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Comment by iSnow | Hacker News Reader

>In Japan, around 30 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women work for more than 50 hours per week.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. 50hr/w was the norm in many countries till the 1960's or so, and yet people were having lots of babies indicating having marriages with sex.

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Just comparing hours hides the reality of what the time outside those hours looks like. When 50h weeks were the norm, you generally had a stay-at-home wife making that whole equation possible.

For some reason when we started sending women out to work, the work they had been doing at home stopped being counted as work. But of course it is work, it still needs to be done. As a result, the modern 50h weeks can be anything between 60-80h weeks depending on your comfort with living in squalor, and the presence of children, it's just we for some reason only count the part you get paid for.

And compound matters income of men entered a long plateau or decline while women‘s preference for better earning partners persisted.

And men continue to prefer dating supermodel tradwives. So what? I don't know what you're trying to say, here.

Here is the problem: college educated and well earning women are marrying as much as they used to.

The drop in marriages is among poor and less earning people. Those non marrying women do have option to marry higher earning men ... they just dont.

I guess commute times don't help much as well in Japan. But yeah 50 hours per week ain't really that much, especially if it would include lunch break. 8 hours is minimum in many European countries and easily can get to at least 8.5-9 hours per day for majority, so 10 hours per day ain't really that special.

No contraception before the '60. A couple could have sex once a year and still produce lots of babies.

Of course contraception was available, just not the pill. Condoms were a thing back then.

how much did women work back then, work that is counted as work - and it is represented in "50hr/w was the norm"?

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