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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you would expect that over billions of people maternity and paternity would average out but it doesn't because of societal pressure. Men who stay at home are "low status" and women who don't are bad mothers. The problem is the social dynamic that creates these "preferences."

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Instead of societal pressure try billions of years of evolution and the fact that women physically carry the child for 9 months before their body is utterly changed by giving birth. Societal pressures... For crying out loud. Sometimes things are as obvious as they seem.

Actually, in the instances I'm aware of it was the reverse: family and society pressured the women to return to work but they didn't want to. If a mother wants to stay home, why not just respect her preference without questioning her "real" motives?

I think you're confusing the preferences of a woman and the preferences of women. It should be perfectly normal for either mother or father to stay home with their kids if they want and that preference should be respected absolutely.

But then you have to zoom out a little bit and ask why you see so few men become stay at home fathers or househusbands compared to women and is the explanation a problem? Why don't men feel like they can be homemakers or take on the primary caregiver role for their kids? Why do so many women take on those roles? If the answer is really always voluntary preference then maybe it's not an issue but that's unfortunately not the case and the pressure and judgement imparted by society for people to conform to their "roles" creates this dynamic and is bad for everyone.

It is not the present social dynamic that creates these "preferences".

This set of characteristics has evolved over millions of years, beginning before humans had even branched off the evolutionary tree.

> In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks.

I'd urge anyone who's questioning this to read the overview of the science from Stanford's School of Medicine: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

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