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In Portugal, men’s roles in gender equality have to be understood in the context of the historical and political dynamics that, over the past few decades, have promoted gender equality policies orientated to the improvement of women’s social conditions. As a result, a model of the ‘adult worker’, with a very high percentage of women working fulltime, is until today predominant. Likewise, concerns with work-family balance and women’s equality were for a long time blind to men’s participation in private life. Gender equality was to be achieved, first and foremost, by women and mainly in the public sphere.

The rapid inclusion of women in the labour market and the promotion of policies guided towards gender equality, which gained pace after the 1974 democratic revolution and the end of the right-wing authoritarian regime of the Estado Novo (1926-1974), were of major importance to promote the model of a dual-earner couple, even when children are small. As a result, Portugal has followed a quite dualistic inroad into gender equality insofar as women participate more in the labour market than men in the domestic sphere. As research findings have shown, these developments have been translated into sharp inequalities, even if men’s participation in household tasks and care responsibilities has been changing, slowly but steadily. Indeed, a number of transformations over the past decade have paved the way for the emergence of new forms of gender division of labour and, most importantly, of new models of masculinity underpinned by a renewed vision of the gender contract. Even so, men are still the dominant players in a number of key arenas of …