Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

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I had this exact experience as well. Returning to my career was strange. People were half glad to hear that I prioritized my family, and half disconcerted that I’d set my career aside. Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to wealth generation.

Women are increasingly treated this way too though. Women were shunned for choosing their career. Now if they choose family, their career still suffers. How can they win? At least men have a clear expectation from society. In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.

We have a serious problem here. It doesn’t strike me as a problem of gender roles so much as cultural priorities (perhaps at the core of this is the pursuit of wealth and growth over focusing on family). I was as capable as my wife in caring for our son so that wasn’t a problem. The problem was that anyone ever saw something wrong with that picture, I suppose.

We also took an enormous financial hit in order for her to continue working, because there was a very real concern than her career would suffer beyond repair if she took off, but I’d presumably be able to return fairly easily with my decade or so of software development experience. This happily turned out to be true. But still, what a strange situation to have to navigate.

> Women were shunned for choosing their career

in my experience raising two kids women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career. My wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but many of her friends, and especially online, thought she was "too good for that" with some even being hostile to the very concept. If a woman has an established career and then chooses to be a stay-at-home mom she's likely to pay a heavy price socially.

And if she had picked career, she would also have payed that price.

Men only pay it when choosing stay-at-home dads.

Similar experience for us. Wife was basically surrounded by nannies and there wasn’t a ton of community support, at least not nearly as much as there used to be for my mother. I assume this varies based on location (not all communities can afford nannies).

It’s just economics IMO. It’s mostly double income now.

It's literally insane that people would consider working at a company to be more important than someone raising their own children instead of paying someone else to raise them for most of the day. I'm thankful the mother of my children could stay at home with them while I worked.

In the US I think, for me personally, its less about the work/career itself being more important than raising the kids (because it's definitely not, don't get me wrong). Moreso is the issue of financial opportunity and stability. Much of society and decent living standards today _demands_ dual income households. Permantently risking half of that dual income is terrifying.

Having been through this, I think some of it is a little jealousy/sour grapes from the 2 income couples who have to work to pay for all their stuff.

By your own admission you chose work instead of raising your own children. Why is that different?

> women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career

I don't doubt this at all, at least in certain circles. I suspect it's not limited to small circles, either. My wife's office culture is somewhat accepting of women leaving to raise families, but many of the women in management have totally forgone that option or have/had their kids in daycare very, very early on. I'm certainly not judging as I have no idea why, or what would necessitate that, or if it's necessarily good or bad. It's too complicated to judge in any meaningful way.

It certainly generates expectations and pressures though, and they're very harmful to people like my wife. Many of the women my wife has talked to feel distinctly anxious about managing their family life with women like that in charge. Further, many of the men in management are quite old and tend to think of leaving to raise a family as a distinct lack of commitment to the work – something which gets you excluded from "serious" work like field deployments where high reliability and commitment is considered crucial to the role.

Many women are already excluded from much of field work because some older dudes think women aren't strong enough to make the work safe. For example, under-water installations of equipment are almost exclusively performed by men because the men running the deployments believe a woman would be incapable of supporting a man if his safety was compromised. As such, the women on the team who want to progress need to fully commit in all other possible ways in order to appear viable. Leaving to have kids is essentially 3 strikes at once against your reputation in field work.

It's tough to watch.

Depends heavily on your social group. If your social group are all college educated liberals then I’d expect this. If they were conservative MRS degree holders or lower income they’d likely envy your wife

This could somewhat be solved by regulation

You get around 1 year of parental leave here in my country - it starts 28 days before expected birth for the mother and lasts for 105 days, the father also gets 30 days, but 15 have to be used during the parental leave, and the other 15 in the next few years. After the 105 days of "mothers leave" are over, both parents get 260 days to divide between themselves however they want).

The norm is for the mother to take the full 260 days, and the father goes to work. On one hand, fathers complain because they're not with their kids, on the other side, usually feminists complain about women losing a year of their carrers (because women still have a choice to go to work and let the dad use those 260 days), and hiring a could-be-soon-pregnant woman is a risk, because she might be gone for a year.

If we atleast split the 260 evenly, and made it mandatory for both parents to be atleast a bit more equally absent from work, that would solve a lot... but since women would lose the 260 day, and there's no money for both parents to be absent from work, this won't ever be implemented.

> People were half glad to hear that I prioritized my family, and half disconcerted that I’d set my career aside.

People don't really know what to do when you demonstrate you don't have total devotion to an organization. Even if it's for a "higher calling," in the case of care, it still feels like they see it as not fully devoted. There's also this weird undercurrent that your career must be the focal point at all times in your life and that you must be constantly growing and fulfilled in it.

> In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.

Yeah, this is really gross. And the norms are pushed by those who made the choice to not have a family, or to outsource/ignore theirs. In effect, it becomes a game of, "who can sacrifice the most to capitalism?" And games like that favor those who are broken/not smart enough to throw more of their lives away.

> Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to wealth generation.

This drive objectifies men, and men are smart enough to realize they can't fight it, so they instead try to channel it. But it's not at all the same as an intrinsic motivation, it's an extrinsic threat of sorts. It dehumanizes men to see themselves primarily as providers rather than people. This makes it easier to prioritize their career at the expense of other things.

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