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The stay-at-home dad is, if not a myth, at least a rarity, as workforce statistics show women continue to shoulder the burden of child care in the home.
Despite talk over the past decade about an increasing trend for men to take time off work to look after children, a survey by the Bureau of Statistics released yesterday found just 12,000 men were not working because of child-care reasons.
This compares to 230,000 women who cited child care as their reason for not working - or just one stay-at-home dad for every 20 stay-at-home mums.
The director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, Professor Barbara Pocock, said the hype surrounding stay-at-home dads had emerged only because of their rarity.
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While for some men in professional occupations taking time off to care for children had earned them admiration from other colleagues, this was not the case for those in blue collar jobs. "I think it is changing for some men in some occupations, but I think we have got a fair way to travel," Professor Pocock said.
Marian Baird, an associate professor for work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney, said a desire by most women to care for their babies had been compounded by economic pragmatism.
"It is hard for the household to make a decision for the higher income earner to stay out of the workforce."
However, this only tended to reinforce the gender pay gap and inequality in the provision of care, because time out of the workforce for women usually further reduced their earning capacity.
Professor Baird said the current Productivity Commission inquiry into paid maternity leave should look carefully at international examples of paternity leave in countries such as Iceland and Sweden, which had encouraged fathers to play a greater role in child care.
In Australia stay-at-home dads had proven largely a myth. "I'm not saying they don't exist, but the trend hasn't taken off," she said.
- reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald