After the pandemic, women have been recalled to the office more – but that doesn’t mean men are doing their fair share of chores. She commutes to the office every morning; he stays at home with the children and a laptop. This is now common among young, middle-class families in the area of London where self-described “work from home husband” Daniel Tannenbaum, 34, lives.
“At the school my eldest goes to, there are more dads than mums doing the school run, not just in the morning but at 3.30 or 4pm too,” says Tannenbaum. While Tannenbaum runs his own digital marketing company, his wife, Samantha, 35, is a dentist and partner at a Hertfordshire clinic.
Their situation “came about naturally”, he explains. “I attend to the children [aged 2 and 5] if they’re sick or up at night, because if my wife is too tired, she might drill into someone’s cheek.” The Tannenbaums are part of a post-Covid phenomenon: more women than men have been hauled back into the office, as their jobs – disproportionately in education, retail or healthcare – can’t be done properly (or at all) from home.
Among the couple’s friends are stay-at-home dads working as insurance brokers, surveyors and startup founders, and office-based mums in the public sector or working in healthcare jobs like Samantha. “It works very well for all of us,” Daniel says, “but my in-laws find this way of living very bizarre and alternative, as they’ve got a strong concept of gender roles and whos.
