New Mummy Blog: The Great Parenthood Gender Divide

News that Richard Branson is now offering fathers who work for the Virgin Management arm of his empire up to 12 months paid paternity leave has caused quite a fuss.

The fact that the company offers paid parental leave of up to year to anyone - male or female - is quite something and goes far above and beyond the statutory or the average amongst Virgin's peers and competitors. But the thing that's really remarkable, of course, is that this time the deal extends to men.

I know only too well the insecurities and struggles of the mum who chooses to take a year 'out' to care for her new child. It's an unavoidable truth that it would only be 10 times harder for a dad to do the same and still insist on being taken seriously in his career.

So while it's a great gimmick for the company, I wonder how many men will actually take him up on the offer. Oh, I'm sure there are plenty who would love to if only they could see how to while remaining relevant in the workplace. But probably there are also plenty who don't actually want to, because they realise it's ruddy hard work.

This isn't building up into a 'let's have a good moan about how hard SAHMs have it and how easy it is for the dads who get to swan off to work' piece. I've been on both sides: although not a dad, of course, I have spent a year at home with my first baby, and six months now with my second, and I was a working mum in between, and will be again. Both have huge challenges and huge rewards.

But the simple fact remains. We don't live in a society that is geared up to gender equality in the division and provision of care for our children. In Sweden, where men and women alike are offered up to 480 days of leave, and two (soon to be three) of those 16 months are reserved for men in a use it or lose it arrangement, 90 per cent of men take paternity leave. Our numbers fall far short.

Call me a traitor to the feminist cause, but I see this as neither right nor wrong. It's just the way it is, shaped by a long history of women as caregivers and our role in the workplace.

Unless your circumstances are very different from mine, and most other people, someone has got to go out to work while the other one stays at home with the baby. Chances are it's the mum at home. So what? Let's think ourselves lucky we live in a country with such generous rules around maternity leave, at least. We could be limited to a fraction of what we get, and be expected to claim disability allowance to be paid at all.

But while the gender divide is still, generally speaking (and I know there are many, many exceptions), omnipresent, I'm not suggesting we hark back to an era of pipe, slippers, fix me a drink and don't ask me to get involved with the kids kind of men.

Of course these men do still exist. But I have friends whose husbands have relocated to the spare room - not once in a while to get uninterrupted night's sleep away from the baby, but semi-permanently for the next five years until Junior finally grows out of his cosy co-sleeping arrangement. With a high-pressure job involving 5am starts and 1am finishes, demanding clients and tyrannical bosses, are they wrong to do so?

Of course not. And neither are the husbands who get up in the night with a bottle, or who have opted to work part time to share childcare, or work flexible hours to be able to do the school run.

My husband works from home and is his own boss. Luckily for me, this allows him to be more hands on than most. We try and stick to a simple rule: when I'm at home and my husband is working, I'm in charge of the kids. When we're both at home and neither of us is working, it's 50 50, thanks very much.

For the most part, it works and he loves being able to be there for all the milestones he might otherwise miss. But it does also mean the lines are blurred: accepting his coffee break versus my I-don't-get-a-break is hard. And he doesn't often get away with having to work late and not being home for bath time.

But in fact, when I went back to work after my first baby, I was the one often coming home late, held up by tortuously delayed trains that got me home so late the only way I could see my daughter was to creep into her room and watch her sleep. And I never saw her in the morning, always leaving to catch an early train before she even woke up.

It was hard. But made infinitely easier by a husband man enough to take on that role without question.

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