Why the focus on married women earning less than single women instead of focusing on household income?
Even if the single woman earns more than a married woman. For the most part, a married couple should have more disposable income after living expenses than her single counterpart. Married couples have a greater per capita net worth than their single counterpart.
In our case, because of choices we made together, my wife earns a little over 10K less than she did when she was single 5 years ago, but because I could depend on her to carry health insurance and she has more flexible schedule, that helps our family, I was able to switch jobs aggressively and I earn roughly $50,000 more than I did before we got married. We are both better off.
Once they are married, the couples also are able to take advantage of economies of scale – anything from buying just one dishwasher to relying on one another’s health insurance. That allows them to build wealth more quickly than their peers who are single, divorced or living together romantically.
For example, a married man may be able to work 12 hours a day to please his bosses and get promoted, because he and his wife can divide household duties so he can get ahead. That’s not as much of an option for a single parent.
Your anecdote seems to confirm the dynamic described in TFA? You're making more money "aggressively", your wife is making less, etc.? You seem happy about it, but lots of men and women are not...
And I've seen the situation play out differently. I just left a job that basically had a 100% work from home policy. It paid slightly less than average for our geographic area, but the men chose to sacrifice maximizing their income to work from home because their spouses had jobs that required them to work late or travel frequently.
I would assume that most well functioning couples work together to optimize their career ambitions, lifestyle choices, and family relationships.
I think that money are simple and crude measure of achievement and social approval. E.g. If part of your motivation is competitiveness or passion for your profession, she is losing after each child. My husbands higher salary won't make up for my missed promotion or less interesting project, it won't make me proud of my skills, basically.
The article however was about men primary. Which I found interesting, because perspective of male who would prefer different tradeoff is rarely available.
Depends on the couple, I guess. Optimally yes. But oftentimes both partners have different assumptions about what is fair contribution and how much free time is fair, don't talk about it really and resentments later on ensures. Like both of them believing they do too much simultaneously.
Other times one of them (can be also a women) takes advantage of the situation and the other one does not have much choice subsequently or figures it out only after a while maybe when it is too late. (If women hates her job, it is easier for her to claim that kids need mom longer/more to stay out of workforce longer which puts more pressure and stress on husband. If stereotypical geek claims that it is just not possible not to stay late, he can avoid some of boring housework. )
In other cases, the choice is made by tradition and peer/family pressure which prescribe proper roles (like in case of deeply conservative catholics I know - roles are strict and given by god end of discussion).
When you are married AND have kids, one thing that can happen is that the parent who is most concerned about the welfare of the kids has no choice but to simply buck up and do what is necessary for their sake. Quibbling with another grown adult about "fairness" and "equality" can be a great way to see the kids get shortchanged.
So, once there are children involved, it is not unusual for the wife to just suck it up and do what the kids need at personal cost to her. It often makes little sense to try to hold hubby's feet to the fire and insist on him doing his fair share at home or whatever.
This is not man-bashing. I am a woman and former homemaker. I do a lot of even-handed writing that tries to consider both sides of the picture. But this is a reality in many marriages. I do not self-identify as a "feminist" in part because, to me, "feminism" is about women wanting careers and to hell with any other considerations. This ongoing argument about equality of the sexes seems to mostly leave out the critical detail of the welfare of the children.
Unless and until we start talking about what works for the family as a whole, including kids, and society as a whole, including families with legal minors, this entire argument about men vs. women and so-called equality will continue to be sick and twisted and will tend to continue to crap on any parent that actually cares deeply about the welfare of their kids, regardless of gender.
I don't know what relevance that has to anything I said. Aside from the cherry picking aspect of how you (mis)quoted me, I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I am 51 years old. I deal routinely with women who look down upon me because they chose to put their careers first. In some cases, they chose to not have children at all. In their eyes, I absolutely am not their equal and unequivocally not deserving of any real respect.
Dealing with such women is usually a worse experience for me than dealing with most men. Such women are typically pretty toxic.
Because these choices are very personal and people are very insecure about them. Does you staying home and being alright with it really means she is bad egoistic mother? Does some women liking staying home signify that world is moving back to homemaker side? Does me staying at home (and having to fight changes situation push on you) really means I am naturally lazy or less capable as conservatives like to suggest?
In a sense, no one talks about these considerations openly, ever. So it comes out indirectly through attitudes.
Everyone is supposed to be motivated only by positive things, you are supposed to stay because you are caring and loving not because you are sucking it up. That idea insults people. You are supposed to work because you love career, not because you don't want to be the lazy nagging stereotype - which you are pretty sure you would turn into if forced to stay at home.
I have plenty of hypotheses of my own as to why other women do this sort of crap to me. In the end, I don't think it matters. If you want to talk about making the world a better place and "equality for all," then shitting all over me because I made different lifestyle choices from you and this hits some nerve of yours -- well, get therapy and quit making it my problem that you aren't actually happy with the lifestyle choices you made.
If you want to call yourself a feminist and talk about getting equal rights for women, then I don't want to hear your crap about how your ideals only actually apply to women like you but still exclude large groups of women.
I think these are just bitter people who felt "It's a man's world and the least worst option for a woman is to not have children."
That's not an idealistic solution. That is not about making the world a better place. That is not about expecting more of the world. That is basically saying "No point in fighting evil. You can't win."
Turning around and shitting on me because you gave up years ago makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.
> Women who behave like their male colleagues may be disliked for being “pushy” or “bitchy”, but these penalties are offset by the fact that they are also likely to enjoy more power and greater financial rewards. When men adopt the jobs and behaviours associated with women, however, they typically experience a loss of status with fewer perks and more social sanctions, especially from other men.
I think older (straight) men do not care about loss of status or social sanctions from other men. They care about loss of status from women. Especially when in long term relationships, there's the fear of an incorrect narrative where their partner often says that adopting feminine roles is appreciated, but subconsciously leads to less attraction. (with acknowledgement that the reverse is sometimes true for women's perceptions in the eyes of men)
[edit: it's actually in the article too ~3/4 of the way down, I should have been more patient]
I think a big part of reckoning with these social pressures may be simply expressing them out loud. It seems to be a truism of therapy that "you should never be ashamed of your feelings," but the very real benefits that white men continue to reap on one level tend to preclude an emotionally honest reckoning on another level.
A lot of the negative effects documented in this essay seem to purely relate to cognitive dissonance. For example, the essay said that men would be more willing to accept certain "child-friendly policies" if they believe that it would not decrease their socially-perceived masculinity.
I can only believe that it would also help men to openly express these fears, to state out loud the dissonance in their self conception that (largely positive) social change has wrought.
Yes, I agree. Men are often told they need to be everything:
Successful yet don't work too much. Help with the kids, yet don't be feminine. Be strong, yet sensitive. Have hard employable skills, but also be an artist. Don't play video games, but be fun to be around.
All of these are difficult to balance.
The scary part is the a majority of divorces are ended by women.
I don't know the answer, but as long as we acknowledge the fact that both modern men and modern women have a long list of conflicting demands on them, I think we can show everyone more compassion.
Perhaps one of the solutions is to acknowledge that you cannot have it all ways. In general, society demands that men have all the positive traits of masculinity, without any of the perceived negatives. A woman may marry a man because he is a successful career-orientated man. Later, she may divorce him because he’s not sensitive enough to her emotional needs.
Exceptions aside, certain traits tend to go together, for better or for worse, and this is the case with both masculinity and femininity. In this way, I wish people were more accepting and less judgemental.
I'm always iffy about articles like this because so much of the ground has been utterly salted by online "men's rights" activists that are more motivated by misogyny and antifeminism than actually righting wrongs.
It seems like a good read, but I would loved more data to crunch. The numerics of working long hours was a great example of how the mathematics of the situation make this stuff happen.
Anyhow, my wife and I actually do the fully-equal thing - she makes a bit more than me (teaching in Ontario is paid well and I'm not working in one of the Big Tech Market cities) so we have get to split things 50/50.
This actually presented a great opportunity: She wanted to go back to work early from her parental leave after the birth of our 3rd kid. So I did something new: I took the other half of the leave. 7 months off with my kids.
If you have the opportunity, do this. It actually made more money for us, in terms of strict income. Both of our employers provided a several weeks of top-up parental leave in which the government unemployment-insurance benefit is supplemented up to your full weekly paycheck. So by both of us taking time off, we got to double-dip on this.
And the experience with the kids was fantastic. I got to play boardgames with my son and teach him to ride his bike, and took my two daughters jogging in a double-stroller every other day. I practically lived in a ring-sling, even getting the stink-eye from greasy guys on a family trip to Manhattan. I got to properly get to know the parents of all my son's best friends and we're all still close. I was in the best shape of my life and had a great time, and my wife likes her job so she was happy to be at work.
I'd considered doing it on our 2nd kid, but friends and family had talked me out of it because of worries about my career. I don't even work in the same place I did when my 2nd was born. I quit that job later on anyways, so I missed out on that time for nothing.
To me, the biggest tragedy is the every-upwards climb of working hours for the household. There was a time when a family would live on a single 40 hour workweek. And what have we gained? I mean, for people who work retail, does the fact that they work on Sundays and every night to 10PM mean they actually sell more goods? Or does it just mean that retailers need to pay staff less per-hour because they're selling for more hours?
If MRAs were primarily motivated by actual concern for men's lot in life, they'd do more proactive work. Instead they are mostly reactive, coming out of the woodwork when something is mentioned about women. They bitch about how bad men have it in order to deflate the issue de jour, then are not to be seen until the next time someone talks about women.
The OP is utterly right in saying that the ground has been salted by these man-children. Men do face problems, but MRAs do little work and mostly just armchair whine. How many of them create working groups or petition politicians or similar? Compare to feminism, where while it has a share of whiners, is mostly pro-active; organising events, talking to stakeholders, starting discussions instead of derailing them. You see it here on HN, where a topic is about women, and the whiners come out to derail... yet these same MRAs don't post their own articles about men.
I always like to point at Movember. A solid men's-issue foundation with no whining, no association with mras, and it generates an pantsload of money for a good men's-issue cause with relentless positivity.
MRAs complain while the real men concerned by men's issues are actually doing something. Worried about the discrepancy between funding for breast cancer vs prostate cancer? Well you can moan about the nasty feminists and how society cares about women's suffering more than men's, or you can make a difference.
Well... feminism is something that has been around for a while. On the other hand, the "Men's Rights" banner (at least to me) seems much more recent, with most of the charges being led by the denizens of places like /r/TheRedPill (where they advocate some sort of extreme version of "every man should be a dudebro alpha male").
While it might not be entirely fair, if the majority of the visible "Men's Rights" proponents are the extremists, then they will end up being the ones to claim the banner for themselves as the term isn't as well established yet.
Well, most people that I've come across (online or otherwise) that wave that "Men's Rights" banner tend to be at the extreme end of the spectrum[0]. If they are the people that are the most vocal, they will be the ones that end up representing the group.
[0] If they are to be believed, all claims of rape by women are false, and should be taken with a enormous grain of salt. Also it's actually better to be a woman in society right now than a man because there's no downside to being a woman and a huge downside to being a man.
> I'm always iffy about articles like this because so much of the ground has been utterly salted by online "men's rights" activists that are more motivated by misogyny and antifeminism than actually righting wrongs.
That's in large part a result of the mainstream completely ceding ground to MRAs. When it's become socially unacceptable to talk about issues affecting men, because so much of the discussion has become framed in terms of privilige and patriarchy - what you're left with is the only groups willing to talk about issues that affect men in public are the socially unacceptable ones (and indeed, MRAs tend to be a nasty bunch).
But that doesn't change the fact that there's real issues, and when no one else is willing to talk about them that's what sustains the MRA groups.
The reality is, gender norms screw everyone over. And gender norms aren't the result of men today trying to screw over women; gender norms are perpetuated by society as a whole, men and women alike.
And you and your wife might have it all figured out; more power to you! But please recognize it ain't so easy for most people. The way you describe it you're living a lot of guy's dream/fantasy, _very_ few men have the option of taking 7 months of leave to be with their kids - or anything like a fully equal household, whether they want it or not.
You may have it made, but a lot of men feel trapped and unable to even talk about these issues.
"Men's rights," like feminism, has adherents with beliefs across a spectrum, from "reasonable things most people can agree with" to "wild and perverse antipathy toward the other sex."
Which is just to say that both groups consist of people and people vary.
When you say that there was a time that a family lived on a single 40-hour workweek... are you including housework and child-raising, or just paid work?
Of course just paid work. But also the amount of manpower needed to raise children has gone up as our expectations for supervision have increased. Letting a 7 year old walk themselves to school is no longer okay, for example.
> Letting a 7 year old walk themselves to school is no longer okay, for example.
This is the worst. Kids need to accrue independent skills early or you wind up with pathetically helpless college students. Self-sufficient kids is the whole point of parenting.
In the US at least, there are very few places where a 7 year old could walk to school. The town I grew up in the elementary school was ~20 minutes away by car for example. "Kids these days" as a whole tend to be more self sufficient (as a result of more dual working households etc); not less.
Maybe, but in general in the West it isn't a problem to let a 7 year old walk to school on their own. In fact, the few cases where someone makes an issue out of it are so rare they actually make national or even international news!
I think that in a couple, there is always some form of resentment towards the partner which does not work (is not pulling their weight) but I think that the level of resentment is many times higher if the non-working partner happens to be a man.
When I was in med school, married with two kids, every member of my wife's family told her to divorce me, not once, but on a regular basis. They all think I'm great now and wonder why we don't visit them much.
> Because men – and especially white, professional men – occupy a uniquely privileged place in society,
I don't know any white, professional men who got where they are because of privilege. It was all effort over many years together with sensible decision-making like finishing school, getting a job, not having kids out of wedlock, turning up to work on time, working hard, being honest and so on.
> Feminists have long argued that men see little need to help out more at home because they already enjoy all the benefits of marriage and fatherhood without having to put in the extra work.
What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood? Non-feminist men also note that women aren't pushing for equality in physically demanding jobs on oil rigs, welding, construction and coal mining - because equality in the workplace is only for office jobs I guess.
> Their status as men is at once so valuable and so precarious that it must be won over and over again.
This is not a bad thing. The man guarding his village's perimeter from bandits can't fuck up or it costs people their lives.
> “Many professional workplaces involve a constant negotiation among men to establish a pecking order,” says Joan Williams, a feminist legal scholar
Yet another feminist quote. Why not ask some non-feminists for their opinions? This pecking order thing is entirely natural among men. Always has been, always will be.
The privilege they are talking about is not some kind of explicit handout. It is a cultural background. It manifests as other people's exceptions, preconceptions, and even things like word choice and shared conceptual familiarities.
For instance, if you've ever seriously considered starting a business, then you're probably privileged. Because for someone like me, it is simply not a consideration. I don't know anyone who cares about business, let alone owns one. Never had any friends who know anything about business. I have no business vocabulary, and I have desire to acquire one. My concept of self-worth is more anti-business than it is business-driven. So I'm never going to start a business.
Does this mean I've not finished school? No. Didn't go to business school though. Does this mean I'm not hard-working? No. Don't work hard to make money though. Etc.
Now if my father had been a businessman, or If I'd grown up in a place where people cared about business, I might know a thing or two about how to do it. That background of experience is the privilege they are talking about.
I am privileged in that I understand machines, art, language, and education. Those privileges have directly and indirectly resulted in almost every success I've ever had. I am a white professional man.
Now you know one. And you probably know many others, if you'd come at this discussion from a position of understanding rather than from a position of defiance.
>What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood?
What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?
> I am privileged in that I understand machines, art, language, and education. Those privileges have directly and indirectly resulted in almost every success I've ever had. I am a white professional man.
That's amazing. You understand machines, art, language and education and no work was required to gain this understanding? It was just given to you? Or was there a few thousand hours of study and practice involved? Some stability in the home life? Encouragement from parents? All of the above?
> Now you know one. And you probably know many others, if you'd come at this discussion from a position of understanding rather than from a position of defiance.
My defiance is because the author has quoted only feminists and cucked men. It's biased and needs to be called out.
> What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?
I am well aware of the cultural superiority of western civilization. Nothing else even comes close. But I'm certainly not going to be guilt-tripped about it by some Rothschild publication.
>>What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood?
>What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?
I think what we seem to keep pointing out is that: the idea of cultural privilege is bullshit. It hasn't been proven. It doesn't exist. They won't even give us a solid definition that we could apply a scientific method. Therefore, any knowledge of the subject is moot. And, you ought to realize that the fact that you sit around thinking of ways to describe the chip on your shoulder is what's keeping you from this "privilege", not that someone has a wealth of opportunities that you do not.
There's been a few studies where identical resumes have been sent out with "white-sounding" and "non-white-sounding" names, with the white names getting more follow-up.
> They won't even give us a solid definition that we could apply a scientific method. Therefore, any knowledge of the subject is moot.
Geez, don't ever ask about a bus route in a new town. The person isn't going to be able to do a blind trial with a null hypothesis in order to tell you that the route 5 goes downtown, so you can't trust them.
Seriously though, you're talking nonsense. Cultural privilege has been shown time and time again. Hell, the whole 'colonialism' episode in global history revolved around the idea.
> There's been a few studies where identical resumes have been sent out with "white-sounding" and "non-white-sounding" names, with the white names getting more follow-up.
IIRC, that study finding didn't survive the replication crisis - the most recent resume studies didn't find bias against "non-white-sounding" names.
An optimistic interpretation of the discrepancy is that the earlier studies had picked low-class "black-sounding" names. It's hard to do this kind of study cleanly since names don't merely signify race, they also signify other things like socioeconomic status and age so to do it right you'd need to carefully validate that the specific names used don't differ in implications other than race; I don't think that has really been done yet.
I've never heard anyone claim that priveleged white men never work hard. Consider that other less privileged people may work just as hard yet see fewer opportunities for success. This is the concept of privilege as I understand it.
>> Coltrane has found that after controlling for variables like age and education, married American men earn significantly more than their unmarried or divorced male peers, and their earnings go up with every child they have. Marriage seems to make men more productive at work because it allows them to outsource much of the housekeeping to their wives.<<
I don't see how that last sentence makes any sense. Since when does one's earnings have anything to do with whether the housekeeping for one child or three children is "outsourced" to wives? I think it's far more likely that being a father to more children is correlated with being older and more experienced and therefore more highly compensated.
Hmm, fair point. It just doesn't make any sense then that more children correlate to higher income because the housekeeping responsibilities fall to the wife.
There's no reason for them to assume it has anything to do with outsourcing housekeeping. Quite simply, an intact marriage and children are likely to provide men with the drive to produce for the sake of his family.
[EDIT - It turns out that even this very comment required editing if we apply the standard to it, that it itself suggests, see below. SUPER SUPER great example!]
---
(This comment is serious, not satire or sarcastic or something.)
I've flagged this article and everyone else should too. When the tech industry (programmers/startups/etc) reaches something like at least 60/40 - I'm not saying we need to wait for parity - then we can return to these questions. (There's nothing wrong with the subject, except for our industry's statistics - that's it.)
Until then I strongly encourage everyone here (male and female, regardless of your opinions of the article - i.e. if the article is good, and solid, and you agree with it, and it's not offensive) to flag articles like this, even when they're 100.00% correct, and even in the case that as a man or a woman you don't disagree with the article at all, don't find it offensive, etc. Mods should bury them from the front page.
I'm not saying this should be permanent, but let's work on this for a few years.
On the other hand everyone should be on their very best behavior for stories from the other side (in other words
everyone should look at their comments for a minute before submitting them, stay silent in many cases where they have an opinion, let women express their viewpoint without replying with men's viewpoints, and so forth), flag comments that can even be misconstrued as misogynistic, and so forth.
I don't wanna work with a bunch of men for the rest of my life. Do you? [EDIT: I am on board with the reply that pointed out that the issue with what men want, but rather equal access for women - great example. :) I should have phrased this in such terms. Sorry.]
Work for the world you want, today. It might seem like the suggestions I make in this comment (which is 100% serious, not satire or anything like that) are over-the-top, but have you seen the statistics in our industry?
Let's do something about it. We don't need to discuss stories like this one, here. We can discuss these stories on HN in a few years. Until then there are plenty of places all over the Internet to discuss them.
Obviously no, I don't. And I don't suggest silencing them, I suggest making them discuss it elsewhere (not here on HN).
Also I suggest that all of this can be discussed, just in a couple of years -- once our industry (programmers, startup entrpreneurs) reaches 60/40 or, hell, at least 70/30.
-----
EDIT: in reply to the reply to this. same way as it happened in every other industry that got closer to parity. (example: medical industry, legal industry, MBA's, etc.)
Your solution to addressing men being over-represented in one segment of the workforce, is to ban discussions about the challenges facing men in the workforce?
It's not a solution, it's a couple of proactive steps we can take in this discussion forum only. My suggestions will have zero impact on discussion forums all over the entire rest of the Internet, nor do I suggest that the same steps be taken all over the entire rest of the Internet. I am only and just talking about Hacker News - that's it. In other words, I am not arguing against having the normal discussion on reddit and elsewhere - just not here. Take it there and go wild. Flag it here. (Even if there is nothing wrong with the article.) When our industry -
programmers, startup entrepreneurs - reaches 60/40 (hell, 70/30) my suggested steps are voided.
I've worked in offices with 15 men (including me) and 0 women. I've also worked in startups where the CEO (a male) told me (a male) he would never hire a woman.
The fact that these are outrageously skewed (approx. 50% of the population is male, so the chances of 15 hires in a row being all male drawn at random would be 1 in 2^15th or 0.003%. The chances that every hire forever will be male - per the CEO's policy - is 0%.)
I don't like these odds. Do you think they're appropriate?
There is something wrong with our industry and we have to fix it. Banishing men's rights discussions from (just) this forum, even if there is nothing wrong with that discussion, for just a few years is a good start.
There's nothing wrong with those discussions. They are nevertheless counter to my suggestion.
By the way, I believe you did not follow my advice of taking 1 minute to look at your comment for a moment and making sure it's on your "best behavior". If you had, you would not have thrown in that quip that the only reason I wouldn't like to work with all men is so that I could leer at some women. You would have self-censored that quip if you had taken a moment to read your own comment carefully. So it's actually a good example of what I'm talking about.
It's outrageous to suggest that the only problem with an office full of men with no women in it (or with, say, the mentioned CEO's policy of "never" hiring any woman) is that the men have no woman to "leer" at. You should have self-censored that suggestion. This is a clear example of what I am suggesting. I am suggesting you should have taken a minute, and then not made that comment.
--
EDIT: HEY! On the other hand if instead of phrasing it as you had, you would have pointed out that it is important that the issue is that women do not have a chance to work in great offices, we would have moved ahead hugely. so even just this super-mini example is a great example :)
I hope after some reflection you actually end up on board with my suggestions!
I was using your requirement for analysing comments ('flag comments that can even be misconstrued as misogynistic') against your comment itself. You gave zero reasons as to why women should have equal access to the workplace, only "I don't want to work with a bunch of men". I knew what you were getting at, but I was purposefully misconstruing your comment (and even pointed that fact out).
Men have social issues to face. Just because MRAs are shrill and annoying doesn't mean that mature discussion should also be stomped on. We can also multitask - we don't have to fix on social ill at a time. It's also fantasy that we can get to your 60/40 split in only a few years - the staffing pipeline just isn't there, and preventing people from discussing issues until we reach that split is preventing them from discussing them for a decade or more, even in the best of circumstances.
As for 'best behaviour', I think it's incredibly poor behaviour to simply suggest long-term complete censorship of a topic you don't like, regardless of the quality of discussion. Sticking your fingers in your ears is not going to get more women hired, anyway.
In my edit at the bottom of the comment you just replied to, I acknowledge that actually what you claim is a flaw in my argument is actually correct.
By purposefully misconstruing my comment as misogynistic, you find a genuine flaw: you are absolutely right, I made a mistake by appealing to "do you, a man, want to work in an office full of only men forever?" rather than, "should offices discriminate against women and not allow them equal opportunity?"
So even though you went out of your way to prove a point, actually we can improve how good of a place HN is for women through doing so.
If you had phrased it as follows: "Logicallee, I want to make sure that you do not accidentally imply that the primary reason for allowing women to work at tech workplaces is for the benefit of men - you may want to edit your statement which could be construed (or misconstrued) this way", then do you see how, especially after I acknowledged it and maybe edited my comment, we would end up with a safer, more welcoming place that takes women into better consideration?
So actually although you thought you were proving a flaw in my argument, what you were really doing is showing the strength of my argument by pointing out a flaw in a part of my comment that was not fundamental to the argument!
This may be hard to follow. Imagine if I said "People could improve their orthographie by using more common words, rather than obscure Greek and Latin words" and you pointed out that I misspelled orthography, but if I had written "spelling" I would have written it correctly. So in this case the flaw (mistake) in my phrasing would have actually strengthened it.
The flaw (mistake) in my verbiage that you point out actually strengthens my argument.
I know we are making really nuanced arguments but I hope you see what I mean! I did take the time to see what you mean.
Whatever you were arguing for, this crosses into rudeness that is quite unacceptable. We've warned you about this a whole bunch of times already. This process isn't infinite. If you continue to flout HN's rules, we're going to end up banning you.
I was specifically making a point about what 'misconstrued' means, particularly given the OP wanted to flag everything. I realise you don't read every comment, but I go into more detail in the first paragraph only two comments down. It wasn't meant to be insulting, but using the (now edited) comment's own requirements against itself.
Not an argument. Feminism is an ideology and like any other has its good points and bad. You can believe in equality and not have to identify as a feminist.
Oh of course. Wouldn't want to be associated with feminism. But hey, you can still be a feminist, just don't call it that, right? Becauase just like men's deodorant and shaving cream, we have to have our OWN version of feminism, free from all of those WOMEN. Wouldn't want to be associated with women or have to navigate a space that isn't ours. Nope.
(Hint: this is sarcasm and feminism isn't primarily about men.)
You can also believe in a better world than the one we currently have, not call yourself a feminist and also not believe "equality" is the standard we should be caring about.
(In case it actually needs to be said again: I happen to be female.)
I disagree with your view of what I posted. (it was not done with a unsubstantive+ragey stance) What I posted was a disagreement with the exaggeration of the alternative point of view they had. (Any article that doesn't agree with the popular ultra liberal women's positive view is "salted by mens rights [insert derogative terms etc]")
Being anti-feminist is not a bad thing. It is a conversation that could be had (is it good, is it bad, etc), the topic of the original poster leads to a conversatoin about this.
My concern with Hacker News is that it claims to be technology focused, and founder focus. However articles dealing with gender issues, like this, get promoted and kept up.
I completely respect and understand your stance that those topics tend to go badly.
>Coltrane has found that after controlling for variables like age and education, married American men earn significantly more than their unmarried or divorced male peers, and their earnings go up with every child they have. Marriage seems to make men more productive at work because it allows them to outsource much of the housekeeping to their wives.
That's an assumption. IMO it's more likely to be that men with families out-earn their single and divorced counterparts because they're motivated to do so.
Particularly as compared to divorced men. There's no point in killing yourself at work if the ex is going to take half the money.
>Chase, a father in his late 40s who is a partner at an international law firm in Chicago. “When I see a woman who has children and I know she and her husband are working like crazy, that concerns me for the sake of the kids,” he says. “But when I see stay-at-home dads, I don’t think very highly of them. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want, but I think it’s kind of wimpy to do that. It’s checking out, not being in the game, not fighting for success. Those are the traits I value.”
Wow, Chase sounds like a real turd, I feel bad for his kids.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadEven if the single woman earns more than a married woman. For the most part, a married couple should have more disposable income after living expenses than her single counterpart. Married couples have a greater per capita net worth than their single counterpart.
In our case, because of choices we made together, my wife earns a little over 10K less than she did when she was single 5 years ago, but because I could depend on her to carry health insurance and she has more flexible schedule, that helps our family, I was able to switch jobs aggressively and I earn roughly $50,000 more than I did before we got married. We are both better off.
https://www.forbes.com/2006/07/25/singles-marriage-money-cx_...
https://www.google.com/amp/www.today.com/amp/money/why-marri...
Once they are married, the couples also are able to take advantage of economies of scale – anything from buying just one dishwasher to relying on one another’s health insurance. That allows them to build wealth more quickly than their peers who are single, divorced or living together romantically.
For example, a married man may be able to work 12 hours a day to please his bosses and get promoted, because he and his wife can divide household duties so he can get ahead. That’s not as much of an option for a single parent.
I would assume that most well functioning couples work together to optimize their career ambitions, lifestyle choices, and family relationships.
The article however was about men primary. Which I found interesting, because perspective of male who would prefer different tradeoff is rarely available.
Other times one of them (can be also a women) takes advantage of the situation and the other one does not have much choice subsequently or figures it out only after a while maybe when it is too late. (If women hates her job, it is easier for her to claim that kids need mom longer/more to stay out of workforce longer which puts more pressure and stress on husband. If stereotypical geek claims that it is just not possible not to stay late, he can avoid some of boring housework. )
In other cases, the choice is made by tradition and peer/family pressure which prescribe proper roles (like in case of deeply conservative catholics I know - roles are strict and given by god end of discussion).
So, once there are children involved, it is not unusual for the wife to just suck it up and do what the kids need at personal cost to her. It often makes little sense to try to hold hubby's feet to the fire and insist on him doing his fair share at home or whatever.
This is not man-bashing. I am a woman and former homemaker. I do a lot of even-handed writing that tries to consider both sides of the picture. But this is a reality in many marriages. I do not self-identify as a "feminist" in part because, to me, "feminism" is about women wanting careers and to hell with any other considerations. This ongoing argument about equality of the sexes seems to mostly leave out the critical detail of the welfare of the children.
Unless and until we start talking about what works for the family as a whole, including kids, and society as a whole, including families with legal minors, this entire argument about men vs. women and so-called equality will continue to be sick and twisted and will tend to continue to crap on any parent that actually cares deeply about the welfare of their kids, regardless of gender.
Second-wave feminism lasted from 1960s to 1980s.
Dealing with such women is usually a worse experience for me than dealing with most men. Such women are typically pretty toxic.
In a sense, no one talks about these considerations openly, ever. So it comes out indirectly through attitudes.
Everyone is supposed to be motivated only by positive things, you are supposed to stay because you are caring and loving not because you are sucking it up. That idea insults people. You are supposed to work because you love career, not because you don't want to be the lazy nagging stereotype - which you are pretty sure you would turn into if forced to stay at home.
If you want to call yourself a feminist and talk about getting equal rights for women, then I don't want to hear your crap about how your ideals only actually apply to women like you but still exclude large groups of women.
I think these are just bitter people who felt "It's a man's world and the least worst option for a woman is to not have children."
That's not an idealistic solution. That is not about making the world a better place. That is not about expecting more of the world. That is basically saying "No point in fighting evil. You can't win."
Turning around and shitting on me because you gave up years ago makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.
I think older (straight) men do not care about loss of status or social sanctions from other men. They care about loss of status from women. Especially when in long term relationships, there's the fear of an incorrect narrative where their partner often says that adopting feminine roles is appreciated, but subconsciously leads to less attraction. (with acknowledgement that the reverse is sometimes true for women's perceptions in the eyes of men)
[edit: it's actually in the article too ~3/4 of the way down, I should have been more patient]
A lot of the negative effects documented in this essay seem to purely relate to cognitive dissonance. For example, the essay said that men would be more willing to accept certain "child-friendly policies" if they believe that it would not decrease their socially-perceived masculinity.
I can only believe that it would also help men to openly express these fears, to state out loud the dissonance in their self conception that (largely positive) social change has wrought.
Successful yet don't work too much. Help with the kids, yet don't be feminine. Be strong, yet sensitive. Have hard employable skills, but also be an artist. Don't play video games, but be fun to be around.
All of these are difficult to balance.
The scary part is the a majority of divorces are ended by women.
I don't know the answer, but as long as we acknowledge the fact that both modern men and modern women have a long list of conflicting demands on them, I think we can show everyone more compassion.
I was nodding along until I got to this one. What in the world do video games have to do with being a fun person to be around?
Exceptions aside, certain traits tend to go together, for better or for worse, and this is the case with both masculinity and femininity. In this way, I wish people were more accepting and less judgemental.
It seems like a good read, but I would loved more data to crunch. The numerics of working long hours was a great example of how the mathematics of the situation make this stuff happen.
Anyhow, my wife and I actually do the fully-equal thing - she makes a bit more than me (teaching in Ontario is paid well and I'm not working in one of the Big Tech Market cities) so we have get to split things 50/50.
This actually presented a great opportunity: She wanted to go back to work early from her parental leave after the birth of our 3rd kid. So I did something new: I took the other half of the leave. 7 months off with my kids.
If you have the opportunity, do this. It actually made more money for us, in terms of strict income. Both of our employers provided a several weeks of top-up parental leave in which the government unemployment-insurance benefit is supplemented up to your full weekly paycheck. So by both of us taking time off, we got to double-dip on this.
And the experience with the kids was fantastic. I got to play boardgames with my son and teach him to ride his bike, and took my two daughters jogging in a double-stroller every other day. I practically lived in a ring-sling, even getting the stink-eye from greasy guys on a family trip to Manhattan. I got to properly get to know the parents of all my son's best friends and we're all still close. I was in the best shape of my life and had a great time, and my wife likes her job so she was happy to be at work.
I'd considered doing it on our 2nd kid, but friends and family had talked me out of it because of worries about my career. I don't even work in the same place I did when my 2nd was born. I quit that job later on anyways, so I missed out on that time for nothing.
To me, the biggest tragedy is the every-upwards climb of working hours for the household. There was a time when a family would live on a single 40 hour workweek. And what have we gained? I mean, for people who work retail, does the fact that they work on Sundays and every night to 10PM mean they actually sell more goods? Or does it just mean that retailers need to pay staff less per-hour because they're selling for more hours?
What you think or told they are motivated by and their actual motivations are different things.
The OP is utterly right in saying that the ground has been salted by these man-children. Men do face problems, but MRAs do little work and mostly just armchair whine. How many of them create working groups or petition politicians or similar? Compare to feminism, where while it has a share of whiners, is mostly pro-active; organising events, talking to stakeholders, starting discussions instead of derailing them. You see it here on HN, where a topic is about women, and the whiners come out to derail... yet these same MRAs don't post their own articles about men.
MRAs complain while the real men concerned by men's issues are actually doing something. Worried about the discrepancy between funding for breast cancer vs prostate cancer? Well you can moan about the nasty feminists and how society cares about women's suffering more than men's, or you can make a difference.
Do they identify as MRAs though?
You and the OP are generalizing. You should apply the same nuance you show for feminisim to MRAs.
While it might not be entirely fair, if the majority of the visible "Men's Rights" proponents are the extremists, then they will end up being the ones to claim the banner for themselves as the term isn't as well established yet.
[0] If they are to be believed, all claims of rape by women are false, and should be taken with a enormous grain of salt. Also it's actually better to be a woman in society right now than a man because there's no downside to being a woman and a huge downside to being a man.
That's in large part a result of the mainstream completely ceding ground to MRAs. When it's become socially unacceptable to talk about issues affecting men, because so much of the discussion has become framed in terms of privilige and patriarchy - what you're left with is the only groups willing to talk about issues that affect men in public are the socially unacceptable ones (and indeed, MRAs tend to be a nasty bunch).
But that doesn't change the fact that there's real issues, and when no one else is willing to talk about them that's what sustains the MRA groups.
The reality is, gender norms screw everyone over. And gender norms aren't the result of men today trying to screw over women; gender norms are perpetuated by society as a whole, men and women alike.
And you and your wife might have it all figured out; more power to you! But please recognize it ain't so easy for most people. The way you describe it you're living a lot of guy's dream/fantasy, _very_ few men have the option of taking 7 months of leave to be with their kids - or anything like a fully equal household, whether they want it or not.
You may have it made, but a lot of men feel trapped and unable to even talk about these issues.
Which is just to say that both groups consist of people and people vary.
This is the worst. Kids need to accrue independent skills early or you wind up with pathetically helpless college students. Self-sufficient kids is the whole point of parenting.
Why not? What's changed?
I don't know any white, professional men who got where they are because of privilege. It was all effort over many years together with sensible decision-making like finishing school, getting a job, not having kids out of wedlock, turning up to work on time, working hard, being honest and so on.
> Feminists have long argued that men see little need to help out more at home because they already enjoy all the benefits of marriage and fatherhood without having to put in the extra work.
What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood? Non-feminist men also note that women aren't pushing for equality in physically demanding jobs on oil rigs, welding, construction and coal mining - because equality in the workplace is only for office jobs I guess.
> Their status as men is at once so valuable and so precarious that it must be won over and over again.
This is not a bad thing. The man guarding his village's perimeter from bandits can't fuck up or it costs people their lives.
> “Many professional workplaces involve a constant negotiation among men to establish a pecking order,” says Joan Williams, a feminist legal scholar
Yet another feminist quote. Why not ask some non-feminists for their opinions? This pecking order thing is entirely natural among men. Always has been, always will be.
For instance, if you've ever seriously considered starting a business, then you're probably privileged. Because for someone like me, it is simply not a consideration. I don't know anyone who cares about business, let alone owns one. Never had any friends who know anything about business. I have no business vocabulary, and I have desire to acquire one. My concept of self-worth is more anti-business than it is business-driven. So I'm never going to start a business.
Does this mean I've not finished school? No. Didn't go to business school though. Does this mean I'm not hard-working? No. Don't work hard to make money though. Etc.
Now if my father had been a businessman, or If I'd grown up in a place where people cared about business, I might know a thing or two about how to do it. That background of experience is the privilege they are talking about.
I am privileged in that I understand machines, art, language, and education. Those privileges have directly and indirectly resulted in almost every success I've ever had. I am a white professional man.
Now you know one. And you probably know many others, if you'd come at this discussion from a position of understanding rather than from a position of defiance.
>What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood?
What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?
That's amazing. You understand machines, art, language and education and no work was required to gain this understanding? It was just given to you? Or was there a few thousand hours of study and practice involved? Some stability in the home life? Encouragement from parents? All of the above?
> Now you know one. And you probably know many others, if you'd come at this discussion from a position of understanding rather than from a position of defiance.
My defiance is because the author has quoted only feminists and cucked men. It's biased and needs to be called out.
> What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?
I am well aware of the cultural superiority of western civilization. Nothing else even comes close. But I'm certainly not going to be guilt-tripped about it by some Rothschild publication.
I under that definition: We can consider a huge percentage of minorities to be privileged. Business popups where there are needs.
I think what we seem to keep pointing out is that: the idea of cultural privilege is bullshit. It hasn't been proven. It doesn't exist. They won't even give us a solid definition that we could apply a scientific method. Therefore, any knowledge of the subject is moot. And, you ought to realize that the fact that you sit around thinking of ways to describe the chip on your shoulder is what's keeping you from this "privilege", not that someone has a wealth of opportunities that you do not.
> They won't even give us a solid definition that we could apply a scientific method. Therefore, any knowledge of the subject is moot.
Geez, don't ever ask about a bus route in a new town. The person isn't going to be able to do a blind trial with a null hypothesis in order to tell you that the route 5 goes downtown, so you can't trust them.
Seriously though, you're talking nonsense. Cultural privilege has been shown time and time again. Hell, the whole 'colonialism' episode in global history revolved around the idea.
IIRC, that study finding didn't survive the replication crisis - the most recent resume studies didn't find bias against "non-white-sounding" names.
An optimistic interpretation of the discrepancy is that the earlier studies had picked low-class "black-sounding" names. It's hard to do this kind of study cleanly since names don't merely signify race, they also signify other things like socioeconomic status and age so to do it right you'd need to carefully validate that the specific names used don't differ in implications other than race; I don't think that has really been done yet.
(more here: http://datacolada.org/51 )
I don't see how that last sentence makes any sense. Since when does one's earnings have anything to do with whether the housekeeping for one child or three children is "outsourced" to wives? I think it's far more likely that being a father to more children is correlated with being older and more experienced and therefore more highly compensated.
---
(This comment is serious, not satire or sarcastic or something.)
I've flagged this article and everyone else should too. When the tech industry (programmers/startups/etc) reaches something like at least 60/40 - I'm not saying we need to wait for parity - then we can return to these questions. (There's nothing wrong with the subject, except for our industry's statistics - that's it.)
Until then I strongly encourage everyone here (male and female, regardless of your opinions of the article - i.e. if the article is good, and solid, and you agree with it, and it's not offensive) to flag articles like this, even when they're 100.00% correct, and even in the case that as a man or a woman you don't disagree with the article at all, don't find it offensive, etc. Mods should bury them from the front page.
I'm not saying this should be permanent, but let's work on this for a few years.
On the other hand everyone should be on their very best behavior for stories from the other side (in other words everyone should look at their comments for a minute before submitting them, stay silent in many cases where they have an opinion, let women express their viewpoint without replying with men's viewpoints, and so forth), flag comments that can even be misconstrued as misogynistic, and so forth.
I don't wanna work with a bunch of men for the rest of my life. Do you? [EDIT: I am on board with the reply that pointed out that the issue with what men want, but rather equal access for women - great example. :) I should have phrased this in such terms. Sorry.]
Work for the world you want, today. It might seem like the suggestions I make in this comment (which is 100% serious, not satire or anything like that) are over-the-top, but have you seen the statistics in our industry?
Let's do something about it. We don't need to discuss stories like this one, here. We can discuss these stories on HN in a few years. Until then there are plenty of places all over the Internet to discuss them.
Also I suggest that all of this can be discussed, just in a couple of years -- once our industry (programmers, startup entrpreneurs) reaches 60/40 or, hell, at least 70/30.
-----
EDIT: in reply to the reply to this. same way as it happened in every other industry that got closer to parity. (example: medical industry, legal industry, MBA's, etc.)
Remember that the more egalitarian and advanced the society, the more the genders self-segregate into different professions.
I don't really want to flag proactive, mature efforts at discussion of people's problems, just so you can leer at more women at work.
(something something 'misconstrued')
The fact that these are outrageously skewed (approx. 50% of the population is male, so the chances of 15 hires in a row being all male drawn at random would be 1 in 2^15th or 0.003%. The chances that every hire forever will be male - per the CEO's policy - is 0%.)
I don't like these odds. Do you think they're appropriate?
There is something wrong with our industry and we have to fix it. Banishing men's rights discussions from (just) this forum, even if there is nothing wrong with that discussion, for just a few years is a good start.
There's nothing wrong with those discussions. They are nevertheless counter to my suggestion.
By the way, I believe you did not follow my advice of taking 1 minute to look at your comment for a moment and making sure it's on your "best behavior". If you had, you would not have thrown in that quip that the only reason I wouldn't like to work with all men is so that I could leer at some women. You would have self-censored that quip if you had taken a moment to read your own comment carefully. So it's actually a good example of what I'm talking about.
It's outrageous to suggest that the only problem with an office full of men with no women in it (or with, say, the mentioned CEO's policy of "never" hiring any woman) is that the men have no woman to "leer" at. You should have self-censored that suggestion. This is a clear example of what I am suggesting. I am suggesting you should have taken a minute, and then not made that comment.
--
EDIT: HEY! On the other hand if instead of phrasing it as you had, you would have pointed out that it is important that the issue is that women do not have a chance to work in great offices, we would have moved ahead hugely. so even just this super-mini example is a great example :)
I hope after some reflection you actually end up on board with my suggestions!
Men have social issues to face. Just because MRAs are shrill and annoying doesn't mean that mature discussion should also be stomped on. We can also multitask - we don't have to fix on social ill at a time. It's also fantasy that we can get to your 60/40 split in only a few years - the staffing pipeline just isn't there, and preventing people from discussing issues until we reach that split is preventing them from discussing them for a decade or more, even in the best of circumstances.
As for 'best behaviour', I think it's incredibly poor behaviour to simply suggest long-term complete censorship of a topic you don't like, regardless of the quality of discussion. Sticking your fingers in your ears is not going to get more women hired, anyway.
By purposefully misconstruing my comment as misogynistic, you find a genuine flaw: you are absolutely right, I made a mistake by appealing to "do you, a man, want to work in an office full of only men forever?" rather than, "should offices discriminate against women and not allow them equal opportunity?"
So even though you went out of your way to prove a point, actually we can improve how good of a place HN is for women through doing so.
If you had phrased it as follows: "Logicallee, I want to make sure that you do not accidentally imply that the primary reason for allowing women to work at tech workplaces is for the benefit of men - you may want to edit your statement which could be construed (or misconstrued) this way", then do you see how, especially after I acknowledged it and maybe edited my comment, we would end up with a safer, more welcoming place that takes women into better consideration?
So actually although you thought you were proving a flaw in my argument, what you were really doing is showing the strength of my argument by pointing out a flaw in a part of my comment that was not fundamental to the argument!
This may be hard to follow. Imagine if I said "People could improve their orthographie by using more common words, rather than obscure Greek and Latin words" and you pointed out that I misspelled orthography, but if I had written "spelling" I would have written it correctly. So in this case the flaw (mistake) in my phrasing would have actually strengthened it.
The flaw (mistake) in my verbiage that you point out actually strengthens my argument.
I know we are making really nuanced arguments but I hope you see what I mean! I did take the time to see what you mean.
We're really dancing on pinheads here, though.
Whatever you were arguing for, this crosses into rudeness that is quite unacceptable. We've warned you about this a whole bunch of times already. This process isn't infinite. If you continue to flout HN's rules, we're going to end up banning you.
What's wrong with anti-feminism? Also, misogyny is one of those catch-alls that's being abused to mean: "Does not complement women" as of late.
(Hint: this is sarcasm and feminism isn't primarily about men.)
(In case it actually needs to be said again: I happen to be female.)
Typo? Hard to tell.
When a discussion turns into "yay label" vs. "boo label", there's no information left in it, and flamewars are the only thing left to do.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337198 and marked it off-topic.
Being anti-feminist is not a bad thing. It is a conversation that could be had (is it good, is it bad, etc), the topic of the original poster leads to a conversatoin about this.
My concern with Hacker News is that it claims to be technology focused, and founder focus. However articles dealing with gender issues, like this, get promoted and kept up.
I completely respect and understand your stance that those topics tend to go badly.
That's an assumption. IMO it's more likely to be that men with families out-earn their single and divorced counterparts because they're motivated to do so.
Particularly as compared to divorced men. There's no point in killing yourself at work if the ex is going to take half the money.
Wow, Chase sounds like a real turd, I feel bad for his kids.