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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

As someone in the "we need more diversity crowd" I think the article is consistent with that position. At the end of the day, even if you can make it in an environment where you don't fit in, there is a level of pain and frustration that comes with that.

Anecdote: My wife and I have similar careers in the same field. We're not the world's most involved parents, but I go through life with people telling me I'm an awesome dad because I change diapers and my wife goes through life with nursery school teachers wondering why she didn't dress our daughter up as a pirate when they gave us notice it was pirate day two whole days in advance. Every time a grandparent notes that it's a shame she comes home so late (while never mentioning how late I come home) is another drop in the "is it even fucking worth it?" bucket.

But it would be erroneous to conclude that she "just wants it less" than I do. Rather, the social cost of her getting it is higher than it is for me.

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Damn but this is true. The levels of expectation involved in being a mother is ridiculous (eavesdrop on mothers talking with each other and count the usage of the phrase: "I know {I am|it makes me} a bad mother, but ..." followed by a completely innocuous parenting anecdote), and the bar for "good dad" is to be slightly more involved with your kids than a character from Mad Men.

That will never change, because it's being driven by female intrasexual competition. Men simply don't compete with each other in the same way.

Are you saying that these women subconsciously set the bar for being a good mother unreasonably high by judging their own behavior worse than it is, and thus signal a superior ability to care for a child to the other mothers?

Couldn't it instead rather be signaling to conforming to the modern idea that child raising is an oh so important task?

Child rearing was always considered an important task. The particulars have changed over the years, but the idea isn't new at all.

I don't think it's so much that women are subconsciously setting the bar too high. Rather, as in any competition the level of the bar gets set in the aggregate. Some combination of the media and their social circle.

That does happen, praising men for doing basic things.

That said, I'm interested in your thoughts about something else… I read (sorry no cite, I think it was in the nytimes though) that while men are less likely to suffer a career penalty due to having kids, that's largely because men are less likely to sacrifice work for child care in the first place. People can argue about the reasons, but it's pretty indisputable in the data that this burden is more likely to fall on the mother than the father.

However, the study (again, I can't cite it, apologies for that) suggested that those men who do take time off from work for child care may face an unusually harsh career penalty for it. In short, employers don't like it when either parent takes time off to watch kids, but they may be particularly resentful when a man does it.

Do you think there may be harsher judgement for men who do this, something akin to pressure not to take paternity leave?

I think it does happen, more in some fields than others, and I think it's really unfortunate. As a dad who sometimes has to peace out because it's a teacher workday and its my turn to watch the kid, I feel pretty good about mostly having worked for people who have been in the same position.

These are great points on societal expectations of parents. On the flip side, there is still a lot of judgement against stay at home dads, who are typically just thought of as lazy or not manly enough if they stay at home with the kids, even if it makes sense because their wife has greater income potential due to chosen career/education.

There was recently a study in the news paper that showed men receiving worse discrimination in pay raise than women in relation to the time spent home with children. One suggested explanation to this is that women's wages are per-discriminated with the assumption that they will spend some amount of time home with children, but men spending time home with children doesn't fit the social expectations and they are instead judged as lazy.

>but I go through life with people telling me I'm an awesome dad because I change diapers

Is this discrimination against men or discrimination against women? Imagine if some software company went out of their way to praise women working there for every minor thing. Every code commit gets cheers at surpassing expectations. Every time an informative comment is added, they send out company wide emails congratulating the woman who added it. Actually adding a feature gets a small lunch party where the woman is treated as the star. It would create a very negative environment for any women working there and be considered discrimination against women.

We've trained decades of mass media consumers than men are simple buffoons incapable of routine household tasks.

> men are simple buffoons incapable of routine household tasks.

Well we kind of are.

When I was in college, the RAs had classes to teach students some basic things like do laundry. They were all pretty much attended by male students.

If you believe the anecdotes about dating males in tech, this problem has only been exacerbated--self important tech guys with disposable income who outsource as much of their life as possible: grocery shopping, meal cooking, lawn care, routine car maintenance, routine house maintenance, cleaning, driving, and other normal household tasks to "Uber of X" like services.

Add to that the propensity for certain cultures to have a Mother-in-law dominated household, and you can see that the "media" isn't too far off in it's portrayals.

Right, but this is another sexist positive feedback loop with a negative result.

My mother just expected me to help with laundry when I was a kid. I also helped with cooking and other chores. Now people are amazed when I hem my own pants or cook lunch.

Okay, I can hem someone else's pants, but how do you hem your own? Do you just guess, pin, put the pants on, and repeat until you get the right length to sew?

Learning how to do basic sewing repairs is one thing I really need to teach myself, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I can sew on buttons though--easy enough really.

Fold to the right length, pin, remove, sew?

Google found: http://www.themodestman.com/how-to-hem-dress-pants/ which says pretty much this but makes it sound complicated somehow.

Might be a problem if you can't reach your feet, I guess.

When I bend-over the hem-height changes, but now that I think about it, the roll doesn't move, so it should be easy.

I put my pants on, roll up the edge until it's the right length, then pin. Then mark the edge so that I can turn the pants inside out when I sew.

> My mother just expected me to help with laundry when I was a kid.

My mom was a traditional indian mom, living in an 2-income required american world. So she did most of the normal household chores, and worked ~full time (seriously props to my mom, because most people today complain bitterly if they have to cook after working all day).

She didn't want me to have that the expectation that I was to be taken care of by my wife, after being taken care of by my mom, so at a young age she taught me how to be self-sufficient. Doing laundry, as well as other basic things--balancing checkbook, making a grocery list, planning a weekly dinner menu, etc.

My sister and I also had chores too.

However there were plenty of kids (especially when I got to college and older), that had no concept of self sufficiency. I even had to teach my wife (who has a PhD in engineering) how to do the laundry, cook--no, Babe, turning the stove temp higher does not cook the food faster, load the dishwasher--sorry no, you can't use regular dish soap, wash dishes by hand, tend to the yard, make a grocery list, etc.

> Right, but this is another sexist positive

Also, I don't get why pointing out and celebrating the differences in genders (i.e. being sexist) is inherently bad.

My wife is pregnant, and it's super apparent that if Men were the ones that had babies, there would be no humans left, because as soon as the first guy popped out a kid, they would tell the others how terrible it was, and we'd figure out some way to make babies without having carry them inside us.

I get that pregnancy, partum and post-partum creates some sort of dream haze, so that women seem to forget the trauma of pregnancy & child birth. It seems pretty common that despite the "discomfort" regarding pregnancy and newborn care, women fantasize and choose to have multiple children, even those who had "rough" pregnancies.

Wow.

I knew a couple. He was over 6 feet tall and she was a little thing. Their first baby was enormous and he missed the birth by minutes. He showed up all excited about the birth of their first baby and she sat up and yelled at him "You are never touching me again!" They went on to have two more kids.

My first pregnancy was really hard -- I threw up for 8 months and the birth was hard -- and it took me more than a year to be willing to try again. When I intentionally got pregnant again, I began throwing up and remembered how hard the first pregnancy had been. I think I also had the flu. I told someone "I hope I am pregnant, because this is making me remember my first pregnancy. If I am not already pregnant, I may not have another baby. Ugh. I don't want to go through this again."

Hormonal birth control has potentially deadly side effects. Women by the millions take it anyway because the risks and side effects involved are less worse than having babies.

Please realize I was a very devoted mother, desperately wanted kids, and still have a strong relationship to my now adult sons. I was baby-crazy in my twenties. I have talked to lots of women over the years and many women a) do not want kids and never did and b) after having the first, took a long time to be willing to try again because it was such a dreadful experience.

Women don't do this because being born female makes us more virtuous (or some crap) than men. We do it because we have the equipment, thus it is ours to do. That's it.

Also, female or not, memory is state dependent. This is not specific to pregnancy. When I had a serious health crisis and was in constant excruciating pain for more than 3 years, I could CLEARLY remember the birth of my first child. Most of the time, I cannot. I am usually not miserable enough to have good access to those memory pathways.

Again, state dependent memory is not some gender based or pregnancy based weirdness. The inability to fully access traumatic memories likely has a protective function for the human race and it is extremely well known, not some "pregnant woman" anomaly.

Thank you for sharing your personal experience. If my comment was taken with any form of malice, that was not it's intent. It was mostly a joke at men & natures expense.

In all sincerity, women would have it easier if men did not use us as a means to take "humorous" digs at other men. It only makes our lives harder. There is enough friction between the sexes witbout that kind of thing.

Congrats on the pregnancy. Best wishes to you and yours.

> Women would have it easier if men did not use us as a means to take "humorous" digs at other men. It only makes our lives harder.

How so?

Lots of men are already pretty hostile towards women. This kind of behavior only fuels that hostility and it is particularly frustrating to see it because it is a situation where a woman does not have to do anything wrong to catch hell over it. A man who presumably thinks he is championing the cause of women can do this and thereby make our lives harder.

Your logic does not follow.

Lots of men are hostile to women. Making jokes regarding women's issues fuels hostility. Therefore men should not make jokes regarding women's issues.

Some people are mentally unstable. Guns in the hands of mentally unstable people can cause catastrophic results. Therefore people should not own guns.

You realize that the parallel "logic that does not follow" about guns is perfectly legitimate in many/most countries, right? Doesn't exactly help your argument outside of (about half) the US.

Logic and rationality aren't necessarily the basis for laws.

Don't people tend to marry later in the US, too? I'd expect most men to have already survived on their own for several years before landing in the haven of marriage. So most would have mastered the washing machine and at least the microwave oven.

>Well we kind of are.

Not as a rule, no. Normal men can do laundry. But you may be right about single guys on the right end of the salary curve.

> but I go through life with people telling me I'm an awesome dad because I change diapers and my wife goes through life with nursery school teachers wondering why she didn't dress our daughter up as a pirate when they gave us notice it was pirate day two whole days in advance.

Society gives you praise for basic child rearing tasks because then you will feel good about not being involved with your kids and will focus on work first. Try and actually be a more involved dad and you will face a lot of backlash.

I was constantly discriminated against because I worked a 9-day fortnight and spent the other day with my kids.

Sorry to hear about your wife predicament. Unfortunately this is how society views roles, and it won't change anytime soon. Maybe when all the old people die and the younger ones learn to view things differently...

But rest assured that the day your family faces any degree of financial distress, it is going to be your fault, only your fault, and nothing but your fault!!! Such is the fate of he, the breadwinner.

Thanks for all the down-votes. But could you please explain why is it politically correct for women to complain about the admittedly unfair gender mores that society saddles them with, but if a guy does exactly the same thing, people just attack him and not even bother to post a fucking answer????

You aren't being a real man but a wimp who complains, showing that you are probably just bitter that you can't get any attention from real women.

This is the summary of how it was explained to me. A man who complains about gender roles does have inherently different judgments made about who he is and why he is complaining than a woman who does the same. And complaining about those judgments does nothing but make the problem worse.

You don't know me. How could you possibly know if I am a real man or not? Ditto for the attention (or lack thereof) I get from women. Of course if you want to argue that any women that happens to fancy me is not real by definition, you have shown already the quality of your logic.

And, speaking of general principles. Take a look to the template-argument: "Because <group X> are inherently different of <group Y>, they get treated differently and that's the way it is. Therefore, any member of <group X> that complains about the status quo only makes things worse". Whenever you see that, you can be pretty sure the people who floated that idea in the first place, must be taking unfair advantage of group X (though not necessarily has to belong to group Y). So, a counter argument can be made that every member of group X that believes in such argument is brainwashed and acting against the interest of group X in general.

Speaking of gender roles, there was a time still on living memory, when wife-beating was socially acceptable. I know for a fact, because I have spoken with a number of old folks, that even if those times, there were plenty of decent guys who would never hurt their wives, but when they learned of a jackass kicking the crap out of his wife, they would not move a finger unless (maybe) if it was clear that her life was in imminent danger.

Now, the sad thing about that history was not that there were jack-asses half a century ago (there are plenty of those today, too), but that the victims were shooed down by society at large. And the really sad thing is that the individuals doing the enforcing and keeping the beated wives quiet were all other women applying the logic of "women that complain about their husband's methods of discipline make matters worse."

Stop seeking social approval so much and do what you think is the best for you and your kids.

You are living a good life if your only problem is "someone wondering why you are bad parent". Seems a little narcissistic to think that people are analyzing/judging you so much. People are self obsessed, you can almost always be sure that they are thinking about themselves.

Also, interesting that people invent strange/vague/meaningless phrases like "social cost" to justify imagined slights against them.

You are product of society, you are "the society". Your thoughts/actions make up society. You cannot be in conflict with it. There is no evil society out there judging and analyzing you every move.

You know it's pretty childish to dismiss someone's experience right? He didn't say he was seeking approval, he said that when he does the most minor childcare thing he gets praise, while when neither he nor his wife do some completely asinine thing (dressing their daughter as a pirate) his wife (not him) catches flack from the teachers for not being "more involved". Dismissing this as "narcissistic" is completely misreading his comment.

>He didn't say he was seeking approval

>>is another drop in the "is it even fucking worth it?" bucket

I read that as seeking approval. Is it not?

What does "social cost getting higher" mean to someone not seeking approval?

He even invented a term for it. "social cost[1]" goes higher when someone judges you negatively and goes lower when someone commends your actions, like a carefully managed bank account.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost

When it's not happening to you it's very easy to tell someone else that getting told every day they are a bad parent is no big deal and they should ignore it.

But when it is happening to you, no matter how hard you try, it eventually gets to you. At least a little bit.

People aren't robots. It's hard work to ignore these things. And, in the case under discussion, it's work that falls more heavily on moms than dads.

Social cost isn't made up and it isn't really the same as seeking approval. It's related to, but deeper than simple approval. For example, you might not care that someone thinks you are a bad parent for not dressing up your daughter as a pirate, however, you do care that the PTA now won't take your opinion seriously because you "aren't invested in your child's education".

If you take not giving a flying fuck what other people think far enough, there can be very serious consequences, such as being investigated by a social worker for how you treat your kids. Parents cannot afford to be too blithe about "that's just your opinion, man!" Society will butt into your business and interfere with or remove your parental rights if they dislike your behavior enough. You do not have to actually be a bad parent for something like that to happen. Only a fool completely disregards the opinions of others, even if they care not one whit about "social approval."

I would contend that you are a product of your experiences, and that you are a participant in society.

Unless you are alone on an island, one person is not a society. One's thoughts and actions are inputs into society. Society itself would then be comprised of an aggregate of everyone's thoughts and actions. There would then be some sort bell curve for thoughts and actions, leading to an accepted norm for the society within some sigma value. Holding a position significantly distance from that sigma does make it part of society, would make it absolutely on conflict with societal norms.

Holding to the emergent norm theory, i would think that, yes, there is not an evil society judging you, but rather the society you participate in itself that will emphasize your contrast to the norms allowing others to judge you. Even if people are egocentric, a visible contrast to norms would be noticed and at best avoided, or at worst confronted.

The social cost is the degree in the action of others impacts an individual. there is a cost in dealing with the resulting time/resource/emotional effort with what ever action or inaction the judgmental individual(s) takes to address/correct/ignore you, directly or indirectly.

and... as other posters stated, i believe you missed the purpose of the previous post.

Are you a parent?

The way you know that people actually are thinking about you being a bad parent is they tell you to your face you are a bad parent. This has happened to me, it happens to my wife a lot more. There is a certain fraction of the population that sees nothing wrong with publicly shaming a parent for parenting in ways outside of their perceived social norms.

> There is a certain fraction of the population that sees nothing wrong with publicly shaming a parent for parenting in ways outside of their perceived social norms.

Why do you associate them with though? If they shame you then you don't want those people in your life.

You're missing a key point. These are unsolicited comments from strangers in public places. To not associate with them I would have to stop going out in public.

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