Q&A: A Facilitator’s Perspective on B.O.O.K. Club
Next Gen Men’s weekly email newsletter, The Future of Masculinity, recently sat down with Eric Arthrell, an NGM friend and facilitator of our B.O.O.K. Club program. Eric is also the researcher behind Deloitte’s Design of the Everyday Man report, and, in this installment, he explores how those findings inform him in discussions with B.O.O.K. Club participants, and his own experiences as a stay-at-home dad.
Q: Eric, who are you and what do you do?
Eric: My name is Eric ArthrelI. Currently I am one of the facilitators for BOOK Club—Beyond Our Own Knowledge Club—which is a place where male-identifying leaders get together to read a book about an experience unlike their own.
And then we talk about it and see what kind of learnings and what kind of reflections we can have from those experiences.
In my day job, I am an Inclusion Manager at Deloitte, for our global consulting practice. So that means working with inclusion and talent leaders globally, and advising on inclusion, diversity, equity and inclusion strategy for our consulting business. That’s afterward.
And then there’s my other hat. The real Eric. He is a stay-at-home dad—especially during COVID—with a three-year-old and a 10-month-old and a wife, who I love.
And trying to figure out how you show up in this new world as an equitable and empowered—and empowering—partner and father and friend and everything. So yeah, that’s me.
Q: Those three hats—husband, father, researcher—how do they complement each other?
E: They came together just before my daughter was—well, I can’t remember if our daughter was in existence at this point, but the thought of our daughter was in existence at this point.
Before I took on the Inclusion Manager role at Deloitte, I worked in the consulting business with clients like any other management consultant would, and I became really interested in man’s role at working at home, and being a more equitable partner.
So I started doing some research, taking a human-centred design research approach. Basically that means talking to a bunch of men and understanding their experiences and trying to get inside their heads. Things like why-they-did-what-they-did and felt-what-they-felt—specifically, I was interested in the aspect of maternity leave and I wondered why the majority of men that I saw in the workplace just weren’t taking paternity leave.
And the narrative was that men just don't want to take paternity leave. And that was not at all what the men who I talked to were saying—from the men who were 60+ years old all the way down to, like, brand new fathers. From them, I was hearing that there was a sincere desire to want to take more time for kids.
It just wasn’t something that a good man or a good husband or a good father did. A good husband, a good father went to work and made money and supported the family that way. And so I became really interested in paternity leave as a way to actually empower women to return to the workforce and take on more—essentially by lessening their mental load at home, with men showing up more equitably.
So I started researching in this space, and that led to me to co-authoring a project for Deloitte called The Design of Everyday Men. And it was through that that I was introduced to Jake, and Jake and I just jived right off the right off the top, in terms of values, perspectives, ideas. He brought a whole wealth and depth of knowledge that I had never been exposed to before. So that was definitely, you know, a horse I wanted to hitch my wagon to, so to speak.
So we’ve been connected ever since, and that’s how I started facilitating BOOK Club, and that’s what I love about it—getting to talk about all this stuff with Jake and our participants, working through where we do align, where we don’t, where we each have blindspots or a different angle we see.
Q: I’m interested about the word design in the work that you did. Can you tell me more about that report and why it was a design that was behind this narrative?
E: Where that title came from, The Design of Everyday Men—there’s actually a book that's fairly foundational in an industrial design and human-centred design called The Design of Everyday Things. And what this person talks about is basically like, things will be used in the way in which they were designed. And so an efficient design can result in use, or improper use, or workarounds, all of which we create on our own, to account for poor design.
So the design of an everyday thing is what encourages the interaction with that thing. And there’s a purposefulness that goes into designing something, for it to be used in a certain way.
And so I basically took that catchy title and was like, OK, well, how are men designed? How are they shaped into being a certain way? What does that mean for how they show up at work, and at home, and in society overall?
There is the phrase “boys will be boys,” which to me, when I hear that phrase, reads as “men will be pieces of shit if you let men be pieces of shit.” And I don’t think that's true. I think our men are designed to show up in a certain way, one that can be detrimental to others and to themselves.
And so when we say “boys will be boys”—we are designing boys to be that way, and we’re not designing them to be other ways.
Q: So what did you find—why don’t men take paternity leave?
E: Well, you know, it’s a really tough conversation because, in a Canadian environment, parental leave is zero sum. If I take six months, my wife does not get those six months. And so what does a good husband do?
Well, a good husband does not take maternity leave away from their wife. A good husband, you know, stays in the workforce and does their part by making money. Or at least, that’s been the design.
And then research shows that—because of those early months and early years, when wives tend to stay at home and men tend to go to work—that creates a hugely unequal landing for men and women, just to succeed in an equal way in the workplace.
And if you’re not succeeding in an equal in the workplace, you’re not achieving levels of power and status in equal ways.
From the Future of Masculinity weekly newsletter, where our community’s hearts and minds come together each week to do the work, tell the stories, and build the blueprint for a future where men and boys experience less pain and cause less harm.