The Parable of the Blue Shirt
Imagine a near future in which scientists discover that children whose parents wear blue shirts are much healthier. Imagine, also, that our hypothetical near-future government has decided at least one parent in every household with children must wear a blue shirt each day. Large penalties await parents who shirk their responsibilities.
Blue is the most common favorite color of both women and men by a large margin, so few people object to wearing blue. And, because blue shirts are a responsibility dependent on neither biological organs nor gender role, those pesky feminists are largely silent on the new laws. Everyone can, and should, do his and/or her share.
Time passes…
Blue shirt parents settle into a routine. Blue shirts become a little passé for working parents in business-casual offices, like “mom jeans” for your upper body. Plus, wearing a blue shirt to work is an open invitation for others to ask about your family. Not everyone likes that.
Meanwhile, stay-at-home parents advertise their responsible parenting by wearing blue shirts more often. Parenting blogs produce upcycled blue shirt tutorials en masse. A green or yellow shirt at a toddlers’ playgroup becomes as rare as a new mother who’ll admit in mixed company that she isn’t breastfeeding.
84% of stay-at-home parents are women. Of the 16% who are men, only 20% — 3.2% of the total — want to be staying home. So, in households with one stay-at-home parent, the most frequent blue shirt wearer is likely to be a woman. Of course, she’s happy and proud to do it! Remember, nobody inherently dislikes blue shirts, and they’re becoming a symbol of good parenting.
Wait, but not all households are cis-het with two parents, are they?
Of course not, this is a dystopian near-future, not the Stepford Universe.
About 125,000 American households headed by same-sex parents include children (accounting for a total of 220,000 kids). 48% of LGBT women are raising a child, as opposed to 20% of LGBT men. That figure includes single LGBT parents as well as couples, but, overall, women are more likely to be the blue shirt wearing parents in LGBT households, whether they’re single or partnered.
Out of the about 12,000,000 single-parent families in the USA, 80%, or 9,600,000, are headed by women. In single-parent households, the one present parent must wear a blue shirt every day. (Kids don’t accrue health benefits when parents they don’t see wear blue.) In addition to legal penalties, social stigma is building up against people seen in non-blue shirts with their kids. Scientists haven’t exactly said that kids need their parent to wear a blue shirt all the time, but it can’t hurt, right?
And when both people work?
In 60.6% of married couple households with kids, both parents work. However, not all jobs are created equal, at least not in terms of blue-shirt feasibility. The most common occupations for working women include:
- Home health aides, nursing & psychiatric care (1,200,000 women)
- Registered Nurses (2,064,000)
- Teaching elementary & secondary school (2,196,000)
- Secretarial & admin work (2,215,000)
In these fields, as with office clerks, social workers, teacher’s aides, and receptionists, more than 75% of all those employed are women. Fortunately for children, nurses are generally permitted to wear blue scrubs. Teachers can wear blue shirts, as can most secretaries and receptionists.
By contrast, 88% of chemical engineers are men. Lab coats aren’t often seen in blue. If an engineer’s wife can wear blue all day while nursing— and is proud to do so, showing off her parenting skills and sparking conversations about kids with her patients— there’s no need for Dad’s workplace to adjust so he can wear blue, too. Maybe someday the laboratory will institute “Fatherhood Fridays” where everyone dons a blue lab coat once a week and dads are celebrated?
Outcomes, incomes, and choices
At the bottom of this parable’s slippery slope lies a wonderful future in which one of the most desirable rewards in parenting — a healthy child — is available if parents just do one simple thing. The thing is painless, only mildly inconvenient, and doesn’t require specific reproductive organs. Nobody really minds doing the thing. The people doing the thing are happy and proud to do the thing. Society stigmatizes parents for not doing the thing and generously rewards parents who do the thing. And yet, somehow, nearly all the parents doing this particular thing are women.
Why?
Not willful oppression, not malevolent sexism, not statutory discrimination, and not even a chromosomal difference, a genetic predisposition, or gendered socialization.
Convenience. A benign responsibility rolled easily down an un-level playing field toward the women’s team. The women doing this thing chose to do it. Nobody was harmed. And yet, the world moved a little more toward men increasing their choices (“Red shirt or blue today?” “Study as a chemical engineer or try out for firefighting?”) and away from women having options. (“Better not apply for that job, it requires a black uniform.”)
“Feminism is about choices” is probably the hardest phrase for me to hear about feminism. Because feminism is about choices, but no choice is made in a vacuum. Choices are made in the slanted environments we live in, with our imperfect human minds and with the input of imperfect human beings whom we love. The choices of privileged women often limit the freedom of marginalized women.
There’s no solution or call to action here. I don’t want to deny any woman her right to change all the diapers, like Mrs. Trump prefers to do. Nor should men be bullied into increasing their share of stay-at-home parenting just to even up the numbers. Perhaps, however, we can strive to be wiser than a fish who doesn’t notice the water he’s swimming in. Observing the context of a choice might not change the choice. But it’ll make for a better story when someone asks how you and your spouse decided who wears the blue shirt.
