The Gender Competence Gap

Are incompetent men driving down marriage rates?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Much has already been written about the growing divides between women and men, politically, culturally, socially, and economically. A surprising number of young men voted for Donald Trump, while young women have tacked overwhelmingly left. Fewer young people are getting married and having children. Women have long outnumbered men on college campuses, and are more likely than men to graduate — dropout rates are higher for men than for women.

A lot of this just comes down to basic competence — and men’s lack of it.

I thought of this when reading friend-of-the-newsletter Olga Kazan’s piece on the gender division of household labor in her own house, where, despite efforts to divvy things up fairly, her husband does less than her and still doesn’t take full responsibility for the tasks he does assume. Basically, they agree to a certain system for dividing up chores and childcare, and then he doesn’t stick to the system — which means she gets stuck reminding him about what he should do, just doing it for him, and / or being stressed out and angry about the whole thing. It frankly sounds very frustrating! And reading it, I kept thinking — despite knowing that Olga’s husband is a lovely person — how is this man so incompetent? Or why is he pretending to be?

The problems Olga illustrates are not unique to her marriage. I hear these same complaints all the time from female friends, and see them established in the data: Especially after having kids, women simply do more. We do more to keep the house tidy. We do much more to make sure that our children are healthy and well cared-for, from managing the household schedule to preparing food to booking and remembering doctors appointments to caring for the kids when they’re sick (often at the expense of our own work) to learning the meaning behind an infant’s particular cries to making sure they have clothes to wear and shoes that fit. Doing all of this while another adult just kind of looks on, and needs to be constantly told what to do to help? Infuriating.

I am not convinced that this is just an All Men problem. I don’t write a lot about my personal life on purpose, but I will say here — at the risk of sounding like a jerk — that I am in fact married to man, and he is a generally competent adult. Yes, we have squabbled about household labor. More importantly, though, we have talked openly about household labor, and what we both expect of the other (and of ourselves), and what feels fair — and how it benefits our relationship to have two people who feel like we are working on a shared project, rather than the resentful nagging household manager and the nagged resentful helper. I have never given him a chore list. I am not the holder of all of the household tasks which I then dole out as if he is an adolescent child being given chores. I do certainly take on more of a household managerial role than he does, but he manages other aspects of our lives in a way that feels like it evens out. Things are not all equal all of the time. There are certain things he hates doing (cat box), and same here (dishes). I am more particular about some things. But I do genuinely feel that I have a partner — not someone who “helps me,” but someone who is equally invested in the running of our household. And, wonderfully, someone who does many things he does not believe to be necessary or important, simply because I do (for example, I love a made bed; every time I come home from traveling, I come home to a bed made up with freshly-washed sheets, even though there is no task on earth my husband hates more than putting on a duvet cover).

I share this not to be smug (my relationship, like any, has its conflicts and its inequities). I share it to say that men are not biologically predetermined to be incompetent.

And yet tons of men simply are incompetent, or pretend to be (I suspect a lot of these men are perfectly capable of doing what needs doing, they just know that if they don’t do it, it will still get done). And then a lot of men wonder why women won’t marry them or reproduce with them.

One dynamic that has animated the modern family landscape is the increase in single parenthood. More and more women are having babies without being married, and while those women are often partnered with the child’s father at conception, they often either stay partnered but unmarried or break up and live separately at some point in their child’s life. There are a bunch of complex reasons for this dynamic, including changing social mores that have radically reduced the stigma of single parenthood (a good thing, in my view). But social science research also indicates that most women and men want to get married, they just aren’t doing it.

I suspect one reason is competence (and specifically, male lack thereof).

Women and girls seem to out-competence men and boys at nearly every stage. Girls do better than boys in school; their test scores are higher, their grades are higher, they are less likely to drop out, they are more likely to go to college, they are less likely to face disciplinary issues. This is probably some combination of the biological and the social, and it cuts both ways: Girls may behave better in school because girls are also socialized for compliance, and that isn’t so great. But the ability to organize one’s life, turn things in on time, avoid getting into serious trouble, and do one’s work with some degree of focus are all necessary in our modern economy, in which the jobs that pay the best tend to have your butt at a desk, and those jobs tend to be gained through educational achievement. On the home and family side of things, a now-pervasive culture of intensive parenting requires a lot of organization; even if you’re a benignly neglectful parent who refuses to over-schedule your child, you still need to keep track of doctor’s appointments, coordinate childcare if you have a job, and hopefully cook a few meals a week. Even without children, rent and bills need to be paid on time, work attended, the house cleaned, the shopping done. In a romantic relationship, time needs to be spent and emotional needs tended to.

A shocking number of men seem unable to do these basics. And if you’re a woman observing that a man with whom you are partnered or even romantically interested cannot do these basics, why are you going to tie yourself to him financially, logistically, and emotionally through marriage?

It’s also remarkably unsexy to share a household with an adult male who doesn’t do the basic work of being an adult — who is a sloth, who is messy, who is lazy, who you wind up treating like another child. The truth is that wealthier couples can at least in part avoid or decrease these conflicts by outsourcing some of the more fundamental tasks (some of the cleaning, some of the childcare), which may be one reason why better-educated (and by extension usually wealthier) couples are more likely to get and stay married. It may also be the case that better-educated people have had more of a chance to practice some of the task-management skills that are so important to running a household, and that these same people who work on computers all day are better situated than someone who works in, say, a factory or a nursing home to do things like call (and take off) for doctor’s appointments, schedule a babysitter, sign up for summer camp online, order household basics on Amazon, and so on.

What’s clear, though, is that when it comes to the basics of adult living, women seem to out-competence men across class lines. And men — including highly-educated men and men who work white-collar jobs — seem more inclined to leave their competencies at the door when they get home from work. It strikes me as fairly rational that a lot of these women would look at men who they essentially have to babysit and say “no thanks”: No thanks to marriage, even if there are kids involved — maybe you’re happy with the kids but not so much the man. No thanks, perhaps, to a relationship in the first place.

This isn’t the only explanation for falling birth rates and declining marriage rates. But it strikes me as one piece of the puzzle — and something that, predictably, the conservative men complaining about fewer marriages and dwindling birth rates while not really raising their own kids don’t seem at all interested in fixing.

xx Jill