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Comment by throwaway293810 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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