Comment by kaitai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaitai | Hacker News Reader

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Child support payments are not the cause of women's financial woes after divorce, but you can absolutely look at the same general sentence: "Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for" being women who had kids, often put their careers on the back burner, often were not aware of financial decision-making within the marriage, & got divorced without the ability to make as much money.

Yeah, it's complicated; you can see one paper here [1] that quantifies the post-divorce earnings gap. It is improving. Anyhow, divorce is a ludicrously bad economic decision for many women. Don't know if that's a factor in the changing rate.

[1] https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2008-... A more recent book: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7519.html There's a chapter on divorce & child support. Gets pretty mathy. An interesting survey from UBS (the numbers are buried) about female abdication of financial decision-making responsibility in marriages: https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/WealthManagementAmericas/doc...

> often put their careers on the back burner, often were not aware of financial decision-making within the marriage, & got divorced without the ability to make as much money.

It's interesting how some paint this picture of mothers who decided to be homemakers as women who are just too dumb to care the correct amount about climbing the career lader.

Apparently raising a good, quality child/person isn't a respectable ambition and should instead be avoided in pursuit of the rat race know as a career... gotta love this mass damnation of mother/fatherhood!

I think that's really unkind. It's not dumb. It is an economic decision in an economic system that does not reward caretakers.

A fault confessed is half redressed. After all, what you call "really unkind" isn't my opinion, it's yours.

What did I say that was unkind?

Maybe you're mad about the term "abdication of decision-making". It's a term of art. What's unkind about it?

Maybe you think it's unkind to say a woman is putting career on the back burner. But that's often accurate and a very conscious decision.

I think you don't like looking at the results of these decisions. That doesn't make the decisions themselves bad, or the people making them stupid, and describing those decisions accurately is not unkind. You are mad at the wrong people.

When I'm talking about these things I'm looking at my own bank account, as a woman who is hanging back in career so she can stay home with her kid a bit. It's just patronizing to pretend somehow magically I'm going to make more money because of this, or that when I'm 40+ I'll magically be able to jump into another tech job at an even higher pay grade. Like all the people we're talking about, I'm making decisions in an economic system that is not going to economically reward me for caretaking. I'm doing it anyway, trying to balance the present time with children with the necessity of supporting myself financially for another 50+ years given my family's longevity. I stand by everything I said.

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