The Coffee Chat (#7)
My conversation with Eric Arthrell - Inclusion manager at Deloitte, COO & cofounder Mouche and dad to a 2.5-year-old daughter, Elin, and a 7-month-old son, Max
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Hi there 👋🏽
Not sure if you noticed but Thursday was the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century!
While a lot has changed in these last 21 years and humanity has progressed by leaps and bounds yet there are some things that feel like they are still stuck in the 20th century. One such thing is how men show up at home when they become fathers. A disproportionately large portion of the parenting burden is still entrusted to women. Irrespective of their education or salary, the reality is that most of the grunt work around childcare still falls on the shoulders of women.
In Canada, women spend an average of 1.5 hours more per day than men on unpaid work (mostly housework and caregiving). This situation is a lot worse in a patriarchal society such as India. Indian women on average spend 19.5% of their time every day on unpaid work as compared to just 2.5% spent by men.
This imbalance limits women's ability to advance in their careers thereby reducing their potential lifetime earnings and retirement savings. It also has ramifications beyond dollars. A lot of mothers feel burnt out and have little time for themselves. In fact, there are now studies that state that the emotional responsibility that comes from being a mother is damaging women's mental health!
Like with most complex problems, this does not have a simple solution. It requires a number of structural changes. However, a simple change that can be implemented at an individual level is trying to split the load.
To the women reading this, ask the man in your life to take some things off your plate. Do it now.
To the men reading this who feel that they are already doing their bit, remember we can always strive to get better. There is always more that you can help with.
Let 2021 be the year where you implement some changes.
☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…
Meet Eric Arthrell.
Eric is currently an Inclusion manager at Deloitte and is someone who has spent the last few years thinking through questions around gender equality and the role men can play. He strongly believes that men should play an active role as fathers and take on more of the child care responsibility. Between February 2019 and November 2021, Eric would have taken almost 2 years off work to play the role of household manager and primary caretaker.
Eric is someone who is currently an exception but I know nothing would make him happier than becoming the norm.
I had an absolutely wonderful time chatting with Eric and getting a peek into how he thinks. I am so excited to share this chat with the rest of the world.
Below is my conversation with Eric…
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your family
I am currently an inclusion manager with Deloitte global consulting. I have been with Deloitte for about seven years. The first six years or so of my career at Deloitte I was on the consulting client-facing side first with Monitor Deloitte and then with Doblin. My wife, Erin works in marketing in the CPG industry. We have two kids - a two and a half-year-old daughter, Elin, and a seven-month-old son, Max.
On nights and weekends, I am also the COO and cofounder with my wife of Mouche, a side hustle ecommerce startup that sells unbleached bamboo facial tissues that look great in your home.
You are someone who is extremely passionate about gender equality and inclusion, to the point that you are now doing that full time at Deloitte. How did you decide to transition out of client-facing roles to pursue this internal opportunity at your firm?
A couple of years back my wife and I were planning on starting a family. And that was probably the first time I realized that when kids start coming into the equation there is a strong differences between how men and women show up in the workplace. And so I spent a lot of time thinking, researching and talking to the people around what my role as a parent should be once our child arrived. That is how I got really interested in gender equality but specifically, why men show up the way they do at work, at home and the kind of roles they play as fathers.
Since that time, I've tried to have a voice in the conversation around gender equality and specifically fatherhood. I was able to do that through a report that we authored that Deloitte called the Design of Everyday Men, which explored men's relationships to work, family and masculinity.
And then in September 2019 I got the opportunity to join the Global Consulting Inclusion team at Deloitte to help design and execute inclusion strategy globally for all our member firms (essentially all the regions or countries that Deloitte operates in)
On social media, you have been very vocal about men stepping up and taking paternity leaves to support their partners and play an active role in the initial days of child-rearing. In the last few years, how much time have you spent away from work?
I very much tried to lead by example on that front. So essentially in the last couple of years I would have taken a lot of time off for kids, almost 2 years.
When my daughter Elin was born I took 7 months off work. I was away from work from Feb to Aug 2019.
Now, with our second, Max it will be in two big blocks. In the summer of 2020, Deloitte offered us COVID voluntary leave which worked out very well as it coincided right after my son was born. So I took 3 months off. Then I came back to work at 80% so I do not work on Fridays. I'm getting prepared for another paternity leave. In May 2021, my wife will go back to work and I'll be off with Max, our son, until about November 2021.
Taking this time off is something that has brought a lot of joy, happiness and fulfillment into my life. Also, I do think we need more men to do this and normalize this because this is a big under penetrated area of gender equality - how men can show up better at home.
Given that this is not the norm when you were making these decisions to take an extended paternity leave were there any colleagues, mentors, or sponsors who advised you against taking such a long break?
So before I even decided to take paternity leave I wrote a couple of blog posts about the correlation between men taking longer and a larger share of overall parental leave and women's advancement in those societies. What I discovered was that in societies or countries where men take a larger share of the overall parental leave, the gender wage gap is smaller so women earn more money, women stay in the workforce longer, and so there are more women in manager positions and on boards. There is definitely positive correlation between taking more paternity leave and, and overall gender equality.
And so, I really had that be the base of my perspective around taking paternity leave. And when I talked to, business leaders (people that that either I reported into directly or general leaders) within the organization I would say there was mostly positive feedback on yes definitely take the time, to do it. I was actually surprised that a lot of the older men that I talked to were actually almost like they wish they'd done this. They felt they missed out on so much. And they're like yes you have to do that, you have to take time off. A lot of these men would talk about how they had kids you know 10 years ago, which wasn't even that long ago, but at that time paternity leave just wasn't a thing. Men in the corporate world just didn't do that. I had one man who sent me an email. It was quite touching. His son is now 5 or 6 years old. And he said, he would give anything in the world to go back in time and have a summer with his son when his son was a few months old.
There were a few dissenting voices but they were the minority. The dissent or negative feedback is a lot more subtle. Like for instance you have people that you're close to that will say things like, to my wife they'll say how much time are you taking off and then to me, they'll say are you taking any time off? Or this one time we were out at an event. And there was someone that we didn't know that we had just met and, and we told that person that I was taking, you know, seven months off as paternity leave. And this person turned to my wife and said, Oh, that's so generous of you to give him seven months off. And it's like, no, it is parental leave, and you split it how you want it. It is not my wife's to generously hand over to me if she wants to.
It also comes down to the fact that taking a long paternity leave can be viewed as selfish - you know making your wife go back to work early while you get to be at home with the child. That's not the mental model that we have around Parenthood. The mental model we have around Parenthood is like the mom does what's best for her. And the husband kind of falls in line to just support his wife through that. And so me saying to my wife hey I want to take a sizable amount of the parental leave, which means you can't have that because our system in Canada means that it's a zero sum if one person has then the other person doesn't have. And you can feel selfish like a bad husband because you know some people could perceive it as you're forcing your wife to go back to work while you're staying at home with the kid, and that's the part that's the hardest.
So role-modeling plays a big role in behavior change. Do you still feel like you're the exception or do you think some of the other men around you are getting more comfortable taking a sizeable portion of the parental leave as paternity leave?
I have a handful of people, like less than five, that either work at Deloitte or work at other places that have reached out to me to ask more in depth questions around parental leave and taking what I call a paternity leave in a meaningful way. The way I define a meaningful paternity leave is three months or more, and your partner goes back to work. And to be honest, unfortunately I have very few examples of other dads that have taken this meaningful paternity leave.
I feel so incredibly passionate about this, to the point that it could be obnoxious. I've gotten that feedback before that I'm kind of obnoxious about it. But personally I've been sort of frustrated that why don't other people care about this as much as I do. I have to keep reminding myself to take a step back and recognize that everyone's goals, desires and values in life are different and everyone will approach these situations in different ways.
And I need to realize that not everyone is going to make the same decisions that I make or I would want people to make. And so do I think that there's been sort of like a groundswell of momentum behind us? Not yet. No, not really. But there's been certainly a couple examples, people that I've talked to who have reached out to me specifically about this, who have then gone and taken paternity leave, and I continue to be in conversation with those people. So it's small.
But it is also important to highlight that there are many more factors than just whether or not a man wants to take paternity leave that can influence this decision and make it complicated.
Your passion on this topic does shine through and I have noticed you are not shy to make your opinion known on social media. In fact, in your LinkedIn profile, you have highlighted the fact that you took a significant time off for child care. And for most parts, I would say you have been celebrated for doing this. On the flip side, a lot of times, women are not comfortable telling the world that they're on maternity leave or that they are mothers because there is this whole "mommy tax" that they face - the idea that people will perceive them as less ambitious or less committed to their careers. It tells us a lot about the world that we find ourselves in where men get celebrated for being working dads while working moms are constantly walking on eggshells.
Yeah, I agree that there is an almost 100% difference. My wife and I always joke how like she took a year off of work with our first child, and she got downsized halfway through! (She ended up coming back to the same organization as they ended up finding a new role for her but she got let go because the company was downsizing her department). Prior to her taking her maternity leave my wife had won performance awards at work. And then she goes on maternity leave and all of a sudden she's dispensable. She goes on leave and she gets downsized. While in my case I go on leave and once I was back I got nominated to speak to our entire partner group across Canada and had like this spotlight video that Deloitte made about me that got put on the website. So, definitely I was like hugely celebrated for doing half as much as she did.
Another point that I want to talk about and highlight here is the fallacy we have some times with traditionally feminine roles like being a household manager or being taken care of children. We have this idea that oh that's a woman's role therefore it's less valuable. Sometimes even from a feminist perspective we can inadvertently devalue these roles.
Could you elaborate more on that last line, please?
So I've heard a lot about how women specifically married women have dropped out of the workforce. I think there's like a million married women that have dropped out of the workforce in the US as the pandemic started. And there has been a lot of conversations around how we are taking this huge step backwards in terms of women's progress in the workplace, how this is a disaster from a women's empowerment point of view, this has negatively affected women's financial independence and reduced women's say in how decisions are made in our society.
While I agree with all these points yet I think what is also happening is a complete devaluation of the choices these women are making to prioritize their role of caretakers and household managers. And I think that is the complete opposite message that we should be sending. We should be saying that people that choose to take on caretaker and household manager roles are doing immensely difficult jobs and through them they also gain an incredible set of skills.
That was infact my objective when I updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect my roll as a full time caretaker. I look at this role at home as a skill building opportunity, as an opportunity to understand empathetic interaction with someone that has completely volatile emotions (a toddler) and to understand what it is like to care for a household, to understand what it is like to have that mental load where you barely get any downtime or time for yourself.
The reason why I put this as a part of my career progression is to show that this is valuable and I should be seen as an even better employee because I've done this. And to be honest, women, obviously have been doing this forever. The men do not do it. However, men are the ones that have power in society. It is the powerful people in society that need to show up and participate in an activity to bring status to it. Therefore I think it is incumbent on more men to just step away from work and take on these roles and really celebrate taking on those roles. And then through that process I think we'll start to see an elevation of these traditionally feminine roles in society.
I hope for a world where eventually when women take a year off to care for a child, they're not getting penalized for it but instead they're getting promoted, they're getting viewed as even more capable than people that haven't done this!!
Yes, hopefully someday in our lifetime we get to see that world.
I am going to steer the conversation now to a more tactical place. So given that you are part of a dual-career household what choices have you and your partner made that have helped you become a dual career household with kids?
My wife works in an organization and a team within that organization that has a lot of women and a lot of mothers and as a result they already have a pretty strong culture where the workday ends at a certain hour with most people leaving between 3 to 5 pm to go home and be with kids, make dinner etc. To enable them to do this most people got into work super early.
So this worked out well for us because we knew we had to primarily solve for the mornings.
Now coming out of my paternity leave I knew I did not want to go back to my client facing consulting role, because the demands of that role, were just simply not aligned with the lifestyle that I wanted to have at least for these early years of our kids lives.
I knew that I was not going to be the kind of person that was jumping on planes and flying everywhere, working all hours of the night and day and weekends, partially because I just didn't want to do that and also because I couldn't put that kind of expectation on my wife. I did not want her to pick up all that slack, that wasn't fair to her. And so I was clear I wanted an internal role at our firm. I reached out our global consulting inclusion talent leader at the time. And she was like hey, you might be suited for this role given experiences that you have had. And so, it worked out really well because I got to join this global inclusion team right when I came back from my paternity leave. My boss, so to speak, is based in Melbourne, Australia, and so, you know, she comes online between 3 to 5 pm. So it worked out really well that I was able to still have really flexible mornings.
So I get Elin ready in the morning, get her breakfast and then walk her to daycare. I am also able to have a little bit of personal time in the morning during which I like work out and then I get into my workday. My wife does the evening daycare pick up and hangs out with our daughter.
So I definitely made a really conscious decision to say, I know what my previous life was like, it's not sustainable for the kind of life that I want to have right now. I knew I needed something different and it worked out really well. And I plan on staying in this type of role for at least the early years of our kids lives because, like, they say you can have it all but not at the same time!! And I think that mothers really embody that well, and men have not been forced to do that as much.
But, I would 100% choose the path that I'm currently in, as opposed to the other path which would be, you know, pushing a lot of stuff onto my wife's plate or like a grandparents plate or something like that. And, sacrificing a lot of that quality relationship building and home time with my children.
What a beautiful line - You can have it all, but not all at once! I think that is a challenge that a lot of people face to figure out what really is super important to them at that moment in time and then optimizing for it. I know everybody tells you not to climb ladders, but there's a lot of pressure in moving on to the next step. Some of it we put on ourselves and some of it the world in general puts on us. Did you ever feel like I started with this person and now he/she is on an accelerated path while I am in a certain way watching them from the sidelines Did you ever get that feeling?
Yeah, I mean, I constantly have that feeling of like people that I hired at a level below me that are now a level above me. And you know, seeing the promotions list, come out and being like oh now that person is above me or not, that person is the same level as me. So you definitely have those feelings of like am I just slowly disappearing on the sidelines here.
And to be honest, I think that is less of an issue with career path, because people are totally enabled to make the decisions that are right for them. If you want to get promoted three times in three years. Honestly, go for it, all the power to you. I think that where we need to be realistic though is that the people that are able to follow that kind of career trajectory they make choices to focus their time and effort on career related things, as opposed to other aspects of their life. And I think that, not just within organizations, but like, as a society, we place a lot of praise and status on people to move up fast and quickly and not nearly enough status or praise on people that don't choose that.
Like whenever I get invited to go on a panel typically, they'll be like, Oh, we often have this person in there, you know, CEO of this or VP of this and I'm always like, what about like the middle manager - 45 years old, three kids at home, you know, has been in the same role for 10 years. I want to see that person on a panel because that person has made some very specific decisions around the kind of lifestyle they want to lead. And I would argue that when you talk to those people that are in that position they are pretty happy and fulfilled. And there's tons of people that have made that decision. We need to celebrate them and say that their career path is just as important as the person that got promoted three times in three years.
The problem is that we are not being inclusive in how we define success. We need to put more status and praise on such people because more often than not they are mothers and they make these decisions because they have these outside of work responsibilities. And so if we want more equality in the world then we need more people to understand their stories and hear their perspectives.
You are someone who has held strong beliefs around these topics for some time. However, I want to know what shifted after you became a parent. After you became a parent, was there any different, new belief, behavior, or habit that you adopted?
After I became a father I have become more comfortable allowing emotions to come to the surface.
I think, as men, a lot of the times we give ourselves permission to mostly feel anger and feel contentment. Those are probably the two things that we let come to the surface in this whole swath of emotions. After becoming a father, crying and sadness is something I have become comfortable expressing.
Parenting makes you nostalgic for the present. And so, like, as something is happening, you can feel within yourself you're like, I want this moment to last forever. I'm already missing this moment and it's happening right in front of my eyes.
And that leads to tears of joy or the tears of sadness or the tears of remorse or whatever you want to call them that come from that feeling. I realized that I needed to let those come to the surface. I think that men specifically are very accustomed to suppressing tears. What I realized is you have got to invite this emotion to come to the surface, you lead into that feeling and then you cry. I have cried a lot over the past couple of years and it is so so therapeutic.
So a few months back we switched our daughter from a crib into a bed and when we switched her into the bed we had to take the rocking chair out of her room because there wasn't room for the rocking chair anymore. And, as you probably know, for the first year you spend so many hours in that rocking chair with your baby. I walked out of the room and it hit me that I was never going to rock her in that room. I just cried. I have also cried after dropping her off to daycare.
I think it is important to realize that you need to let it happen as opposed to it just happens to you. And that was a big step for me. That was a really big change for me since parenting started, and it was something that I was conscious about going into paternity leave that I need to be better at being in touch with my emotions.
So it looks like you have got a good grip on your emotions. Now, how do you manage your energy?
I work out pretty consistently. I'm lucky enough to have like a garage space where I can get sweaty. Now that our daughter has gotten back to daycare, there is a little more time throughout the day to squeeze in a work out.
What I realized is that if you want time you need to take time. Time is never offered to you. Your child is never gonna be like hey I'm just gonna sit here and play with this toy for two hours and you go do what you want - like that's never gonna happen. And so, if you want time you need to work with your partner or with your kid to get that time for yourself.
And so, I would try to do that. I would like bring a bunch of toys down to the garage and I would spread them out all over the floor. And I would just let Elin walk around and play with the toys while I worked out. And I would normally play some music that she likes so she could be a little entertained.
So it looks like you have a pretty good grip on this parenting thing :)
What advice would you give other men who are on the cusp of becoming parents? What advice should they ignore?
For dads what I always say is that you need to insert yourself into the parenting. I find that the industry of parenthood is very mother centric, which is for good reasons obviously. However, if you are a new dad do not assume that you are by default going to be included in things and that is in everything from say pre-natal care, to OB GYN appointments. You need to say I am going to go with you to those appointments. You need to show up, you need to ask questions and you need to be informed. Read. Be informed on what pregnancy is all about, what child birth is all about, what raising a new born is all about. The dos and don'ts. The products that you should use, the techniques that you should use. In heterosexual couples a lot of men assume this is a woman's thing. You need to be equitable and show up. Be hand in hand with your wife in that journey.
The advice not to listen to is to remember that there is no single way to do childbirth or parenting. You need to figure out with your partner what is the best way for you both. Communicate. Work through conflict. Figure out what is right for you.
Quick-fire Questions:
What’s the best thing you have watched recently?
The love story between two men is so authentic, unprecedented in media, and uncompromising in its recreation. Simply amazing. Also, the characters are hilarious
What’s the best thing you have read recently?
From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle.
It’s an indigenous man’s journey through drug addiction and homelessness in Canada to eventual redemption. Talk about inspirational and eye-opening. I ended every chapter with tears of heartbreak and joy for Jesse. It’s an absolute must-read for all Canadians and those interested in indigenous experiences and the impact of toxic male culture on men.
What’s the best thing you have listened to recently?
Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album might be the album of the century!
Watch the Netflix Song Exploder episode on her for a double-down on this album.
I would love to hear from you, feedback is always welcome!
And if you happen to know an inspiring working parent who should be featured in a future edition (or if you yourself are one) - please do get in touch.
Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer