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Comment by ENGNR | Hacker News Reader

The article dances around the reason… the desire for flexibility is financially penalised.

The gender pay gap is really the parenting pay gap, since it didn’t exist before the age where people start having kids. Encourage more men to be stay at home dads and you’ll see the gender differences disappear.

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When Spain increased parental leave for men, desired fertility dropped. Some men want to do childcare, but a substantial cohort want to chase comp and status while someone else stays home to raise their kids.

The phrase I’ve heard more than once about this is “Men want kids like kids want pets.” Easy to want something, but work is hard.

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

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Interesting! So the desired number of children dropped (I wonder what number it was reduced from, maybe from an unrealistic number), and the # of hours men spent with their children went up, and women did get back to work earlier. It seems overall to be having the right effect?

Good luck finding a woman that would be happy with that arrangement. On paper they exist but in practice they are nowhere to be found and when you found one, it turns out she couldn't keep up the arrangement past a relatively short period, making men look like an incredibly stable and secure bet.

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