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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but if I double my salary and my wife drops out of the workforce to be a full-time parent, on average our income stays the same :)

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I'm doing that, but my soon-to-be wife makes less than I do and her career growth was very limited, so our average income will go way up, and I think my experience is more typical (most couples have some kind of income inequality, with the man usually making more).

For most people in the developed world that doesn't seem to usually be the case beyond the time the kids are very young though. At least here in Berlin it seems usual for kids to go to day care at the age of 1 year, at which point you can at least have 1 parent working full time and the other part time (or both full time).

It's relatively hard to get a daycare spot for under 1 year. We were lucky to have a daycare in our apartment complex (Southern Germany) which takes kids from three months and up.

In The Netherlands it's pretty normal to bring kids to daycare from 3 or 6 months.

In the end, there is often a salary hit though. My wife started working less. Also, there is no extra time anymore - on working days, we always go home at 17:00 sharp.

Yes, that's why I wrote 1 year and not 3 months :)

That's still not that huge a portion of a typical ~40 years career (unless you have a lot of children - I think the average for western Europe is somewhere between 1 and 2 kids) and you'd get parental leave payments during that time.

So sure it probably hurts your combined income but I think it's very rarely a 50% reduction as suggested by OP saying he needs to double his salary to stay at the same level.

Out here in SF it's no exaggeration to say full time day care runs $20k or more a year, so a single income X is probably worth considerably more than two incomes that sum to X (especially when X is high enough that tax credits for child care phase out).

The WaPo article wasn't about the Mad Men universe though.

I don't think men and women would have equivalent salaries in the Mad Men universe.

In europe this is still very common.

Labour force participation rates by sex: USA: 70.2% for men, 57.7% for women. Europe (OECD countries): 79.7% for men, 62.6% for women. So it's more common in EU for women to work than their sisters in the US, but the gender difference in participation rates is also higher in Europe.

Sources: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm and http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R

Europe is a big place.

I think you need to modify this to "in some part of" or even in "many parts of".

Where I come from this is extremely uncommon.

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