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Comment by aaronblohowiak | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the gender pay gap is troubling, but I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers instead of looking for ways to make primary caregivers also earn as much as primary earners.

Even in very liberal sf bay, there are not so subtle exclusionary biases against fathers as primary caregivers which I have experienced on parental leave. In passing in the grocery store, there are nods and acknowledgments, but in classes, the local "mothers group", and the support infrastructure for new parents, there is a lot of non-inclusive language. As a most privileged person, I take this all as a very gentle lesson in what it is like to be not in a position of privilege, but I do think it contributes to men opting out of primary caregiving. Also, breast feeding.

Choosing to prioritize children over career reasonably impacts career trajectory. I'd prefer if we had more gender oblivious parental policies and expectations instead of reinforcing gender essentialism through overly targeted programs.

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> I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers

I'd like to see moms and dads choosing who the primary caregiver will be in their own families. I don't see why it's the business of government programs, Hacker News commenters, "society" or anybody else.

I identified as a feminist when feminism was about correcting obvious inequalities between the sexes. Nowadays it seems to be more about behavioral engineering and how we can coerce people to behave in a manner which matches our definition of a perfect society. I no longer identify as a feminist.

Feminism is about behavioral engineering because we live in a winner-take-all society, and even sexism that falls short of "obvious inequalities" can hold people back dramatically. We live in a world where it's just easier for couples to have the woman be the primary caregiver, because of social pressures. Every school, doctor, etc. has my wife and I write down our work numbers. Nobody ever calls me first. I did the entire application process for my daughter's pre-K, and they still called my wife first to remind us to submit the enrollment contract. Merely not leaving your family makes you an above median father in society's eyes. But god forbid you're a mother who doesn't think it's a priority to shuffle your kid from activity to activity all week.

>Nowadays it seems to be more about behavioral engineering and how we can coerce people to behave in a manner which matches our definition of a perfect society.

I haven't noticed this, are you sure it's not your attitude that's changed, not society?

For example, TFA talks about adjusting seemingly unrelated parameters like working hours to exert influence on gender parity benchmarks.

Not that I think working hours aren't too long, considering modern technology, but that's another story.

I think OP is just saying that being a male primary caregiver, or supporting other men who are, is one way to help with this problem. I'm not sure where the coercion is -- what's the threat being made?

> I think OP is just saying that being a male primary caregiver, or supporting other men who are, is one way to help with this problem. I'm not sure where the coercion is -- what's the threat being made?

I don't think there is a threat, but it does ignore the fact that men and women are different. For example, men tend to be more competitive, negotiate harder for pay rises. Women tend to like more flexibility in their work.

Some of us think that the fact that there are fewer male primary caregivers isn't a problem to be solved, but natural given the natural preferences of men and women in general. I think there are many more women than men working in pre-school education for a reason. Furthermore, many women are made to feel ashamed of their desire to be housewives, think it is some failing on their part, and end up seeking a life-consuming career -- not because they want to, but because society tells them they should.

> I don't think there is a threat, but it does ignore the fact that men and women are different. For example, men tend to be more competitive, negotiate harder for pay rises. Women tend to like more flexibility in their work.

How much of that is that we (1) socialize women to be that way; and (2) impose disproportionate parenting obligations on them to begin with, which causes them to seek more flexibility?

This question is what's at bottom of this entire discussion. I'm guessing you think socialization is the overriding factor. Others attribute the majority of the differences to nature.

Everything that's been said in this thread follows from each commenter's position on this question.

> Others attribute the majority of the differences to nature

In the world of policy, we often have to run with an assumption before we can prove it. The question is, what presumption do we apply? The logical thing to do is to make an educated guess from observation. Look at history: Women have long been excluded from the professional world, and been socialized to accept non-economic societal roles. This is recent history: Had my grandmother gone into my field (law), she would've started her career at a time when firms openly refused to hire women regardless of qualifications; had my mom done the same, she would've started at a time when the practice was still widespread and the federal government was fighting to stamp it out. We can also look cross-sectionally. In countries with strong communist influence, the representation of women in science/engineering is much higher than in the U.S.: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/stubborn-obstacle....

If you're a doctor treating a patient who had cancer 10 years ago and it went into remission, you're committing malpractice if that's not the first thing you check for if new troubles arise. Given the above observations, it is disingenuous to start with the presumption that observed differences have biological rather than sociological explanations.

You may think the nature presumption is wrong. Fair enough. But, humbly, you're too confident in your reasoning if you think your case is so strong that the nature camp must be acting disingenuously.

There are all manner of research findings about the biological differences in the sexes. And reasonable people can in good faith build cases from that research just as you've done from the observable evidence.

Would I be wrong to conclude that you have a strong preference for the socialization explanation? I feel like this debate is held back by the illogical and erroneous belief that a socialization explanation is Good, while the nature explanation, should it turn out to be true, would be Bad. Or, that anybody who believes the nature explanation is themselves Bad or at the very least has bad intentions.

> How much of that is that we (1) socialize women to be that way; and (2) impose disproportionate parenting obligations on them to begin with, which causes them to seek more flexibility?

I cannot speak to (2), but cross-cultural studies suggests that differences in the way women are raised across different cultures don't influence women in the way you suggest. In fact, in more prosperous societies, there are greater sex differences, not less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3JuaIg99X0

Trying to persuade people to live differently is not "behaviour engineering", it's how all social change occurs. Society is just people's attitudes and behaviours wrt. each other.

It seems like all you're saying is, "I supported feminism when things i didn't like were criticized. Now things I dont care about are criticised, I don't like it."

Forget the feminism, there's documented problems with your approach in general. You're assuming local optimisation leads to a global maximum (or not caring whether it does), whilst any entrepreneur can tell you that's false.

Almost no one will bat an eye at how fathers get a fraction of the time off mothers get in the US at "pro parents" companies. Eg: Mothers might get 3 mothers, fathers might get 1.

Sure, mothers need a bit more time to physically recover, but you almost garentee the mother will be the one staying home for the kids: they get several times as much time to practice. Then they'll just ride the wave.

This seems like such an obvious and trivial thing to fix that would get us a large part of the way to solving this problem. It would solve a lot of others, such as the subconscious "fear" a company might have when hiring a young woman that she might vanish for a few months if she gets pregnant, while a man would not leave for as long.

Let's just make it equal already.

>Almost no one will bat an eye at how fathers get a fraction of the time off mothers get in the US at "pro parents" companies. Eg: Mothers might get 3 mothers, fathers might get 1.

The laws give them the same amount of time off, twelve weeks. There is a serious parental leave problem in the US, attacking the few places at least taking steps in the right direction doesn't seem smart.

federal law gives 12 weeks unpaid leave. Companies may give paid leave, and usually make it uneven and pat themselves on the back by how pro-women they are, when they are effectively screwing them over long term for a short term benefit by promoting this inequality.

I don't even mind that they do it, so much as they really think they're OMG super pro diversity and pro women by doing so, when in a way they're hurting them.

Even state law paid leave is often uneven in aggregate, but for arguably good cause (e.g., California has equal paid bonding leave for natural or adoptive parents, but women giving birth also have paid pregnancy disability leave.)

While companies may not explicitly divide parental leave up the same way, they may be driven by similar concerns when creating unequal leave policies.

Yeah, having equal leave + a bit more for actual pregnancy does make sense (it takes quite a bit leading up to childbirth and recovery after ward).

not 3x as much though.

The fact that a Kizi game has done well makes it more likely that the system will be a success as there is money to be made by publishers so they will hopefully put more money towards making games for it on http://kizifan.com . I am just looking forward to trying out the X-wing mission and more of the same for Star Wars Battlefront II, now that they have said there will be VR support.

I understand your point, and in the big picture you are correct. The issue is only 12% of employers offer any kind of paid parental leave, so these companies are still pro-women even if they aren't perfect. If you criticize them they have the option of going back to nothing for everyone, fairer but significantly worse.

The combination of pushing breastfeeding and giving women much longer maternity leave starts things off in the wrong foot. I did all the night feedings for my daughter. At almost five, I'm still the nighttime parent (the one she wakes up every day at 3 am because she's not totally on board with sleeping by herself yet.)

The breast feeding should not be dismissed a minor reason. Faced with a crying (so likely hungry) baby, a woman can just offer her breast, and have a happy and quite possibly sleepy individual a few minutes after.

For a man who's left home with refrigerated mother's milk bottles, the ordeal involves getting the bottle out of the fridge, warming it to exactly the right temperature via one of those monstrous bottlewarmer thingamajigs, giving it a good shake and then performing a few samplings to ensure it's properly warmed, not too cold or too hot in some places. Most of the time the temperature is inconsistent and the bottle requires a little more warming or time to cool off.

Finally a proper-temperature bottle is presented to the baby, who meanwhile is crying his socks off, pretty convinced at that point that a 3-minute delay means eternal starvation for the rest of his short life. Getting the baby back to the happy state is significantly more involving and time-consuming at this point.

This also assumes that baby will be perfectly fine with 1 bottle, and not 1.3 or 1.7 bottles (which doubles the time requirement for the procedure).

I've given bottled breastmilk to my son for almost a year while my wife worked.

Breastmilk can be kept at room temperature for up to 6 hours.

I usually had a bottle ready for an hour or two before my child was hungry.

Also since it lasts for so long, if the baby doest finish it at that point I can usually give it a few hours later with the second batch. But I usually wasted 20-30ml a day, as I preferred to err on the side of my baby not being hungry.

Getting a child on a schedule, or close to it, is very possible and relieves all.the problems you mentioned, except when he is on a growth spout, but thats a problem even with breast feeding.

Yeah, schedule brings some method into the madness, but the counterparty still likes to throw a curveball or two by refusing to follow the schedule, spilling the bottle, etc.

Not every mother produces adequate supply where you can just leave extra milk out and if the baby doesn't drink it, say "oh well" and toss it out. Not every baby gets on a predictable schedule either - my 6 month old didn't fall into a regular nightly feeding schedule until he was about 4 1/2 months old.

That said you make a good point that with careful planning and measurement, and with an adequate supply of milk, you can do a pretty decent job. But it still doesn't equate with my wife's no-muss no-fuss ability to roll over at 3AM and pop the crying baby on her breast, or the oxytocin she gets from the experience.

Not every mother can breastfeed either, if she can't pump enough (which happened to us with our second child) then you'll have to consider mixing with formula.

My wife was usually pretty mad at me for wasting even the little I wasted, but the alternative is to warm up only a bit at a time- that gets the baby angry very quickly.

Frankly the nights are extremely hard with bottles, but my wife breastfed in the nights, so it I didn't get to experience that part much. That said it doesn't have to be bottles exclusively, just when the mother isn't home.

It depends on each individual, but having looked at how my wife breastfed my son, I wouldn't say "just offer her breast". Creating milk in women's breast isn't free. They must prepare for it, and also have to take care of their breasts. My wife said it was very tiring and also got mastitis a few times. The experience may vary and I guess it'd be generally easier for young, healthy women, though.

We couldn't switch to formula because after the initial few weeks my son refused to take it. We tried various ways but couldn't make it work except breastfeeding. If we could, I wouldn't have minded preparing formula, considering how much work my wife has done for pregnancy and delivery.

My baby had mostly formula, we trained him to take it room temperature or refrigerated. The bottle warmers are all crazy junk, we tried one and all it seemed to do was make the outside of the bottle uncomfortable to hold without warning the contents in an appreciable way. It's definitely worth a little more screaming early on to train to accept milk at any temperature. (Keep in mind, babies are classically conditioning you while you're conditioning them)

Also breast feeding doesn't work for all women either.

Infants have less ability to maintain homeostasis than older humans; there are good reasons to give them milk/formula at or near body temperature.

And there are bottle warmers that work quite well. (For formula, I've heard that there are devices that do measuring, mixing, and warming, do it all quickly, and do it well, but I've not personally used them.)

Room temperature feedings are really not an issue.

8 pound baby investing a less than 3oz feeding at room temperature is really not an issue. 100f vs 70f = 30 degrees * 3 oz / 128 oz ~= at most 0.7f temperature drop however this is spread out over time and a fairly extreme example to begin with.

That said cold milk is a larger issue.

It's about maintaining digestive track temperature to allow for proper ingestion of nutrients in which case room temp (20c) milk or formula does hinder the process.

We didn't came up with warming it to 34-37c for no reason. Serving it at 10-15c colder than body temp puts a lot of stress on the infants digestive system and prevents proper nutrient absorption.

Nutrients are obsorbed below the stomach which releases milk fairly slowly and in plenty of time to warm up to very near body temperature. If you have some actual studies I would be happy to read them, but this seems physically unlikely because digestion is a very slow processes where temperature exchange is not.

> We didn't came up with warming it to 34-37c for no reason.

A lot of people do it because their parents did it. After you've trained your baby to prefer warmed bottles, they will likely throw a fit with room temperature bottles. I don't see how you could construct a sound study on this (because it's pretty hard to double blind warmed vs cold bottle), but you could probably do a correlation study on reported bottle temperatures vs miscellaneous infant maladies.

I was able to find that there are at least some studies on temperature in preterm infants (where better feeding response certainly justifies maximum hassle), but I couldn't find anything for infants that reached full term.

What a long and useless story for women who can't feed with breast (there's a lot of reasons for this). It's a sexism.

This is an entirely self inflicted problem. Breastfeeding has few proven long term benefits.[1] I did all the night feedings for my daughter and I barely had to wake up. Throw some formula powder in room temperature water and you're ready to go. An entire generation was raised that way (almost nobody in the 70s and 80s breastfed) and they turned out fine.

[1] The benefits ascribed to breastfeeding tend to evaporate when you account for socioeconomic factors: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614...

Exactly. Everything else being equal (salary, career impact, societal expectations), it simply makes more sense for mothers to care for the babies, because biology (assuming, of course, that exactly one parent has to work; both being home is ideal, and both having to work offers no choice).

Do you have children? Because this is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

>who meanwhile is crying his socks off, pretty convinced at that point that a 3-minute delay means eternal starvation for the rest of his short life

> Choosing to prioritize children over career reasonably impacts career trajectory.

I don't think the impact is reasonable. Try taking a year or two off work while your kids are little. The reaction you'll get to your resume gap is completely out of proportion with whatever atrophy your professional skills might suffer in that time.

So you think there is a market failure in pricing these workers? What do you think is causing it?

Prejudice is stronger than the market. We had a market economy in the US for two centuries before social change forced businesses to stop categorically excluding more than half the potential workforce (women and black people). Prejudice caused businesses and schools to exclude people like Jews in the grounds that they were too successful.

In this case, the bias against people returning to work is based more on prjokections about what will happen than anything concrete. Those projections, in turn, are based on traditional notions that once a woman has kids and has become a mother, she can never again be relied on to prioritize work. That ignores the basic fact that parenting is only really time-intensive for the first couple of years.

I don't think that is the same thing - preventing Jews from visiting business schools is not amenable to market forces, if there is a law against Jews visiting schools. Women had other things to do - Black people were working, too, but I suppose they were also banned from getting a proper education and from doing certain jobs.

People returning from paternity leave are not banned from any jobs.

The question is still: why can businesses get away with paying less? It would seem that their demand for these workers is not high enough, or they can enough workers without the missing experience. Otherwise, they would be competing for these workers and wages would go up.

> I don't think that is the same thing - preventing Jews from visiting business schools is not amenable to market forces, if there is a law against Jews visiting schools. Women had other things to do - Black people were working, too, but I suppose they were also banned from getting a proper education and from doing certain jobs.

There were no laws against hiring women/jews/black people into professional positions in the 20th century. The market chose to categorically exclude them until the government made it illegal to do so.

> The question is still: why can businesses get away with paying less?

Because businesses can engage in irrational hiring behaviors so long as the irrationality is widely shared.

At least the Jews seemed to have found a way around it, though - why were they successful? Did they build their own schools, or how did they do it? Afaik at least for some time they were banned from certain professions, which is why many become money lenders and became rich - might have been before the 20th century, though.

I don't know that much about the history of the US, but it seems Jim Crow laws were in effect till 1965? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

Women, as I said, had other things to do, before the invention of the washing machines.

The question remains, why not found a company hiring those supposedly cheaper workers, and blow the competition out of the water?

I suppose a company hiring only blacks in the early 20th century would have been unable to sell it's wares because of racism?

Are software developers on a "market for lemons"? Because employers presumably can't know how good a developer is, they bid too low, which in turn makes good developers avoid the market altogether? (ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons )

Why would this surprise you? In almost any conversation I've ever had with software developers about hiring, the person I'm talking to invariably says something that acknowledges tremendous mispricing of software developers based on how they're recruited and qualified.

There is a frustration among developers, I guess. But are there really a significant number of overqualified developers stuck in underpaid jobs? If so, is it because they undervalue themselves, or because there are too few employers willing to pay a lot of money? It seems if there were many employers willing to pay a lot for great developers, at least some of them would be able to recognize a given candidate? (Meaning, suppose there was an undervalued developer and he/she would apply to 100 companies, would none of the 100 recognize the greatness of the developer?)

Yes: there are a huge number of developers stuck in crappy jobs.

So why don't they apply for other jobs?

Also, there seems to be a market rate for developers, which is usually not a bad salary. What is the reasoning for assuming most of them are underpaid? Because a lot are 10 times developers?

Is it about information asymmetry, or worse, complete unknowns because even the developers themselves don't know how good they are?

Would helping developers discover how good they are help their cause? Do sites like HackerRank help, or are the problem sets not relevant enough to the real world?

It's not just about whether and how much your professional skills atrophy. It signals what's important to you in your life, what has the highest priority. Sheryl Sandberg used to work in Silicon Valley and go back to New York where her family lived at the weekend. She took a week's maternity leave. She routinely worked 80 hours a week. Work was clearly her first priority.

People get paid extra for credibly signaling that they'll be there for their employer or their colleagues in a partnership.

I am experiencing this effect at present, looking for general part-time work ( not even back in IT ) for when my toddler starts school.

Paraphrasing:

"What did you do in these two years since 2015?"

"I was raising my son whilst my wife worked"

"But, didn't you do any work? Did you just sit around for two years?"

I think that the global root of the problem is that we as a society do not recognize raising children as an extremely important work that should be respected and compensated. All the gaps will be fixed once there will be the way for women to get compensated for taking risk of child birth and linked reduction of career opportunities. Women do take a lot of risk, just not of the type companies pay for, and there is probably no way to make companies fully cover it. So the question is who and how should do it. Maybe some kind of basic income especially for this purpose would work. It is actually weird that while the idea of the basic income is so widespread, there are no equally popular ideas of using it to fix the gender wage gap problem.

> extremely important work that should be respected and compensated

Why someone who chose to work and pay taxes instead of having kids have to pay for raising someone elses kids? I am assuming you expect "the government" or some other non-participating entity to compensate, right?

Because those kids will work and pay taxes, and you'll need that tax income to keep you alive and looked after when you're older.

Why would provide social care for disabled people or homeless children?

That is not the same thing and is not what is being discussed.

A kid born, raised, and educated in a modern western country will generate far more economic value over its lifetime than it cost to raise and educate it. If tomorrow it was found that all the 18-35 year olds that will ever be born have already been born, what do you think would happen to the stock market? It would crater--stock prices are built on the assumption that there will be new generations of consumer to sell and advertise stuff to.

Who do you think is going to pay the taxes and support your lifestyle when you are retired? The kids that you didn't want to help pay for.

Indiviudal investments, a 401k account and Social Security are all paid for ahead of time. There's no dependence on children there.

> Social Security are all paid for ahead of time

What the hell are you talking about? Your taxes now are not to finance your future social security when you retire.

You're in dream land if you think you have no cost to society because you have a 401k to live on when retired.

we as a society do not recognize raising children as an extremely important work that should be respected and compensated

On a planet of 7 billion people, the urgency of making more is simply not a problem that we as a species face. It's a lifestyle choice and nothing more at this point in history. And at some point, say 10 billion, I predict that it will be actively discouraged in most of the world.

I certainly agree with the goal of giving individuals their freedom and to have the right to act in an atypical way.

But let's keep a hold on reality here. Women carry babies, not men. Women breastfeed, not men. Women have higher trait agreeableness and exhibit maternal behaviors at all ages in all cultures ever [1]. These aren't "gender essentialism", they're biology.

There is a difference between saying "this kind of person usually does this" and "this kind of person must only do this". The first is often correct, the second is the one that's problematic.

Women will always be more linked to children, and that's fine. We shouldn't try to hammer humans into an ideologically-defined artificial shape, even if it's "equal". That's a recipe for great sadness. Just let people be.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

I think No one disagrees with you on biology.

It is the socialogical and economic disadvsntages that mothers have as a result, if they exist and lead to the paygap, then it might be poasible to fix that.

At my company here in Germany nobody bats an eye if a male chooses to go on parental leave.

Ditto Sweden.

Men don't seem to take nearly as much total time off as women, but many - even most - professional men seem to take 6 months off, and perhaps 1 day off a week for years.

My sample is from offices. I know of friends at factories etc who also took 6 months off, but I don't know if its as pervasive.

> I agree that the gender pay gap is troubling, but I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers instead of looking for ways to make primary caregivers also earn as much as primary earners.

Why would you like to see this?

assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men, the current system under utilizes potentially highly skilled women. I believe that I and my loved ones would benefit from a system that fully utilizes our best and brightest.

Indeed, as well as underutilizing men who might be highly skilled at child care.

I suspect the brilliance of your comment will be unappreciated.

Are you assuming men and women are not choosing these roles freely or are you suggesting to force them to do things they do not want to do?

Along those lines:

"The Retro Wife: Feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home."

http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/

I think you can change biases, incentives and cultural norms to influence people's choices. Current cultural norms guide people into an inefficient allocation.

If the distribution of skill is independent of sex (your assumption, if I understand correctly), why do you think the allocation is inefficient?

If less women and more men were primary caregivers, then the outcome would be exactly the same as it is now, because skill is independent of sex.

You're assuming that the primary caregiver will be randomly chosen. aaronblohowiak is assuming that the parent with better professional skills is more likely to work professionally, and the parent with better child-rearing skills is more likely to be the primary caregiver. This would lead to better outcomes everywhere.

> assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men, the current system under utilizes potentially highly skilled women.

You would also have to assume that domestic labor has less value than corporate employment.

In a strictly cold, economic sense, this is probably true. You can make the assumption that domestic labour has a financial payoff in terms of better chances for the child in later life, but when you compare it to the effect of a higher household income right now, that later financial payoff has to be quite extreme to have an equivalent effect.

Not at all. Imagine a person with a choice between working a $40,000/year job -- an amount higher than the average personal income -- or doing domestic labor.

Of the $40,000, the government will take some $10,000 in federal and state taxes, another $10,000 in disqualification from income-based social assistance programs and you lose another $10,000 to transportation expenses to get to the job. The domestic labor still needs to be done (and having your spouse do it instead is just square one), so now you need to hire a nanny, a housekeeper, a tutor and a landscaper and pay more to eat less healthy takeout food more often. While spending less time with your children and having a much less flexible schedule.

The people who choose differently are not inherently behaving irrationally or producing any inefficiency.

My baseline here is this white paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19843

It's from 2014, and basically says that an increase in $40,000 in parental income (that is, incoming money today) would translate to an increase in the child's expected income at age 30 of about $13,000. If you're going to say that choosing domestic labour over a $40,000 job is economically rational, that's what it's got to beat.

There are, of course, other drivers for parents. No parent is perfectly rational in an economic sense. That's why I qualified my comment.

Ah, I see where you're going wrong.

That paper is measuring parental income, but it's comparing e.g. a person who makes $30K against a person who makes $70K even if they both work the same number of hours. Obviously the second person will then be better off, because there is no opportunity cost for the extra money, even if they lose most of it to government and other costs. There is no additional transportation expense or childcare expense or anything like that, it's just comparing janitors with lawyers, and on top of that not even accounting for parents with marketable skills passing them on to their children.

And it's measuring averages against instances. There are people -- especially higher income people -- who don't lose as much of their additional income to costs. If you already make a lot your real marginal tax rate is lower because you already don't qualify for income-based assistance, and you would have bought a second car either way, you would have eaten in restaurants either way, etc. And at the other end, unemployed single parent or two unemployed parents vs. one parent with any job is going to be a huge difference.

But that isn't the question. It isn't that it never makes sense for both parents to take a job, it's a question of whether it ever makes sense for one parent not to. Because if it ever does, that affects the average.

It's a hackneyed cliche, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I'm saying that the baseline assumption should be one based on a known baseline, which this paper gives. If there's data to support a decision in a more specific case than the broad grab-bag this paper represents, that would be interesting. Otherwise what you're saying amounts to "one should bet on being an outlier" - and if that's the bet, the payoff has to beat the alternative. Everything you've mentioned will be represented in that average.

The average only matters to you if you're average.

For each person, you have to measure the value of the wages they could earn against the value of the domestic labor they could perform. It's quite plausible that the average value of wages is higher than the average value of domestic labor, but that does not lead to the result that 100.000% of people are better off working for money.

It most plausibly leads to the result that most of the people who do work for wages are better off to do so and most of the people who don't are better off not, because members of the second group are below average at wage labor or above average at domestic labor or have economic circumstances that cause money to be less valuable than time. Which is why they choose the way they do.

This is well in accord with the fact that the majority of working-age women do work for wages. But a large plurality do not, and averages provide no evidence that they are behaving irrationally. Half of everyone will be below average at one thing and a different half of everyone will be above average at the other thing.

Based on your assumptions this makes perfect sense. But in this world we are not allowed to question these assumptions. Tabboos are odd things, shields more than swords. And what requires a shield to survive, realities or fictions?

Your unstated assumption is that men and women have roughly equal dispositions toward child-rearing, which I personally wouldn't agree with. Men and women aren't fungible.

I suspect that it wouldn't need to be nearly roughly equal for the current situation to suck for the most domestic men and least domestic women.

Really depends on the man and the woman.

> assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men, the current system under utilizes potentially highly skilled women.

This is very likely a 180 degree wrong conclusion.

"assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men," the breakdown of the allocation of workers by sex is mostly irrelevant.

I would like to see this... Because why the fuck not? If I have kids with my SO one day it would be fucking amazing to be able to spend just as much time with my kid as my wife would. We should both be getting the same amount of months off, and be able to choose how we apply them. (I.E. I'd probably like the first month off, she could probably take the first 6 months off, and then I'd take my final 5 months off after that.)

Maybe because it's not good when people with both the desire and the aptitude for something are discriminated against and hindered in pursuit of their personal goals? Seeing more men in that role would be indicative of greater equality, and that's something many of us like to see.

As a stay at home dad, I agree. Everything is still very gender biased. I cannot tell you how hard it is for our piano teacher to start to say "mom" or "mom's", then remember I'm in the room and also say "dad".

It's also still a little socially strange for a dad to go to group of moms and try to get their phone numbers to arrange play dates.

But there are other dads that stay at home, it can be done, and everything has its challenges. We do need more men to stay at home, IMHO. In particular, young girls really benefit from strong paternal relationships.

I think there's a growing stigma in the US against being a parent. I think that has grave consequences for our children. It's hard to show compassion for others if nobody has ever shown compassion to you.

> I think there's a growing stigma in the US against being a parent.

There's a growing stigma against women who choose to stay at home too.

My wife reports that women who don't stay home are (at minimum) condescending about SAHM and often say very nasty things. I won't venture a guess as to why because it doesn't matter. It's not right.

When women at work find out my wife stays home I've heard the most bizarre comments.

I'm pretty disgusted by everyone's desire to politicize my happy little home. It's just gross.

I'm sure it depends heavily on your country, career field, age, income level, etc...

Most people I know were somewhere between surprised and jealous, more or less impressed that we were able to not go bankrupt with just me working and my wife at home.

Mothers especially told me they wished they could have stayed home when their children were young. I was shocked how many people I worked with had to go back to work days or weeks after giving birth.

Then again I'm a guy, so maybe it comes off as being a good provider versus taking the "easy" way.

Besides breast feeding, the problem is as much as womn take a hit for caregiving, men take a larger hit. They are punished more than women for caregiving roles, perhaps because there is still an expectation (so women still more slack even if they do take a hit) for taking care of children.

As a society we need to attempt to align the individual/family/social costs/benefits of rearing children and make them as equitable as possible for people regardless of gender.

The popularity of reducing complex issues down to gender warfare tires me. Variances in pay due to availability to focus on career are entirely logical and reasonable.

You're suggesting to fix something that isn't a problem by demanding unnecessary changes in behavior. It's like suggesting that we should eliminate gender height differences by decapitating men. It serves no purpose, wastes energy, and doesn't address the true problem:

How do we equitably manage the impact of childbearing/caregiving on career growth and earnings? This is a nearly impossible problem if we want fairness at the individual level, as population averages don't apply to people. Contrast a CEO vs McDonald's clerk taking a year off. Problems like these aren't sexy and don't make headlines.

There are already attempts to address this issue, such as alimony.

Would you say it is more of a privilege or more of a burden to be able to spend time with your own children?

Women tend to be the primary caregivers because they choose so, and they are able to choose because it is their privilege because they are the ones giving birth to the children.

It is funny to me that male feminists think they are heroes if they take over primary care, while in reality they are robbing mothers of their privileges.

Of course it is up for every couple to decide who takes care of the children, so in the rare cases where the mothers prefers her career, sure, fathers can step up.

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