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Comment by fragola | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of it is that men are freeloading on childcare. Who takes leave when the baby is born? Women. Who is more likely to drop out of the workforce when they have kids? Women.

So, as it stands, it's really a better economic decision to hire a man than to hire a woman, even if the woman is cheaper per hour (you still have to train a new person and so on). As a woman, I always find this discussion frustrating because nobody admits this. Everyone just pretends that employers are being irrational and sexist.

My husband stayed at home with the baby at first and he was socially ostracized for it. "Parents' groups" (really, MOMS' groups) told him straight up they didn't want him to attend, no other men were staying at home, etc. People actually pointed and laughed at him in the street, and this is in Seattle!

Until childcare is a socially acceptable role for the dad, this whole issue is going nowhere.

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I think you hit the nail on the head. It seems like organizations having equal paternity and maternity leave would level the field a little too.

The problem with such theory is that there is plenty of data from countries with different amount of male childcare, and by now it should be clear if increase male child care results in increase pay for women.

For example, Sweden. The data trend has been steady for the last 50 years or so that the work force is getting more and more gender segregated, with women prioritizing jobs that has high social status but below average pay. During that time, the trend has also been steady with fathers spending more time with their children, without the "gender gap" going down. As correlation goes, we could almost claim that fathers spending time with children would increase the economical difference between men and women.

A more reasonable conclusion could be that childcare ratios might effect pay difference within the same profession/title, but that aspect has been completely dwarfed in respect to the difference choices of work profession that women and men do.

Swedish mothers still take four times as much time off as Swedish fathers: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden....

Despite this, the NYT reports in the article that women's paychecks are benefiting from all the paternal involvement in childcare.

I think you miss read there, I said that the trend is that Swedish fathers take more time with child care now than in the past. As in, 50 years ago, fathers spent less time on child care than fathers today do.

In 1990, mothers spent about 10 times more than fathers. 20 years later, than number is less than half of that. Has the drastic effect of doubling the number of days that fathers spend on child care and cutting the days mothers spend by almost a third had any measurable effect on wages for women in general? That linked article below estimate that Sweden will have 50/50 childcare by 2040, so can we predict with data supported evidence that income differences between genders will be reduced to 0 by the same year? I doubt that, and I have not seen any numbers that points towards it.

http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/mannen-tar-ut-allt-fler-dagar/

I don't see how I misread at all. 4x as much time off for the mother vs the father still tips the calculus to the point where it makes sense for employers to discriminate.

IMO it's premature to congratulate Sweden's supposed gender equality when the disparity is that huge -- Sweden's women still spend 400% of the time as their male counterparts on childcare. That's huge.

If someone want to put blind faith in their theory, then good luck. I personally want evidence to support my theories, where data can either prove or disprove it.

Going from 10% to 25% is significant, and 200% increase is huge by any standard. I doubt a scenario where there won't be any change in wages until its 50/50 and then by some flip of a switch all women will suddenly earn 20% more.

Freeloading how? By not doing what? When, and for how long?

I don't think perfect parity in childcare is worth some of the artificial contrivances that perfectly equitable circumstances might demand.

Modern society is not natural or normal, in a cosmic sense.

If you mean freeloading, as in skipping town and denying involvement in a pregnancy, your arguments hold water, inasmuch as putting a child up for adoption is a similar degree of freeloading.

If you mean father and mother both being equally in the child's continual presence for the first 24 months of life, I doubt humanity's general economic wealth, in aggregate, could support such practices.

Should children be raised by butlers and maids in the name of equitable career paths for parents?

Maybe we should all be raised in B.F. Skinner Boxes, and learn to walk through operant conditioning.

What exactly is wrong with a man wanting to stay at home with the kids? Even if the mom does it during infancy (when, due to breastfeeding and so on, she's arguably a better fit), the dad could take over later, maybe the second year. How is this unnatural?

Take my situation: I'm a woman, I make way more than my husband. I'm not the most lovey-dovey/maternal person in the world, my husband is. He did not have the resources while staying home that are available to women. In fact, he was jeered at in the streets and discriminated against.

IMO, people who smear a loving man being the primary caregiver for his baby as being "unnatural" are cruel and backwards.

Oh nothing is wrong with it, but that's a way different story. A desire to contribute to or fully take on child care should not be mocked.

But I really don't think the commonly observed imbalance of sympathy and empathy one sees, when comparing motherhood and fatherhood, is a freeloading type thing.

>What exactly is wrong with a man wanting to stay at home with the kids? Even if the mom does it during infancy (when, due to breastfeeding and so on, she's arguably a better fit), the dad could take over later, maybe the second year. How is this unnatural?

It's completely unnatural. So is you going to work. So is your husband going to work. The only thing that would be natural is both of you living in the woods as hunter-gatherers, as part of a tribe of hunter-gatherers.

As soon as we start talking about "jobs", "careers", or any kind of society that's bigger than a small tribe, and certainly anything involving technology beyond the spear or any kind of written communication, naturalness has completely gone out the window.

>IMO, people who smear a loving man being the primary caregiver for his baby as being "unnatural" are cruel and backwards.

They're also stupid, because as far as we know, there's nothing at all natural about having monogamous relationships. We really don't know how our distant ancestors lived socially, and the best we can do is look at primitive tribes that survived to modern times like the Native Americans, Australian aborigines, pre-contact Hawaiians, or various South American tribes. Not all of those were monogamous (Hawaiians in particular were highly promiscuous).

Anyway, back to modern society, what kind of craphole do you live in where your husband was "jeered at in the streets"? You might want to think about relocating to a better city.

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