar, a coauthor of the book “Dads Don’t Babysit,” explains it in terms of the “breadwinner stereotype,” which he says has made it so that “even men who act on their desire to have a more equitable relationship are likely to suffer greater dissatisfaction if they are not the breadwinner in a couple or family.”

Jonas Rave, a 40-year-old dad of one living in London, says he thinks gender stereotypes are particularly salient when it comes to the language we tend to use. Words like “caregiving” and “nurturing” are “deeply feminine-coded,” he says. “I think as a result, many men might feel less ‘manly’ when they are ‘lead parent.'”

“The traditional father who goes fishing, plays catch, coaches Little League, and suchlike is more societally acceptable,” he adds. “The emotionally available, more soft and gentle dad, possibly less so.”

As for the prospect of speaking about the ways in which these social pressures and entrenched stereotypes are challenging — or even harming — men, many of the people I interviewed didn’t want to do so because they were scared of how they might be perceived. Some feared an employer might consider them less capable or committed to work if they acknowledged struggling with the parenthood juggle. Others didn’t want to risk being seen to be complaining about something that mothers have endured for centuries. “The last thing I’d want,” one father tells me, “is for anyone to think I’m ‘mansplaining’ what women have been dealing with forever.”

The labor market still demands so much of workers and especially male workers in male-dominated industries, and that’s hurting us all.Heejung Chung

The mismatch in structure, meanwhile, is evident in the fact that in countries such as the US, caregiving is not treated as a public utility, Calarco says. Instead, it’s usually the responsibility of the parents.

Because of the enduring gender pay gap, which still sits at about $0.15, it’s usually the woman who shoulders most of the burden of care. Of the countless families she’s studied during her career, Calarco says she’s only really witnessed egalitarian — or near-egalitarian — parenting arrangements in families that can afford to outsource almost all of the childcare.

Corporate parental leave is also rarely gender equal, and though many companies have recently bolstered their paternity benefits, few offer all parents — regardless of gender — identical leave and pay. In the cases in which it is offered, take-up is also often lackluster.

A report published by McKinsey and the gender-equality nonprofit Moms First earlier this year found that dads in New York state were forgoing $1.6 billion in state-guaranteed parental benefits by not taking leave. In 2021, an academic paper found that US fathers who did take parental leave typically took a week or less. That same paper also found that of those who did take leave, just 14% of fathers took more than two weeks.

Indeed, many of the dads I interviewed said they still thought men were judged for taking parental leave or assuming the role of primary caregiver. About a third of those I spoke with said that they didn’t take all of the leave that they were legally entitled to. “I do think that, generally speaking, requests to work flexibly or remotely are looked upon more favorably if they’re made by women than by men,” says Matt Fleischer, a 41-year-old father of two in New York City. This effect is what Chung identifies as “femininity stigma” — men being stigmatized or even punished for demanding certain accommodations and benefits that have historically been used by women.

“The overarching problem here is the inability of the labor market and society to adapt to the new reality of parenting and work and evolving gender roles and norms,” Chung says. “The labor market still demands so much of workers and especially male workers in male-dominated industries, and that’s hurting us all.”

Neither the dads nor the academics I talked to were optimistic about being able to strike a balance soon. Calarco notes that the Trump administration’s cuts to certain services have eroded an already inadequate safety net that the government had up until recently provided. She says she’s seeing a “backlash against anything that’s not normative,” and while this is particularly pronounced in the US right now, “the US tends to be the canary in the coal mine when it comes to negative social change.” A push for “hardcore” masculinity in the workplace, touted by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk — which is exacerbating an already deeply ingrained culture of presenteeism — is not helping either, several of the people I spoke to told me.

Chung says it’s still very much the case that employees who are pursuing the “ideal worker norm” — embodied by someone who puts in extremely long hours and is myopically focused on their job — are rewarded the most generously. This, she says, creates incentive structures that don’t allow for the workforce to evolve and to be more accommodating of parents. In 2023, Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard, won the Nobel Memorial Prize for her work highlighting, among other things, what Chung is referring to: the concept of “greedy work,” in which employers in certain industries demand long hours and reward mostly male workers who are unencumbered by duties outside their paid jobs, such as parenting.

“The gender norms that are making it hard for dads and moms to be treated equally in work and in society are so, so deeply ingrained that I don’t see things changing anytime soon,” says Scott, the father of one from the West Coast.

“What I really wish for, is for parenting to be widely seen as a path for personal growth, joyfulness — along with the stress, anxiety, boredom, and frustration — for both genders in different ways,” says Rave, the dad in London, “but with the same ultimate goal in mind: to raise good humans.”

One thing that could move the needle is more role models. “Norms can shift quite quickly once you get a critical mass,” says Reeves, the American Institute for Boys and Men president. “And I do think that millennial men are a potential positive force in society and that they’re using their labor market power to shift things.”

Millar agrees that notions such as the breadwinner stereotype and femininity stigma can indeed be dismantled through modeling an alternative and creating a new norm. And yes, Millar says, a great way to start doing that is for men to take paternity leave and for managers to allow — and encourage — men to do so. “When men perform solo parenting they get better at it, they become more confident doing it, and everyone wins: men, women, children, and yes, society at large.”

Josie Cox is a journalist who has worked for publications like Reuters, The Independent, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the book, “Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality.”