The tight knot for women in politics (and perhaps in life) has been, will always be, this: Everything associated with motherhood has been coded as faintly embarrassing and less than — from mom jeans to mommy brain to the Resistance. And yet to be a bad mom has been disqualifying, and to not be a mom at all is to be understood as lacking something: gravity, value, femininity. Just this month, Tucker Carlson wondered, about New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whether “someone who’s never even raised children gets the right to lecture me about morality,” as if parents are given a moral compass upon the birth of a child.

Fatherhood for male politicians so far has, for the most part, worked only as a bonus. It’s been a way to show off the shiny white teeth of a strong gene pool and an escape hatch from a job you’re getting fired from — in order to spend more time with your family! It’s been a way for powerful men to signal respect for women without evincing femininity themselves: They are the fathers of daughters, folks. At its best, presenting publicly as a committed father has offered an opportunity for men who otherwise cast themselves as tough and authoritative to demonstrate their tender side.
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Even unconventional paternal history has not been brought to bear against men in the way it has against women. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s son, Levi, is most frequently pictured sitting on his dad’s lap as a toddler in the ’70s. That Sanders did not live with the mother of his son, that for years he did not correct press reports that Levi was the product of a first marriage, that Levi called his father “Bernard” from early childhood … these quirks haven’t mattered to Sanders’s campaign, as they should not — but as they certainly would have were he a woman. Donald Trump’s wretchedness as a president is rarely tied to his wretchedness as a father.

But as our expectations for fatherhood rise, even when the fathers castigate themselves for absences, the judgment hasn’t been harsh. Barack Obama openly acknowledged his familial shortfalls in The Audacity of Hope, where he wrote about how, when he ran for Congress in 2000, leaving Michelle at home to care for their two young children, her “anger at me seemed barely contained.” So a man whose first book was about the search for connection with his father was candid about the ways he had often been absent as a parent, and no one cared.