What The Hell America!

In 1878, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen described his country as “an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine from a masculine point of view.” Today Norway is tied with Finland for second place in the Global Gender Gap Index, surpassed only by Iceland. The index measures economic participation, educational opportunity, political representation, and health and survival. Norway is particularly strong on women’s employment — and on men’s corresponding helpfulness in the home. It has one of the highest rates of female workforce participation in the world and gets top marks for how much unpaid household labor men perform.

The expectation in Norway is that both men and women will work and raise children, and have the time and resources to do so. The Norwegian system is not perfect, but it’s much closer than the United States to the feminist ideal of a dual-earner/dual-caregiver society, defined by Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers as a society where “men and women engage symmetrically in employment and caregiving, and all parents have realistic opportunities to combine waged work with the direct provision of care for their children.”

Norway’s relatively gender-egalitarian society was created through decades of class struggle, which built the Norwegian welfare state, and socialist feminist struggle, which sought to use that welfare state to develop a more gender-equal society. And one of Norway’s most successful interventions was the 1993 implementation of the pappaperm policy, or paternity leave system.

By then, Norway had already seen decades of progress: women had entered the workforce en masse in the 1960s and ’70s, ending a highly unequal system of spousal dependence, and a twenty-four-week parental leave (shareable between mothers and fathers) had already been instituted to accommodate their participation. Meanwhile, there was already a robust welfare state coupled with strong pro-labor policies and regulations, which made work less brutally exploitative and social programs nearer at hand.

But problems remained, particularly that men still didn’t feel culturally identified with parenting responsibilities and considered childcare women’s work. They largely declined to take the allotted shared parental leave. Employed women who returned from leave were still saddled with a disproportionate share of childcare burdens, limiting their options for career advancement and preserving a gender pay gap. This dynamic, which emerges everywhere women enter the workforce in large numbers, is known as the “motherhood penalty.”

In 1986, Norway established a Committee on Men’s Roles to address the motherhood penalty and related issues. As documented in Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s book Another World Is Possible, the committee deliberated for years. In 1993, on a recommendation from the committee, Norway expanded the total parental leave to forty-two weeks and introduced a “father’s quota,” or pappaperm — four weeks of fully paid leave reserved exclusively for fathers, not transferable to mothers, and not synchronous with mothers’ leave.

These were four weeks designated specifically for the father to be home alone with the infant. To be eligible, the mother was expected to be back at work or school. The idea was that men should have the opportunity to not only bond with their children during infancy but actually experience what it’s like to be the primary caregiver. Thereafter, the theory went, fathers would be less likely to conceive of childcare as “helping” their wives but as performing a task necessary to their family’s functioning, a task whose difficulty they appreciate and of which they understand themselves to be equally capable. The program’s designers believed that fathers, mothers, and children would all benefit — perhaps children most of all.

Norway’s paternal leave was use-it-or-lose-it: men could either take the state up on the offer to be stay-at-home dads, or keep working for the exact same pay, and indeed likely take a household pay cut, as alternative childcare would be necessary once mothers returned to work. The offer was too attractive to resist.

Once the pappaperm was implemented, writes Hakimi Zapata, “the percentage of dads who took parental leave went from 2.4 percent in 1992 to more than 70 percent in 1997.” With these kinds of numbers, a massive cultural sea change was inevitable: parenting newborns and the children they grow into could not, under these circumstances, still be considered “women’s work.”

Today Norway’s parental leave system has evolved into one of the most generous and flexible in the world. Leave is divided into three parts: fifteen weeks each for mothers and fathers and a shared period that parents can distribute as they wish. The non-transferable pappaperm, which now also applies to same-sex partners and adoptive coparents, is now nearly four months long.

As a consequence of the overall evolution of family policy, Norway’s motherhood penalty has been drastically reduced. Other Scandinavian countries have since adopted similar family policies. In 2018, Nordic men reported more happiness than their European counterparts and a weaker correlation between job satisfaction and happiness, suggesting that they’re finding joy in family life.

Today 90 percent of Norwegian fathers take their pappaperm leave. One Norwegian researcher who spoke to Hakimi Zapata said she struggled to find representatives of the small minority of men who don’t take their allotted leave. The researcher speculated, “They probably felt ashamed or stigmatized, and they didn’t really want to share,” adding, “It’s a really strong norm. If you’re eligible for leave, then it’s expected that you take it. And if you don’t, I think people sort of feel that they need to have a good reason.”

If Norway’s story is any indication, the fastest and most effective way to change ideas about gender roles is to implement programs that make equality the path of least resistance.

A survey conducted in December 2024 and January 2025 asked American men to agree or disagree with the statement that “a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man.” It found that 28 percent of Gen Z men agreed, more than double the percentage of Boomer men. It’s hard to disentangle results like these from the rising profile of manosphere figures like alleged sex trafficker and abuser Andrew Tate, who explicitly argues that “your capability as a man in all realms reduces the amount of time you need to spend” with children to fulfill parenting responsibilities.

Still, however disturbing, figures like these spotlight representatives of a vocal and energized minority, not mainstream American opinion. Even in the above survey, presumably 72 percent of Gen Z men do not agree that childcare undermines masculinity. That’s consistent with another survey finding that 75 percent of fathers say men and women should do equal childcare.

Most of us still believe in some measure of gender equality. The bigger problem — and likely one component of the reactionary upswing — is that Americans have spent decades becoming more progressive in our values while our institutions make reconciling work and family profoundly difficult.

To bring that observation down to earth: while three-quarters of American men think men should take equal responsibility for children, only 5 percent take paternity leave of more than two weeks — primarily because it isn’t available. The United States is the only developed nation and one of only five countries in the world that doesn’t have mandated paid maternity leave, much less paternity leave.

Americans work much longer hours than our counterparts, while labor law says nothing about maximum work hours, equal treatment for part-time workers, rights to flexible scheduling, or minimum paid time off. Our public childcare system is paper thin, and we have paltry tax credits and subsidies for families with working parents. As a result, men and women alike “feel trapped by policies and cultural expectations that tie men to work, and women to care.”

Our punitive policies toward both workers and parents create a feedback loop that reinforces traditional gender roles. When everyone is pressed for time and money, the partner who is socially expected to raise children and keep house takes on those responsibilities, for which she is punished in the economic sector — causing men to work longer hours to compensate, which further removes them from family life, and so on. These persistent patterns don’t completely negate real progress, but they prevent us from fully realizing the benefits of changing attitudes.

We’ve slumped along like this for decades, with notionally progressive gender values but no practical way to live them out. The paradox has generated a collective cognitive dissonance. The revival of gender orthodoxy is one possible way of resolving this intolerable tension. It is, however, the worst possible option. Another path is to openly acknowledge the mismatch between our values and our systems, and to demand reconciliation in a positive direction.

Even people with avowed progressive sensibilities are fighting an uphill battle against economic and social pressures. The Norwegian example offers a compelling blueprint: If their experience is any indication, we can make rapid progress on social attitudes and lock in preexisting cultural gains by championing programs that make work and family easier for parents to balance.

Recovering from this cultural nadir will require strategies other than impassioned appeals to egalitarian ideals. With “anti-wokeness” drowning out left-wing appeals to social conscience, we need new strategies. A comprehensive program, as envisioned by Gornick and Meyers, would include paid family leave with nontransferable father quotas, regulations creating shorter-hour workweeks, protections for part-time workers, rights to request flexible scheduling, and universal, high-quality early childhood education.

This is how we win. Not just with public awareness campaigns about the perils of the manosphere, but with a movement that can say: We see your lone-wolf sigma male discourse, and we raise you paid paternity leave.