Two weeks ago, the following notice appeared on the fence of a building site in the northern-English town where I live:
Warning: men and women at work*
Men and women: the text is a sign that the construction industry is finally starting to recognise the many female workers it employs. The text, by being so unusual, also invites passers-by to reflect on this fact: that is, that some of the people who build our homes and offices and bus stations, are women.
I’ll come back to this in a moment, but first: Sweden and Hong Kong.
I’ve just returned from a journey to Sweden, where I got my first sight of the latte pappas: Swedish fathers who care for their children full-time. They can be seen out on the streets with prams and diaper-changing bags, and they walk around completely independently, without being accompanied by a mother.
If this presented a culture shock to someone living in Britain, that does not mean Sweden is the only place in the world where independent fathering is normal. In fact, the latte pappas reminded me of something I saw in Hong Kong years ago:
This poster in the underground of Hong Kong was warning against pickpockets, but it did something else as well: normalise fathers who take care of their children unaided by any mother. And it looks like baby and daddy make a good team.
Meanwhile, back in my English town last week, the notice on the construction site had been ‘corrected’:
Warning: men and men at work
Who did this? A humorous passer-by? It that case, the deletion only emphasises the newness of this language: the corrector must have found the incongruousness of working women so huge, that to draw attention to it seemed funny.
Or was the sign defaced by a worker him[?]self? Perhaps someone with an obsessive compulsion for correctness who wanted to point at that at this particular site, no women were employed? Or a male worker who thought that no women ought to work there? Or someone else still?
Perhaps a Hong Kong latte pappa can come over and teach his mates here a lesson in new gender roles?**
* It seems justified to insert a colon here: the warning is not directed at those who are at work.
** I haven’t touched on the issue of class here – the term ‘latte pappa’ at least sounds privileged – for which we would need to combine knowledge about the person(s) who defaced the construction notice, what classed message is transmitted by the Hong Kong poster, what use Swedish working-class fathers make of the state’s care benefit system, etc.
Photo credits: women at work by JHMS; Hong Kong father by APHG.
Historian at large 