When Intention Meets Everyday Reality

Gender equality in unpaid care is a large and complex issue. To make it possible to investigate behaviour rather than discuss the ambition in the abstract, the project narrowed the focus to something observable:

“fathers independently assuming primary responsibility for at least one recurring childcare routine”

Examples included feeding, bedtime, school drop-off or appointments.

That created a more useful question:

When behaviour isn’t changing, it is tempting to explain the problem by looking at the person whose behaviour we want to change.

• They don’t know enough.
• They aren’t confident enough.
• They aren’t motivated enough.

Those explanations lead naturally to familiar interventions: more information, more training, more persuasion.

But the project asked a different question:

The exploratory data complicated the obvious diagnosis.

Respondents generally reported confidence in managing childcare independently and agreement that mothers and fathers were equally capable. Support for shared caregiving was also generally strong.

What emerged more strongly were conditions around the behaviour: work schedules, time constraints, established routines and persistent default expectations about who does what.

Observed behaviour

Fathers are not consistently assuming independent responsibility for recurring childcare routines.

Easy explanation

They need more knowledge, capability or motivation.

What the evidence suggested instead

Capability was largely present. Motivation appeared broadly supportive. The stronger constraints were in the conditions surrounding the behaviour.

If the project had accepted the obvious diagnosis, the intervention might have focused on awareness, information or persuasion — helping fathers understand why greater participation matters or encouraging them to become more involved.

But the exploratory evidence pointed elsewhere.

1. If people don’t know what to do

   → provide information or guidance.

2. If people don’t know how to do it

   → build capability.

3. But if people are willing and capable, while existing conditions keep reproducing the old behaviour

   → change the conditions around the behaviour.

The project therefore explored interventions including clearer ownership of recurring childcare routines, improved coordination and greater flexibility around work and family demands. One concept proposed assigning independent ownership of a specific recurring routine and embedding that responsibility into coordination families already used.

The purpose was not to tell people once again that shared caregiving matters.

It was to make the intended behaviour easier to perform consistently within everyday life.

Designing an intervention still doesn’t tell us whether it will work.

So the project distinguished between starting a behaviour and sustaining it.

The testing plan proposed examining whether fathers independently performed the chosen routine, whether partners still needed to remind or step in, and whether responsibility persisted after the initial intervention.

Longer-term follow-up over three to six months was proposed to look for established habits — or evidence that work demands and previous routines were pulling behaviour back towards its earlier pattern.

Evidence that an intervention isn’t holding would not simply mean the participants had failed. It would provide new information about the conditions still shaping the behaviour.

This project sharpened a question I now carry into much broader implementation work:

• An employee may not follow a new process.
• A community may not participate in a programme.
• A customer may not use a sustainable service.
• A team may return to its previous way of working.

Those behaviours can quickly be labelled as resistance, lack of awareness or insufficient motivation.

But the constraint may sit somewhere else — in time, access, routines, incentives, relationships, organisational structures or competing demands.

Before deciding what people need to do differently, I therefore want to understand what conditions are making the current behaviour make sense.