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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I come from a conservative Muslim country, and there is no doubt that we’re well behind America in terms of gender equality when considering the whole picture. But I think there are areas where we are distinctly ahead. The women in my family are all highly educated and accomplished. But at the same time, none grew up being fed a narrative that what will make them happy is to find a sensitive man who shares their taste in music. And none believe that. American society by contrast feeds women all these false narratives. And then it leaves them holding the bag—raising children alone, etc.—when ideals don’t match reality.

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but the problem is that those ideals are the result of the western model of gender equality. maybe they are false narratives, but the current alternative is going back to the inequality of the past.

the question then would be, how does gender equality look like that doesn't rely on these narratives?

if on the other hand we assume that these ideals are good, then the problem is not that the narratives are false, but that we haven't yet actually achieved equality.

I think that’s a false dichotomy. First, greater equality today isn’t only, and possibly isn’t even primarily, a function of “ideals” but instead economic change. Women are more equal to men today because “good jobs” involve knowledge work, instead of putting up utility polls are lifting up heavy things on an assembly line.

Second, you can have “moral equality” without assuming “fungibility.” My cousin just got married. The wife is brilliant—she’s civil engineer. The aunties are all impressed. But if they have a baby and her priorities shift and she decides she wants to stay home (which happens to many women!) those same aunties will 100% expect my cousin to take up the slack and support the family, because he’s the man. Morally equal, but not fungible.

yes, that's true, but that is not the equality we seem to want in the west. statistics show that female engineers are still a stark minority in the west. we are far from achieving equality here. in muslim countries and in china there are way more women in those fields. there is a school of thought that believes that the reason for that is because in the east, women can't get equality at home, so they find it at work. whereas in the west, women are expecting to get equality at home and are therefore not looking for it at work. my personal guess is that in the west career is more important to men than family, whereas in the east family matters more, and women only achieve equality in the areas that matter less.

traditionally picking up the slack would mean for the man to go earn more money. but women want to keep working. and, this is part of the issue, in middle to lower income families they have to. we have created a situation where a single income is no longer enough to support a family. the economic change is not financial freedom for women as much as a financial dependency on both parents working.

and the narrative we are creating and that we seem to want is that men help in the household and with childcare. and that too is happening but only just enough so that everyone supporting that narrative can point to an example, but not as much as everyone thinks. even in households where both parents are working, most of the housework is still done by women.

Huh? Connect the dots between the narrative of pairing up with a partner who shares your taste in music and raising children alone? This reads like a parody. Are the men spurning their children because of the woman's scorn for Post Malone?

I read "shares taste in music" as "will have extensive common interests / be best friend".

When the narrative of "the one" breaks down, marriages dissolve. Children get custodial_parents -= 1.

I'm confident children are better off in two-parent households, but I also have plenty of friends who've gone through divorces, and not one of them fails to care for their children. It's just a mystifying thing for Rayiner to have said. Women have been sold a bill of goods, he claims, and as a result, men are abandoning their children. The tragedy of it all!

Some divorced moms don't do a great job of letting the dad remain involved in a significant way. "Every other weekend" kind of thing. To the detriment of the children, sometimes.

I don't want to generalize, but that's a common narrative also. I have no direct experience.

I'm also confident that servers are better off with passwordless SSH, but I know plenty of companies with passworded SSH who respond well to security concerns, and would in all cases be available and sincere in their attempts to prevent their infrastructure from being compromised.

Some times, one way is objectively better than another way. And yes it may be ego-bruising for those doing things the "less good" way, but we don't need to throat-clear so obnoxiously whenever these things are discussed.

I do think you should also take an honest approach to the valuable points Rayiner has made, here and elsewhere. Not everything is correct, but recently it seems like you're just jeering and nervously trying to change the subject when actual discussion of the issue would be uncomfortable for certain current orthodoxy.

In this case, American women (and men!) have been told, through the media, their peers, and reinforced through modern corporate culture, that behaving, acting, and expecting things in a certain way will make them happier. But that's not bearing out in reality. So are they being setting up for ego death, when reality doesn't match expectations, if the expectations are wholly unrealistic and perhaps even wrong?

Basically put, i think they're saying something along the lines of: The person that you have common interests with isn't necessarily the person you want to raise a family with. But that's what people are conditioned to focus on, rather than more practical things

Yes, the part where having unrealistic expectations of a partner can lead the end of a relationship is coherent, if obvious, The part where the women is left raising a child alone is neither.

It should also be obvious that maintaining two households is significantly more expensive than one. So excepting the cases where both parties reconstitute a household, these folks are on average poorer than their married counterparts in societies with minimal divorce. Further, the rate of failure to pay full child support in the US is high, like over 50%.

In Bangladesh, parents select men (90% of marriages are arranged) based on earning power/education, family reputation, and looks, in that order. American culture by contrast immerses women in this narrative that what’s important in a man is sense of humor, sensitivity, impulsive romanticism, etc. Indeed, American culture portrays women who prioritize the things that Bangladeshi moms tell their daughters to prioritize quite negatively.

This hurts women in two ways. First it makes them more likely to select shiftless men who will run out in their families to pursue their dreams of being YouTube stars. Second, by setting cultural expectations and incentives, it increases the supply of such men.

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