The Mars/Venus Myth

An excerpt from Holding it Together by Jessica Calarco

Hello readers! Today I’m bringing you an excerpt from Jessica Calarco’s newly released book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Calcaro, a sociologist, famously lamented that “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women,” an observation that felt particularly acute after the pandemic. Now, that evocative line has grown into a timely and necessary book about not just the country’s failure to support its women, but how stubborn ideas about gender, work, family, and our obligations to each other (or lack thereof) shape all of our ability to work, love, and thrive. Below is a snippet of the book, and if you enjoy it, I hope you’ll consider buying and reading the whole thing.

xx Jill

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Excerpted from Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net by Jessica Calarco, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Jessica Calarco, 2024.

THE MARS/VENUS MYTH

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. I was about ten years old when I first saw those words, printed in their stark blue and pink, on the cover of John Gray’s “classic guide to understanding the opposite sex.” The book, originally published in 1992, went on to top the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than ten million copies in its first five years, and recently experienced a massive resurgence in popularity thanks to a viral TikTok video sharing advice from the book. That advice boils down to the idea that we’d be happier (and have fewer divorces—Gray is a couple’s therapist) if we went back to a time when women knew their place.

To make this argument, Gray asserts that men and women are fundamentally opposite and that relationships between them will only work when both parties embrace their separate roles. Women, he suggests, “value love, communication, beauty, and relationships,” and are thereby best fulfilled by nurturing. Men, by contrast, value “success, achievement, and efficiency,” which makes them best suited for roles requiring competence and power.

Gray’s arguments may sound scientific, but it’s merely a pseudoscience sheen. Instead, Gray is promoting the Mars/Venus myth, which equates gender (and sexuality) with biological sex, treats both as a set of binary opposites, and asserts—without solid evidence—that biology dictates gendered skills, temperaments, preferences, and needs. As I’ll explain, this myth also helps to undermine support for expanding and strengthening the social safety net by justifying men’s exploitation of women and by muzzling women who try to complain.

ACCEPTING THE PERKS OF PATRIARCHY

Consider Dennis and Bethany, a college-educated white married couple with two young kids and a “traditional” breadwinner-homemaker division of roles. Dennis identifies as a moderate political independent, reads The New York Times every day, and has progressive views on some things, like being open to the possibility of free college for all. As we’ll see, however, there’s also an ambivalence to Dennis’s attitudes about gender, marriage, and family—an ambivalence that undermines his commitment to egalitarianism and to enacting policies that might make things more equal for him and Bethany at home.

On the one hand, Dennis supports the idea of gender equality. In a survey, for example, I asked Dennis, “Do you think it’s generally better for a marriage if the husband earns more money than his wife?” to which he responded that “it’s just as good for a marriage if the wife earns as much or more.” In that same survey, Dennis also said that he would strongly support “a national paid family leave program guaranteeing mothers six months of full salary paid leave following the birth or adoption of a child” and also that he would strongly support a similar policy guaranteeing six months of paid family leave for men.

On the other hand, Dennis is wary of the possibility of gender equality going too far. When asked “Do you think children are better off if their mother is home and doesn’t hold a job, or are the children just as well off if the mother works for pay?,” Dennis chose the option saying children are better off if their mother is home. Dennis also indicated on his survey that he wouldn’t support a national program to provide all US families with free or low-cost childcare. “As a concept,” he emphasized in an interview, “I think it’s probably a great idea.” Yet he was skeptical of whether, in practice, the quality of care would match what his kids were getting from Bethany at home, and he worried that paying for high-quality care for every child would load the country with too much debt and put too much of a tax burden on high-income earners like him.

Dennis was also willing to accept very unequal gender arrangements in his own family, so long as he got the upper hand. Early in their marriage, Bethany was working full-time as a social worker, making about $30,000 a year, while Dennis was working full-time in information technology, making about $90,000 a year. When their daughter, Willow, was born in 2015, Bethany continued working for pay full-time in a flex work arrangement. Two or three days a week, Bethany’s mom or her female cousin would come over to watch Willow so Bethany could go to work. On the other days, Bethany cared for Willow while working from home. As Willow got older, it got more difficult for Bethany to continue working full-time while also caring for Willow, just as we saw with Holly in chapter 3.

When Willow was about a year old, Bethany got offered an opportunity to move up into a manager role that would have required her to be in the office full-time. Bethany could have taken the promotion and found full-time paid childcare for Willow. Instead, as Wesley did for Jocelyn, Dennis encouraged her to quit her job and stay home, where she took on not only all the childcare but almost all the housework as well. Explaining that decision, Dennis told me, “She was going to make more money . . . but it was going to be more red tape and more work, and she wanted to hang out and take care of our kids and not spend half of her paycheck finding care.”

Dennis recognized that a breadwinner-homemaker arrangement might be perceived as regressive, but he had no qualms about their arrangement, saying, “It’s funny, because we’re not your typical fifties family where we have to fit these roles and whatever. But it’s fine because we don’t feel that way. It just kind of worked out that way for us.” Dennis repeatedly emphasized that Bethany quitting her job was logical, that “it just made sense.”

For Dennis, that separate-and-unequal arrangement “made sense” both financially and in terms of the perks it offered him. When I asked if he ever helped with things like taking the kids to the doctor or staying home when they were sick, he told me, “It’s just easier if she takes care of all that. Why use time off when I don’t have to? I can use that for more fun things. That’s part of the perk of her getting to stay home.” Dennis acknowledges the “perks” he gets from their arrangement, like getting to save the time he’s not at work for “fun things” like going to the gym, watching sports, or taking vacations rather than using it for housework or parenting tasks.

Dennis, meanwhile, also believes that their arrangement has perks for Bethany and even implied that Bethany ought to be grateful that she “gets” to stay home. He told me that Bethany should be grateful that he doesn’t help more with household chores because he wouldn’t perform them as well or meet what he sees as her too-high standards. And he recalled that when he has tried to do chores like laundry and dishes in the past, Bethany ended up having to redo them, and so now, “I just let her do that.” Of course, Dennis could have learned to do laundry and dishes more effectively. Instead, however, and like the men interviewed by sociologist Allison Daminger for her research on gender inequalities in family life, Dennis treated these differences in his and Bethany’s skill sets as flukes of personality, saying, “It’s just naturally divvied itself out.”

In Dennis’s opinion, Bethany is unlikely to go back to work full-time, because, in his view, it’s good for the whole family to have her at home. “We’re lucky enough she doesn’t have to. And it allows her to do stuff at home. She’s much happier. Everyone is much happier.” According to Dennis, Bethany’s hair was falling out from the stress of her job as a social worker. And so, Dennis assumed that it would only make sense for Bethany to go back to paid work if she would be making more money than they would have to spend on childcare. He put it bluntly, saying, “She was making dirt,” and concluding that if Bethany went back to her old job, it would be “almost a wash by the time you would talk about paying for childcare or whatever.”

Bethany’s stance on stay-at-home motherhood is more ambivalent than Dennis’s. Dennis said children are better off if their mother is home and doesn’t hold a job. Bethany, by contrast, said children are just as well-off if their mother is working for pay. Bethany, who identifies as a liberal Democrat, also strongly supported not only guaranteed paid family leave (like Dennis), but also (unlike Dennis) a national program to provide all US families with free or low-cost childcare, free national healthcare, and raising the federal minimum wage—all policies that would give women a more realistic choice between paid work and staying home.

Bethany’s reasons for staying home were also different from what Dennis implied. Dennis said that Bethany was unhappy in her job as a social worker and didn’t want to have to deal with the increased workload that would come with a promotion, and that she decided to stay home because she wanted to “hang out and take care of our kids and not spend half of her paycheck finding care.” Bethany had a different recollection of her decision to leave the workforce. “Both of our moms stayed home with each of us,” Bethany explained, “so it was what we knew. And we knew we could make it work [financially]. So we decided to go for it just because, I mean—it’s a lot. Parenting and working and then also managing the childcare. To me, it just was harder as Willow got older and could do more. And I wanted to be there with her and see that.” Now, Bethany does acknowledge that she wanted to get to see Willow learn and grow, but it was the last of a long set of reasons she listed for staying home. Before that, she talked about how difficult it was to work full-time while caring for an infant and about the pressure she felt to recreate for Willow the kind of stereotypically idyllic childhood that she and Dennis both had had. Note, in turn, that Bethany never mentioned being unhappy with her job as a social worker—only unhappy with how difficult it was to do that job while also being the primary caregiver for Willow at home.

Bethany and Dennis had both grown up with multiple siblings and being at home also made it easier for Bethany to feel as though she could manage adding another child. By the time Bethany gave birth to their son, Oliver, in late 2018, however, the isolation of stay-at-home motherhood was starting to weigh on her, and she found herself craving more adult interaction than she was getting with just Dennis at home. And so, in 2019, she started a very part-time job teaching group fitness classes—a job she was able to take since the kids could attend the free on-site childcare while Bethany was teaching classes at the gym.

Bethany had to fit working for pay around her family life, while for Dennis, it was the other way around. That distinction became even more apparent when Covid-19 hit and sent everyone home. The gym was closed, so Bethany stopped teaching classes, but she also didn’t go back to teaching even when the gym reopened in the fall of 2020, because of new restrictions on childcare eligibility, and because Willow was starting kindergarten online. Dennis, meanwhile, could have continued working from home that fall. But he went back to the office in June 2020—as soon as his employer gave him the go-ahead—because it was easier for him to focus on work without the distraction that came from having the kids underfoot at home. Dennis’s decision to go back to the office left Bethany in charge of virtual learning, a responsibility that she hated and left her feeling as though she wasn’t patient enough. “I want to take that mouse and just point to whatever she wants,” Bethany explained, exasperated, “but I know I need to let her learn.”

Bethany was grateful when Willow was able to switch to in-person learning, but even that change didn’t ease the pressure as much as she hoped. When my team and I talked to Bethany in 2021, when Willow and Oliver were six and three, her schedule involved getting up at least an hour before the kids every morning to do chores or lead workout sessions for friends over Zoom, then get the kids up, get them breakfast, drive Willow to school by 8:45 a.m., then run errands with Oliver, try to get some housework done, get lunch for Oliver, get him to nap for a bit, drive to pick up Willow from school at 3:45 p.m., then make dinner, feed the kids, bathe them, and get them ready for bed. “At that point,” Bethany explained, “I’m exhausted, or worn out, and so I sit down until I fall asleep basically, and then start all over again.”

Bethany also expressed frustration with how much of the housework and parenting fell to her. She noted with a wry laugh that “it only took a pandemic” for Dennis to “finally figure out how to clean up Oliver’s tray after dinner.” Once Dennis went back to the office, however, they quickly slipped back into pre-pandemic roles.

Although Dennis is more involved with the kids than Bethany’s father and his father ever were, his style of involvement also tends to create more problems for Bethany than it solves. “Like when they’re taking a bath,” Bethany explained, “they don’t need to play around. Get them bathed, get them out. If Dennis is doing bath [time], like, they’ll play for forty-five minutes and then they’re all wound up.” The longer that bath time took, meanwhile, the longer it took to get the kids to bed, and the longer that Bethany had to wait for a break.

At the same time, Bethany found ways of excusing Dennis for not being more (helpfully) involved. Talking about bath time, for example, Bethany noted, “In his defense, I’m with them all day and he’s at work. And so, when he does get home, we have dinner, they might get to play a little bit, but during the week, that’s when he wants to see them, or, that’s when he gets to see them. So I get that.” Note here how Bethany walks back her frustrations with Dennis, stifling her own sense of injustice and coming to his defense. This kind of self-correction was common among mothers my team and I interviewed, who often backtracked when they caught themselves speaking ill of their children’s fathers—as though they felt bad for complaining, even if their complaints were valid.

In Bethany’s case, other evidence suggested that there was truth to her initial take—that Dennis wasn’t happy being home with the kids. Like Russell, whom we met in chapter 3, Dennis acknowledged that he often felt frustrated with the kids and that, during the pandemic, his frustrations often turned to yells. In her own interview, Bethany also noted Dennis’s quicker temper but then promptly backtracked, excusing his yelling on the basis of the fact that he wasn’t used to spending so much time with them at home. “I think it’s harder for him,” she decided, “because he’s with them at the end of the day, when they’re already tired. And so I feel bad for him, because he gets frustrated with them and they get frustrated.”

Those same justifications led Bethany to step in when she saw Dennis getting angry, even when it meant taking on more of the parenting responsibility herself. Of course, Dennis could try to keep his frustrations in check—the way Bethany does with the kids all day. And Bethany could demand that he do better, rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt. But the Mars/Venus myth lures them into accepting the status quo. As I’ll explain, that myth not only helps men like Dennis justify exploiting women’s unpaid labor, but it also teaches women not to complain.