'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments
nber.org
nber.org
It seems easier to get along with someone who has a career and therefore similar goals and troubles and life-rhythm.
And a wife with a career is less likely to look for long term alimony in the event of a divorce.
In my case, it forced me to rejig my career plans and strike out on my own. I'm far, far, far better off for having done so (and so, more importantly, is my family), but at the time, it did seem like the end of the world.
A remote working dev has the flexibility to earn a good keep while also letting their partner have the more rigid location and schedule.
I seriously suspect a lot of jabs directed at feminism would die away if more men took paternity leave and used it as directed (and not, say, as a way to goof off for an extended period of time).
I was talking about this with my girlfriend recently. She's leaving the city in a year to do graduate studies. I'm a mostly location independent entrepreneur. But, leaving Canadian tax residency is complicated, and there are some big advantages to the fixed office setup I have here, because I do some video production.
I was thinking of keeping my residence here, but frequently traveling to visit her. There's some types of work I can do quite easily on the go. I'll only find out how well that works once we actually do it.
How did you arrange things?
My wife eventually got a really good professorship halfway around the world. We had a couple of titanic fights about what taking this job would entail -- and we eventually came to the conclusion that we would come out ahead if I quit and started my own company. I'm concentrating on building a portfolio of services now that will provide cashflow for a bigger project later on -- and it's going well. I get to play with the kids all day, write code when I feel like it (mostly late at night) and focus on getting healthier (I've lost about 20 pounds in the last year...no more stress eating on the job). Location doesn't matter because Internet: last year we spent 8 months in Doha, 2 months bumming around Europe and 1 each with family in Los Angeles and Bangladesh.
Honestly, I'm surprised more techies don't go down this road.
I'm not comfortable disclosing my personal situation in any greater detail in public -- but I'm happy to chat about it over email if you are interested!
Wonder why doesn't everyone just do it? It's so easy, right?
Thankfully the person I married is far more willing to face my ambitions and discuss compromises and other options. We've run the gamut from me pursuing med school to SAHM-hood (and SAHD for him, too) - which, despite society generally looking down on childrearing, I think it's possible and great for someone to be ambitious about it.
Alimony is a bit amusing to consider from my perspective, then. It's being seen here and elsewhere as a bit of a "woman takes my hard-earned money" thing. I could easily think the opposite! I'm not sure all these people would necessarily appreciate being on the end of that kind of criticism if they made any sacrifices for my ambition that created an imbalance :) And with my relationship and aiming to work with my partner as much as possible for the benefit of our family, I wouldn't begrudge spousal support so easily, even if we split acrimoniously.
[1] Note use of "us" and not "other". You aren't putting the other person on a pedestal here!
The reason alimony is unfair is marriage is a two way street and alimony is not.
I work 60+ hours a week in a high stress role. I come home at 6pm and spend a couple of hours playing with my kids.
Then my wife gets them ready for bed while I do another hour or so of work.
Finally around 9 or 930pm I sit down with my wife and we relax together for another hour or so.
What would happen if we divorced?
I'd get to see my kids every second weekend and I'd lose all my emotional support.
Without my partners support I couldn't handle my 60+ hours of high stress work each week. And I'd like to see my kids more often.
I could easily take a 60% pay cut and drop my hours to a sustainable 25-30/week but I'll end up in prison due to my states alimony laws.
Personally, I went from "she's slacking while I'm busting my ass" to "we are both very, very tired at the end of the day for very good reasons". The mutual increase in respect and empathy afterwards was noticeable.
> Without my partners support I couldn't handle my 60+ hours of high stress work each week.
So within the marriage, they're perfectly happy with the split (or at least that's a reasonable read of their comment).
They're saying that if a divorce happened, alimony laws would require them to continue working long hours to keep up their income, even though they lost the partnership benefits of the marriage that make such a workweek possible.
My wife supports and enables me to be ambitious and handle high stress work.
Without my wife I couldn't handle it and would burn out in months. But the legal system doesn't care.
My point is if we did divorce I would be screwed by the legal system whereas my wife would be supported by the legal system.
How is that fair?
The other issue is location/lifestyle: even if all else is agreed, it often becomes impossible to decide where to live (or to stay in one place) when both partners are ambitious.
I am not passing value judgement here - different strokes for different folks. But the strokes must match for a married couple, if it is going to work out.
But I advise against mentioning gender. Turning it into a gender-issue is going to make people dislike and downvote you and kill any hope for reform.
It's also unfair to women who pay alimony (my half-sister for example).
The real problem is a divorce system laden with incentives for couples to rip each other to shreds, with lawyers and others (follow the money) only too happy to help. Watch 'Divorce Corp' on Netflix. It may change the way you think about marriage and divorce in the United States.
Birds do this better than human beings and that's why they are usually bond for life. It is expensive to raise offsprings and it is not worth expending energy to gather resources to raising offsprings that aren't your own.
So..from a game theory point of view..it is not about divorces or alimony but the ability or inclination(or lack thereof) to be monogamous.
Earliest mention of alimony occurs in the code of Hammurabi..wherein a man shall return the dowry of the woman along with a portion of his property ..but only when the woman has borne his offsprings. And until the children have been reared and the property/monies split evenly amongst mother and children, she cannot seek another suitor or marital partner or have other children.
Alimony comes from necessity ..it is necessary in a society that is rife with inequalities. If men and women were equal in a marriage, there would be no need for alimony.
In the olden days, a woman entered a marriage with a dowry. In gold or currency or property. The dowry was meant to be her financial nest egg and the man has no rights over it. Entire dynasties and kingdoms were based on marriages and dowries.
And then it was the time of churches to decree what is moral and what wasn't. Divorces were all initially only due to infidelity and often by the man. Alimony became a safeguard so a man wouldn't profit from his philandering ways. If the fault lies with the woman, the woman forfeits the right to collect alimony.
With no fault divorces in our modern times, alimony became part of the divorce settlement. If we don't have divorces, there won't be alimonies..if we don't have a marriages, there won't be divorces.
Therefore, the only way eliminate gender inequalities is to eliminate the institution of marriage.
Times have changed. What if..as a thought experiment, we revamp all manners of social contracts. We will have to reconsider the basic human right to procreate to perpetuate the species. It should become a responsibility and a privilege to be earned..not a birthright to be exercised by all. And also eliminate the institution of marriage.
Thoughts?
That being said, while I agree that historically marriage was all about children I do think there are social benefits to bonded pairs which extend beyond raising children. For example, single people are more likely to commit crimes.
...explicitly for the woman.
I understand that there's men who don't, but it really feels like they're either hung up on weird gender norms or trying to find a method of asserting dominance.
To me "ambitious" is about both how big your ambitions are and how hard you pursue them.
> "The questionnaire asks how often students are willing to travel for work, the number of hours per week they are willing to work, and their desired compensation. They were also asked to rate their ambition relative to their most recent work colleagues and their tendency to lead in day-to-day interactions on a 1-to-5 scale."
Disclosure: My wife is also a programmer.
Could have fooled me, many western women lean towards tsundere...
How so?
Could have fooled me, many western women lean towards tsundere...
These two properties are not incompatible.
> Women have been trained to be a timid, subservient partner to men for a millennia, and it's hard to get away from
suggests most women are "timid, subservient", which is not compatible with "many western women lean towards tsundere".
"Tsundere (ツンデレ?, pronounced [tsɯndeɽe]) is a Japanese term for a character development process that describes a person who is initially cold and even hostile towards another person before gradually showing a warmer side over time. The word is derived from the terms tsun tsun (ツンツン?), meaning to turn away in disgust, and dere dere (デレデレ?) meaning to become 'lovey dovey'. Originally found in Japanese bishōjo games, the word is now part of the otaku moe phenomenon, reaching into other media such as maid cafes, anime, manga, novels, and even mass media. The term was made popular in the visual novel Kimi ga Nozomu Eien."
In the current climate in western culture, it's more like women know exactly what they want and how to demand it, the problem is more that it is given to them without challenging them enough, thus preventing personal and professional growth. Right now, I get to witness how a coworker has to give private lessons to students in the evenings, beside working 100% as a software engineer, because he is forced to pay for the life of his ex-wife who moved in with her new boyfriend. He is financially ruined and barely able to make ends meet.
Even if your story were true, it has nothing to do with the climate of western culture, nor is it reasonable to extract a broad judgement of women from this anecdote. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it also seems from your comment that you don't personally know the woman whose intentions you're inferring (from the evidence of a biased party).
Do you honestly believe none of these people had not tried to appeal the judgement? And if the appeal court rules that the initial judgment stays then what?
seems to be the crux of modern gender wars.
I've not met all humans, yet I believe most (>95%) have two arms and two legs. Is this not a reasonable belief?
Maybe there's some biological basis for that. But mostly, I think, it was just historical accident. Driven by technological limitations, perhaps. And for sure, it's all in flux now :)
Example: up until recently, many young girls in the west grew up on Disney princesses. Rewatch the movies, and pay attention to the female protagonists in those movies being active vs passive agents. Most are passive -- they're simply dealt a series of events (which generally happen only because they are beautiful or otherwise intrinsically valuable, not because of how they act).
Being exposed to those narratives from a very young age surely has an effect on identity, personality formation, etc.
I was arguing that how societies got to that point, over the past few millennia, was an historical accident. Or a series of accidents. There have been matriarchal cultures, for sure. With modern military technology, there's arguably no reason why they couldn't become dominant. But just a few decades ago, there was.
Edit: http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/women-in-th...
Wow. I hadn't thought of it that way.
As I say above, it depends what you are optimising for. Not that long ago, a typical single-income household could afford a house, a car, a couple of vacations a year and to send the kids to college and to save some. Now a typical dual-income household is struggling to make ends meet. I don't have any strong feelings either way on whether the man or the woman should be the breadwinner; that's up to each individual couple to decide between them. But it's unclear how making dual-income the norm is "healthy" for anyone.
It's already the norm and has been for quite a while now. I'm specifically speaking on women getting paid their value. I mean if both partners have to work 40s, then might as well maximize profit on that labor.
Even now the dual earner household exists because many people believe it improves their lifestyle. But let's be honest, most people wouldn't want to work if they didn't have to. Sure, in the absence of the need to make a paycheck they'd likely still do productive, valuable activities, but very few like to work for corporate America. Most jobs suck. Most managers suck. Most of the time pay sucks. Having a job isn't (or shouldn't be) special for either gender, it's a necessity to whatever point it takes to keep a roof over your head.
Maybe when the robots take all our jobs we'll finally find a better way of living.
That's a lot of biological basis, which nevertheless is much less relevant today.
Now sure, no woman should be forced to care about being feminine. Nor should she be forced to care about beauty or any other traits that the men she wishes to attract like. But at the same time, men shouldn't be forced to like any certain person either and if they happen to favor more feminine women, then that's 100% their choice to make.
If women were just "choosing" to approach their career in a different way, or had just been brainwashed, then they would react the same regardless of who is around.
What this study shows is that single women expect single men to react badly to their ambition. Not that the women actually have less ambition. Yet so many in this thread are discussing this as if it's evidence that women have different inclinations. Incredible confirmation bias.
I am sure there are biological factors, including variations in androgenic hormones etc. But I do believe it is largely cultural and this study matches what I've seen in my own life quite closely.
This is unfortunate because I am attracted to more ambitious women.
"Rough", "abrasive", "difficult" were the common labels. While there were things she may have done differently, I don't think I'd have seen the same blowback from an identically-acting male leader. I suspect that her experience is common and that if it's gender biased (I think it is), this continual molding could tend to create the outcomes you observe.
Thought experiment: How often do we tell young girls "Don't be so bossy" as compared to how often we say that to young boys?
Or "Imagine that you just heard a mom tell her kid, 'Don't be so bossy!' What gender is the child that she is addressing?"
I can't say, but every time I wind up watching a children's show targeted at girls (usually in a lobby or exercise room), the protagonists are all highly assertive and there's often heavy-handed promotion of the subtext "boys are dumb and useless and it's OK to be a complete asshole to them if it gets you what you want."
Hopefully it's just part of the natural swing towards over-correction and it'll all settle out in another few decades, but a corresponding overcorrection in corporate policy could get ugly. Psychopaths do well enough in the corporate environment as it is.
Imagine if you heard a parent tell their child "don't be an asshole". What gender is the child? I think it's true that women are held to a different standard when it comes to assertiveness, but the existence of a female-specific insult is not evidence of that. There are plenty of male-specific insults of the same nature. Asshole, dick, douche, prick, bastard, etcetera
I do however think that this might lead to girls being discouraged from becoming bosses (a bad thing[1]) while boys being discouraged from becoming assholes (a good thing).
[1] - Or at a minimum, a biased thing.
I think a more enlightening question is:
Are parents/teachers etc being overly unfair towards girls than they would be towards boys for the same bossy behaviour?
I'd argue no. If anything it is the opposite. Only different language is used.
Let's take a step back and remove gender from the discussion.
My experience working with senior leadership has been to get results you end up stepping on toes. As such you get called all sorts of things.
It's also my experience that the way a person acts towards their boss is different from the way they act with their peers which again is different than the way they act towards their subordinates.
With this in mind are you sure it had anything to do with sexism?
Am I sure? I'm an engineer, so no, I can't be 100% sure.
It's certainly a lot easier for an unambitious low-income woman to find a husband than vice versa.
It depends what you are optimising for. If men "go all out" but experience burnout, stress ulcers, depression, carpal tunnel syndrome, problems from bad diet and poor posture and lack of fresh air and exercise, yadda yadda then are women wise or foolish to emulate them? What about the life expectancy gap that no-one likes to talk about?
Consider that many men who sacrifice their health to "ambition" are doing so to provide for or at least to impress a woman. Who is really exploiting who?
I'm guessing both effects have an effect in reality.
If we believe the posted study, you might have met several, but they are just hiding their ambitions from you.