Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home
Author: Kate Mangino
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Cover Description
From gender expert and professional facilitator Kate Mangino comes Equal Partners, an informed guide about how we can all collectively work to undo harmful gender norms and create greater household equity.
As American society shut down due to COVID, millions of women had to leave their jobs to take on full-time childcare. As the country opens back up, women continue to struggle to balance the demands of work and home life. Kate Mangino, a professional facilitator for twenty years, has written a comprehensive, practical guide for readers and their partners about gender norms and household balance. Yes, part of our gender problem is structural, and that requires policy change. But much of our gender problem is social, and that requires us to change.
Quickly moving from diagnosis to solution, Equal Partners focuses on what we can do, everyday people living busy lives, to rewrite gender norms to support a balanced homelife so both partners have equal time for work, family, and self. Mangino adopts an interactive model, posing questions, and asking readers to assess their situations through guided lists and talking points. Equal Partners is broad in its definition of gender and gender roles. This is a book for all: straight, gay, trans, and non-binary, parents and grandparents, and friends, with the goal to help foster gender equality in readers' homes, with their partners, family and wider community.
TL;DR Review
Equal Partners is a quick read with useful insights and suggestions to help everyone in a home work toward equal distribution, not just visible labor but cognitive labor too.
For you if: You live with a partner.
Full Review
I picked up Equal Partners after reading the author’s interview with Anne Helen Petersen in the Culture Study newsletter. Every partnership is different, and all people are different, but no matter what, it’s hard to achieve a truly balanced distribution of labor (visible and cognitive) that goes into a household. It takes active work from both people involved, and this book has some useful suggestions on how to work toward it.
The book is split into three sections: research and info about the problem of unequal distribution of labor, suggestions for partners, and broader societal changes that must be made. The middle is by far the most useful, especially if you are pretty well versed in modern gender issues, but I appreciated all of it. There are also some really interesting takeaways from couples she found who had actually achieved equal partnership in the home. I thought it had some reflection exercises and conversation guides that were useful in real life, as well.
I also appreciated that Mangino made an intentional effort to break out of gender stereotypes (and the gender binary) as much as possible. It occasionally felt like she tried a bit too hard — going slightly off topic to explain gender concepts that most people understand nowadays — but better too much than too little.