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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Seems like an easy dating market for men that explicitly want to have children and can support a wife.

South Korea has substantially more men that want children than women that want children. It's also not short on men that can financially support a family. What it seems to be short of is men that are willing to do anywhere close to 50% of the work involved in raising a family.

Men wanting children more than women seems to hold across countries and ethnicities.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.711984...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...

Makes sense, men literally don't have to do shit, it's like going to an online baby store and waiting 9 months for amazon delivery. On the other hand women can die in the process or more usually just have their entire body subtly destroyed in countless ways, from bone loss to getting actual depression. Rich people use surrogates for a reason.

For women, children are a job and huge opportunity cost. For men, they are a hobby and minimal opportunity cost. Broadly speaking.

Only strictly traditionally. There are lots of stay at home dads and moms who only briefly paused their careers for a minimum amount during maternity leave (see: outside the US where you don't just get fired). But the entry level cost is always completely one sided.

Anecdotally, I believe this occurs because I have witnessed, but is not observed at scale in the data. Even Pew Research shows aggregate belief system that men are providers [1], women are caretakers, even as pay between both reaches parity [2]. Chance of divorce doubles for men when they become unemployed, but the same effect is not seen in women, for example [3].

Most of my data and observations are US centric; if you have data from outside the US, and I would love to review any citations you can provide simply out of curiosity from a sociological perspective.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/20/americans...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41053582 (citations)

From your sources:

> marriages where the husband is the primary or sole breadwinner has fallen steadily in recent decades, driven mainly by the declining share of marriages where the husband is the sole provider – this was the arrangement in 49% of marriages in 1972, while today that share is _23%_.

> share of marriages where the wife is the sole or primary breadwinner has increased from 5% in 1972 to _16%_ today

Well I would've expected that to be a bit higher, but that's still only a 7% difference which is extremely minimal given that it's not been that long historically since it's even been, you know... legal.

The rise of both having to be equal providers probably has more to do with the rising cost of living and flat wages than anything else. Some of that caused by suddenly having twice the workforce of course.

Thanks for the cites. The stereotype is that women want babies and men don't. Many stereotypes are just an overgeneralization. This stereotype is just dead wrong.

IIRC, the article I read about Korea said that the difference in Korea was much more stark, that men were twice as likely to want children as women.

How well informed are you on (South) Korean gender politics?

That is one the of the problem areas, woman no longer want to be solely dependant on man, because that's what happens in your scenario.

Well, wives work too.

That’s where the support part of the sentence comes in. The man can support the wife not working and the children that come with it.

You don’t understand. Women _want_ to work, like most people. House caring is a shitty, mostly thankless, boring, unpaid job — most of white collar jobs are much better in comparison. Rich people outsource most difficult parts to hired help. And for those who don’t — the total experience is not that interesting and too exhausting, only possible if there are no other options in life.

I understand that women want to work. However both parents working does not appear to be a tenable position. In a male-centric local like Korea, a man who can pay for a family is a good catch. Hopefully he respects his wife.

Maybe if there would be a safety net for when man doesn't respect his wife. Relying on hope is foolish.

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