This post is about gender assumptions. In this case both “assume” in the normal sense of “impose by expectation informed by stereotype” but also “assume” in the sense of “take on titles, offices, duties, responsibilities.”

Emily Bazelon of Slate’s quasi-ghettoized XX-Factor blog raises two good points, one about stereotyping forward, the other about struggling out of self-stereotype.

This morning one of my co-workers was worrying about a conversation he’d had with a mother at his daughter’s school, who’d tried to talk to him about rearranging a playdate for his kid and hers. He hadn’t known anything about the arrangement in the first place, and I said that most moms would know not to try to talk playdate with a dad. Which didn’t exactly give him credit for trying to sort it all out, or encourage him to try again next time. This is why when my husband chides me for referring to “my kitchen,” I say I’m sorry. At least I think I do.

She said it here.

Play dates are easy for women because play dates are easy for the stay at home parent and, still, more often than not, women are the stay at home parent.

As the stay at home dad I’m nominally supposed to do most of the play date arranging. And indeed since I pick up our children from school more often than my partner since she’s often working I do arrange more play dates over all — mostly by being grabbed by this child or that asking “can we have a play date?” If the mom (there are still usually only a few other dads at school) is at hand we negotiate it there. Otherwise it’s out with my cell phone and (since the youngest is in 3rd grade now and, of course, the play date candidates know their parent’s phone number) I let them ask permission of which ever parent they see fit. Sometimes we arrange play dates in advance but those are usually ordered around things like soccer practice or games where I just bring home children to play till practice. Parents usually pick up their own children and often one of them will return mine so I don’t have to make an extra trip. Sometimes you or another child’s parent makes calls and arrange play dates in advance.

That all works fabulously well and it’s extraordinarily easy to keep track of.

If you’re the one making the arrangements.

That all works fabulously well, too, and is extraordinarily easy for one’s partner to keep track of if…

if…

if and only if…
You write it down where the other partner(s) can see it should they need to know! In other words it’s not a testicle thing. It’s not an ovary thing. It’s a calendar/schedule/daytimer/communication thing.

Also a is-this-a-shared-responsibility thing, of course, and that makes a nice segue into Bazelon’s second point: who’s kitchen is it?

I do virtually all the shopping and cooking in our house, from first coffee in the morning to breakfast (something hot and home-made most days like oatmeal, steamed pot-stickers, pancakes or eggs, with cold cereal once or twice) to school lunches (sometimes a sandwich, sometimes freshly steamed veggies with nori seaweed, sometimes left-over soup or fresh-cooked spaghetti or ravioli) to dinner (I won’t even start) to desserts if there are any to late night snacks (if, for instance, ramen or some other kind of soup is requested.) And while I certainly don’t do all the cleanup I do quite a bit.

That’s been the arrangement for roughly as long as our 5th grader has been in school. Every now and then, though, my partner still gets nettled about the way I prioritize kitchen cleanup. Indoctrination runs deep. The funny thing is that any time she goes off that way I initially cringe and start apologizing for… what? Messing up her kitchen? Yes, it’s silly. And yes even though I spend a lot of time there it’s still our kitchen. But we each had that Kool-aid poured for us long before we could speak.

But “poured for us” isn’t the same as “bred into us.” Our children may have their own domestic manias and obsessions when they grow up, but I’ll be surprised if they’re the same as ours.

Photo by Flickr user onnufry used under a Creative Commons license.