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> > This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men. >

• akavi 11y ago
  The framing does make a difference, as it sets the perception of which gender is being "wronged". I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.
  • ahoy 11y ago
    I chose my language specifically. Single women are more often family caregivers than are single men.
    • homonculus1 11y ago
      Does that support the narrative that caregiving is shunted onto women against their will/without their say? For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for. Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.
  • deleted 11y ago
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  • stale2002 11y ago
    Both are true and both need to be fixed. Yes, men are often pressured to be the breadwinner of the family. That is a problem too, and it should be less stigmatized for the women to be an equal breadwinner.
    • nickff 11y ago
      You are implicitly assuming that there are no differences between male and female preferences (on average). It seems plausible that biologically-originated gender differences may extend beyond genitalia. Is there any reason to believe men and women have the same priorities, abilities, and preferences, and that we should expect them to attain the same outcomes?
      • pasquinelli 11y ago
        is there anything in particular necessitating any belief at all about what priorities, abilities, and preferences men or women have? you can assess those things for actual, concrete human beings. there doesn't need to be any social pressure on people of any gender to conform to any of those notions.
      • knughit 11y ago
        You'd need to show that our incredibly complex artificially created environments are built with biological gender differences at their core, or acknowledge that a huge part of human existence is learned behaviors. The fact is, huge amounts of "gendered culture" have swapped genders over the centuries. For example, everything you learned from a book, or from spoken language is not part of your innate biology. Only a part of how you gravitate toward that material may be biologically gendered.
        • nickff 11y ago
          If you believe that gender-correlated differences in life outcomes are largely due to societal norms, there are some issues which should be much higher priorities than (relatively) small differences in earnings due to choices of professions. For instance, almost all inmates on death row are male, and 90-95 percent of the prison population are male; this is a terribly disparate outcome with a much greater impact on the lives affected (and likely due mostly to mens' life choices, not a biased legal system). Perhaps you might argue that we should encourage men to stop committing crimes, but alas, we already do that, and it does not seem to work. Should we then use affirmative action to start encouraging women to take risky decisions to be more like men and be imprisoned at similar rates (or perhaps just imprison women at random if we are only after equality of outcome)? I don't know that this would work, but it would be 'fairer', would it not? I believe that men are affected by a great number of factors including their biologies, and struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise.
  • taneq 11y ago
    Well put. Likewise, you can reframe the difference as 'women are paid less overall than men' or as 'men get less leisure time and less time with their families overall'. It would be interesting to see a campaign for shorter hours for men without changing pay.
    • nickff 11y ago
      I understand that people want a different work-life balance, but I do not understand why they expect higher compensation per unit of output while working less. Increasing the number of workers a company will need to achieve the same product will add overhead and a great deal of ancillary costs; if your goal is to get people to spend less time at work, you should be willing to accept a pay cut (at least proportional to the decrease in output). Labor is the largest cost for most companies, and expecting them to remain in business while dramatically increasing their costs is unrealistic. To be clear, this is not about being 'fair' to the companies, it is about having realistic expectations of the results of our actions.
      • shkkmo 11y ago
        People who work less and have a better work-life balance can get more done in less time. Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks. I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers to focus on improving 'output per worker hour' in addition to 'output per worker'. To be clear, if we want this we have really only have one option: Increase demand (for jobs or products from) companies that do this well. Good work-life balance is a non-salary perk like many others that companies offer. You can't legislate this focus on the part of employers, all you can do is incentive it.
        • nickff 11y ago
          I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year. I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years. Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers. My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.
• Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  I explain my issue with this question. >How it is more often foisted upon women? I show that there is an equal pressure put on men to do different things. My issue is with the "more often". Now, maybe you were only talking about the pressure on women and not the pressure on men... you should be able to see the issue with this as well.
  • jrock08 11y ago
    Except that we are talking about why women on average don't make as much during their careers. You are punting and saying, well men have pressure to work more. You are absolutely right, and it should be part of the conversation, but you've not somehow proved that the women being encouraged to prioritize family isn't a problem.
    • Johnnybe 11y ago
      It isn't a problem. Women generally should prioritize family. Women are generally more nurturing than men. Why are you making this out to be a problem?
    • cortesoft 11y ago
      Those pressures are not independent. Any time you say "women are pressured" to do something, there is an implicit "relative to men" added at the end. The same goes for the reverse. Think about it this way - there are two constant, fixed pressures we are talking about: the pressure to make good money to raise a family, and the pressure to take care of the kids. We have no way to change the TOTAL pressure - both of those things are fairly fixed (we need to make money and we need to take care of family). The thing we are talking about is HOW those pressures are distributed. Traditionally, the money pressure is more on men and the childrearing pressure is more on women. You can't change any one of those without changing the rest. If you decrease pressure on women to raise children, that in turn raises pressure on men to raise children. This, in turn, would also increase pressure on women to make money, and decrease the pressure on men. You can choose which angle you come at for the problem, but all of them result in the same thing.
    • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
• deleted 11y ago
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• DominikR 11y ago
  > So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe? Have you considered that most women actually prefer spending more time with their children and therefore prefer men that earn more to finance this? (therefore men focus on their career to attract women that usually at some point prefer to work on flexible schedules)
• 4bpp 11y ago
  The word "foist" does imply coercion to do something that is against the target's will or interest. Would you be equally okay with the statement being replaced with "self-sacrificial status climbing is more often foisted upon men in our society"? Add to that the common narrative* that men are in charge in our society and therefore social pressure is essentially equivalent to pressure exerted by men, and you quickly get a statement that amounts to "[the problems we observe] are caused by men forcing women to care for family members". * Even if you don't actually subscribe to this position yourself, it's unfortunately in the nature of debate on a politicised topic like this that the moment you take a position associated with one of the standard camps ("the American Left" or "the Blue Tribe" here, I guess), people will assume that you also hold other opinions typical of that camp. Certainly, "men hold the power in American society" is one of those typical opinions.