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It's difficult to be an ambitious person and also be very gentle and caring. One requires focus on the needs of other people, the other require focusing on your

It's difficult to be an ambitious person and also be very gentle and caring. One requires focus on the needs of other people, the other require focusing on your own needs and riding over people. Gender roles and families allow the existence of both emotional states within one entity - it is possible for a family to be made up of both a very human side and a very aggressive side. This maximises the success potential of a family unit - one half can be ambitiously working towards acquiring more, while the other can be ambitiously working towards building closer family ties and emotional support. When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another. Raising a family and acquiring a lot of money require completely different emotional outlooks, and I believe that there are not many people who can make the switch from roughriding for money to being tender at home. Families need two different people fulfilling different roles to be successful. That's the evolutionary method, that's the method that is culturally agnostic and that has taken us as humans this far. Intellectually trying to force a different system to exist is causing unhappy societies and break-ups of family units that used to be happy. When couples say the other half completes them, they mean that the other person fills in some parts that they lack, they don't mean that the other is exactly the same as they are.

kurtosis 16y ago
why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy? Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.
- billswift 16y ago
  Only if they weren't already spending up to the limit (and past) of both incomes together. If one is working and loses his job, the other can get a job; if both are working and don't have any cushion, they are more likely to have a problem.
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
Even if those two kinds of roles were as incompatible as you claim, which I don't believe for a second, why would the separation of roles run along gender lines instead of individual preferences? It seems to me that you are implying a natural suitability and inclination of women for being gentle and caring and a natural ability of men to be totally focused assholes taking on all the intellectual challenges.
- nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
  I think his point is that an ambitious person, either male or female, tends to try and find a caring and nurturing person as their soulmate and spouse, as a natural way of balancing the family relationships. It certainly doesn't need to always be males who are ambitious and females who are nurturing; my uncle has been a stay-at-home father for 16 years while his wife has been an ambitious doctor who is always on call.
- TheSOB88 16y ago
  Are you saying that's not true? Certainly males are more aggressive than females (like in many mammalian species), and certainly women have caring, child-rearing instincts.
  - fauigerzigerk 16y ago
    I don't know what are instincts, what is culture and what are just stereotypes of either. However that may be, my opinion as a male is that I should not be kept in a zoo because someone thinks I have a natural inclination for killing and raping others. My personal experience tells me that it would be completely bonkers to think that women aren't just as sharp and focused as men on average.
    - JanezStupar 16y ago
      Sharpness and Focus != Ambition Ambition is drive one feels to achieve - that IMHO is very different between genders (on average offcourse).
- 16y ago
sudonim 16y ago
I grew up outside of the US with an American mother i'd characterize as post-feminist. She taught me that men and women are equal but not the same. I meet a lot of women in the states who have adopted career advancement and a high salary as their version of "success". I had a long conversation with a female friend of mine who graduated from Stanford, worked as a VC. She said that there is a lot of pressure from other women to go into business and be competitive. That if as a woman you decide "I want to have a family and raise children", you're selling out. With all of the effort for women's rights (and there is still more to be done), no one is defending a woman's right to be a successful mother and homemaker.
- jnovek 16y ago
  A Stanford graduate working as a VC is hardly a representative of an "average" woman. It may be hard for HN readers to imagine b/c so many of us are city dwellers, but there are parts of the US where it is still socially unacceptable for women to defy traditional gender roles.
  - sudonim 16y ago
    She isn't the "average" woman. My main point is, in her circle she felt it was socially unacceptable to _adopt_ traditional gender roles.
    - jnovek 16y ago
      I'm saying that I believe her problem to be a unique consequence of her very unusual social situation. It's not a problem that most women have. Incidentally, how do you think a man would be treated if he finished his degree at Stanford Business and decided to be a homemaker? would it be different than a man who graduated from another school in another field?
- zem 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual: "The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll", young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."
sethg 16y ago
When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another. Statistics suggest otherwise: ¶ As more women have entered the workforce over the past few decades, the divorce rate, contrary to popular expectation, has gone down. ¶ US states where women have a higher labor force participation rate have lower divorce rates. ¶ Couples in which the wife an be considered a “career woman” have a 25 percent lower chance of divorce. http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/ http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/
- tel 16y ago
  --- If you accept divorce rate as an indicator for a failed family. For instance, what if families with two hard-working parents spend less time together but still find a level of contact that's need-filling. They grow neither happy nor unhappy enough to divorce. It's a stable but weak and unnurturing family and perhaps isn't the best place to bring up a young child. Failure of a family is multifaceted and the op puts forth a theory too strong to be knocked down merely by decreased divorce rates. (Edited: In light that the statistics the author quoted might be wrong, I'm should disclaim that I don't personally think that the polar-opposites parental style we're talking about here is best. I just want to advocate caution judging family-style health by divorce.)
  - sethg 16y ago
    It’s not a perfect indicator, but it is what the economists would call “a revealed preference”. I understand that people can have all sorts of reasons for remaining in an unhappy marriage, but I would expect that all other factors being equal, a large-scale social trend that makes the average marriage less happy would also lead to more people becoming unhappy enough to bail out.
    - tel 16y ago
      The original argument was never about marriages being "less happy". It was about them being less healthy, less caring, less connected. It's quite likely that they're happy enough to not want to divorce without being a stable, healthy family producing a good environment to raise a child.
euccastro 16y ago
You forgot to list the cons of both parents being very gentle and caring. Why does one half need be "ambitiously working towards acquiring more"? The candid materialism of Americans (if you pardon the assumption) never ceases to amaze me. Want a "successful" family, start paying more attention to other things not exchangeable for green pieces of paper.
- qq66 16y ago
  America's long history of unchecked ambition hasn't always been great for its citizens' well-being, but it's the reason why we put a man on the moon, have 10 of the world's 10 best research universities, and are known for larger-than-life aspirations and achievements.
  - euccastro 16y ago
    I said materialism, not ambition.
zem 16y ago
even if that is correct, the problem comes when you tie it into gender roles. societal factors tend to deny families the ability to choose which partner will play which roles.

kurtosis 16y ago

why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy? Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.

billswift 16y ago
Only if they weren't already spending up to the limit (and past) of both incomes together. If one is working and loses his job, the other can get a job; if both are working and don't have any cushion, they are more likely to have a problem.

fauigerzigerk 16y ago

Even if those two kinds of roles were as incompatible as you claim, which I don't believe for a second, why would the separation of roles run along gender lines instead of individual preferences? It seems to me that you are implying a natural suitability and inclination of women for being gentle and caring and a natural ability of men to be totally focused assholes taking on all the intellectual challenges.

nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
I think his point is that an ambitious person, either male or female, tends to try and find a caring and nurturing person as their soulmate and spouse, as a natural way of balancing the family relationships. It certainly doesn't need to always be males who are ambitious and females who are nurturing; my uncle has been a stay-at-home father for 16 years while his wife has been an ambitious doctor who is always on call.
TheSOB88 16y ago
Are you saying that's not true? Certainly males are more aggressive than females (like in many mammalian species), and certainly women have caring, child-rearing instincts.
- fauigerzigerk 16y ago
  I don't know what are instincts, what is culture and what are just stereotypes of either. However that may be, my opinion as a male is that I should not be kept in a zoo because someone thinks I have a natural inclination for killing and raping others. My personal experience tells me that it would be completely bonkers to think that women aren't just as sharp and focused as men on average.
  - JanezStupar 16y ago
    Sharpness and Focus != Ambition Ambition is drive one feels to achieve - that IMHO is very different between genders (on average offcourse).
16y ago

sudonim 16y ago

I grew up outside of the US with an American mother i'd characterize as post-feminist. She taught me that men and women are equal but not the same. I meet a lot of women in the states who have adopted career advancement and a high salary as their version of "success". I had a long conversation with a female friend of mine who graduated from Stanford, worked as a VC. She said that there is a lot of pressure from other women to go into business and be competitive. That if as a woman you decide "I want to have a family and raise children", you're selling out. With all of the effort for women's rights (and there is still more to be done), no one is defending a woman's right to be a successful mother and homemaker.

jnovek 16y ago
A Stanford graduate working as a VC is hardly a representative of an "average" woman. It may be hard for HN readers to imagine b/c so many of us are city dwellers, but there are parts of the US where it is still socially unacceptable for women to defy traditional gender roles.
- sudonim 16y ago
  She isn't the "average" woman. My main point is, in her circle she felt it was socially unacceptable to _adopt_ traditional gender roles.
  - jnovek 16y ago
    I'm saying that I believe her problem to be a unique consequence of her very unusual social situation. It's not a problem that most women have. Incidentally, how do you think a man would be treated if he finished his degree at Stanford Business and decided to be a homemaker? would it be different than a man who graduated from another school in another field?
zem 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual: "The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll", young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."

sethg 16y ago

When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another. Statistics suggest otherwise: ¶ As more women have entered the workforce over the past few decades, the divorce rate, contrary to popular expectation, has gone down. ¶ US states where women have a higher labor force participation rate have lower divorce rates. ¶ Couples in which the wife an be considered a “career woman” have a 25 percent lower chance of divorce. http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/ http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/

tel 16y ago
--- If you accept divorce rate as an indicator for a failed family. For instance, what if families with two hard-working parents spend less time together but still find a level of contact that's need-filling. They grow neither happy nor unhappy enough to divorce. It's a stable but weak and unnurturing family and perhaps isn't the best place to bring up a young child. Failure of a family is multifaceted and the op puts forth a theory too strong to be knocked down merely by decreased divorce rates. (Edited: In light that the statistics the author quoted might be wrong, I'm should disclaim that I don't personally think that the polar-opposites parental style we're talking about here is best. I just want to advocate caution judging family-style health by divorce.)
- sethg 16y ago
  It’s not a perfect indicator, but it is what the economists would call “a revealed preference”. I understand that people can have all sorts of reasons for remaining in an unhappy marriage, but I would expect that all other factors being equal, a large-scale social trend that makes the average marriage less happy would also lead to more people becoming unhappy enough to bail out.
  - tel 16y ago
    The original argument was never about marriages being "less happy". It was about them being less healthy, less caring, less connected. It's quite likely that they're happy enough to not want to divorce without being a stable, healthy family producing a good environment to raise a child.

euccastro 16y ago

You forgot to list the cons of both parents being very gentle and caring. Why does one half need be "ambitiously working towards acquiring more"? The candid materialism of Americans (if you pardon the assumption) never ceases to amaze me. Want a "successful" family, start paying more attention to other things not exchangeable for green pieces of paper.

qq66 16y ago
America's long history of unchecked ambition hasn't always been great for its citizens' well-being, but it's the reason why we put a man on the moon, have 10 of the world's 10 best research universities, and are known for larger-than-life aspirations and achievements.
- euccastro 16y ago
  I said materialism, not ambition.

zem 16y ago

even if that is correct, the problem comes when you tie it into gender roles. societal factors tend to deny families the ability to choose which partner will play which roles.