Compromising Fatherhood: Expansion Versus Constriction in Fathers' Gender Identities and Role Performances
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Objective Our study examines how fathers perceive and negotiate incongruities between their personal gender identities as men compared to their interpersonal gender role performances as fathers . Background Fatherhood today is shaped strongly by contradictions around gender expectations. Many fathers feel ambivalent toward traditional masculine norms that undermine their aspirations to be an involved parent. Understanding how fathers grapple with these contradictions can reveal much about the social‐psychological processes underlying divisions of labor in different‐gender partnerships. Method Our dataset consists of in‐depth interviews with 36 Canadian fathers of young children. Guided by Symbolic Interactionist theory, we take a flexible coding approach to identify and analyze paradoxes around gender, work, and family in fathers' narratives. Results We find that fatherhood is linked simultaneously to identity expansion —by facilitating men to integrate more caring masculinities into their self‐concept and role constriction —through pulls into traditionally gendered work–family arrangements. In the face of this expansion and constriction, fathers make distinct identity‐behavior compromises to bridge a perceptual divide between their gender identity construction and gender role performances. Conclusion We define compromised fatherhood as a social‐psychological manifestation of gendered conflicts at the identity‐behavior nexus and a discursive frame with which fathers account for these conflicts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".