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Using an approach combining quantitative and qualitative data, this article examines the reconfigurations of male roles induced by women's increased participation in the labour market and in household spending in Dakar and Lomé. These changes marginally affect men's involvement in domestic work and their contribution remains limited, occasional and focused on certain very specific tasks, and even more so in Dakar than in Lomé. Alongside a dominant masculinity based on the idealized male breadwinner model, other practices seem to emerge, taking place in the private sphere of the home, and mainly with regard to the education of children. But these are a further extension of the role of household head and represent forced reconfigurations of male practices that have lost their usual field of expression and structure (providing materially for the family). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]