In response to The Laura Perrins Interview: Feminism is just trade unionism for women, Groan wrote:
The feminist inspired Fatherhood institute (FI) published a pretty silly report. Then, of course, the headlines in the Independent and Daily Mail were of the “UK fathers worst in world” and the FI had then to publish an apologia.
Yet inspection of the actual information suggests more accurately that UK dads work hard full time and consequently have less time than in other countries. The “rankings” were not as bad as the drift of the FI’s argument, so added in were such directly connected issues as how many MPs were women and how many senior managers, plus others like the proportion of GDP on paid child care.
All not at all about the amount of time actual fathers or indeed mothers may spend with their children in life. The final straw being to posit Portugal as some positive example because 42 per cent of part-time workers there are male. This in a country where unemployment and underemployment is very high as it climbs out of a near “Grexit” euro crash.
One can only presume the bewailing of the headlines are crocodile tears from FI as the “index” was clearly constructed to berate UK men as not caring enough.
On the run up to Fathers’ Day, the same research could simply have said hard-working UK dads find it hard to spend time with their children! Seeing as a third of young dads work 48hrs+ a week. And dads in general work more hours than mums (big surprise that).
In their apologia FI admit that they left out the contribution of mums and dads to financially supporting their family because… well they haven’t really got a reason. Clearly no one in the FI has actually to earn a living to pay the exhorbitant housing costs in the UK . So not so subtly the role of breadwinner is left out and one wonders why men feel less and less inclined to shoulder the responsibility of being the main earner, at least for a while, if in doing so you are being a bad dad.
