My wife, Maureen, and I are standard-issue modern parents. Our children are standard-issue twins, a boy and a girl, 3¾ years old. We push my daughter toward the toy trucks and my son can hug all the dolls he likes; nothing is "for boys" or "for girls." We want them to feel unconstrained by gender, free to pursue their interests.

Yet Abe is a typical little boy. Everything is urgent. He yearns to kick balls and hit things with sticks; he is in a state of perpetual wigglehood. We keep his hair short. We keep Ivy's long. She's cuddly and talks about ponies. She insists on dresses. And she starts to dance the moment pop music is playing, moving Coachella-style (free arm waggle, toe touch, arms out and spinning, repeat) but right on the beat. Abe tries to dance too, but…well….

We tell them that a girl can do anything, be anything. But the world constantly interferes with our intentions. One week, both kids seemed to grow several inches and needed new underwear immediately. We went to Target but could find only the Hello Kitty and Avengers varieties. At that moment, parents truly committed to erasing the boundaries between genders would have stomped out of the store and found a place that sells handmade, natural-fiber undergarments free of gender signifiers, but for God's sake we were already at Target. So since that trip my daughter has been covering her nethers with icons of a mouthless cat and my son obscures his with Thor. A small battle lost.

When you have kids, you realize how gender roles are part of the deep structure of the world, and how quickly those roles seep into tiny, growing brains. There's a photo of a little girl on the box that holds my daughter's doll; the toy truck says "back up" in a male voice. The women at day care painted my daughter's toenails and not my son's. He was jealous, so my wife painted his toenails too—and then we worried that the ladies at day care would be upset (they weren't, really).

Sometimes my wife and I discuss what it would take to raise our children with true gender equality, the kind that progressive parents are supposed to achieve, the kind they talked about in the 1970s. I think it would require us to move to the moon.

Plus, my daughter looks so cute in a dress with bows in her hair. Holding hands with my son in a pair of shorts. That's an acceptable happiness, right, taking pleasure in that?

But at the same time my son needs to know that "feminine" things are as important as masculine. Like, I don't know, knitting. We'll have failed as parents if our son rejects knitting as beneath his station. And yet if my son does not want to knit, we must not force him to. Nor will we push our daughter away from knitting, should she wish to take it up. These are the things my wife and I discuss. We are raising children, not statements; the world is what it is. Except….

There's this thing a lot of men say—I've said it myself. We say, "Of course I'm a feminist; I have a daughter." But men have had daughters for as long as there have been humans. I'm calling myself out on this. I'm saying, Okay, if I'm serious about equality for my daughter, is my muddled "everyone is equal" vigilance enough? Is it enough to tell our daughter that she can be whatever she wants? How can we ensure she can be whatever she wants?

Look at the big, wide world: We're 95 years out from the constitutional amendment that gave American women the vote—the 19th, to be precise—and yet, as is oft tweeted out, women make 78.3 percent of what men do (this from census data). That's the world my daughter is entering.

There are a lot of other studies that show women make less than men, and will continue to do so, despite the fact that in America, at least, more women are graduating from college than men. For example, the World Economic Forum published a report entitled 2095: The Year of Gender Equality in the Workplace, Maybe. ("Maybe!") That document says that women do more than four hours of unpaid work every day, whereas men do two and a half.

A woman on average will make $434,000 less than a man over her career.

Women are caregivers across the globe. Caring for children, or for sick parents, keeps them from paid employment. Around a quarter of American women quit jobs for family reasons; 10 percent of men do. It adds up: A woman on average will make $434,000 less than a man over her career, according to a Center for American Progress study. The gap is much greater if you compare men and women who went to college—$713,000.

Meaning if we raise our daughter as the "equal" of our son, we'll still have come up 21.7 percent short. How do we give Ivy the same opportunities as Abe? Do we praise her 21.7 percent more? Hug her 21.7 percent harder?

I know that prognostication is dicey, and that my children's world will be very different from our own. Robots will build more screens; computers will be less devices and more ambient omnipresences. The people who succeed will be those who can work with huge volumes of symbolic information, who can move data around in meaningful ways. The problem is, the things that we're told will be most valuable in the future are, today, controlled by men. Programming and engineering are notoriously male dominated. If robots are going to do more manual labor, and if to succeed you'll need to be in the robot business, then the future is going to belong to the Abes, not the Ivys. It's disturbing.

And then I realized, Maybe I can buy my way out of this one.

My wife and I are 40. We weigh too much and sleep too little and exist for our children: to feed them even though they throw our food; to get them to go to bed even though they refuse to go.

Maureen and I met 10 years ago. You could say I was a struggling writer, but I was just struggling. I was washing my clothes in the bathtub, and my paychecks went uncashed in a shoebox. Maureen told me to do my laundry and helped me balance my books.

She made more money than I did back then, and her life was the one with more options. At the time I was a computer programmer and writer. This was a basically useless combination, like being a carpenter who sings.

So along we went, both of us working—some good years, some lean ones. When we got married, I promised to keep us in the lower middle class. That meant both parties would work: We'd rent an apartment, manage to afford health care; our kids would go to state schools.

But then, around 2010, a bunch of things happened. I was a nerd who understood publishing at the moment when publishers wanted to understand nerds. So I started to make more money than my wife. She had a job in construction, training carpenters how to use different materials. She liked the work a lot.

Then she got pregnant with twins. The pregnancy had complications. Her doctor insisted we move to an elevator building immediately, to keep my wife off of stairs. Craving security, we bought an apartment, spending every cent we had.

So we had twins on the way and little cash to spare. I was making more, Maureen less. We did the math, and we didn't have enough money for full-time child care for two babies, so we decided I'd make the money and she'd stay home. It's a very familiar moment in a lot of lives, this moment of economic divergence.

The plan was she'd be out for a year, then we'd send the kids to day care and she'd get a job. That didn't work. We did send the kids to day care, but Maureen still isn't back in the workforce. She's tried everything. She attended a two-year construction-project management program and graduated with excellent grades. She sent out an insane flurry of résumés, found a mentor, called headhunters.

She prepared our taxes with such care that our accountant hired her part time. She did such a good job helping manage a nonprofit that its executive director offered to turn her into a project manager—but for the software business, and Maureen wants to be in construction.

Older women who work in that field have taken my wife aside to explain just how sexist construction can be. But other people have told us about a hiring freeze—her male classmates in her two-year program are also looking for jobs. Many of these same people advise her to wait, to stay in the industry. "It needs women," they've said.

And we can afford to do this, to wait. So we do. Hoping it will pay off in long-term happiness. But there is also a gap between us. She earns money doing bookkeeping, but she is sometimes ashamed of how insignificant the amount is. She's got too much brain to not be busy. She's earning negative compound interest on her choices—including the choice to stay home with the kids—while I just keep accelerating. She sends out more résumés; I just started a company.

During our time together, I've gotten to know the story of her life, played it back many times. Every time she decided to change her path—to go into construction, to return to school—it took substantial effort and planning, people were critical, and sometimes it just didn't work. And every time I decided to change something—I was going to go to graduate school, then just sort of…changed my mind, wasn't in the mood—it worked out fine.

Plenty of women will read this story and shrug: She just should have tried harder; she should volunteer more; she should get out of construction; and so forth. But others will read it and sigh and say, "Sounds familiar."

The thing is, men just get to make more choices, take more risks. We get to change our minds more often. And we don't end up removing ourselves from economic circulation for a year or more when we have children, not usually. It looks like that when I survey my friends, and it looks like that when you read the statistics.

My wife does not have a full-time job, and she wants one, and that is out of our control. In 2015, my wife makes much less than me, and barring something surprising happening, she probably always will.

She is my equal, but the world keeps telling her that she isn't. I don't want that for Ivy.

There is an overall American deal, I think. Not everyone gets it, but everyone should. And the deal is that you get to invent yourself at least once or twice, the way Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain. You get to start a company or write some poems or build a house in the woods. I'm a writer simply because I said, "I'm a writer," and after years of my saying it, people agreed to publish my work. In other words, in my opinion, the American dream means all of us have the right to be an obsessive pain in the ass and do what we want for a few years. Even if it doesn't pan out.

But for women, those few years are automatically assigned to child-rearing. If a woman doesn't have children, then she can take more chances with her career. If she does have children, forget it.

I don't really need to tell you this, do I? But can I make an observation? Without recognizing it, Maureen and I assumed that the money she made would go for child care. This doesn't make any sense, really. We share a bank account; our money all goes to the same place. But somehow we decided it was her job to earn enough to finance day care. Think about it: I expected my wife to justify the freelance work she was doing by covering child-care costs. It's weird. But we just took it for granted.

Sometimes I imagine Ivy's future. I can see my daughter as many wonderful things, but now I imagine her at age 35, a junior vice president, stepping purposefully from her office one morning to walk down a number of interlinked, carpeted corridors, smiling at peers who, like her, have successfully navigated their way to a peak career moment at a peak technology and media firm. This is my daughter, entering the clinic at the giant company where she works, where everyone is professionally nice and dressed in medical white. No one is going to question her judgment or second-guess her. They'll put her under a local anesthetic and extract a cluster of eggs for grading and freezing.

I mean, that is the natural consequence of ambition, right? Deferred child-rearing? Frozen eggs? Apple and Facebook will pay for it now, after all. Another weird solution to the problem of ambitious women.

How much difference, in hard dollar figures, will there be between my daughter and son? If they go to college, they'll enter the workforce in 2032. Let's say my daughter's starting salary (adjusted for inflation) is something like $80,000. Further adjusted for inflation, getting out into 2070 or so, we're looking at somewhere between $1 million and $3 million of lost wages for her, at least according to my spreadsheets. It's a huge number and it bums me out.

How much difference, in hard dollar figures, will there be between my daughter and son? ... We're looking at somewhere between $1 million and $3 million of lost wages for her.

For a girl born in 2011 to have the same opportunity as her brother—for her not to have to repeat the challenges faced by her mother—I need to identify and contribute to an investment vehicle that can yield $3 million. That's daunting.

Maybe things will get better—the World Economic Forum did predict that we could have equal wages for men and women by 2095, but that's a long way out, and my girl's childbearing years are going to be between roughly 2022 and 2050. Time to start saving.

I'm thinking I'll call it the JTG fund, for Jump the Gap. I'm working with a lawyer to organize it. Right now I'm not sure how often I can afford to do this, but at least I'll take my fee for this article—several thousand dollars—and put it in a separate account. I have no idea how to turn that into a few million dollars, but I do know that putting money in the bank is better than not doing it. So once I'm paid, this thing becomes real.

I've been telling my friends about my idea. Interestingly, one of the first questions they ask is: What if your son is gay?

I don't know why they ask this, but they do. There are a lot of false equivalencies in this world. Like assuming that child-care costs are somehow my wife's responsibility. But so what if he's gay? If anything, that will give him more options; he'll be able to focus on his career, and there will be no risk of an unplanned pregnancy. He can wait until he's 50 to have a kid, should he want one. That's the way of sperm. He'll be exhausted, but he won't be broke.

And what if your daughter doesn't want children?

Well, then, she'll have some extra cash.

Won't your son be jealous?

I don't know. Probably some days. Just because we're doing this for our daughter doesn't mean we're done with our son. There are going to be college funds. If he needs money, and we have it, we'll give it to him.

This isn't about favoring one child. The parents I know in their sixties and seventies are still shelling out to subsidize a down payment on a house or to put a grandchild in private school. Children could always use some help, some easing in the world.

So I'm not saying that we won't help Abe as much as we can. If he were hurt in some way that required special technology to move around, we'd go all in. We'd sell the apartment to buy the technology if we had to. But we can't predict that.

We can predict that, because of the systematic economic inequities, our daughter will not be on the same financial footing as our son. And so why not start now? If the wage gap is going to be there for the rest of our lives, and we know we want to help our children for the rest of our lives, it seems like the most ethical thing to do. (It's odd to think that if we have grandchildren, they'll be born into this same wage gap.)

I've been thinking of the right way to structure the fund. Perhaps it could be set up to disburse 25 percent on top of her salary, once a month. A nice bonus. Or maybe it's better to just make it a plain old trust, let her have the whole lump sum when she reaches a certain age—35?

But what if she wants to be a mom at 25? That might be wonderful for her and the kid, especially if she could afford help. It's hard to even imagine a young, ambitious, college-educated woman of the kind we plan to raise having a child in her mid-twenties, but…isn't that also a great age to have a child? (Not to mention that Ivy could get pregnant at 19 and decide to keep the child, and then, chances are, she'd really need the extra money.)

What if she gets rich and your son is poor and she doesn't want to share any of her money? What if she uses the money to buy heroin? Or to join a cult? What if it makes her feel that she's somehow better?

I think that if we do a decent job raising our children, they will know and understand why we did this, why we gave one child more money than the other. Because we'll point out the inequities in our own relationship, the inequities we grew up with, the thousand generations of inequities, and tell our kids that this mattered to us, that giving them an even playing field mattered.

We don't want to control her with money. We don't want to be up in her uterus. That's no place for parents to be.

I hope my daughter is not addicted to heroin. It would be an awful waste of this opportunity if it went up her arm. If my son needs money, I hope she'll share it.

Isn't it weird to be thinking about your daughter's childbearing years while she's three?

Yes, it's terrible. We don't want to control her with money. We don't want to be up in her uterus. That's no place for parents to be.

I think basically we have to teach her to be financially responsible, careful. Then we have to give her whatever money we can save to make up the wage gap—and back away. Because the whole point of this plan is to allow our daughter to take more risks, to schedule her own life, to find balance between her private and professional lives. I hope she doesn't give all the money to a cult. I hope no one exploits her. I hope she opts to have the fund be disbursed slowly, or leaves it alone to earn interest.

But I don't want control. I want the opposite; I want to know that I created freedom for another person, freedom that otherwise might be impossible. I'd enjoy knowing that we'd paid down all the obvious taxes that women pay on womanhood, starting when my girl was just learning to dress herself.

After the bank account is established, we'll be 1/250th of the way there. It's a long way to go. I suppose we could just will her our apartment, which is turning out to have been a good investment, but that does feel like true favoritism; this is where my children grew up. It wouldn't be kind to my son.

There's another criticism here, one that no one has offered to me but that bothers me: Why don't I take the money and put it back into the world? Help with basic literacy, fund a women's health clinic, build a school somewhere? Why dump all this cash into a woman who will have access to education, who will be accorded many privileges—a decent public education, clean and even stylish clothes, as many books as she can read, dozens of digital devices and toys?

I hear that. I should do more. But this is…my daughter. This is the situation I can manage, the responsibility given to me, and it's an immediate one. I am doing this because of a deep and abiding love for my children, and because I want there to be more fairness in their world. I hope that transfers to the broader world.

And I am doing it with my wife's consent, because we agree that Maureen's situation is frustrating. She's paying an awfully high price for her gender, my wife—underemployed, underutilized. She wants to participate but isn't sure how.

We can't go back and change our decisions or return to the parity we had as a couple in 2003 any more than we can get back our ungray hair or go on impromptu vacations. We wouldn't want to, because of all that has come between that year and now.

My daughter does not know yet that she is not as free and equal as my son. I would like it if she never has to learn that. I will solve the problem in an American way, by purchasing her equality and hoping for the best. This is a gift I can give to my family.

This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of ELLE.

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