Child Custody and Gender Bias: Are Courts Anti-Father?

I’ve said on this blog a few times before — some quite recently — that the Michigan court system (and in fact the American court system) is biased toward mothers when it comes to child custody. This is true in a strictly legal sense, as the assumption regarding the children of unmarried parents is that the mother should automatically retain full custody. But there’s a solid reason behind that: absent some form of legal documentation of paternity, the father of a child is always in question.

The more pressing question, and one that’s been called to my attention a few times over the past few weeks, is this: are Michigan courts actually biased against fathers in general? There are some depressing statistics in this regard:

• 83% of sole-custody awards go to women.
• When men get awarded child support, they average 17% less than women.
• A huge 40% of married American households feature a woman who is a primary breadwinner, but only 3% of American spousal support arrangements are paid to ex-husbands.

As slanted as those statistics are, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the courts are biased against fathers — and there’s solid evidence that they are! But that’s not really the problem. The problem is that people are biased against fathers. Oftentimes, fathers are biased against themselves!

(Now, I don’t want this to become a big messy blog post about gender roles and sexism and all that stuff, so I’m going to keep it very simple and discuss only the most broad-stroke cultural tendencies. We’re all aware that there are thousands of small ways in which any given family can and will vary from the cultural norm, but it’s the norm itself (not those individual instances) that is problematic.)

Most Custody Arrangements Aren’t Determined By the Courts
The first piece of evidence is perhaps the most powerful: 91% of custody agreements are made without the court having to issue a ruling on the matter. Whether it’s on their own, with the help of a mediator, or after consulting with the extended family, more than 9 out of 10 moms who end up with custody of their child do so with no judge involved. (This is what I mean when I say fathers are biased against themselves.)

But Court-Determined Custody Arrangements Are Still Strongly Anti-Father
That said, there is still a powerful anti-father bias in American society as a whole, and that unfortunately includes many (but not all) judges. While no studies are available specific to Michigan, here are a scattering of results from other state’s inquiries:

• Minnesota: 56% of judges agreed with the statement “I believe young children belong with their mother.”
• Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, & Louisiana: 72% of judges disagreed with the statement “Fathers, by nature, are better parents than mothers.” Only 34% of judges disagreed with the statement “Mothers, by nature, are better parents than fathers.”
• Colorado: Older judges were ‘more likely’ (no specific number given) to default to mother’s-custody and openly put the burden of proof on the father to prove that the mother is unfit. Younger judges still showed preference to mothers, but generally did so after personal consideration of the facts rather than putting the burden on the father.

Clearly, there are still significant obstacles to gender neutrality in custody cases even when you only take into account those cases decided by a judge rather than by the parents (with or without the help of a third party). Next post, we’ll talk about the law behind the dilemma and why it’s not that much help as it stands.