Far from embracing the school run, most men are still trapped by rigid cultural notions of being strong, dominant and successful. Is it leading to an epidemic of unhappiness similar to the one felt by Betty Friedan’s 50s housewives?

Back in the 90s, it was all going to be so different. Not for our generation the lopsided approach of our parents, with their quaint postwar notions of father-breadwinners and mother-homemakers. We would be equal; interchangeable. Our young women would run companies, embassies, hospitals and schools, while our young men, no slouches themselves, would punctuate their careers with long, halcyon spells dandling babies and teaching toddlers how to make tiny volcanoes out of vinegar and baking soda.

That equality would have formidable knock-on effects. The gender pay gap would narrow. Sexual harassment wouldn’t disappear, but decoupling professional power from gender would do a lot to erase it from the workplace.

A generation or so later, it is clear: this is the revolution that never happened, at least not in the UK. The home-dad pioneers among us who once blazed a trail, now look on aghast as successive waves of men scurry past and say: “Right. Back to work.”

What happened? Latest statistics for England show more than 80% of fathers still work full time, rising to almost 85% for dads of very young children. This rate has barely changed for 20 years. The ratio of part-timers has flatlined just above 6% throughout this decade (having soared through the 90s and early 00s). Just 1.6% of men have given up work altogether to take care of the family home. New rights for fathers to share parental leave with mothers have poor take-up rates.

You can glimpse this paternity gap at 3.30pm on weekday afternoons at school gates up and down the country. Far from being overrun with gaggles of enlightened men in clothes covered with baby sick and badges saying “World’s greatest dad”, the father quota is, in my own limited experience, disappointing. There are often more grandparents doing the pickup than dads.

At the same time, there is no shortage of surveys finding legions of men saying they want to find more time for family life. So what is stopping them?

In 1963, The Feminine Mystique, a seminal book by Betty Friedan, helped launch the second wave of feminism by positing that American women faced “a problem that has no name”: they had essentially become typecast as uber-feminine mothers, home-makers, cake bakers and sexual slaves to their husbands. Forcing women to live up to this idea of femininity left an entire generation depressed, frustrated or hooked on Valium.

The question is this: 50 years later, are men facing their own “problem with no name”, a “masculine mystique” which imposes rigid cultural notions of what it is to be male – superior, dominant, hierarchical, sexually assertive to the point of abuse – even though society is screaming out for manhood to be something very different?

Men who do change their working lives to accommodate their children generally say it can feel tough, lonely, incongruous, even emasculating. When, 15 years ago, I gave up work altogether for a year to do childcare, it took a while to get used to being the only dad in the park; the strange man arguing with a difficult child outside the library on a damp Tuesday morning. People stared.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Early and his son Jonah … ‘There is a stigma when people see you doing a role that isn’t traditional.’

Little has changed. Father-of-two David Early, 31, from Glasgow, says he still feels in a minority when he is out and about with his toddlers. “When I’m with the children, and I have her in the sling and him in the buggy, I have people looking and thinking: ‘What’s that guy doing with two kids strapped to him?’” says Early. “There is a stigma when people see you doing a role that isn’t traditional. It can impact on your professional life.”

For Early, it certainly did. When he asked for additional parental leave after his first child was born, his managers for his data management job were not impressed. He eventually quit and found work elsewhere to be able to balance his work and family in the way he wanted.

Paul Cudby, 36, was luckier. A business analyst for the National Grid in Leicestershire, he found his manager more receptive, and worked out a highly flexible work pattern that leaves him free to do the afternoon school run before turning the laptop back on again in the evening. “There comes a moment in every dad’s life when there’s a choice. You’ll find yourself missing something at home and the question is: what do you do about the emotional pain? Do you say: ‘I’m just going to have to suck it up,’ or do you say: ‘Something’s got to change’?

“I get plenty of little jibes about being a part-timer. They are well meaning, but I can understand how some people get offended. I think there possibly is a knock-on effect on my career.”

And that’s just it – men are finding out what women have known for years: that parenting properly will certainly upend your career. For many men, so thoroughly programmed to identify who they are with the work they do, this can seem like an existential threat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tormod Sund … ‘The traditional man … breadwinner … those kind of ideas are rooted in the past. Photograph: Mark Rice-Oxley/The Guardian

Tormod Sund, 42, is a father, an anthropologist, a charity worker, a Norwegian and a Londoner – and has been the primary carer for his son for more than 10 years. He says he still feels like “a bit of an oddity” in a society that still expects men to be alpha.

“The traditional man … breadwinner … those kind of ideas are rooted in the past, but you don’t get rid of them in one or two generations,” Sund says. “Those ideas are still quite strong socially.”

“When you meet new people, the first thing they ask is: ‘What do you do?’ I would say: ‘I work from home.’ The idea of what is successful and normal if you’re a man is that you should have a career. It’s less acceptable for a man to say: ‘I’m staying at home with the children.’ We work. Our identity is connected to that.”

The barriers are not just psychological. They are professional and financial as well. Jasmine Kelland, a human resource studies lecturer at Plymouth University, interviewed scores of fathers and managers, trying to find out more about the male reluctance to reduce hours. She found that of all the working permutations – part-time, full-time, men, women – the part-time man was held in lowest regard on a range of metrics including competence, commitment and even ability.

“In the workplace, fathers do not get as much support as mums,” Kelland says. “When they say, for example, that they need time off because a child is unwell, organisations are less supportive. There are quite a lot of negative perceptions about fathers who want to work part-time.”

Dr Alpesh Maisuria has experienced this first-hand. The 37-year-old London-based academic says that even in more “enlightened” parts of the economy, bosses are not always understanding. “My value as a bloke in this country is to do with my productivity and output, much more than being a father,” he says. “I would suggest in many instances, even as an academic, the fact that I’m a father might be a hindrance to my bosses.”

The “part-time paternal penalty” is not just a British peculiarity. A 2013 US study found that men who engaged in childcare risked a workplace backlash. “Men who lack complete focus on, and dedication to, their work and who do the low-status ‘feminine’ work of childcare and housework are likely to be seen both as failed men and as bad workers,” the report found. At the other end of the scale, however, Sweden incentivises all fathers to take at least three months paid paternity leave. The result has been a far more even-handed approach to “latte pappas”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Alpesh Maisuria … ‘The fact that I’m a father might be a hindrance to my bosses.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

“When I take him out to playgroups or cafes in the UK, I’m usually the only bloke in there,” says Maisuria. “In Sweden, you’ll find a whole load of these blokes alongside you.”

There are, of course, financial considerations: a great many households won’t be able to afford to sacrifice even part of a father’s salary. With the gender pay gap persisting, the default position tends to be men working full-time while women do the childcare and perhaps work part-time.

“Involved fatherhood is quite a middle-class concept,” says Dr Helen Norman at Manchester University’s school of social sciences. “It’s only really accessible to middle-class men who can afford to change their work; the fathers on lower incomes don’t have that [option].”

A support worker with a housing association in the West Midlands, Richard Watkins, 32, worked all the hours he could, until separation from his partner and problems with their children forced a rethink. Now, his six-year-old son lives with him and Watkins felt he had to cut back his hours to nurture his child. “We came very close to relying on food banks,” he says. “The only way I can survive doing this on my budget is to have it [all] mapped out for the next two years.”

Ultimately, he says, he will have to go back to work full-time. Which is a shame. The benefits of full-on fathering – the dad dividend if you like – are both obvious and subtle. There are no end of advocates agitating for progress, from Fathers Network Scotland and its “Dad Up” campaign to Working Families and the Fatherhood Institute.

Martin Doyle, 37, a Bristol-based communications manager for Lloyds bank, noticed that, after he went part-time, there was a big a difference in the son that he and his husband had adopted. “It’s been massively beneficial – our son is a lot more settled and a lot more relaxed than he was,” he says. “His confidence has grown, his self-belief has grown. I’ve been able to be there to support him.”

Engaged fathers can also liberate women to resume careers – indeed women will never get close to true equality until men bend over backwards to meet them halfway. And according to Norman, there can be a positive effect on relationships, too: in households where men do sole childcare a few times a week in the early years, this will have “a positive effect on the relationship over time”, she says.

But could it be that the biggest beneficiary of all would be men themselves?

From his office overlooking the Royal Festival Hall terrace in London, Ted Hodgkinson is putting the finishing touches to a festival that is all about the male predicament.

The Being a Man festival, running from 24-26 November, aims to get under the skin of the masculine identity, prod it around a little, see if it falls apart. The furore over sexual harassment will tinge some segments, particularly a session called “Standing Up for Her Rights”.

But the event aims to be far broader than a single news story. Writers, actors and performers, including Robert Webb, Alan Hollinghurst and Simon Amstell, will explore the relentless levels of expectation heaped on men and assess whether this is responsible for statistics that suggest it is truly dismal these days to have a Y chromosome.

Suicide is a predominantly male tragedy (a man takes his life every minute somewhere in the world). Ditto gambling, drug overdoses, rough sleeping or just disappearing. Rape, murder, terrorism, war, people trafficking and domestic violence: all are predominantly masculine disgraces. Wherever you go in the world, men always make up more than 90% of jail populations. Flick through today’s newspaper and the chances are it will be full of all the bad things that men are doing. Of course, recent weeks have been dominated by sexual harassment, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Mass shootings and sickening murders, not to mention terror attacks and the brutality of war.

Then there are our role models: misogynist presidents, groping politicians, narcissistic sports stars, self-satisfied billionaires, airbrushed actors, heroic superheroes, alpha men, all of them. Even the average shape of a man has changed in 20 years: guns, pecs and necks wider than heads in some cases. There is no room for the winsome, the vulnerable, the uncertain.

I ask Hodgkinson if he thinks a “masculine mystique” – a cultural insistence on “strong, dominant, successful” types as the only valid manifestation of manhood – is making us unhappy in the same way that the feminine mystique depressed women in the 50s and 60s.

“In one sense it seems as though men are holding all the cards,” he says, “but the statistics show otherwise: three out of four suicides are men, 73% of adults who go missing are men. They feel they have to walk out of their own lives for one reason or another. We have to look at what masculinity means to understand this. Often it equates showing emotion with weakness. There is a bottling up of shame; not wanting to let people down.”

The good news is there is no shortage of books, documentaries, artists working to challenge old patriarchal notions, from Professor Green’s acclaimed documentary about men and suicide to Grayson Perry’s 2016 book The Descent of Man. (The downside: two-thirds of men say they don’t read much.)

“There is an awakening around these things. There is a shift there,” says Hodgkinson.

Jonny Benjamin agrees. He became a mental health campaigner after contemplating his own suicide on Waterloo Bridge and being talked down by a stranger. He says he sees changes coming through in the new young generation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jonny Benjamin … ‘We need more sports stars, more footballers to talk about their vulnerabilities.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

“The good thing is that now it’s being questioned,” he observes from his own work talking to young people about mental health. “There is work in schools challenging this whole kind of ‘big-boys-don’t-cry’ attitude.”

Benjamin says it is notions of pride, shame and honour that still do men such harm. Men need to know that it’s OK to show vulnerability, subjugate every now and then, lose, cry, express their emotional turmoil. It’s not just women who suffer from comparing themselves to the perfection they see in the public space.

“We need more sports stars, more footballers to talk about their vulnerabilities,” he says. “Just to say: ‘I do struggle sometimes, I do get anxious. Life isn’t all money and cars.’”

There are nascent campaigns calling for a more honest dialogue about the links between maleness, depression and suicide, most notably the work done by the Campaign Against Living Miserably and the Movember foundation.

But will that ever build into a full-blown movement that reforms maleness from the inside and changes its relationship with the world? It’s hard to say. Thus far “masculinism” has manifested itself principally in niche areas such as custody law or male victims of violence, or simply as strident misogynist voices pushing back at feminism.

And it’s hard to see how to make a movement when you are essentially still in control of much of society. As Sund says, “we are not a minority who are oppressed in any shape or form, so it’s hard to find that moral space”.

The crisis of manhood, if it exists, is very different from that faced by women in the 50s and 60s. In some senses, it’s a mirror image. Women – some at least – were saying: “Some of us might want to work.” Men – some at least – are saying: “Some of us might want to work less.” Women were saying: “We want to be taken seriously in public life.” Men – some at least – are saying: “We want to be taken seriously in our private life.”

Men and women struggle to get on at work and find time for their families Read more

Both sexes are trying to live up to cultural projections rather than satisfy their own complex human needs. Men today may have greater choice than women did half a century ago, but that doesn’t make it easy.

Women had an oppression to rail against; the outcome was a broad awakening that would not be subdued. The “oppression” of men is far more subtle, even self-inflicted.

The awakening has barely begun.

Being a Man festival runs from 24-26 November at Southbank Centre. More info and tickets available here: southbankcentre.co.uk/being-a-man

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.