In full disclosure: I do believe there are essential differences between men and women in regards to their child-rearing ability. The skills that each gender ha

In full disclosure: I do believe there are essential differences between men and women in regards to their child-rearing ability. The skills that each gender has are unique in this regard. This is a generalization, and is not true in every case. Regardless, this means that all other things being equal, there will still be a societal preference for women to rearing children. But let's ignore that for the present, and pose the question: What would it take to equalize the amount of time that parents spend rearing their children and working outside the home, such that the children are still well-reared? Consider it purely economically: People have a limited amount of resources and time. One's gender has nothing to do with that. If men predominantly stayed home and reared children, while women worked, the situation would be the same. Rearing children is a full-time job. Either you are going to do it, or you are going to pay someone else to do it (in which case you are taking away from your home life, and you don't have it all). Men do not get to have it all either. They do not get to have a full-time job, and also spend large amounts of quality time at home. That is why there has traditionally been a compromise: the primary responsibility for child-rearing, respective of time, falls on one parent, while the other has the primary responsibility for earning a family's living. So, what could change this? Employers could start expecting men with families to work less. That would equalize men and women in the workplace - married men and women that is. Make no mistake, though, so long as there are people who are willing to work full-time and more than full-time, those people will be preferred by employers and be better paid. If married-with-children workers worked less, then childless workers will be preferred. This creates an economic pressure on the families with children to make a choice: Someone has to work more, or they have to live with much less. That's the brass tax of the economics of the thing. You can't legislate that away.