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I agree with this and the subtlety of the OP’s argument. There is clearly a problem, there are clearly many contributors, I have personally seen The OP situatio

• detoxdetox 7y ago
  Lost in the modern rush for status and money, "obscenely convenient high quality daycare" used to be called "Motherhood" and was supplied by Mothers themselves. Some would argue, the most valuable contribution to society, even if not directly monetized. To sustain a healthy population, we used to need 10 children per fertile woman, which made "stay at home Mother" an obvious necessity for the vast majority of women. In modern times, we get by with 2 children per fertile woman, and that frees up a lot of female energy to be channeled elsewhere. It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children. Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders. And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
  • deyouz 7y ago
    We should remember that woman != mother. Not all women are straight/want children/have children.
    • war1025 7y ago
      But a majority of women do fit into that category, so if you want to have more women in professional positions, their needs will necessarily dominate the conversation.
    • lolc 7y ago
      You're excluding women who are not straight but want or are having children! Seriously though, I find the post you replied to to accurately distinguish between women and mothers. The women who are not bearing are included in those numbers! If we peg the share of women who don't have children at ten percent the child-per-women number of 2 means a child-per-mother ratio of around 2.2. It doesn't change the argument and is an unnecessary detail. (I disagree with the thrust of the post and think that letting mothers participate in society outside home an important factor in female empowerment. But please let's talk about that, not haggle over definitions.)
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  • henrikschroder 7y ago
    > and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children. Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for fathers to take care of their own children? > in the care of poorly paid strangers Or you could leave your children in the care of educated professionals in child development, who will ensure your children gets age- and stage-appropriate stimulation, as well as socialization with other children in a safe environment, something that very neatly complements caring for children at home. > And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment". Actual studies from countries that have a longer and better history of this than the US show that it does increase gender equality by quite a lot.
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    • skinkestek 7y ago
      > Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for fathers to take care of their own children? Nothing wrong with that, but mother goes first for obvious biological reasons.
      • kalenx 7y ago
        After pregancy and the very first months of life, I fail to see any "obvious biological reasons".
        • maximente 7y ago
          WHO recommends breast feeding until age of 2, so that's at least one thing that seems not readily changeable across sexes.
          • celticmusic 7y ago
            you can bottle feed breast milk.
            • 7y ago
  • adamsea 7y ago
    > Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers What is a "Mother"? Is it different from a "mother". And I was a bit surprised by your conclusion - initially I thought you were going to argue that high-quality daycare, childcare, and maternity leave, are so valuable to society that they should be provided as a service by the government and/or guaranteed by law to be provided by employers.
  • gfodor 7y ago
    I've re-read your comment a few times now, and I don't see anywhere you've written something that implies you think women ought to become mothers due to some moral standard you have. So I don't think the downvotes are warranted. It sounds like you are highlighting the contradiction between the fact that women are now increasingly expected and needed to do the job of full-time motherhood while also somehow, miraculously, contributing financially to the family through their careers. I agree that this places increased burden on women, and is due for a correction, both via new programs/regulation and a cultural awareness that this is being asked of them. Your point about raising children as 'unmonetized value' is something I think culturally we need to grapple with, much like we need to grapple with things like the externalities leading to climate change. We need to be able to price the value of child rearing into our capitalist society in a much better way, so women have clearer incentives and more freedom in choosing the path they take as they become parents, regardless of what path that is. edit: I should state that while this article is about women and hence what I wrote above focused there, the same problems apply to men who want to allocate their time between parenting and their career. Society needs good parents, because we need good adults, and this value exchange is woefully un-accounted for in our current system. In practice, both parents suffer from having to make this trade-off, including those who have someone other than the mother take on a large part of childcare.
    • ByzantineO6 7y ago
      Children, well-reared and thriving, were once an (imperfect) investment in prepaid,loving elder care. Bismarck's Social Security and its successors replaced this intergenerational dynamic. Like so much else Progressive, the net is that value once added inside a family is now done by taxpaying strangers. And increases GDP, yay! It's a big win for the State! Not so much for people.
    • adjkant 7y ago
      While implication versus what was literally written is quite muddy with this comment, what is missing from the entire comment is why it has to be a mother and not a father. The ending part also shows a lack of understanding of how childcare actually works today as well.
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  • naiveprogrammer 7y ago
    There is certainly something to be said about the way stay-at-home mothers are perceived by many in our society. They provide one of the most valuable contributions to society and should be praised. The issue is: many females take this issue at a personal level. Being a stay-at-home mom is a choice and most people don't look down on women who choose a different path. Also, some women can't simply cope with the fact that they have a biological clock and their careers may be on the way to their motherhood (or vice-versa). I wish there were more honest conversations about this. Males also should equally share the burden here I must say, as more and more of us run away from life responsibilities. The 30 year old basement dweller meme is real.
    • theFeller00 7y ago
      With such a large percent of this generation destined to be childless you don't think that conversation is coming? I'd bet on it once more start to realize the reality of their decision. Men or women, really.
      • naiveprogrammer 7y ago
        Absolutely. And there is a gap here to be bridged. In the current political discourse, I see a narrative of men and women being put as adversaries, as if they were competing for something whereas in most cases they are complements and their whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And I repeat, males are just as guilty here. Divorce has gone through the roof, single mothers are an ever increasing share of the parental composition. Men are running away from their responsibility which is to raise their children in conjunction with their partner. I hope we turn a corner sometime soon.
  • entee 7y ago
    Not sure I follow. Given two mothers (gonna leave aside some of the baggage here, fathers can do child care, not all women/people are straight or fit in the conventional framework): Amanda wants to have kids but also wants to be a Supreme Court litigator. Jane wants kids and wants to stay at home to raise them. Why is giving Amanda the option hurting Jane’s ability to chose her preferred outcome? Should we force Amanda to chose? How is that empowering?
    • codingmess 7y ago
      It's hurting in some ways, for example in increased prices for housing. If families with two income earners compete with families with one income earner, the outlook is bleak for one earner families. Prices simply rise to what the two earner households can afford. In fact many families can not afford the single earner model anymore. There are also changed expectation, although presumably those can be managed. But once daycare is available, pressure can be on women to actually work. Where I live, you get strange looks if you don't give your kid to daycare from age one. Apart from that it seems to me if somebody has a well paying career (like Amanda), they should be able to afford daycare anyway. If they don't, I'm not sure if society should pay for daycare just so that somebody can go to work to satisfy their ego (if their work yields less than the cost of daycare).
      • ck425 7y ago
        What you fail to mention though is the whole host of benefits to society that comes from gender equality, equality that is a direct result of woman working. Unfortunately it seems to be fundamentally difficult to make both models of the family work equally well simultaneously.
        • monoideism 7y ago
          > whole host of benefits to society that comes from gender equality Can you give me some examples? Not disagreeing, just would like to know. I can see how there's a lot of benefits to society for men and women to receive equal amounts of esteem and respect for the work they do, but I'm not convinced it has to be the exact same work in the exact same proportions.
  • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    If a full time caregiver is needed at home, dads can step up as well. After being laid off shortly after we had our first kid, I decided to give my wife a chance to get back into her career while I stayed at home until the kid was ready for daycare. There is no reason to put all this burden on moms, dads have an equal part in this either way.
    • codingmess 7y ago
      It is not a burden, it is a privilege. For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege. And if you believe the feminist narrative that it is dads forcing mothers to take care of the kids, consider that most women chose their jobs and the expected salary long before they meet the future father of their kids. Man choose careers that pay less, so the fathers end up having to earn the money. Them staying at home would simply mean less money for the family, often not enough money.
      • satyrnein 7y ago
        This sounds sort of like "no, you see, I can't possibly help you with this, because it's such a privilege for you."
        • username90 7y ago
          Being able to stay at home is a privilege. My brother, my dad and some of my friends took a few years off to stay at home when the mother worked, I don't see how being able to do that is not a privilege, all of them did it because they wanted to and liked it. However all of them experienced a lot of sexism from being a stay at home dad. So an alternative explanation to the skew between men and women at work could be that men face so much sexism at home so they have no other option than to just slave away for 40 years. The people I know were lucky to have a progressive wife with a high paying career and enough mental fortitude to shrug off the constant verbal jabs at you, most men are not that lucky.
          • nl 7y ago
  • ck425 7y ago
    It's worth noting that the amount of time parents (more so mothers) spend with each child has increased vastly, with relatively little evidence to suggest much increase in attainment. Most studies show that it's quality of time, not quantity, with parents that really matters. The evidence suggests we don't actually need to parent so much. Personally I see absolutely nothing wrong with sending kids to day care. We should focus on high quality family time, not high quantity. Unfortunately this view isn't acceptable in the age of helicopter parents.
    • gowld 7y ago
      Quantity Time is Quality Time. Being there means a hell of a lot when it come to building deep-seated trust and understanding.
    • gfodor 7y ago
      Do you have any citations here? I've always assumed that mothers on average spend less time with their children than in the past, especially the far past, where the men were often abroad fighting wars.
      • astura 7y ago
        "Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago" https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-now-spend-twice-as-much-time-with-their-children-as-50-years-ago https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
        • 75dvtwin 7y ago
          >"... One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. ..." This is analysis is just hard to believe. Between reading books, preparing food, driving to activities -- a full-time parent spends probably 4-5 full hours, except when another parent takes over or there is a continuous split. The interrupt costs are also very high (and affect negatively ability to work).
    • 7y ago
  • DavidVoid 7y ago
    >It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children. It's high time that fathers start putting in some more work in that department too. Sweden has 480 days of paid parental leave, and each parent has exclusive right to 90 of those days. Have fathers spend some time raising their kids instead of just letting their wives do it and you'll see that things should get better.
    • Consultant32452 7y ago
      This is a very feminized view of child rearing. Fatherhood's traditional gender role in raising children is to provide resources and protection. If you don't recognize that as "parenting" then you are missing the plot. Hugs are great, but not nearly as great as food and shelter.
      • oezi 7y ago
        Today, just providing "resources and protection" is indeed considered parenting but inadequate. Any man can help with hugs and the household given the reduced work hours.
        • Consultant32452 7y ago
          https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunger-facts https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunge... 1 in 7 children in America may not know where their next meal is coming from. Many children live in unsafe neighborhoods. I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that men are primarily responsible for the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs while women are primarily responsible for the upper tiers. Obviously that doesn't mean a man can never change a diaper or a woman can never pay a bill.
      • DavidVoid 7y ago
        So you think that if a father is just working (and essentially doing what he'd do if he didn't have a child) then that should be considered good parenting because he's providing resources? Might as well call every working man a good parent then even if they barely even interact with their kids. There are very important emotional aspects to parenting that you people who constantly complain about feminism seem to completely ignore, I'd much rather have a father who's there and who I can spend time with than a father who's working two jobs because "more money earned == better parent".
  • the_gipsy 7y ago
    Ah yes the 50s, when women took care of the children and men would attend serious matters, how god intended.
  • maire 7y ago
    Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife. That is why the newly affluent men of the mid-20th century wanted it so much. They came out of the great depression, fought a great war, and wanted a wife at home. You should not judge all of history by this one era. The work of child care used to fall on the entire extended family. The nuclear family reduced the flexibility in raising children. It was further reduced by a lack of work-life balance for both fathers and mothers. When women started working (again) the lack of flexibility fell on the mothers to fix. In my own life - I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked. I had flexibility through daycare, my awesome husband, my awesome mother, and my awesome employers. I know they are all awesome because when my daughter (a software engineer) faced the same issues, her employer was not at all flexible. She quit work to stay at home with her three boys. I have a bunch of engineering friends who faced the same issues as my daughter. I originally thought they left the workforce out of choice and now I know they did not.
    • datashow 7y ago
      > Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife. You really need some data to back it up here. "I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked." is not good evidence. For one, there is a representative issue. For another, there is a huge difference between part-time work and full-time work. We don't know how many hours your mother, grandmothers, and great grandmothers worked, or worked for how many years. Check data presented on this webpage: https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-force-participation-key-facts https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-force-participation-... . Female labor participation rate has being increasing since 1900. Apparently the data contradicted with your own personal experience. This is why we should try to avoid general argument based on our on personal experience.
      • maire 7y ago
        Labor force does count the actual workforce. They only count "wage slaves". One grandmother was a farmer. She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband. So she would not have been counted. I am not clear if it would have counted my other grandmother since she was a business owner. She owned a beauty salon. She also opened the first health food store in Berkeley with her sister to put my mother and her cousins through college. I doubt either would have been counted as labor force participation. My mother was counted.
  • rixed 7y ago
    Two children is a lot of effort only because male and/or public involvment is so low, and it is so because it is socially expected. It is socially expected because, I assume, men are setting the expectations here. As to how, your comment, assuming it fall on to women to care for children and ridiculing "female empowerment", is a textbook example of it.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    You’re talking about a history that never really existed except for a few decades in a few western countries. Look at countries where women actually have many children. They’re not “stay at home moms.” They’re agricultural societies where men and women work alongside each other, and groups of very old or very young women in the village take care of the children.
  • saghm 7y ago
    > Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders. Is there any evidence indicating that this is actually true? What makes you think that the existence of out-of-home childcare is forcing mothers to work? This seems backwards; I think it's much more likely that the existence of mothers who worked would lead to alternative childcare options being offered, not vice-versa.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      The market is a feedback loop, not a static system. Daycares may have started appearing because some mothers wanted to go back to work earlier. But, as more and more families started using them - whether to gain a financial leg up, boost the mother's career, or for personal reasons - they've become established. At the same time, the market started pricing it in - what was perhaps once a trick to boost your material status, now became the default, and these days sending kids to daycare isn't a way to boost anything - not sending them is a way to have less money. Similarly, daycare is expected in careers simply because there's more than enough mothers doing it that not doing it puts you at a competitive disadvantage. The market rewards being above the mean, but otherwise works to make the mean cheaper. If a few % of people find a way to move above the mean, they reap great rewards - which encourages others to do the same; the mean starts to move up, and competitive pressure starts to push its value down. In the end, "the new way" becomes the default way, and initial rewards from doing it are erased.
  • thefz 7y ago
    What about letting every woman decide for herself on where she wants to direct her work instead on keeping on making definitions and deciding what is good for them.
  • sbilstein 7y ago
    there is this latent assumption here that men are reliable breadwinners and/or that they generally do not use their economic power in this arrangement to abuse their partners and families. Women working is a way of evening out the power imbalance that has led to suffering for women all over the world since the beginning of time. When you have no economic power you are dependent on your husband which is why unpaid labor is so dangerous. The husband calls the shots. Not all husbands are good guys. It's only reasonable for women to want to reduce their exposure to this problem via things advocated for by feminists over time: birth control to avoid unwanted and forced pregnancies (far more common in the days of having 5+ children) and of course death during childbirth, literally their own income stream so they can pay for things a husband might not value equally: healthcare, tuition, clothes, and more, an income stream to enable a divorce should the husband be an abuser, problematic addict or worse... in less shitty scenarios, the sudden death of a male partner can result in financial ruin for a family with a 'non-working' mother. Again, its economically reasonable for a woman to want to hedge against being stuck at 40 years old with no advanced skills in a career. It's all about female empowerment.
• codingmess 7y ago
  Feminist narrative is that taking care of family is a stressful burden and women would love nothing more than to get away from that to relax in their fulfilling career. That narrative is nonsense, and the evidence is simply that in this day and age, nobody is forced to have children anymore. While a certain fraction of women don't "feel it" around their kids and prefer to work, it really isn't the case for most mothers. Many have kids because they also then enjoy spending time with their kids. The article cites a number of 50% of mothers wanting to work, but I really doubt that number. Or rather, it is too unspecific. What kind of work, and for how many hours? Sure many would want to work part time, for good pay, with flexible hours. But it's kind of silly to ask that kind of question. Who wouldn't say yes if asked "would you like to get a higher salary, work less hours and so on". There also is a "the grass is always greener on the other side effect" - many mothers who decide to go back to work end up being rather stressed out about it all.
• dave_b 7y ago
  How is it a problem that women are looking at the biological realities and choosing motherhood over a 9-5 job? Most people were originally sold on the “problem” being the supposed sexism that prevented women from doing what they really wanted. Now we’re seeing that women don’t really want to work for the man over their children, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe that equal outcomes is the goal in and of itself. Seems like a bait and switch. Solving this supposed problem with “convenient” (aka tax-funded) childcare is a huge misapplication of resources from the perspective of the family. It benefits big business by increasing the labor supply and driving down wages. It benefits big government by adding taxpayers and creating a problem to be solved with more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the family is trading the value of motherhood (an untaxed $160,000 according to the article) for an average 9-5 job in most cases, plus losing out on quality mother-child time. If a family really wants to make that trade then they can pay for it themselves, but it would be unconscionable to push people toward that outcome by subsidizing childcare.
• ByzantineO6 7y ago
  Just allocate more of our infinite resources to paternalistically supporting women's refusal to choose between competing desires. Reminds me of the evergreen "torn between two alphas" trope. No, just no. You already won the lottery twice on family SES and genetics to even be an academic.So choose, princess. Daddy is tired of your whining.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  I never understood why the awful working conditions of a law firm are ok for any sex. I think where you find big gender gaps in career paths you are looking at awful jobs.
• barry-cotter 7y ago
  > As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family. Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing an on premise company to a fully remote one. There’s also a hard upper limit on your career because managers are the bottleneck for communication so they almost have to be available when active else is. Arrangements to make flexibility economically profitable are also often denounced, see Uber. > Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things? It would be a better world but flexibility imposes large costs. Obscenely convenient childcare is also far from a panacea. Sweden has cheap to free childcare and it’s available 24/7 for those whose jobs demand it. But while Sweden’s employment rate is very high it’s among the most sex segregated in the world and fertility isn’t noticeably different from countries that aren’t so generous, suggesting the effects on family formation are minimal.
  • healsjnr1 7y ago
    This point of view keeps coming up and it completely misses the point that _this already happens to every single women who has given up their career to look after children_. This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption. I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism. It is the biggest issue I have with articles like this. Stamping out overt workplace harassment and sexism is barely the beginning. There are deep structures in place that have benefited men like me for millennia. These need to be considered not as complicated side issues but as the core barrier to achieving equity (as opposed to equality) in these fields.
    • dgzl 7y ago
      I'm strongly against abandoning equality for equity, and I don't agree that STEM academia and industry are internally sexist.
• ptaipale 7y ago
  I am not so sure that the suggested availability of high quality childcare really helps those numbers in STEM. In Nordic countries (I live in Finland), which are quite well known for having good quality childcare available to all families at low cost, the situation has not increased placement of women in STEM professions. In fact, quite the opposite: the more "gender-equal" a society, the fewer women study STEM subjects.
  • kerpele 7y ago
    Is it possible that the problem there is the amount of women starting studies in stem fields? I don’t have any numbers but anecdotal evidence of two Helsinki based schools in CS related programs had very lopsided gender ratios in bachelors and masters levels.
    • kerpele 7y ago
      Okay, I looked it up and apparently CS is the only stem field where there seems to be significant bias (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/edu-kumpula/2019/10/10/faculty-of-science-has-a-strong-gender-balance-in-students/ https://blogs.helsinki.fi/edu-kumpula/2019/10/10/faculty-of-...)
      • ptaipale 7y ago
        The correlation of women in STEM graduates and Global Gender Gap index is negative: the higher gender equality, the lower the proportion of women graduating from STEM subjects. Possible reasons are considered in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...