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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

We should do all we can to support mothers and parents. They should be free to make their own choices. But nobody should be surprised if mothers make different choices than fathers. Nor should we force the matter. There is some biology here. Equality doesn't create interchangeability.

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I'm arguing for equality of opportunity, not outcome. If the final split isn't 50/50, fine, as long as everyone is making free choices. The problem is that today that (equality of opportunity) is not the case -- there's immense pressure for the woman to be the one to stay home, if someone does.

But "free choices" is a tricky thing. Many would say that so long as 50/50 isn't reached, for whatever reason known or unknown, the choice is not free.

And some would argue that, since we can't achieve 100% perfection, we shouldn't bother trying to fix something that's broken.

Precisely. I just want equality of opportunity, that people are free to do what they want, not necessarily that the choices are a perfect 50/50 coin toss. However, since we posit that there are no inherent biological mental differences between sexes then some people contend that if the split is not 50/50 then there is still discrimination.

I suppose we have to believe that male and female brains work exactly the same, don't we?

It'd be nice if we could maybe admit that people work differently, without having to stack-rank it.

The immense pressure is the women's own doing. Women largely prefer to partner with men who make more money than them, so naturally if one partner becomes a stay at home parent it makes more sense economically for it to be the woman.

If women don't like the pressure to be a stay at home parent, then women can start marrying men who make less money than them (men don't as a group place little value on their partner making more than them) and instead face the pressure of providing for their family.

As a women who would love to have my future husband raise the kids, let me tell you it's not easy to find an intelligent man in a big city who is willing to stay home and raise children.

Do you know what their reasons are? I'm really curious, because that seems the obvious choice for me (assuming your wife is earning enough).

Of course, just like it's difficult for such a man to find a woman wanting to be the careerist in the family, because both groups are minorities.

We especially shouldn't be surprised if mothers make different decisions with fathers when society judges them, parenting books fearmonger, and parental leave is extremely disparate.

Why don't we set aside the biological differences (all of which we have the means to offset) and tackle the most obvious problems first.

>> Why don't we set aside the biological differences.

Because short of growing our young in labs, biology is the one thing that cannot be removed from the equation.

That's completely ludicrous. There are breast pumps, there is formula, there is no compelling reason that a mother has to stay at home. The question becomes is this a biological imperative or a social imperative, and until we remove the social portion it's too confounded to tell. Why do we also assume that men have no "overwhelming paternal instinct?"

The answer is that we have an ideology strongly rooted in the past and justified by the ridiculousness that is modern evo-psych.

Not the biology I meant. I meant the fact that someone just hauled around a baby inside themselves for nine months, with all that entails. Breast pumps cannot change the fact that women and men may have different views.

I don't understand. Do you think that gestating makes you have a stronger attachment to your baby, even after months of having your child around?

You're right that men and women may have different views. The overwhelming majority of women in my parenting group who could afford to were very excited to go back to work. The majority of fathers had a romanticized view of staying at home.

Maybe my experience is an outlier, but I think that after a few months both parents have developed connections with the baby -- it's just that half of them are told by society that if they haven't it's wrong. There's a reason that many women develop postpartum depression, and I don't think that it's entirely chemical. Being a stay at home parent is extremely isolating.

Pregnant women are much more likely to take parental leave than men because they have to.

> There is some biology here.

Sure. But there's also centuries of entrenched societal structure that is only slowly dissolving. And much of that structure was built up with bogus explanations of what women were biologically capable of.

So at the very least, we need to carefully consider both biology and possibility when we talk about this. But if we're going to err, I think it's worth leaning the other way for a while. We'll never really know where the true balance lies until we try things with the assumption that biology is not all that important.

That's certainly popular for most topics on Hacker News. Can people live on synthetic food substitutes? Let's put some up on Kickstarter and see! Do humans have a natural lifespan? Let's try pretending otherwise and see where we get. Maybe we could also favor it for radical ideas like women having careers.

> But there's also centuries of entrenched societal structure that is only slowly dissolving. And much of that structure was built up with bogus explanations of what women were biologically capable of.

I don't think the centuries old explanations are as bogus as you imply. The differences between men and women that we can all agree on such as avg. strength, breast feeding composed a lot more constraint on the divisions of labor. Regardless of what you think about breastfeeding or formula today you can't argue that it more or less forced women to do the early child rearing in centuries past. And men's increased brute strength was far more important for much of the labor before the industrial revolution.

"Natural differences" was used to explain all sorts of things. E.g., why women couldn't be writers or doctors or lawyers or senators. I think those were bogus. Women weren't allowed to vote in the US until 1920 (and we were early adopters). I'm pretty sure that voting didn't require brute strength before then.

"Natural differences" was also used to justify slavery. That goes back to Aristotle, and up through the US Confederacy. I think that was bogus too.

I also assert that the claim of individual differences can only ever justify individual situations. If a strong person ends up having to carry the coal because a weak one can't, fine. But we're talking about systems where millions of people were judged on hypothetical averages and the crudest of stereotypes. E.g., firefighters need to be strong, but there's no reason to think that the US's weakest fireman was stronger than the US's strongest woman.

And I think that the reason women were forced to do all the childrearing was mainly not biology. Even if we ignore things like cow's milk and wet nurses, dads are perfectly capable of doing all the work once a child is 2 or so. Women were forced to do it because they lived in patriarchal societies where women were nearly property.

So I think we should always be deeply suspicious of any justification that comes down to natural differences. The history of it as an argument is absolutely terrible.

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