I agree with this and the subtlety of the OP’s argument. There is clearly a problem, there are clearly many contributors, I have personally seen The OP situation play out with my female friends/colleagues in STEM (and other “high power” sectors). This does NOT discount that sexism still is a problem nor that there may be cultural/societal norms that influence the family planning issue.
It’s a complicated issue, it needs to be tackled on many fronts. As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
> As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing an on premise company to a fully remote one. There’s also a hard upper limit on your career because managers are the bottleneck for communication so they almost have to be available when active else is. Arrangements to make flexibility economically profitable are also often denounced, see Uber.
> Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
It would be a better world but flexibility imposes large costs. Obscenely convenient childcare is also far from a panacea. Sweden has cheap to free childcare and it’s available 24/7 for those whose jobs demand it. But while Sweden’s employment rate is very high it’s among the most sex segregated in the world and fertility isn’t noticeably different from countries that aren’t so generous, suggesting the effects on family formation are minimal.
This point of view keeps coming up and it completely misses the point that _this already happens to every single women who has given up their career to look after children_.
This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption.
I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism. It is the biggest issue I have with articles like this.
Stamping out overt workplace harassment and sexism is barely the beginning. There are deep structures in place that have benefited men like me for millennia.
These need to be considered not as complicated side issues but as the core barrier to achieving equity (as opposed to equality) in these fields.
If you or I were to take off a year to be a stay at home dad, would we suffer the same career consequences as women? If the answer is yes, then the issue is that we don't let anyone have children without harming their career, and that sounds counterintuitive and should be fixed.
If the answer is no, then bigotry is at play. It's impossible to know this answer, so we should just make it painless to take time off. I know of plenty of academics who go on sabbatical, fall off the face of the earth, and ignore every department email for a year or however long. This process actually improves their career, not hinder it. Taking time off is harmless.
Saying that women give up a career to look after their children is like lamenting the fact that people are giving up drinking to look after their liver.
The French word for work, 'travail', comes from 'tripalium', a medieval torture instrument. It's bad for everyone, and I definitely think a society where only one parent has to work instead of two is better.
A 'career' is something pop singers and top athletes (male or female) have. They even have agents to manage those careers. But most people have a job; they do work, travail, tripalium.
The fact that people confuse the two is just capitalist propaganda.
How is it a problem that women are looking at the biological realities and choosing motherhood over a 9-5 job? Most people were originally sold on the “problem” being the supposed sexism that prevented women from doing what they really wanted. Now we’re seeing that women don’t really want to work for the man over their children, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe that equal outcomes is the goal in and of itself. Seems like a bait and switch.
Solving this supposed problem with “convenient” (aka tax-funded) childcare is a huge misapplication of resources from the perspective of the family. It benefits big business by increasing the labor supply and driving down wages. It benefits big government by adding taxpayers and creating a problem to be solved with more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the family is trading the value of motherhood (an untaxed $160,000 according to the article) for an average 9-5 job in most cases, plus losing out on quality mother-child time. If a family really wants to make that trade then they can pay for it themselves, but it would be unconscionable to push people toward that outcome by subsidizing childcare.
I am not so sure that the suggested availability of high quality childcare really helps those numbers in STEM.
In Nordic countries (I live in Finland), which are quite well known for having good quality childcare available to all families at low cost, the situation has not increased placement of women in STEM professions.
In fact, quite the opposite: the more "gender-equal" a society, the fewer women study STEM subjects.
Is it possible that the problem there is the amount of women starting studies in stem fields? I don’t have any numbers but anecdotal evidence of two Helsinki based schools in CS related programs had very lopsided gender ratios in bachelors and masters levels.
The correlation of women in STEM graduates and Global Gender Gap index is negative: the higher gender equality, the lower the proportion of women graduating from STEM subjects.
Lost in the modern rush for status and money, "obscenely convenient high quality daycare" used to be called "Motherhood" and was supplied by Mothers themselves. Some would argue, the most valuable contribution to society, even if not directly monetized.
To sustain a healthy population, we used to need 10 children per fertile woman, which made "stay at home Mother" an obvious necessity for the vast majority of women. In modern times, we get by with 2 children per fertile woman, and that frees up a lot of female energy to be channeled elsewhere. It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders. And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife. That is why the newly affluent men of the mid-20th century wanted it so much. They came out of the great depression, fought a great war, and wanted a wife at home. You should not judge all of history by this one era.
The work of child care used to fall on the entire extended family. The nuclear family reduced the flexibility in raising children. It was further reduced by a lack of work-life balance for both fathers and mothers. When women started working (again) the lack of flexibility fell on the mothers to fix.
In my own life - I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked. I had flexibility through daycare, my awesome husband, my awesome mother, and my awesome employers. I know they are all awesome because when my daughter (a software engineer) faced the same issues, her employer was not at all flexible. She quit work to stay at home with her three boys. I have a bunch of engineering friends who faced the same issues as my daughter. I originally thought they left the workforce out of choice and now I know they did not.
Of course! But that's only a tiny minority of wealthy women. Nobody is claiming that, historically, women did not work. It's just that female work was performed in proximity of their young children and interweaved with their care. Which is work in itself as well.
The historical norm of peasant societies is gendered work roles. Roughly speaking, the male works in the fields and the female works around the house / village. This pattern is even present across age groups, not uncommon to see 10 year boys herding the cows to pasture, and 10 year girls milking the cows at home. While I'm aware there are task and/or region and/or period specific exceptions, we're talking of the general pattern of [european] peasant societies here.
Women working away from their house and young children is the prevalent modern anomaly.
Working around the house/village is still work. Male peasants for the most part don't work outside the house/village either. They usually work on fields that relatively close to where they live. And a large fraction of the women work alongside them. Older men and women - grandpas and grandmas, etc. - do a lot of the childrearing while the younger women work.
Not sure about the US but here in Eastern Europe our peasant grandmothers were definitely working on the fields themselves, most of the times even longer hours than the men. It was the job of the very old women around the house to stay at home and take care of the eventual infants, but even then, that was an exception rather than the rule. I know that one of my grand-grand-mothers wanted to go and work the fields until her late 80s, together with everybody else from the extended family, staying at home was a sign of weakness and was seen as almost courting sickness/death.
Prior to industrialization, most women were home-makers.
And home-making was no slacking off either. Managing expenses, food (storage & cooking), raising children (feeding, teaching, playing), social bonding (neighbors, communities) etc. It kept their hands full.
> Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife.
Running an aristocratic, bourgeois or farming household is a full time job, just as much as being an office manager. Post WW2 mass affluence with lesser time demands for running a household due to domestic appliances and other convenience led quickly to women exiting full time household management and joining the labor market.
Just a small additional comment - if a company creates an environment that encourages community then they will keep women. I was lucky to work at two companies like this - Xerox and early Apple. I don't think they set out to create a family friendly environment. They were trying to have an environment that encouraged creativity. They were part of the zeitgeist of the Bay Area. It just happened to also be family friendly. Those days are gone (sadly).
> Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife.
You really need some data to back it up here. "I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked." is not good evidence. For one, there is a representative issue. For another, there is a huge difference between part-time work and full-time work. We don't know how many hours your mother, grandmothers, and great grandmothers worked, or worked for how many years.
Apparently the data contradicted with your own personal experience. This is why we should try to avoid general argument based on our on personal experience.
Labor force does count the actual workforce. They only count "wage slaves". One grandmother was a farmer. She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband. So she would not have been counted. I am not clear if it would have counted my other grandmother since she was a business owner. She owned a beauty salon. She also opened the first health food store in Berkeley with her sister to put my mother and her cousins through college. I doubt either would have been counted as labor force participation. My mother was counted.
> She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband.
Neither would have her husband been counted in the non-farm labour force survey. Thus swapping husband for wife would not have shown up as a change in the first place.
This is an interesting discussion. I remember my economists professor talking about how in Alberta during the 2006 boom labour force participation dropped as wages increased. In that case it was an example of the in-elasticity of labour demand.
From the social aspect it was an example of how for many families 2 working parents is not optional. A situation was fully true earlier in the industrial revolution. As the revolution progressed and labour had more negotiation power over capital real wages rose and duel working parents decreased.
Thus my pet theory is that the reduction in real wages is a non-trivial driving force for the current historic high labour force participation stats.
>One grandmother was a farmer. She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband.
I'm not sure what you think this proves. When the choice is "do something or starve" people do all sorts of things they would rather not do, from farming to prostitution to selling their children:
Most people for most of history were peasants. Peasant women don't just raise children - they usually contribute to almost everything else that the farming economy requires, as well. Think of old photos of peasants/poor farmers. Do the women look like they have been spending their time just raising children?
My family on both my mother and father's sides were farmers, including my parents for most of my early childhood. On the farm, women would work mainly during harvest season and a few other moments, but I remember quite vividly a conversation where my aunt got pregnant and other adults in the room we're angry that the birth might fall too close to harvest season so she wouldn't be able to help out. She said what was she supposed to do? To which her mother replied that you get pregnant at so and so season and that this is how it had been done for generations. At that moment I realized that most of their birthdays did fall out of harvest season (including mine!).
Your comment brought back those memories. I know an anecdote is not data but in my case (we're not American however) most women were expected to help out with the harvest and sowing. Children also helped out during harvest (some of my worst and best memories!). I also would say that at least in my region, some would help only seasonally in the farm. The rest of the year they're expected to be "managing the home" and any women that wanted to study would be met with very sexist attitudes and responses. Also worth mentioning that raising children does take a toll on you. If you think peasant women look bad because of hard work on a farm, it's probably not. Think hard work off the farm, combined with poverty, stress, anxiety, etc.
If by modern you mean common for the lower middle class in 1850 sure:
>And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands.
It's worth noting that the amount of time parents (more so mothers) spend with each child has increased vastly, with relatively little evidence to suggest much increase in attainment. Most studies show that it's quality of time, not quantity, with parents that really matters.
The evidence suggests we don't actually need to parent so much.
Personally I see absolutely nothing wrong with sending kids to day care. We should focus on high quality family time, not high quantity. Unfortunately this view isn't acceptable in the age of helicopter parents.
Young children are information sponges. Think about how easy a 2-3 year old picks up language. It is not that hard to believe that 2-3 year olds also pick up behavioral patterns from their surroundings. For life. Do we want Mothers to shape their young children's behavioral patterns, or low paid child care workers with no skin in the game?
8 year olds? Send them to school with a key around the neck. They'll figure it out.
The math: 2-3 kids, spaced 2 years, up to 3-4 years old = a career break of 5-8 years. That ought become social norm and be encouraged.
> 2-3 kids, spaced 2 years, up to 3-4 years old = a career break of 5-8 years. That ought become social norm and be encouraged.
This is what a lot of wealthy people already do, because they can afford it due to one spouse's very high income, so the other spouse has a sort of vanity job (i.e. serving on the board of a charity).
But for the working and middle class, this is a bit of a pipe dream. Two people working are needed to pay the mortgage for the house that gets you the "good" public school.
Universal extended paid family leave and health care are a good way to encourage people to take time off to raise their young children. Many European countries do exactly that. I have friends in such countries who continued their academic careers part time while raising their children. It didn't hurt that they never worried about health care coverage for their families. It is a reason why European academics move back to their home countries after stints in the United States.
But things like that that will require raising taxes, and well, are we actually ready for that conversation?
Solving this by regressing to a society that discourages women from doing jobs outside the home is backward. Instead, change the system so that working parents have more freedom to make that choice to stay home with kids if they want to without imposing unreasonable struggle and risk upon their families, just like the wealthy have that option today.
No matter how well-trained and passionate the childcare workers are. At least in my country, a typical daycare has around 6 kids per caregiver for children less than a year old, 10 for 1-year-olds and maybe 15 or so for 2-year-olds.
If you have ever cared for a less than a year old child, you will surely know that caring for six at the same time, and doing it well, is simply impossible. So most of the time they end up sticking them into "baby holding devices", largely ignoring them (as they have no time to pay attention to all the children), or what's worse, hypnotizing them with videos on a smartphone.
I don't blame the childcare workers, I would do the same (or worse) because it's physically not possible to do better with such numbers of children. I don't blame the childcare managers, childcare is already a significant expense for most parents and if they multiply the cost by 2 or 3 by hiring much more personnel, most parents just wouldn't be able to afford it. It's a problem that really needs either heavy public spending or societal change to fix.
Those are pretty high ratios - and I agree detrimental to children and very hard on the caregivers.
As we're talking about stem mothers, I was thinking more of ratios I've seen in the SF for more affluent parents:
* Private nanny offering 1:1 time until kid is 2 or so (better option than daycare) or daycare with 1:3 ratio for infants
* Preschool for kids older than 2 with a 1:6 ratio.
My general read is that some childcare providers can outperform some parents. Yes, it's not their kid, but the higher passion for education can more than outweigh that.
That's not necessarily an argument against daycare, it is an argument for high quality daycare.
Studies show that boys with working mothers are less sexist and have more positive relationships with woman in general. Picking up behavior patterns goes both ways.
Yeah here in Iceland we have state run kindergarten’s open to kids from 18 months. They are staffed by degree educated people specialising in child development as well as assistants. They’re nothing but delightful in my experience. They are definitely underpaid though and I would absolutely like them to be paid more.
I’ve also heard horror stories of private daycares from my friends who have lived in the US though. Particularly those studying so without particularly high incomes.
They do have skin in the game. As shown in many studies, people generally are good. Therefore, most daycare workers would prefer if the children they worked with turned out good rather than bad.
While daycare workers may be underpaid, in many countries they work requires at least some education. They would also accumulate experience in proper child care the more years of experience they have in the profession. I.e. it is not a given that mothers are better than professionals in raising their own kids.
Do you have any citations here? I've always assumed that mothers on average spend less time with their children than in the past, especially the far past, where the men were often abroad fighting wars.
>"... One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. ..."
This is analysis is just hard to believe.
Between reading books, preparing food, driving to activities -- a full-time parent spends probably 4-5 full hours, except when another parent takes over or there is a continuous split.
The interrupt costs are also very high (and affect negatively ability to work).
Conversely, day care should be exceedingly expensive to account for the cost of having high quality labor (vs minimum wage caregivers) tend to children, with the end result being day care is a last resort, not something provided universally (when taking into consideration the volume of “bullshit jobs” in the marketplace); your job should be of an exceptional nature to be preferred over childcare obligations.
Given that daycare effectively pools more than one family's children per adult caretaker, it should still only cost a fraction of an equally good job's salary.
I argue current day care costs don’t reflect living wages for caregivers, and it’s already out of reach for a lot of people. When wages rise, even less will be able to afford it.
I've re-read your comment a few times now, and I don't see anywhere you've written something that implies you think women ought to become mothers due to some moral standard you have. So I don't think the downvotes are warranted.
It sounds like you are highlighting the contradiction between the fact that women are now increasingly expected and needed to do the job of full-time motherhood while also somehow, miraculously, contributing financially to the family through their careers. I agree that this places increased burden on women, and is due for a correction, both via new programs/regulation and a cultural awareness that this is being asked of them. Your point about raising children as 'unmonetized value' is something I think culturally we need to grapple with, much like we need to grapple with things like the externalities leading to climate change. We need to be able to price the value of child rearing into our capitalist society in a much better way, so women have clearer incentives and more freedom in choosing the path they take as they become parents, regardless of what path that is.
edit: I should state that while this article is about women and hence what I wrote above focused there, the same problems apply to men who want to allocate their time between parenting and their career. Society needs good parents, because we need good adults, and this value exchange is woefully un-accounted for in our current system. In practice, both parents suffer from having to make this trade-off, including those who have someone other than the mother take on a large part of childcare.
While implication versus what was literally written is quite muddy with this comment, what is missing from the entire comment is why it has to be a mother and not a father. The ending part also shows a lack of understanding of how childcare actually works today as well.
Implication, grammatical choices (such as capitalizing mother consistently), and topic focus are of course not the full picture, but they are not mind reading either.
The internet can lose a lot in translation, and I think I was quite charitable with it, and only addressed the explicit parts.
If a full time caregiver is needed at home, dads can step up as well. After being laid off shortly after we had our first kid, I decided to give my wife a chance to get back into her career while I stayed at home until the kid was ready for daycare. There is no reason to put all this burden on moms, dads have an equal part in this either way.
I read a study (from Rutgers I believe) about men who scale back on work to care for children. The conclusion was that while women are more likely to incur a “parent penalty”, this is partly explained by e fact that many men simply don’t scale back. The comparatively small number of men who do take time off or scale back to care for children face unusually severe career penalties for it. Some ideas explored were penalties for violating gender norms. Employers penalize women but in the end kind of expected this. When the men do it employers treat it as a kind of misrepresentation of intent and respond punitively.
I know a cite would be particularly helpful here, I’ll try to dig it up.
Gender norms are reflection of society expectations.
Society expectations evolve/change with economic and war conditions affecting a particular society at that time.
Those things, unfortunately, go in waves.
So we can pick different parts of history and we will likely see 'gender norms' are being adjusted for the particular environment at that time period.
On top, there are biological projections, and genetic predispositions that are projected on 'gender norms'.
Things that 'change less' are genetic traits and biological differences.
Combining economics/war conditions, with genetic traits + biological differences, creates a sort of 'superposition' that we are observing.
As a society, it makes sense to accommodate the desire of individuals, but not force people into particular choice.
Accommodating a variety of legal choices, is what we should be striving for, rather than trying to influence a particular path.
It is sort of like trying to introduce new type of species (animals or trees) into a new environment -- and expecting that we know about the ecosystem, to predict the effects of invasion.
Most of the time, with our current knowledge and prediction capabilities -- we fail.
---
Which is why, I think accommodating choices (and not predicting or promising outcomes) -- is what we should be doing.
It is not a burden, it is a privilege. For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege.
And if you believe the feminist narrative that it is dads forcing mothers to take care of the kids, consider that most women chose their jobs and the expected salary long before they meet the future father of their kids. Man choose careers that pay less, so the fathers end up having to earn the money. Them staying at home would simply mean less money for the family, often not enough money.
Being able to stay at home is a privilege. My brother, my dad and some of my friends took a few years off to stay at home when the mother worked, I don't see how being able to do that is not a privilege, all of them did it because they wanted to and liked it.
However all of them experienced a lot of sexism from being a stay at home dad. So an alternative explanation to the skew between men and women at work could be that men face so much sexism at home so they have no other option than to just slave away for 40 years. The people I know were lucky to have a progressive wife with a high paying career and enough mental fortitude to shrug off the constant verbal jabs at you, most men are not that lucky.
I don't think the person you are replying to is either agreeing or disagreeing it is a privilege. They are just pointing out the increadibly bad argument they are replying to.
A brand new account posting self-contradictory nonsense like For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege. sounds like a troll to me.
I think the comment "no, you see, I can't possibly help you with this, because it's such a privilege for you." captured the contradiction pretty well.
(I "stepped up" and took time off when my child was born. It was both a privilege that I was able to do that, a burden that it needed to be done, and one of the hardest things I've done in my life. Trying to make it an identity labelled "feminist" move is insulting. I too experienced the sexism you referred to - I mean I bought dipers that say "only a mother knows" on them.)
No - what is going on is that feminists point to statistics of dads not staying home, then claim it is because dads "don't step up to help in the home". That's a feminist lie - several, actually. First lie: it is a burden to take care of your kids. Second lie: dads are lazy slobs oppressing the mothers to do all the awful work, while they chill in their comfy careers.
It's not even a question of "I can't help you with that because of your privilege", it is that the question is not even the question.
Of course there are dads who wouldn't like to stay at home, or who don't even consider it because of societal traditions. Likewise mothers who don't want to stay home (less often). Overall, it is a question of money (privilege), and a private matter between the parents.
While women experience a "parent penalty", the one men would/do experience is much more severe because rather than being seen as necessary or expected, it is a character judgement: you chose to walk away and didn't have to so you have demonstrated you are wiling to be a traitor. (fair or not, this is the judgment).
If one is to advocate for men "stepping up", one must at least understand what they are asking.
"What, just step in front of the cavalry charge, they'll go around you don't worry you're just chicken hehe checkmate".
And while it might be unpopular to suggest this is so, I agree with the parent poster that the first thing that seems to get lost in these discussions is that taking care of children is not a burden. Work, yes, hard, yes, a burden? Only if you didn't want them in the first place. I say this as a father of 2 who sometimes sacrifices work to take care of my kids. It's a privilege the days I do so and I am currently undertaking a Herculean effort to modify the shape of my career and my income in order to do so more often because I love them and want them brought up right instead of leaving them in the hands of some daycare. Burden? WTF?
And it seems to be an absurd argument: "Caring for the children is a burden that holds back women therefore men should do it so women can work." Wait what? How does that fix anything?
This is why I largely stay out of these discussions. It seems to be impossible for them ultimately to be realized as nuanced. This problem is hard and a balanced, equitable solution is multifaceted. To state the solution as "well men should just...." in any context whatsoever does a disservice to the discussion.
As someone with kids I can verify it's a huge amount of work taking care of them! It's incredibly hard work, by far the hardest thing I've ever done. If you want to call that a burden then so be it.
For you to call that a feminist lie makes it sound more like you are trying to make this an ideological argument rather than anything based on experience. All your arguments are based on some strawman argument if feminism.
Why do you think mothers "less often" don't want to stay home?
It's hard work, but not a burden. People have kids because they like having them. Keeping with the Ferrari analogy, cleaning your Ferrari is also hard work, but nobody would pity you for the "burden" or having to clean your Ferrari.
Not sure if you are aware, but if you don't like them anymore, there are ways to get rid of them. You could send them to a boarding school (or at least to a school where they have to stay at school all day), hire a nanny, or give them up for adoption, for example. If your parents are still alive, you could ask them to take over, too.
As for feminism, the whole discussion only exists because of feminism. Therefore, yes, it is about feminism.
Please don't use HN for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology you're for or against. It already looks like you're using HN primarily for that, and we ban such accounts, as the site guidelines say.
Not sure I follow. Given two mothers (gonna leave aside some of the baggage here, fathers can do child care, not all women/people are straight or fit in the conventional framework): Amanda wants to have kids but also wants to be a Supreme Court litigator. Jane wants kids and wants to stay at home to raise them. Why is giving Amanda the option hurting Jane’s ability to chose her preferred outcome?
Should we force Amanda to chose? How is that empowering?
It's hurting in some ways, for example in increased prices for housing. If families with two income earners compete with families with one income earner, the outlook is bleak for one earner families. Prices simply rise to what the two earner households can afford. In fact many families can not afford the single earner model anymore.
There are also changed expectation, although presumably those can be managed. But once daycare is available, pressure can be on women to actually work. Where I live, you get strange looks if you don't give your kid to daycare from age one.
Apart from that it seems to me if somebody has a well paying career (like Amanda), they should be able to afford daycare anyway. If they don't, I'm not sure if society should pay for daycare just so that somebody can go to work to satisfy their ego (if their work yields less than the cost of daycare).
What you fail to mention though is the whole host of benefits to society that comes from gender equality, equality that is a direct result of woman working.
Unfortunately it seems to be fundamentally difficult to make both models of the family work equally well simultaneously.
> whole host of benefits to society that comes from gender equality
Can you give me some examples? Not disagreeing, just would like to know.
I can see how there's a lot of benefits to society for men and women to receive equal amounts of esteem and respect for the work they do, but I'm not convinced it has to be the exact same work in the exact same proportions.
I think technological progress has freed women to do other things than, say washing clothes and other household chores.
That doing other things can of course benefit society, if they so chose. A washing machine saving 16 hours of labor per week can bring society a benefit of 16 work hours per week.
As for childcare, I am not sure I agree that organizing childcare so that fewer people can take care of the children is necessarily a benefit. It can be, but there seems to be a limit, too. For example few people would say "one person is enough to take care of 100 toddlers", which would free 99 people (mothers, mostly) to do other things than childcare.
Also, if we think in terms of "benefits to society", wouldn't there be other worthwhile targets? For example, what if instead of watching TV, people would do something useful for society? It would be a huge net benefit - so maybe we should outlaw TVs?
Meaning we neglect that people may have children because they like having them, not because they want to provide a service to society.
The two income trap you mention was the subject of an Elizabeth Warren book sometime in the early 2000s. It’s a real issue, I’m not sure how to solve it, but it seems like a different larger scale issue. Also at this point its a little late. That societal evolution has already created facts on the ground such that in most larger cities it’s impossible to afford a good middle class lifestyle without two incomes.
Given that, what’s a simple thing that we could do to make life better? Make it easier for people to cope with that. Good, easy childcare is one clear way to do it.
It’s also wrong to suggest this is a rich people problem. If anything the lack of childcare is an even more acute strain at the lower end of the wage scale.
Completely free childcare for everyone may be unworkable or undesirable for a variety of reasons, but it seems clear we can do a whole lot more, and we would benefit in the aggregate. Not the least of which because more people from different backgrounds in the workplace is a great way to build empathy and creativity.
The "we" who benefits, would that include the children?
Essentially, the going theory seems to be that society would be better of if it would delegate childcare to less people per child, contrary to the "traditional" one on one of mothers and their children. (Thinking about it, in the old days mothers had more children, so it was rarely one on one either).
Also, it seems to consider having children merely as a productive factor for society, rather than something people do for its own sake.
I like to compare children to Ferraris, as both are expensive (children probably even more so than Ferraris).
So in analogy, people like to buy Ferraris, but society would be better off if those Ferraris would be parked in somebody else's garage. Think about all the time people waste driving their Ferraris, which they could have otherwise put to productive use for the benefit of society.
It's hurting Jane in the sense that her family has to get by on one income vs two and due to 'keeping up with the Jones' her family then feel poor and disenfranchised because they can't have all the same stuff Amanda can. Forgetting of course that they then have the privilege of Jane being able to raise get kids personally.
If we use a tax to pay for the child care, then depending upon how the tax is structured it could be that an increase tax on Jane (either directly, or on the partner in the relationship who is working) can make it so that it makes more economical sense for Jane to work and use the subsidized child care. Just like today the opposite often happens (child care costs so much that the lower earning parent can have a hard time justify having a job). I think it is possible to find a balance but we haven't managed to do so yet and I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon.
> and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for fathers to take care of their own children?
> in the care of poorly paid strangers
Or you could leave your children in the care of educated professionals in child development, who will ensure your children gets age- and stage-appropriate stimulation, as well as socialization with other children in a safe environment, something that very neatly complements caring for children at home.
> And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
Actual studies from countries that have a longer and better history of this than the US show that it does increase gender equality by quite a lot.
Yup. My wife and I were faced with the option of her contributing financially to the home and we pay for child care, or her being an at home mom. If she went to work, she would net $20 a week after paying for child care. Yeah, nope.
When we had just one kid, the math of my wife working or not worked out to basically what you found. If she was feeling engaged in what she was doing, we probably would have found someone to watch our daughter. But she wasn't really, so she stayed home.
Then we had twins.
There is a daycare just down the street that we looked into just for shits and giggles. A mere $550 / week if we wanted all three there full time.
My wife earned negative income for a few years but kept with it. I didn't agree with her decision but supported her in it. She just didn't want to be out of the work force so long that she would have trouble getting back in once the kids were in school.
Considering you usually have better salary with 2-4 years extra experience there is more to it than that. I guess universal daycare is a non starter in the US, and even though we have that here in Sweden women still opt to stay at home more than men, but that difference getting smaller every year. One of the measures says 30% of childcare days are used by fathers, but that is only paid time. The statistics for the unpaid time is usually a lot worse.
>Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond.
It doesn't work like that, because the "complementary food" is just that: complementary. The main source of nutrition according to the WHO should still be breastfeeding until two years old. The typical recommendation is to start each meal by breastfeeding first, and then give some food afterwards as a "second course".
The mother can still go to work by using a breast pump to extract milk and leave it refrigerated or frozen, but the logistics are quite hellish and breast pumps not even always work.
All in all, and I say this as a parent that ideologically supports equality and believes that both parents should share parenting efforts equally... nature just doesn't work that way. At all. :(
Worked nicely just breastfeeding during the nights/mornings for us and most people I know after 12 months, and earlier should not be much of a problem IMHO, it's something you should be able decide on your own. It's not something to demand from mothers, because the stigma of not breast feeding can be pretty hard for a new mother and it is completly unnecessary to put that psychological pressure on someone..
That is excessive, and is a troublesome outcome from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott I only have anecdotal data but this advice does not help families that have problems with breast feeding.
It's not a matter of being disallowed, it's a matter of convenience and comfort. If a woman is working a factory or a large department store, she may have to pump in the restroom. That's not exactly a comfortable or convenient place for it. Far different from an office which offers a quiet room with a comfortable chair or couch for her use.
Beyond that, there's also the matter of storage. Breastmilk is unpasteurized and needs to be refrigerated immediately for safety reasons. In an office, it can be as easy as putting the bottle in the fridge in the staff room. A fridge may not be available in other workplaces.
There is actually a 4/4/4 rule of thumb; 4 hours at room temp, 4 days in fridge, 4 months in freezer (source: newborn baby care class at large hospital in CA)
Still agree with the rest of your thoughts about other hurdles to overcome in the work place
They are solutions, but would people choose them? This story is about what women are choosing to do with their lives. From what I gather, they’re not choosing the hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable way without a good reason.
That’s because people in many countries don’t have access to clean water. There’s no reason to pressure women in developed countries to breastfeed for 2 years.
Unless you’d like to push them out of the workforce.
No, it's because there are a lot of scientific results correlating it to all kinds of better health outcomes both for the child and the mother, also in developed countries.
Whether this benefit is worth the great burden two years of breastfeeding imposes on women is, of course, debatable, and each woman should choose and not be questioned on their decision (as people often do). But sweeping the issue under the rug by denying the proven benefits of extended breastfeeding is not helpful.
Not when you adjust for education and SES and nothing beyond one year. Which is great news, because as you say, it can be burdensome.
(Not a knock on extended breastfeeding itself. I think mother and baby should breastfeed as long as it’s working for both of them - well into the toddler+ years if that’s what mom wants. But claiming unproven benefits is actively harmful to women.)
Mothers have the first pick because they invested more into the kid coming into being. They risked their life and invested 9 months into bearing the child. So they get first pick to also be the person spending time with the child.
If the birth and childbearing is being compensated by being able to spend time with the child, why give any consideration in any other field (say custody, parental leave, etc) if its already paid for.
Sorry, still not quite sure what you mean (I'm not a native speaker, maybe that's why).
Childbearing is of course not the only cost of having a child. Custody and parental leave just make it a bit less expensive (at least for some).
However, the initial investment is usually mostly by the mother. Other expenses come later. I think you could discuss who has the right to the kid if, say, the mother abandons it after birth and the father lovingly raises it for 10 years. I suppose that is also what happens in custody lawsuits?
I like this comparison, but only because I haven't found a better one yet:
Suppose you dream of sailing, and you start building a sailing boat. You work on it for a year, building the boat with your own hands.
The day the sailing boat is ready, your husband takes it from you, says "thank you, now you may go back to your normal career again", and sails off to unknown lands with your ship, while society applauds his sacrifice for the sake of your career.
That millennia long track record contains very high numbers of infant death, and the only thing pushing those numbers down is our ever-expanding collective knowledge of best practices regarding child-rearing.
Women aren't born with innate genetic knowledge of how to prevent SIDS, it's taken generations of studies to figure out causes and develop working practices to counter it.
I you put a baby in safe environment and you don't touch it, don't play with it he widdle and die. Think about that for a moment. One thing for sure we were able to reproduce for millennia but let science do it for a while and see what happen.
>It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
It's high time that fathers start putting in some more work in that department too.
Sweden has 480 days of paid parental leave, and each parent has exclusive right to 90 of those days. Have fathers spend some time raising their kids instead of just letting their wives do it and you'll see that things should get better.
This is a very feminized view of child rearing. Fatherhood's traditional gender role in raising children is to provide resources and protection. If you don't recognize that as "parenting" then you are missing the plot. Hugs are great, but not nearly as great as food and shelter.
So you think that if a father is just working (and essentially doing what he'd do if he didn't have a child) then that should be considered good parenting because he's providing resources? Might as well call every working man a good parent then even if they barely even interact with their kids.
There are very important emotional aspects to parenting that you people who constantly complain about feminism seem to completely ignore, I'd much rather have a father who's there and who I can spend time with than a father who's working two jobs because "more money earned == better parent".
This is privilege speaking. As a upper middle class it is easy to scale back.. have more time blah blah
Now try that if you are under the mean. Good luck. It is absolutely the case that SOMEONE has to pay the bills. If you are making 40-60k and alone you can live pretty ok, now try that with 3 kids.
Making so much money you can afford to relax, take time to hangout with kids, take them skiing, buy PC for them, take them travelling, feed them good food. Put them in school where they will make connections for the future. You will absolutely makes a better parent, period.
Today, just providing "resources and protection" is indeed considered parenting but inadequate. Any man can help with hugs and the household given the reduced work hours.
1 in 7 children in America may not know where their next meal is coming from. Many children live in unsafe neighborhoods.
I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that men are primarily responsible for the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs while women are primarily responsible for the upper tiers. Obviously that doesn't mean a man can never change a diaper or a woman can never pay a bill.
I remember reading that in a nordic country they had 1 year of parental leave to be shared, and men got 1 month and women 11 months. There goes your gender-equality.
There is certainly something to be said about the way stay-at-home mothers are perceived by many in our society. They provide one of the most valuable contributions to society and should be praised. The issue is: many females take this issue at a personal level. Being a stay-at-home mom is a choice and most people don't look down on women who choose a different path. Also, some women can't simply cope with the fact that they have a biological clock and their careers may be on the way to their motherhood (or vice-versa). I wish there were more honest conversations about this.
Males also should equally share the burden here I must say, as more and more of us run away from life responsibilities. The 30 year old basement dweller meme is real.
With such a large percent of this generation destined to be childless you don't think that conversation is coming? I'd bet on it once more start to realize the reality of their decision. Men or women, really.
Absolutely. And there is a gap here to be bridged. In the current political discourse, I see a narrative of men and women being put as adversaries, as if they were competing for something whereas in most cases they are complements and their whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And I repeat, males are just as guilty here. Divorce has gone through the roof, single mothers are an ever increasing share of the parental composition. Men are running away from their responsibility which is to raise their children in conjunction with their partner. I hope we turn a corner sometime soon.
You’re talking about a history that never really existed except for a few decades in a few western countries. Look at countries where women actually have many children. They’re not “stay at home moms.” They’re agricultural societies where men and women work alongside each other, and groups of very old or very young women in the village take care of the children.
> Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders.
Is there any evidence indicating that this is actually true? What makes you think that the existence of out-of-home childcare is forcing mothers to work? This seems backwards; I think it's much more likely that the existence of mothers who worked would lead to alternative childcare options being offered, not vice-versa.
The market is a feedback loop, not a static system. Daycares may have started appearing because some mothers wanted to go back to work earlier. But, as more and more families started using them - whether to gain a financial leg up, boost the mother's career, or for personal reasons - they've become established. At the same time, the market started pricing it in - what was perhaps once a trick to boost your material status, now became the default, and these days sending kids to daycare isn't a way to boost anything - not sending them is a way to have less money. Similarly, daycare is expected in careers simply because there's more than enough mothers doing it that not doing it puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
The market rewards being above the mean, but otherwise works to make the mean cheaper. If a few % of people find a way to move above the mean, they reap great rewards - which encourages others to do the same; the mean starts to move up, and competitive pressure starts to push its value down. In the end, "the new way" becomes the default way, and initial rewards from doing it are erased.
there is this latent assumption here that men are reliable breadwinners and/or that they generally do not use their economic power in this arrangement to abuse their partners and families.
Women working is a way of evening out the power imbalance that has led to suffering for women all over the world since the beginning of time.
When you have no economic power you are dependent on your husband which is why unpaid labor is so dangerous. The husband calls the shots. Not all husbands are good guys. It's only reasonable for women to want to reduce their exposure to this problem via things advocated for by feminists over time: birth control to avoid unwanted and forced pregnancies (far more common in the days of having 5+ children) and of course death during childbirth, literally their own income stream so they can pay for things a husband might not value equally: healthcare, tuition, clothes, and more, an income stream to enable a divorce should the husband be an abuser, problematic addict or worse...
in less shitty scenarios, the sudden death of a male partner can result in financial ruin for a family with a 'non-working' mother. Again, its economically reasonable for a woman to want to hedge against being stuck at 40 years old with no advanced skills in a career.
What about letting every woman decide for herself on where she wants to direct her work instead on keeping on making definitions and deciding what is good for them.
But a majority of women do fit into that category, so if you want to have more women in professional positions, their needs will necessarily dominate the conversation.
You're excluding women who are not straight but want or are having children! Seriously though, I find the post you replied to to accurately distinguish between women and mothers. The women who are not bearing are included in those numbers! If we peg the share of women who don't have children at ten percent the child-per-women number of 2 means a child-per-mother ratio of around 2.2. It doesn't change the argument and is an unnecessary detail.
(I disagree with the thrust of the post and think that letting mothers participate in society outside home an important factor in female empowerment. But please let's talk about that, not haggle over definitions.)
> Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers
What is a "Mother"? Is it different from a "mother".
And I was a bit surprised by your conclusion - initially I thought you were going to argue that high-quality daycare, childcare, and maternity leave, are so valuable to society that they should be provided as a service by the government and/or guaranteed by law to be provided by employers.
It’s a complicated issue, it needs to be tackled on many fronts. As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?