Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, is currently in Ballarat after going on a whirlwind public engagement tour through Victoria and Tasmania.

She has written seven books on marriage and family life, with her text Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage cited in the recent USA Supreme Court decision to allow marriage equality, making her something of a heroine in the gay rights movement.

Dr Coontz is also a frequent guest columnist for the New York Times, writes for CNN.com, the Observer/Guardian, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. She has also appeared on Oprah among other top-ranking American television shows, and several prime-time documentaries including one hosted by Barbara Walters.

She is in Australia thanks to Ballarat LGBTI spokesman Luke Gahan and the Australian Sociological Association.

Dr Coontz said Ballarat could look to cities like Quebec in Canada, where 76 per cent of men now took substantial paternity leave on the birth of a new baby.

She said results had shown men who had the opportunity to engage more in the domestic sphere, even after they returned to the workforce, tended to play with their children more and do more housework.

Dr Coontz said engaging men at home had been a missing aspect of the feminist movement over the past few decades. She said the problem wasn’t just in male resistance, it was also that “affirmative action” hadn’t been taken to integrate men into the home more.

“Girls who have involved fathers grow up to have far more wide-ranging aspirations to go into the kinds of jobs that are not gender-stereotyped, and we find that boys who have those kinds of fathers grow up to be much more empathetic,” she said.

“We’ve been working for a long time on integrating women more into the office, but now I think the next phase of the gender revolution is to integrate men more into the domestic sphere.”

Dr Coontz also raised concerns about the gender pay gap that couldn’t be explained by “supposedly objective factors” that was attributable simply to “direct discrimination”.

“Unmarried women are making 90-95 per cent of what unmarried men are making, but it’s when women have children that that’s when they tend to pay,” she said.

“What really reduces the gender pay gap is generous provision of affordable and decent childcare that parents can trust.”

Dr Coontz will be in Ballarat until Monday.