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Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues.

There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.

Let's face it, working, for most people, is something you do out of necessity. Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.

There's probably a small percentage of men that find their work interesting. Even smaller for all their work life.

Edit: Please, yeah, I know that raising children is work, pardon my lightly written comment.

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> Why do we really expect women to have a similar behaviour of men about work, when they have a socially aceptable and now economical venue to avoid it.

Baby raising is quite important work. I would argue that raising the next generation of workers, taxpayer, customers and pension fund contributors is the most important work of all.

Sure. You can replace "work" in his text with "work for hire" or something else if it helps you understand what he meant.

Critiquing the framing doesn't mean they didn't understand.

Understanding somewhat doesn't mean they can't understand better.

Sure, but the manner in which they critiqued the framing shows they didn't understand, potentially deliberately.

It's a common rhetorical device.

Deliberately changing the intent of someone's words may be a common rhetorical device but it's not engaging with the argument at hand.

This isn't a formal debate. There isn't just 1 argument at hand. People bring up tangential points all the time.

It's not a formal debate, but I think it's rude to misinterpret someone in this way. It's not even a tangential point, because it's not actually connected - it's parallel.

And sure, people do that all the time. People do all sorts of things. It doesn't mean they are communicating effectively, getting any kind of point across or coming to any conclusion at all.

I could start into semantics too, for example saying that people don't bring up tangential points because tangents aren't points they are lines. It wouldn't be a good idea, because it wouldn't further the discussion at all. That's basically what I see happened here.

Pointing out unintended implications of what someone said isn't misinterpreting them. It's connected to the claim parenting is a socially acceptable way for women to avoid work. Their point was clear. The verbal meanings of tangent and point don't disrespect geometry.

That comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what "framing" means. Framing pertains to different ways of expressing the same facts, for example the glass is half empty vs. the glas is half full. Whether you consider work to require being hired and paid for it by an employer or understand it in a broader sense as including any activity that is important for society is not a matter of framing. These are fundamentally different concepts of work that also have different extensions.

You're completely missing the point of the person's comment...

The top comment is asking why girl's perform better, and yet and under-represented in top tier jobs. The comment you replied to responds that they think it's because of having child and choosing not to go back to work.

At no point are they taking a stance on whether or not raising a child is as important as working a job...

I think YOU'RE missing the point. Childcare is still considered a less important and honorable occupation than pretty much everything else you can do. If you're "just" a parent, you're not considered qualified for really anything else.

That means most men won't do it, because they'll lose status. Meanwhile women will always place lower importance on status than on childcare, and so they will do childcare because no one is available to do it for them.

The disparity won't ever disappear until it's just as valid and socially supported for a man to stay home and raise children, as for a woman.

You're making a straw man argument about the importance of work that wasn't in the original commenter's post at all. Seems like you are bringing bias or an agenda into your comment.

Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do, even if they have no financial incentive. Most people don't like having to go to the office 8 hours a day, and very few probably would if money wasn't in the equation.

> Sure, but that's something most humans naturally want to do,

I don't know that is true of most men. Have children? Sure. Raise them? Not so sure. I once read that men wanting to have more children is inversely proportional to the amount of work the mother expects them to contribute.

If you took a bunch of women that weren't expected to be the primary caregiver, and gave them the same variety of expected hours per day spent on children, I would expect to see a similar correlation.

Men and women contribute to child rearing in different ways.

Women tend to be more nurturing so their role is disproportionately more important during a child's earlier formative years. They also tend to have a stronger orientation toward domestic affairs. Men, on the other hand, tend to be more strongly oriented toward the public sphere. The home is the focal point. Thus women are at the center of the action, as it were, when it comes to the amount of time they spend with children, while men tend to be more strongly motivated to take care of affairs for the sake of their families outside of the home. The home is also associated with greater safety and comfort, which is something women tend to prefer (we also see this reflected in occupational preferences), while the public sphere contains more risk and discomfort, something men prefer to face esp. when the reward is sufficiently high (this is also reflected in occupational preferences; men tend to prefer taking on more dangerous and higher stress jobs and longer hours in exchange for more pay).

I have used the word "tend" for a reason. These are not two sealed off magisteria. Proportion is probably good way to frame things, though to a point. So men also participate in child rearing, esp. where discipline is concerned (the complement of maternal nurturing is the need for paternal authority which serves the child later in other ways like the ability to relate to authority elsewhere in a healthy way). Women also operate in the public sphere and often also work. Conditions and circumstances can also constrain how male and female roles are expressed.

I think their point can be expressed in another way: in the earlier formative years when, as you say, a mother's role is more important, do you think a father would want to have more children if he's expected to be as suited to the mother's role as what a mother is?

When your "customers" or "boss" are people you love vs. a boss or corporation that is more prone to be an asshole than not, and the work of having kids has genetically encoded feel good chemicals while many find work a pure slog, it's not surprising if given the choice people would chose to be mothers vs. workers for a while.

..Just have to say that these are terrible reasons to have children.

You produce a small version of yourself and you are emotionally satisfied that something you did will mean something in the end. If you get to raise the child yourself then you get to perpetuate your mental life as well.

Still selfish reasons, but at least much better than producing... laborers.

> Baby raising is quite important work.

Which is exactly why many women drop out of the work force to do this important work, and many men would, too, if it was more socially acceptable for them?

Frankly, I would make the stronger point: it's more important than your job (raising children can be difficult, to be sure, but it's not quite "work" in the sense that work by and large tends to be servile while raising children is a higher end for which work is done). The reason people work is overwhelmingly so that they can support their children and their families.

I think you're being deliberately obtuse and uncharitable to the argument being presented. Any reasonable and charitable reading clearly interprets it as talking about "job for pay" rather than saying "childcare is not work".

No one disagrees. We literally have a day to celebrate that and societies for millennia have cherished that. Many wars have been fought in essence so the mothers of their group would have better conditions to be a mother in as it gives their offspring the best chance to thrive.

Most everyone loves their mom more than anything else.

In the United States in the last 30 years, the percentage of women working in computing fields has decreased significantly. In that same time period, births per women has decreased and the age of first-time mothers has increased.

>Having Babies. Really, being a mother is what skews most stats about women on money issues. There has been policymaking about this in a bunch of european countries, and if they are released from financial constrains (handouts, public housing, whatever) they seem to double down on it.

Curious as to what you mean by 'doubling down on it'?

You're not wrong in your statement that having kids kills the career of many women. The question is, why? The drive to reproduce is probably our second strongest in the human species, right after survival. Why, then, is it not easier to have kids and a career? It's about as universal a value as we have. Why is it not more supported? Why don't we have any guaranteed child leave in the US? Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?

I say all this as a guy who doesn't even want kids, but I do think it would be better for society if there was more support for parents, even if I paid more taxes to pay for it.

Why don't we have universal daycare / preK?

How about increasing the tax credit that goes to all parent, regardless of they choose to do childcare? Maybe for some parents that would be enough that one parent could quit their job and finally have the joy of spending more of their time with their own kid. I don't see why we should subsidize institutional childcare over other forms of caring for the very young.

as a parent I think parents should have to pay more taxes, and it should go up per child.

If this is based off of environmental concerns, I'd much rather we implement a carbon tax. Target the thing you wish to reduce.

I'm mostly with you on this, but there's a larger percentage of guys than you think. If you worked in corporate America long enough, especially in tech, you've encountered lots of guys that clearly enjoy being at work more than home.

People are complicated. I had a comment along the same lines as yours, but now that I talk about it, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's a total tossup. Moot point because I don't feel like I can leave the workforce, but it's not so clear.

I do think you brought up a good point though. It's kind of a forbidden dark point, but still one worth considering. What if it really is better to have less money, and not have to deal with any of this work stuff?

Before women were allowed to work the few women that did pursue higher education were basically expected to marry immediately after graduation. There was absolutely zero expectation that you would work a job relevant to your education because you were supposed to be a housewife who is busy with her kids. The biological aspect is probably the biggest driving force.

I'm sorry but why are you so sure they're trying to avoid work? From my experience most women would love to have careers and be financially independent and successful. But babies indeed make it a lot harder -- both from a time/energy perspective and from a discrimination perspective.

I'm too lazy to look for literature (sorry), but I remember studying it, and later read some paper about it.

Anyway, whatever is the reason, they do take the tradeoff.

Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it well--is not avoiding work.

>Having babies and raising them fully--especially doing it well--is not avoiding work.

It was pretty obvious from the context that the person you're replying to meant "working" as in "working a job for money".

You're right, but you ain't making the big bucks. Even then, they seem to find it rewarding enough.

If I was woman and I decided to have baby, I'd probably be either very stressed with my current job, or looking for something part time.

Now imagine if I live in Sweden or the like where the state hands out money for raising children.

wait, there are countries where the state does NOT hand out money for raising children?

Yeah, probably most? IDK, I don't have the stats at hand, but in plenty of places you're alone agains't what it comes to you, no matter your gender.

The personal and societal reasoning about parenthood changes, but they still do have babies, despite being on their own. For many people, children is their retirement plan.

Anyway, it's not the same to have a nice monthly stipend than a small cheque far in between. Spain, for example, is considerably worse financially-wise for raising a kid than countries more up north. Not only because the country job market is shit (which is important even if you don't work, because your partner has to bring money home), but because the state really doesn't do much about it.

Now imagine living in a place where there isn't really a functional state to look for.

In Canada and the US, the state will take children away from parents in poverty rather than hand out money. But then it gets really weird; they then place the children in foster homes, which get significant handouts.

It's not avoiding work, but it is making a choice to pursue one type of work (child rearing) over another (market labor in shitty, unfulfilling, but well-paid jobs). That's a choice women have substantially more ability to make than men.

I don't think that the parent comment meant that raising children isn't work. It absolutely is, and an extremely massive one too. What they most likely meant by "avoiding work" is "avoiding a paycheck job".

Having babies and raising them partly isn't avoiding work either. Babies get partly raised for all sorts of reasons.

Some replies might be missing the point that it may well be reasonable to pay people raising children. OP implies it's a handout. I would argue it's an unpaid service to society and those of you relying on a crop of well-educated non-criminals to be your employees and peers are freeloading.

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