The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, traditional gender roles make for a happier marriage

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

The women’s liberation movement of the 1970's has long been championed as breaking down the barriers for women in the workplace. As women began to enter the workforce in droves, traditional gender roles in the home – one which saw the husband as the breadwinner and the wife as the homemaker – were torn down and replaced with a new, egalitarian vision for a modern day partnership defined by a two income household and an equal division of labour. And yet, there are some women who believe this transformation has yielded unhappy results. They argue that in order to be in a happy marriage, one must admit that men and women are not equal; they are different. When we deny our biological DNA and inherent gendered desires and capabilities we create mass confusion in the home, the resentful record keeping of household tasks, and a decrease in sexual desire. Men and women may be capable of doing many of the same things, but that doesn’t mean they want to. Modern feminists say the opposite is true: couples who share childcare responsibilities report greater relationship and sexual satisfaction. Women who find satisfaction and productivity through their work are better partners and parents. And spousal abuse is 300 percent higher in traditional marriages than in egalitarian ones. Marriage is not about prescribed roles for women and men. It’s about love, equality, and personal choice, and embracing these qualities will make everyone happier. Arguing for the motion is  Suzanne Venker, radio host and author of The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know – and Men Can't Say  Arguing against the motion is Ellen Lamont, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University and author of The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date   The host of this podcast is Ricki Gurwitz Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Traditional gender roles make for a happier marriage. Hello, I'm your guest moderator, Ricky Gurwis. Today is the first in our women's series of debates. This is a chance for us to explore issues that are central to the lives of women and the challenges they face at home, at work, and in their communities.

Our first of these debates is about marriages and gender roles. Today, the National Women's Party lobbies for the 26th Amendment to guarantee women equal rights under the law. That amendment would make women people in a legal sense for the first time. We begin in the 1970s. As women began to enter the workforce in droves, Traditional gender roles, which ascribed the husband as breadwinner and the wife as homemaker, were torn down and replaced with the new, egalitarian vision for a modern-day partnership,

defined by a two-income household and an equal division of labor in the home. And yet, 50-odd years later, there are some women who believe this transformation has yielded unhappy results. They argue that in order to be in a happy marriage, one must admit that men and women are not, in fact, equal. They are different. Men and women may be capable of doing many of the same things, but that doesn't mean they want to. Modern feminists, however, say the opposite is true. Couples who share child care and household responsibilities report greater relationship and sexual satisfaction, and women who find satisfaction and fulfillment through their work are better partners and parents.

Marriage is not about prescribed roles for women and men. It's about love, equality, and personal choice. And embracing these qualities will make everyone in the family happier. On this installment of monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments. By debating the motion, be it resolved, traditional gender roles make for a happier marriage. arguing for the motion is Suzanne Venker. She's a radio host and author of The Flip Side of Feminism, what conservative women know and men can't say.

Arguing against the motion is Ellen Lamont. She's an associate professor of sociology at Appalachian State University, and author of The Mating Game, How Gender Still Shapes How We Date. Suzanne, Ellen, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks for having me. Suzanne, you are a woman. arguing in favor of our resolution today, be it resolved, traditional gender roles make for a

happier marriage. I'm going to put two minutes on the clock for your opening statement. Take it away. So the most damaging aspect of the debate about gender roles is that it makes men and women competitors when in fact marriage is designed to be complementary. And the reason it's designed to be complimentary is because what happens to men when they become fathers is markedly different than what happens to women when they become mothers. In fact, it's the presence of children who are continuously left out of this debate that changes the entire conversation. At this stage of life, most men feel an innate pull to provide for their wife and children. And most women feel a deep desire to nest, to not have to think about earning for the time being so they can focus on their

baby. This is the real reason why so-called gender equality can never be achieved. Women are notorious for cutting back or even dropping out of the marketplace once they have children. That gender roles become so significant had little to do with social pressure, as feminist claim, but biology. All of this is in our DNA. We are talking human desire here, not a social construct. In fact, our culture specifically tells men and women that it's bad to succumb to gender rules. So this is so embedded in our culture, sorry, that women are now having to hide their desire to stay home precisely because society tells them not to. So the social construct argument is bogus. The fact that gender roles are innate does not mean they need to be set in stone.

There's plenty of room for overlap within the structure of a traditional family arrangement. This argument that you either believe in a strict division of labor or an equal partnership is a bogus choice. A good marriage is a partnership, irrespective of which tasks husbands and wives are responsible for. The bottom line in this debate is that there's an innate and overriding drive in most women and in most men that emerges once children come along. And these unique drives should be celebrated, not dismantled. Thank you, Suzanne, for that excellent opening statement. Ellen, we're going to come to you now. You are arguing against our resolution today.

Be it resolved. Traditional gender roles make for a happier marriage. Let's have your opening statement. Great. Thank you. So at present, 70% of Americans hold egalitarian views. So they want men and women to divide paid labor and household labor and child care relatively equally. Yet fewer than a third of heterosexual couples.

actually divide household labor and child care equally. So sharing household task is actually an important predictor of well-being in marriage. Those who don't share tasks experience the highest levels of conflict. On the other hand, equal sharing of domestic labor results in higher levels of happiness and greater sexual satisfaction. Women's work is also key to increased marital stability as we see that women's increased earning power actually stabilizes marriage. Americans who share these responsibilities are less likely to divorce. So family well-being and marital satisfaction is related to people's willingness to be flexible rather than follow rigid gender roles. We've democratized our relationships, giving everyone an equal voice, and building greater gender equality

in the process. However, there is a huge gap between what people want from their relationships and how their relationships function in practice. So attitudes have shifted faster than behaviors. Women are unhappy that they have taken on more paid labor while men, although they have increased their contributions to household labor and child care, aren't doing anywhere close to the amount that women do. And we have a gap between what people want from their relationships and how we structure work and social policy in the United States.

So in this manner, desired behaviors aren't supported by, social institutions. So our workplaces aren't family-friendly. We don't support necessary caregiving work through public policy such as paid parental leave or universal low-cost child care. So this leaves couples managing work-family conflict on their own, and they often feel as though they have no choice except for to fall back on a gender division of labor. So this gap between what people want and what they can enact drives stress and strain in marriages. This indicates that a shift in work practices and public policy can better support egalitarian relationships, which will increase happiness. The issue at play is really that people don't actually have the egalitarian relationships

they desire. Thank you, Ellen. That was an excellent opening statement. Okay, now we are reaching the rebuttals portion of our debate. Suzanne, this is your chance to rebut to rebut to anything that you heard in Ellen's opening remarks. Well, I heard flexibility that there shouldn't be strict gender roles, and if you refer back to my opening statement, I concurred that this doesn't have to be strict. There is a structure that you can put in place where one person is generally responsible for one and the other for the other with plenty of room for overlap. But at the end of the day, healthy relationships and strong marriages will depend on sexual polarity, not on sexual equality. and men and women have been trying to kind of do what they're told, for lack of a better way of putting it, you know, to live linear lives that are virtually identical as if men and women are interchangeable, which they are not.

So what's happening is they're trying on this argument that society is telling them they need to do, figuring out that it's not working, and then winding up talking with me as a coach, and I see it every day and every week, and this is what I contend with. that egalitarian arrangements remove masculinity and femininity from the equation as if men and women are the same, causing relationships to either become conflict-ridden like you wouldn't believe, or flat, which basically means sexless. Going back to what Ellen commented on about sexual satisfaction, I'm not sure exactly how she put it, is better in a galantarian household is simply not true. The argument, the stats show just the opposite. The National Survey of Families and Household show that couples with more more traditional housework arrangements had sex more frequently. Thanks, Suzanne. Okay, Ellen, do you have anything you want to take issue with from Suzanne's opening statement or her rebuttal? Yeah, so only 7% of the population actually wants a traditional marriage at this point in time. What we see instead is that a lot of people, one, the majority of the population wants an egalitarian relationship. So the idea that they're unhappy in this arrangement just doesn't seem to be true.

and that's not what the data is telling us. Probably where we see some of this conflict coming is, one, from the fact that people are actually not able to build those egalitarian relationships. And, you know, there is hostility between the genders, but I think that is a misguided hostility as men and women, and this is pretty normal. That's who's in front of your face, turn on each other, rather than thinking about the structural systems in play that don't allow them to build those egalitarian relationships. So, again, the solution isn't to then revert to more traditional marriages, it's to then build those

egalitarian possibilities through public policy. Research does show that traditional marriages have more sexual frequency. That's not the same as sexual satisfaction. I believe the most recent data is saying that egalitarian relationships have more sexual satisfaction. And a lot of the data on the conflict in egalitarian relationships is a little outdated. That was true as people initially started to build egalitarian relationships. It's a time of transition. People don't know what's expected of them. We would expect to see conflict in those situations.

However, as this has become a greater norm, we're seeing that data shift. And now the data is telling us that people are more content in these more egalitarian relationships. So a question for Ellen. So what are the social structures you'd like to see in place that can undo this this desire, this natural desire that you said, people tend to fall into. Yeah, I didn't say natural desire. I would argue that this is socialized. But I would say in terms of... So how could it be socialized if they're getting the complete opposite message for the last 50 years to not be traditional gender rule, to not partake in that? I would disagree with that

point. I would say that we have mixed messages that women in particular are receiving. So if we look at the data on childhood socialization, media messages, it is a very much. mixed bag. So girls are being told that they need to be ambitious. That is absolutely true. And parents are raising their daughters with more ambition and ideas that they should be equally educated to men. That is absolutely true. But they are also receiving counter messages that they're expected to be the more submissive nurturing partner at the same time, that they're expected to subsume their desires to men. Boys have also received newer messages. They have not shifted as quickly as the messages girls have received. So boys are still being told to be

achievers. There's a little bit more emphasis on caregiving, but certainly not to the same extent that girls are being pushed to be achievers. So it's creating a mismatch. But I certainly wouldn't say that girls are no longer socialized to be nurturing or to be a more submissive partner. I have no idea what you're watching or reading that would suggest that because that just is not at all the reality that I live in or anybody I know lives in that they're getting the message to be submissive, number one. And number two, men are not getting the messages to be more ambitious. They're actually getting really bad messages about how horrible masculinity is. And so they have therefore taken a step back because they do not feel needed or wanted in their natural state,

which is what's causing this massive problem between women and men today, where women are out-earning men and out-educating men. And it's causing massive relationship and marital breakdown because of the push to pretend men and women are interchangeable. I want to step in here for a second. Suzanne, isn't it a good thing that women are now reaching their full potential in the workplace and becoming a financial contributor to the household? Like, wouldn't you want that for your daughter? That's an interesting way of putting it.

It's not a matter of reaching your full potential. That's not how I raised my kids. It's about life has a series of tradeoffs. here's what's possible, which is basically anything you want. You're capable of doing it. I have a son and a daughter, by the way, raised similarly in terms of you can do whatever you want. There's nobody stopping you. The issue is that women have babies and men do not.

And women and men are different. And they have different, as I said in my opening statement, they have different responses to becoming parents down the line. so that you don't want to teach daughters and sons similarly as though that isn't a reality. So, for example, when you teach your daughters that they can do or be whatever they want, you have to have that caveat that says, on the other hand, if you want to have a marriage and family, if you want to have children, here's what's going to most likely happen in your 30s. Here's how you're going to feel. Here's how your priorities are going to shift.

Here's how the world is going to look. It's going to be massively different than what you see at 18, 19, 19, 20. 2021-22. So let's figure out what you want and then make decisions based on whom you marry, where you live, which career you choose, so on and so forth, around what that priority is going to be. And if you have kids and you still want to have an ambitious professional career, how does that look? That looks like hell. That looks like hell. And that's what I deal with every day, every week. And that's what's going on in this country is that no one wants to tell women, children have needs. You can't just have children and move them into your life as you knew it,

as though they're just sort of an appendage. Your whole life is going to stop. It's going to look completely different. And you have to meet those needs if you want to have children. So you're supposed to accommodate them, not the other way around. Ellen, do you want to respond to what Suzanne just said? It just doesn't hold up if you look at cross-national data. So if this was actually some kind of innate difference between men and women, we would see these same tensions arising in other countries, and we don't. So in countries such as Sweden that have enacted very supportive work family policies, we see very egalitarian models, and we don't see women expressing the same level of tension between work and family. In fact, they are saying that

working mother is not an oxymoron, for example. They're saying, of course, these are two completely compatible roles. And they are saying that men should be equally involved with their children and that it is a right for men to be involved with their children. And that it is a negative on the part of the United States to kind of have set up a system that cuts men out of the privilege of parenting as well. And so in that sense, this is a way to actually get kids the support that they need. So there are a lot of policies that you can act to do exactly what Suzanne is saying, which is supporting the transition to parenthood, and that is things like extended parental leave. So in Sweden, they get 16 months. That's 16 months to stay home with your children.

That is something I would support. I agree that the transition to parenthood is a massive undertaking and that babies need lots of support. So this is one way that you can enact that. That is paid parental leave. Everyone has a right to it. Mothers have a right to a certain number of months. fathers have a right to a certain number of months as well. And in fact, it's a use it or lose it, so that if fathers don't take that leave, the family gives it up. And that's a great benefit because it gets fathers involved as a primary parent early on in the children's lives. And what the data show is that when fathers get involved in that capacity at a very, when their children are very young, we see them parenting the same way that mothers parent.

And so they become very active rather than in the United States when they're kind of seen as helpers or, you know, secondary parents, they create equal parenting strategies. And then there's also all sorts of other policies that we see in Sweden that benefit working parents as well, and that lead to child well-being. So things like part of it is work culture. They're not going to work the same long hours as they do in the United States. So in the United States, we have this ideal worker norm, this one-way honor system where people are expected to be constantly available to their workplace. That's not the case in Sweden where a lot of people are getting their children out of their child care at 3 p.m. so that they have balance in their

children's lives as well. So they have time at daycare, which they see as beneficial. And the country has invested heavily in that daycare so that it is very high quality. They see benefits to their kids in terms of socialization to that daycare. And then they're at home as well, right? So it's not like these huge extended hours like we see in the United States, and it's not underfunded or inaccessible or too costly like we see in the United States. So I would argue there are other ways of doing this that don't lead to those tensions that Suzanne argues are inevitable. Sign up now for a complimentary monk membership. As a free monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and privileges, including streaming of select debates, dialogues, and podcasts on our

website, a 24-hour advanced ticketing window to access seats to our in-person debates before the general public, written transcripts of all of our content, and email updates on special offers and promotions. You can grab your complimentary monk membership right now at Triple W Monk Debates, that's MUNK, DebateswithanS.com. Simply click on the membership tab in the top right of our navigation. Grab your monk membership and open your mind to a world of great debate. Welcome back to our podcast debate. Our resolution today is be it resolved. Traditional gender roles make for happier marriage. Suzanne Benker is arguing in favor of the resolution and Ellen Lamont is arguing against. So let's jump right back in. Suzanne, I want to ask you about an argument that

Ellen just made, which is that there's a rule. role for the state to play to pick up a lot of the slack so that mothers will be able to go back to work easier and earn for their family the same way their husband does. So how would you respond to that? That there's a role for the state to play here. Well, there's a lot to say about social policy and other countries and how they do things. I'll go back to what I said in my initial statement. being equal as a husband and wife does not have to translate to performing identical tasks. A marriage is a team effort. It's a partnership. Somebody's got to earn the money. Somebody's got to raise the babies. Yes, in an ideal world, I guess, depending on what your view is, everybody does

this exactly the same way with the exact same amount of time as though, I'll go back to it again, as though men and women are interchangeable, as though they want the same things. That's not what is proving to be the reality in people's lives. So women, for example, everything that Ellen just said presumes that men and women, I'll go back to it again, are the same, are interchangeable, as though that's an ideal to have men and women be interchangeable. And I'm saying, you're throwing out what makes relationships so great, which is that women are women and men are men.

And yes, there's overlap. And yes, you share. But you don't have to do the same things to be equally valuable. One of the things that my podcast is predicated on is that men and women are equal in value, but wildly different by nature. And when you embrace those differences, rather than fight back against them and argue with them and try to come up with some faux concept of equality, which means us looking exactly alike, doing the exact same thing throughout our lives, you lose the strength of the relationship. And that's at the end of the day what I see happening across this country. And I don't know if I'm happy to get into the social policy end if you want to go there. But I don't know if you have enough time for that.

Okay. Let's build on something you just said, which is equally valuable, but inherently different. So, Ellen, would you agree that men and women are different? Women by nature are much more nurturing. men are much more ambitious, and we in the modern world are trying to change that. We are trying to disregard generations of biology of what men and women want and what they excel at. No, I would not agree. So the neuroscience doesn't tell us that there are major differences between men and women. In fact, it shows that humans are one of those less sexually dimorphic species. So we have these very small differences that then get exaggerated.

So it's not that there are no differences, is that they are small differences that we exaggerate. And so what the neuroscience tells us is that we have brain plasticity. So we are what we do. So if we start engaging in different behaviors, which is what happens often in early childhood, then what we'll see is these kind of behavioral differences that we see. So in effect, we're actually looking at socialization and assuming it's biological difference. And the idea that these are roles that go back generations doesn't necessarily hold water either, given the large level of variation across countries. And then just also given the variation that the way we build relationships is always in conversation with our economic systems and our survival systems.

And so to ignore that families have to adapt and change, given the circumstances of the society that they're living in, basically is asking them to, suffer, economically suffer in a way, because you're saying you should be living as though we have a different economic system than we do. The reality is women have to work. We need two income families in order to be economically stable. That's a result of a number of shifts, some of which are things that we could potentially change, but at the same time, as women have entered the workforce, they found that they've enjoyed being in the workforce. So I would also disagree. agree with this idea that women don't enjoy and don't get satisfaction from the workplace. So where the tension comes in is that the workplace hasn't adapted to the fact that they have two parents,

two working parents in the workplace. And they're still presuming the male breadwinner female homemaker model. And so if the workplace would adapt, then we would see less of that tension within individuals, which would reduce what Suzanne is calling misery. The workplace has been trying to adapt for decades. And they're struggling. The reason they're struggling is because women keep bowing out. That's what's happening. They're in the workforce. They start out strong.

They're in their 20s. They're going up. They're going up. They're going up. And then somewhere around 30 and 35, they're dropping out. And it's such a massive problem now that feminists can't get the agenda through that they want because this keeps happening. That's human nature. That's not social construct.

You'll notice a big difference between Ellen and me, and that is that she talks academically. The world knows, the country knows that there's a big difference between the way academic, talk and regular everyday people who are out in the world living this every day. And that's really where the disconnect is that the people out living in the world, living it every day are getting their information through the media, often through academic types, who are talking at a different level about concepts. And I'm talking about reality on the floor. I'm married. I have a husband. I have a son. I have a daughter. I live it. I breathe it. I see it. I'm not up in a classroom talking about it, reading about it, and throwing out stats left and right. I'd say that's probably the

biggest difference between Ellen and me. That's fine. And I would agree that my arguments are grounded in the statistics that are drawing on people just like you. So it's not that we're just picking stats willy-nilly, it's that we're conducting actual systematic research to then find out how people are engaging with their work in family lives. And what it shows is that women are not opting out of work. They are being pushed out of work. That's not true. There's no proof of that whatsoever. Yes. There is extensive proof of that. No, there's no proof of the reason behind the leave. There's an assumption, two million women left during the pandemic. And the assumption, according to people like yourself or in the media, is that they were pushed out. They can't handle it. They don't, that the systems aren't there for them. That's why they have to go. There is no proof of that. You have no actual proof that they are not leaving because they chose to leave, because they want to leave, because they found that there's. a better life out there, because they put pen to paper and figured out that the second income

isn't working, there are all kinds of reasons women opt out. But the argument in the media is not the number one cause. Yes, we do have proof. That is what the data says. And that is what interviews with women who are struggling actually say. So unless you want to say that those women are lying, that is what the data is telling us. So Ellen, you talked before about how a lot of households need two incomes nowadays. And I think most people would agree with you because the cost of living has increased in such a way that it's almost impossible for a family to exist on one income. But I want to dig a bit deeper into that. You know, is it possible that if we weren't paying for the extra costs associated with that double income household? So, for instance, we didn't have to pay

for child care expenses. We didn't have to pay for extracurriculars after school. We didn't have to pay for school so that we could work a nine to five job. Some families have a cleaner come because they aren't home to clean the house or they eat out more because they don't have time to cook. So what I'm getting at is if one parent is home and doing all those things, cutting back on the family costs, is it possible to live on one income? And we've just accepted this narrative that we need two incomes to survive nowadays. So partially, I would agree with you that we have increased the cost of living in certain ways through things like eating out, through things like expensive extracurriculars. But at the same time, that presumes a kind of

upper middle class lifestyle, which is not necessarily the reality for the majority of the population. So the majority of the population is going to need those two incomes simply to make ends meet, given, of course, as you said, the cost of housing. Now, what can be done? And it's true, a lot of women will opt out because the cost of child care is actually more than whatever salary they would earn. And that's why we see more of this traditional division of labor amongst the lowest income groups, so groups closer to the poverty line, because they can't afford to go to work. So I would argue no, given the cost of living and given also the expectations for how we invest in our children, that we would need two incomes in order to do that.

Suzanne, I want to ask you about reaching your full potential as a working woman. So many women who are in the white-collar workplace, they're in jobs that encourage and allow them to flourish professionally. They learn and they grow and they're able to contribute to their household expenses. They often report a high level of satisfaction and fulfillment that can translate into their home life. So they're happier partners, they're happier parents, and perhaps that makes for a happier marriage.

What's your response to that? I would say that that is a very broad concept. So we have to be very specific when we're talking about that. Are you talking about mothers of one-year-olds or mothers of 10-year-olds? Let's just start there for an example. Are we talking about part-time or full-time? I don't think that people realize that the majority of what we call working families. I don't know what a non-working family is personally.

But when you're talking about people in the workforce, you have to specify how many hours, whether it's full time or part time and how old the kids are. Otherwise, it's just none of this means anything. We know that most people who have children under age of 18 are a combination of either one income or one and a half incomes. So in other words, when you look at the stats, it's actually about 50-50 where 50% of married parents with children under 18 are. are working full time. The other half are either one-income families or one-and-a-half-income families. And then you have to say, well, maybe we got to look at the people who stayed home in the early years and then went back part-time and or full-time after their kids were in school. All these specifics really matter when it comes to talking about happiness or stability or balance.

I don't like that word either. But we know that the happiest situation, is for mothers who are free to either opt out for X amount of years and then to even work part time after their kids are in school. That is actually the most ideal situation. So that doesn't mean that people who work part time and have teenagers, let's say, and are flourishing in their career are necessarily miserable. Nor, again, these are two blanket of statements, nor going back to something that Ellen said, men aren't not involved at home just because they're employed and mom isn't or the mom is employed part-time. That doesn't translate to men not being involved in home. These are, again, going back to my opening statement, at the end, the choice is not no

equality, no partnership or having that. It just doesn't work that way. How realistic is it for a mother to take off a chunk of time when their kids are born and be able to go back into the workforce, let's say 10 years later, even part-time and restart their career? Like, they've missed a huge gap. How do they get back to that? You're skipping what they've gained. Now, this goes back to the tradeoffs I was talking about in life. And you said, how do you raise your children? How do you raise your daughters? You have to choose in life what's most important to you and what you value. Okay. If family is it for you. If it comes first, if your relationships at home, if you want to build marriage and build a relationship with your children that takes you decades into the future,

That takes time and energy and focus and sacrifice. And if you know that, you're not put off by the tradeoff because you're so focused on what you're getting. That's number one. Number two, very, very often when women return to work, and it doesn't have to be 10 years later necessarily, it could be five years later, they find they don't want to go back to what they were doing before anyway. So this idea that there's this linear life that you teach an 18 or 19 or 20 year old, you know, that you're going to find your career. and it's going to look exactly like this for 40 years. And that's what your focus should be. I just take massive issue with that anyway.

I would never teach that. So I just think the whole premise is wrong. Ellen, do you want to respond to anything you heard from Suzanne just now? Yeah, sure. So one of the key issues is that Suzanne's arguing that women and men are different. They have different roles to play, but equally valuable, right? And this is something that I hear very frequently. But it's hard to say that that's the case in a capital.

capitalist economy. So I definitely agree that we should, as a society, value child rearing. But there are other ways to value that child rearing than simply asking women to completely step out of the workplace for a certain extended period of time. And women make a lot of sacrifices when we do that because there is a lot of, there are a lot of negatives of financial dependence. In particular, if we continue to see these high rates of divorce, that leaves women actually highly vulnerable in the event that they end up being divorced. We have a lot of off-ramps for women when they decide that they want to leave home, or sorry, leave the workplace. Again, the data is saying that they try to stay in the workplace, but they get pushed out. But we don't

have a lot of on-ramps. So once you're out, it's very hard to get back to where you were. And what women say who have done that is that they say that their marriage took a major hit, that the terms of their marriage change and not in ways that they enjoyed. And in fact, in many cases, it destabilized the marriage because they were used to operating in these egalitarian ways, and now they're no longer operating in these egalitarian ways. So again, I would say that we don't necessarily have to have as significant tradeoffs, as Suzanne says, if we structure work differently. Work doesn't have to be these incredibly long hours, especially for professionals.

So, Suzanne wants to say that she's someone who's raised two children and I'm sitting in academia, but I've also raised a child. I'm also a mother. And what allowed me to combine a full-time job and my child was the flexibility of my career. And so, again, this could be something that we build into more careers so that women can spend quite a bit of time with their children and also devote themselves to investing in their careers. Again, the tradeoffs are too large of that financial dependence. And most women don't want that financial dependence. Ellen, I want to follow up on something you alluded to earlier, which is that while young married

couples tend to want to be part of an egalitarian partnership, the woman ends up taking on more of the household tasks. And studies support these findings. Women, on average, spend more time cleaning the house, cooking meals, booking activities for the kids, they organize the family's schedule, and now they're working full-time. So it can be exhausting. And in a way, it's actually more demanding to be a woman now than it was in previous generations. And then there's an added level of confusion where both husband and wife or both partners are attempting to be equal partners, and yet there's no real defined roles. And there tends to be confusion over who does what task, which can lead to a buildup of resentment, something along the lines of, you know,

I did this, so now it's your turn to do that, versus a more, let's say, defined partnership, where the woman takes on more of the household tasks and the man does more of the breadwinning or the yard work, et cetera, et cetera. There's more clarity in roles, which leads to a more peaceful and symbiotic relationship. So I would agree with most of what you just said. And this is what it means to be in a period of transition, right? So people are still learning these new particular roles and we still have these older messages as well. But the argument that a marriage of traditional roles is more peaceful is not the same thing as happier and doesn't mean that there's not resentment seething underneath. And certainly if we look at 1950s marriages, that's what we see, that they quickly broke down in the sense of we started seeing families quickly transitioning away from those types of relationships. as women got more opportunities. So the question then is how do we build our relationships, but also our workplace structures,

so that we don't have women doing most of this work, right? And again, that's where the data shows that getting men involved in children's lives at a very young age and as a primary parent. So not with a woman hovering over them. As a primary parent, they do start to take on more of these roles, without having to be asked. But also, you know, having these more egalitarian ideologies allows people to kind of think about how we can best build more egalitarian roles. We still have

these kind of, we're not there yet in a sense. So we say we're ideologically egalitarian, but we still have a lot of that transitional element, or we're still getting narratives about these fundamental differences about men are unable to do this particular care. But if we look at other countries, they are able to do this particular care. We're not seeing these tensions, which tells us that we can, if we think about ways to structure family differently, we can probably move away from these. So I agree with you. I definitely see that happening. I see men and women creating conflict over this when perhaps the conflict needs to be addressed towards the state and the workplace much more. So how does the state and the government, curious, change

male and female nature with its policies. Curious about that. Because I disagree with you. I don't think these are natures. Okay. So again, these are patterns that we had a different arrangement. If the government functioned differently and if society and the system were different,

then that would allow men and women to be essentially equal, right? Are the same? So I'm wondering what are those policies that would do that? Yeah. It would cause men and women to behave interchangeably. Yeah, exactly what you're calling for. what I said, which is getting men involved early in parenthood. What does that mean?

And that allows them to take on these particular practices. Again, what does that look like, though, in reality? What does that mean? How do you get men to be? I think what Ellen is saying is to get more paid parental leave for fathers early on. So they become. See, the specifics matter. All this stuff is just talked until you get into the specifics.

That's why I'm being so picky about it. what does that look like? What does that mean? I gave the information from how Sweden does it. And what we see is very egalitarian practices in Sweden. Fathers are heavily involved in their children's lives and they're not being micromanaged in the same way. You know, that suite, you're right, it's the most egalitarian of all. And you know, the differences show up the most there as well, too, the gender differences. In a generation in Sweden, just since enacting these policies, we now see these egalitarian outcomes. So, and you're right, there are still holdover effect. But that doesn't mean that we don't keep moving in that direction, which is what the majority of the population wants. They want these egalitarian relationships.

I don't know why you keep saying that. The majority of the population wants that. I really don't understand that at all. Where do you get that the majority of the population wants men and women to be interchangeable or even think that's possible? That's different. To say that they're interchangeable is different from saying that they want egalitarian relationships. That is exactly what it is. It's wanting men and women to act and behave and live lives that are. absolutely interchangeable as though, as you pointed out yourself, there are no differences because you claim that there aren't or they're so small that don't matter. So you want men and women to be interchangeable, for example, in the first three years. Let's just talk about that. You want men home for the first three years? It doesn't need to be for the first three years. It just needs to be

for a significant enough time. Like I said, Sweden does it for three months. It's without mothers there. Ellen, what if a man doesn't want to be home with the kids? Yeah, that's fine. No one is saying that everyone has to build their relationships the same way. If a family wants to build a traditional relationship, they're free to build a traditional relationship. Again, that's not what most people want, but if someone wants it, why would we prevent them from having it? They're free to do that. The goal is instead to give people options. So in the case of Sweden, if they don't want those three months, they lose those three months. So the father can, the father just continues to work. Okay, in the interest of time, we are going to move on to closing statements. Our resolution today

is be it resolved, traditional gender roles make for happier marriage. Ellen, you are arguing against our resolution today. Let's hear your closing remarks. Thank you. So there are absolutely tensions created in the move to egalitarian relationships. But these tensions are better addressed by instituting more work family policies than reverting to traditional marriages. So again, the majority of the population does not want traditional marriages. And the supposed stability that they provide comes at a heavy cost that most aren't willing to pay at the current moment. Things related to things like economic stability, women's dependence, examples around violence against women. If we think about what created the stability of the 1950s, part of these were, was the economic system, part of this

was tax policy, but also a lot of this was coercion that kept women in particular types of marriages. Women have more choices. They're not willing to stay in these types of coercive relationships. So instead, what we should do is enable people to enact their egalitarian desires by addressing overly long work hours, ideal worker norms that expect people to be on call for work at any given moment, addressing workplace discrimination, implementing paid and extended parental leave for both mothers and fathers, providing sick days, allowing for more flexible work arrangements, and developing more affordable and accessible child care for working parents. And something that's key is that family arrangements cannot be understood outside of

the economic systems. And for most, the traditional marriage is not a viable option, even if they did want it. So there is no single family arrangement that works for everyone. So the goal should be then to enable families to enact their desires. For many, this is going to be, to lead to more egalitarian marriages, but for those who want traditional marriages, they can do that as well. And we see a lot of benefits to egalitarian marriages, greater happiness, greater stability, greater gender inequality, which is good for both women and men. It allows women more independence that, again, reduces things such as intimate partner violence. But it's also good for men. It allows them to engage in more caregiving. And they say they want that. They want to be more involved

in their children's lives than their fathers, and this will allow for that. And happy, stable marriages benefit children. So if we can then allow people to actually enact these egalitarian desires, they will end up happier, stable, and that'll trickle down to the children as well. And by enacting these types of policies, we're not ignoring children's needs, but actually thinking about the needs of parents, children, and the workplace at the same time. Thank you. Thank you, Ellen, for that closing statement. We're going to come to you, Suzanne. You are arguing in favor of our resolution today. Be it resolved. Traditional gender roles make for happier marriage. Let's have your closing statement. So I don't have a prepared closing statement. I'm going to repeat a little bit of my opening one

in thinking about what we were talking about here today. And I'm reminded of an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago by big-time career woman who wrote an article called how I fell for an I'm the man man. And it was kind of shocking because it was in the New York Times. And the gist of it was that she, you know, she'd been used to being a career woman her whole life and she meets this guy. They're a little bit older in their 30s. And he basically said, I'm the man, so I should take care of the money. Now, of course, they both earned money.

But the point, the gist of her article was that she found this incredibly exciting. that despite the fact that she earns her own money and will continue to, she really liked the fact that this man took this roll on and said, I'm not going to put all this on you. It's my job. I'll take care of us, which didn't mean she didn't work. It just meant that he wants to be in charge of the money.

And she had to rethink everything she'd been taught by society because she was finding herself drawn to this. And that is because a woman wants to feel as though she's protected and provided for regardless of her employment status and regardless if she continues working. And this is the disconnect that's going on right now in this culture that I'm seeing with my coaching practice, that women were not, because they've been taught to pattern their lives after men and just assume they'd always be in the workforce, they're finding that they feel very differently down the road. And one of them is to enjoy this protective and providing nature that

men naturally feel. And I'm going to come back to what I said at the beginning. It all comes to a head once the children come along. You cannot have a conversation about so-called gender equality without talking about the number one thing that gets in the way of that. And that's children. Everything works out, quote-unquote, fine in this, you know, idealized world until the children come along. And as you pointed out yourself, Ricky, men and women don't respond to the home in the same way. They don't feel the same urge and see the same things and are drawn to the same activities or tasks and they're better suited for one or the other and they're trying to, again, be interchangeable with it and it's not working. It's not working. And so it's okay to embrace what comes naturally to you

as a woman and what comes naturally to you as a man. And still you can have a quote unquote equal partnership. One does not have to exclude the other, and that's my argument. There's no, no working or all working. There's some combination therein. There's no depending on a man your whole life versus not. Those are all red herrings. They're scare tactics. Life doesn't have to be that way. There's a completely different way of mapping out your life to incorporate our inherent differences and still move forward with the world as it is today. Well, thank you, Suzanne, and thank you, Ellen, for joining us for this lively and engaging conversation. I know we touched on a lot of topics that are top of mind for many women in the workforce with young families these

days. So thank you both for coming and sharing your insights with us today. Thank you. That wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participant, Suzanne and Ellen. You've given us a lot to think about. If you have any feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email at podcast at monkdebates.com. And a reminder that our weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focused, comes out every Friday. Join Janice Stein and Richard Griffiths as they delve into the big news stories of the week. You can access the Friday Focus podcast on our website, triplew.munkdebates.com.

Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. I'm Ricky Gerwitz. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.