Norma Foley’s Department of Children plans to run an awareness campaign focused on the harmful messaging promoted by tradwife and manosphere influencers.
Part of the Government’s National Strategy for Women and Girls, the campaign will highlight shared caring responsibilities between men and women and alert us to the risks of taking too seriously tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, with her empire built on home-made tallow balms and electrolyte blends and millions of clicks, or “top G” Andrew Tate, currently sulking in an American jail as he fights extradition to Britain.
Along with other measures – including a €1 million employment fund to help women get back to work, the possible-potential-maybe introduction of pay-related parent’s leave and several vague promises to do or review or “roll out” things already under way – the Government’s big new idea is to “challenge trends where women can be pressurised, particularly by online messaging, into particular care roles”.
The intentions outlined in the broader strategy are all very laudable and worthy, if sometimes a little woolly. But at the risk of once again being a miserable feminist drudge who can see no good in anything, I would like to raise a couple of teeny, tiny issues.
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Let’s start with the wording of the bit about caring responsibilities. On the list of all the things “pressurising women” into caring roles, Neeleman and her bone broth hot cocoa are not in the “particularly” category. She is not even touching the top 50.
Dominating the leaderboard in her place are the usual suspects: the impossibility of finding a creche place; the cost of that creche place should you eventually secure it; the lack of after-school care places for older children. Up there, too, is the pressure of knowing that your employer is unlikely to appreciate you clocking off at 4.40pm so you can dash home to feed the children and get them back out the door for GAA/dance/hockey, compounded by the pressure of knowing you don’t have a choice. And then there are the childhood illness and school plays and teacher training days that will inevitably clash with hard deadlines and in-person work meetings. Then there’s the fact that, should you decide early on that you will be the flexible parent and reduce your hours and pay accordingly, you enter an unspoken contract with your partner whereby you will almost always be the one expected to take up the slack.
The thing persuading women to lean out at work and turn down economic opportunities is not that they have been indoctrinated into believing they’d prefer to spend their days clad in a gingham apron, lovingly placing a buttered cheesecloth over a broiler chicken. It’s that we live in a society which, as Liz Carolan pointed out here recently, expects us to parent like we don’t have jobs and work like we don’t have children. The school day and the working day are permanently and intractably out of sync and “granny will do it” (or sometimes grandad) is the best anyone seems able to come up with.
If Foley seriously wants to help women avoid being lumped with the bulk of society’s caring responsibilities, why are messages about caring roles wrapped into a strategy “for women and girls”? When did helping to dismantle society’s structural misogyny become yet another thing on our to-do list? Women are good problem solvers, but even we have to draw the line somewhere. It is like asking polar bears to solve the climate crisis.
One of the big shocks of first-time parenthood for women is the discovery that we are expected to just magically make it all happen so that society can keep functioning. It probably shouldn’t come as a shock, given that our Constitution literally spells it out, but there you have it. The panic of this realisation comes to new fathers too, though in the ensuing battle – strap in, new parents, because it will rage for the next roughly 18 years – over who gets to plug the childcare gaps and who gets to have hobbies, men more often seem to emerge victorious. (Are you sceptical about this? A 2024 US study found that women had 13 per cent less free time than men, and working mothers spent twice as many hours per week on unpaid household activity compared with working dads.)
The second big land comes in retirement, when our own children are off the books. This is the point at which many of us will discover that, once again, our services are needed to keep the wheels of capitalist society turning. One in three primary schoolchildren are minded by “an unpaid relative or family member”, according to the 2022 Census. These heroic women – and, again, some men – get no official recognition. If they are women who left the workforce to care for their own children before they accumulated enough stamps, they may not even get a pension.
Don’t expect a Government information campaign highlighting any of that.
But where is the strategy for men and boys? Where is the campaign for employers about the benefits of offering flexible working and keeping talented, conscientious, multitasking women in employment? The plan talks about “reviewing” flexible working provisions under the Work Life Balance Act – excuse me if that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
Online misogyny is real and needs to be tackled – but with something more effective than a public awareness campaign. A plan to clamp down on the social media platforms profiting from this misogynistic bilge would be a start.
In the meantime, warning women not to swallow retrograde messaging about care seems a bit absurd when the economy depends on us continuing to do precisely the opposite.
