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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

As if taking care of the kids ISN'T WORK? This article is about priorities, and we all need to stop being elitist assholes who think work outside the home is more important because it generates currency.

My wife is a stay at home mom, and she works her ass off to do the most important job in the world: creating new, productive citizens.

What sucks is how she has to deal with social pressures which increasingly make her feel like a loser if she isn't pursuing a career outside of raising our children. Feminism is about giving women and men the same choices. Hell, I wish men could stay home with kids without being viewed as "not real men" in the majority of this country.

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Women and men don't currently have the same choices. That's the problem.

There are huge systematic biases that push women towards less powerful roles in society.

Agreed regarding the biases pushing women towards less powerful roles. On the other hand, men are pressured socially to always choose certain roles, whether they want power or not. By definition, the majority of men aren't leaders and possess little power. But watch what happens to a guy who becomes a stay at home dad. The snarky comments, the jokes, the behind the back comments.... Don't think for a second women get anything nearly as bad in this decade when they choose to go to work.

I think that's where the disconnect between the Feminists and the Reddit-type Men's Rights people are(not talking about the psychos on there). The MRA guys aren't saying men need more paths to power. They just want more choices, while the Feminists want a society that isn't constantly steering women to subservient roles, no matter what choice they make.

One one hand you've got a person who's had their arm chopped off and is squirting blood from a gruesome stump.

On the other hand, you've got someone complaining about their hang nail and saying it's just as big of a deal.

My mother was a drug addict. My earliest memory of her was being alone all day at the age of 4 with my 4 siblings, with no food and my 8 year old sister (she was the oldest) trying to find something for us to eat. After dark, my mom came home and tossed a bag containing one serving of McDonald's french fries and a hamburger wrapper (minus the hamburger) on the floor, yelled "dinner's here" and walked into her room and locked the door.

She had been awarded sole custody of us in my parent's separation, by default, and was subsequently given full custody, despite a well known history of public fits of violence against my father. Out of five kids, none of us talk to my mother. She is dying of emphysema induced heart failure, and will die alone. My sisters are old enough to remember her letting my twin brother and I starve in our crib all day. They hate her.

The state only gave my father custody after the neighbors called the police 3 separate times. The 3rd time, because my sisters were locked out of the house in the snow after returning home on the school bus to a locked house with only my brother and me inside.

So fuck you for making light of a situation that, on a daily basis, negatively affects children's lives by awarding custody to the lesser of two parents.

I have the opposite scenario. When I left my job to found my start-up, it forced my wife to go back to work and NOT be with the kids. I can tell you that, while I don't suck as a dad, my wife was infinitely better at being a nurturing parent than I was.

To me, the real question is -- are we sure that women in the workplace is progress or will we look back 50 or 100 years from now and laugh at how silly we were to try to ignore gender difference.

Throughout "Lean In", Sandberg uses the terms "works inside the home" or "works outside the home" to help drive that point home.

There's also a lot of discussion about how men don't have the same choice to be primary caregivers the way women do. I was skeptical, but it was a good read.

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