Why ask these questions only as they relate to women and motherhood? Why haven't men being presented a false promise that value and purpose is derived from work? Being a father without a snazzy career is equally (if not more so) frowned upon by plenty of people these days. I don't think that stigma is healthy, either. Why do men have to emulate other men to be "valuable"? Why do men have to avoid emulating women to be "valuable"?

> Couple that with the fact that depression is most prevalent among childless women in their 40s

I don't know your source for this but you should at least consider the possibility that women, particularly women with financial resources (childless women in their 40s, for example), are significantly more likely to seek mental health treatment compared to similarly situated men. Correlation is not causation and more women being treated for depression does not necessarily mean more women are depressed.

I've read plenty of rants from both genders of stay-at-home dads getting snubbed by stay-at-home moms from their play groups, brunches, and other social activities. I think the stigma against stay-at-home dads hasn't gone away, just shifted to different venues.

Men aren't presented with this false promise. Men are influenced to work through negative reinforcement. A man who doesn't have a career is judged harshly, much more so than women, by society and has a difficult time dating and finding a partner.

Men also have a higher economic need to work. Women have much higher social mobility, so women are less economically motivated to work. A low income man will stay poor unless he works himself out of his social class. A low income woman can much more easily marry a man with higher income than her to propel her social class and household income up.

Women are more often presented with the positive reinforcement of value and purpose from work because women deal with less negative reinforcement when not working.

+1000 this

Have you noticed that it's leaders focused on their businesses and capitalism that we turn to when we look for definition of value and purpose. Those folks who are looking for our productivity that feeds their wealth.

Maybe we should look for our value and priorities somewhere other than these folks.

> Maybe we should look for our value and priorities somewhere other than these folks.

That may be a strange thing to say at the web forum of a company whose whole purpose is to channel young people towards that mentality and the capitalist perspective of value and purpose.

So please, say it louder.

I used to think that, but then I found out that many people aren't trying to emulate men, they are trying to do a more encompassing thing, juggling an unprecedented number of roles and responsibilities surpassing what has been human in nature.

So, basically, even worse than emulating men.

My observation is that a lot of this is based on an assumption that men want to be in corporate careers. As in, pursuing a corporate/intellectual blue collar or white collar career is not an optional checkbox of pride for men that want to exchange time for food and shelter and have a female partner. I think if this was acknowledged for how it is interdependent in the state of the world it would help even out representation and many other strifes, as opposed to gendering the problems and invalidating problems based on priority.

This is something that crosses my mind often. Work has some perks, but I would NEVER have taken a career so seriously if I never wanted to get married.

> Why do women have to emulate men to be valuable?

Growing up in a "traditional" family, the first thing that struck me when I went to work at a big investment bank was how the women did everything they could to be like men - all the way down to dress. I remember thinking, this is called equality? That what men traditionally did is clearly so much better, so women now need to become men, and we should celebrate the achievement that they are now free to do so?

I mean, yes, obviously if they want to, the fact that they can is a good thing. But the fact that they almost need to, is not.

(https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-h...)

I don't disagree homemaking should be less stigmatized, but the real problem is American startup culture that expects this kind of around-the-clock all-in hustle mentality. The vast majority of businesses are actually just small firms with a few people that make a decent living. That's the lifestyle that should be celebrated and desirable. There's no reason running a business can't be compatible with having a family, we just need to re-define what it looks like to run a company. The focus should be on sustainability and balance, not growth at any cost.

I have no difficulty believing single, childless women are very happy in their 20s and 30s. I wonder though if that rapidly changes past 40.

I would hypothesize the same effect happens for men as well.

While there are differences in general approaches males and females take in raising children I don't think there is any research indicating females are necessarily better than males, or the contrary. The reductio ad absurdum of it is that males tend to be more challenging and females tend to be nurturing, but those distinctions are highly variable.

> If in a male/female relationship the female is the more ambitious one prioritize the male as the primary care giver

Why equate "ambition" with "desire for a high-paying career"? Somebody who wants to raise a family can also feel ambitious about it.

I don't think the argument here is that women make better parents than men. Rather, we live in a free society where men and women make their own choices. And women and men have substantially different work preferences after becoming a parent.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/...

But would add that in the very early stages:

1. Women are the ones who get pregnant, which takes a physical toll, and maybe makes working super stressful jobs and long hours ill advised.

2. There is a period of time needed for recovering from the trauma of child birth.

2. Many women prefer breast feeding their children. Yes, they can pump, but may prefer to feed their children er, "naturally", which means getting up at odd hours of the night for a period of time.

3. If the mother is doing most of the feeding because of this, it takes time to fully wean the child. And then the child will likely have a stronger bond with the mother than the father for a little while after that.

4. And maybe the father is now working more hours than the mother due to the added burdens the mother has, which could be another reason the child might be more attached to Mom than Dad at these very young ages.

5. Repeat all of the above for the number of children you plan to have.

All of which is to say, socialization is a huge factor. But there are also differences between being a mother and being a father that are strictly due to biology.

2. The problem is exactly with the characterization (that you made) of the “more ambitious” route being the career route. Why do we assume having a career requires more ambition than wanting to raise a healthy family?

I'm not aware of any stigma from women being stay at home moms. My impression is that most, if not all, people are aware that money gives you power (or freedom, if you will). And who doesn't like freedom.

There's also less security of income for everyone, so a household relying on one spouse's income is risky. Especially if there's no extended family around that can come to the rescue in the event of loss of income.

>Why do we assume having a career requires more ambition than wanting to raise a healthy family?

Because it's too easy to say "I want to raise a healthy family", therefore it's a poor signal. Proving yourself with work, well remunerated or not, is a better signal. So I would say there are a lot of incentives for women to work, but not because society stigmatizes it, but because it leads to optimal results for women (and men).

Re “too easy”: I’m not talking about just wanting to raise a healthy family, the implication is that you actually do it. And that takes a lot of hard work.

The suggestion that two working parents provides optimal results is not true or sustainable in my experience and seems to be the undertone of the discussion: in order to have both parents working, someone probably sacrificed their most fertile years to build a resume. And this isn’t necessarily good for the future of our species.

Is a household with two stable incomes nice? Sure. At the expense of the woman’s fertility.. the sacrifice is questionable. Would also love to see our society support mothers of older children who need less immediate care entering the workforce not just young blood fresh out of high school and college.

And how do you discern if your potential partner is and willing to do the hard work? One way is to use the type of work they do as a proxy. Maybe it's not a good proxy, but I think it is one in use in much of the dating market.

I agree with most of the rest of your comment, but people are just trying to play with the cards they have, even if that results in undesirable long term consequences for society. In the US, I blame all the voters who have somehow not prioritized parental leave and adequate time at home with children. I guess many of us want to be able to shop at grocery stores and eat at restaurants at 9PM at minimum cost.

I think that's a fair thing to say but one of many's life unfair situations. I've seen some people put so much effort/work into homemaking that goes beyond of most people I know put into their jobs.

One of those things these days, for better or for worse, happens to be the type of work you get after college.

That is true, but there's an even bigger stigma against men who want to perform that role. Sure, you may find a very career-driven spouse who would be happy with you taking the role of the caregiver, but that is not a common occurrence. The man who does not provide substantial income to the family will find it much harder to find a partner than a woman in the same situation. Talking about heterosexual couples here, of course.

Women, making a broad assumption, seem to have the traits (honed over millemia) of watching over the family.

But in a household, if the husband and wife exhibit the opposite traits, then that must be encouraged too.

I know of a family in which the woman is the bread-winner, the husband takes care of the kids and home, and both are happy.

1) The success of movements for gender equality actually make the excesses of those movements hard to critique.

2) Treating a problem as a choice. The problem is having a home that is relatively clean with 3 healthy and enjoyable meals a day for 2 adults and children. Having one adult focus on income earning while another focuses on household management is a solution many families find works for them. There are others. 2 career focused adults with a nanny is an option if those careers have enough earning power. Some immigrant families here in Canada will have the entire extended family live in a single (large) residence. The grandparents do childcare and household maintenance while all the adults work.

Most media seem to treat family arrangement as people dictating their political philosophy onto those less powerful when in reality the vast majority are managing trade-offs in time, finances, lifestyle, and career.

3) The increasing tendency to optimize society for the upper end of the wealth distribution. When a woman becomes a fortune 500 CEO, supreme court judge, or in any other way reaches the upper echelon of society this is treated as a victory for women as a identity class, even though such victories have no material benefit to the 99% of women who lead normal lives near the median.

Ideally, society optimizes for the median while allowing outliers to path to success. But that requires a level of nuance and flexibility that doesn't seem to have much place in public life.

Why do we assume that those behaviors are inherently a man's?

Women that have a drive to become business leaders do so for personal reasons and not to emulate anyone (except perhaps personal heroes who could happen to be women).

You later speak about a wish to become a stay-at-home father. Is this emulating women or is it a wish based on activities that are not inherently gendered such as cooking and taking care of children?

This role can be toxic and lead to problematic behaviours that can worsen a person's personal life and mental health, regardless of their gender identity.

it's like the beard, it's traditionally something that, in general, men have and women don't.

that doesn't mean that things can't change in the future and that the change won't be for the better.

That would be women born in the 1880's, 1900's and early 1920's.

While few women had the privilege required to focus on their career, it was still present. At what point should we mark something as "tradition"?

Remember that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was not a thing until 1974. Until then, banks required single, widowed or divorced women to bring a man along to cosign any credit application, regardless of their income.

I also think that traditions in USA is used to mean inertia ("things have always been done that way" etc.), but US are a very bad country for female workers for reasons that go beyond traditions.

My country has its share of remarkable women, Miuccia Prada is one of them and she's still alive and well, Fabiola Giannotti is Italian and the first female director of CERN, Maria Montessori (1870) the inventor of the Montessori educational method was Italian,Grazia Deledda was the second woman in history to win a Nobel price in 1926 and the first Italian woman and the list could go on, the fact is that until not long ago men and women had different jobs because it was required by the job.

See construction for example, you don't see women in construction.

Traditionally, if we talk about the entire World, means since at least hominids have settled down and started farming.

Luckily things are changing, but there's still the question: do really women want that?

I'm not questioning their abilited here, but the idea that having the choice they would chose to be part of something that men have built in their image at their rules.

For example in Scandinavia where gender equality is higher than everywhere else in the western World, women are less keen to attend STEM faculties because they are too hard for too little reward. They can make more money working as lawyers or for the government, having also more time to do what they like, including spending it raising their kids and with their families. Once they reached equality (same opportunities) they started to chose because they don't have to prove anything to the others.

EDIT: if you think about it we Italians are usually laughed of because we live with our "mamma" and talk a lot about the "famiglia", we are " those lazy Italians" but that's the reason why being a housewife here it's not a stigma. Housewives are not rewarded enough in Italy, but being one it's not the end of your social life. On the contrary in USA (in particular) not working to death is frowned upon, free time is for the lazy people, "work hard and the American dream will come true", these are the kinds of " traditions " that make it impossible to be a woman, a mother and a successful business woman, to the point that paid maternity leave is not even a right!

Here in Italy, which is not the best country in the World about maternity policies, women have 5 mandatory months of paid maternity leave during which they can't be at work, it's mandatory that they abstein from it. The period can be extended if the medical conditions require (or suggest) it.

Paradoxically younger generations that grew up on social media immersed in American culture, see things the same way and have a very hard time accepting that not being highly succesful at work (or in general) is not the end of the World and they also think that being an housewife is a failure.

full disclosure: there haven't been housewives in my family at least in the past three generations, so I am not saying it because I wish for women to stay home and take care of the kids.

Three of my close friends are women in the construction industry and my cousin is a car mechanic. My best friend who is male works as a secretary and my uncle is a nurse.

People will works on things that passionate them when they have the freedom to do so. There is no such thing as a gendered job.

I am familiar with the gender equality paradox and personally believe that it's causes are socioeconomic and not about "not having the stress" to "emulate men". Especially since Nordic countries have a higher percentage of women in parliament which I would argue is "traditionally" a man's role.

anecdotes aside

Women working in construction numbered 1.5 percent of the entire U.S. workforce

they also earn only 80℅ of the men's pay on average.

> and my uncle is a nurse.

and so was my father, for 42 years. There are cultural differences in the World, as a low payd job there is less incentive for men in USA, only 13% of nurse are men, in Italy about 30% of them is a man.

But in Italy 80% of teachers up to high school are women, for example, still today.

Because traditionally education is a women's role.

We think (or thought) they do it better.

I'm in a similar situation where I'd love to be a parent full-time and be essentially free to live my life. But I could never do that even if my wife wanted to work and let me stay at home. With one person's salary, you can't really sustain a house unless you drastically drop your living standards. It's not really a choice.

We have allowed companies to lower the value of work, drastically forcing every being in a household to work as soon as possible. Society has bought into this making any choice that is not work/career feel like a wrong choice.

Regardless of sex, the problem is the work culture itself.

The answer is not as simple as "companies should just pay more."

This is currently coming up as people claiming all stimulus bills will cause inflation, but there's no inflation in the US for the last 30 years, when we did have it the cause was an energy price spike, and so they have no empirical evidence.

FTFY.

As you state further in, it's not women's exclusive job to be child-rearing nor is it not 'work' to maintain and run a house.

Today a single mom with full time job can still run a (not too big) house.

So to be fullfilling there has to be more than just keeping the house clean and people fed, which is probably why so many upper-upper-middle class women have a part-time job running some kind of fashion store.

Until COVID hits and children have to be taught virtually from home.

There are no easy and cheap answers here, but a series of trade offs. I think the original question is “where is the conversation of the trade off?” I don’t think it’s settled that the ideal social structure involves a dual income family. And I think very few people envy the workload required of single mothers, regardless of technical advances that make cleaning a home easier.

Caregiving goes well beyond making sure the kids have clean underwear.

It's the US (and especially California) that drains everything possible from young families.

Have you seen videos of orphaned animals that bond with stuffed toys or socks or whatever? Cue a DeepDream hallucination triggered by the word "ma-ma": The perfect supernormal stimulus for Baby. Even better than the Peppa Pig nightmare fuel you can already find on Youtube. Little Ash A-10 will be too absorbed to miss you in his cute CarePod.

Worse, this applies down the income ladder, such that childcare workers, cashiers, waiters, etc. are also living at the edge of subsistence because of housing. As a result, the price of these services gets bid up as well. This affects everybody but tends to affect families more than singles, because they can't bunk with roommates and they require a lot more services that involve paying other people.

This isn't really California-specific: families in Eureka, Merced, and Bakersfield do just fine (except for it being boring and not having many opportunities). But most people associate "California" with either the Bay Area or LA, and both of those metros have lots of money flowing in, lots of people flowing in, and restrictive zoning that keeps housing scarce.

If we could, things would get cheaper, and traffic might even get better (since commutes would improve.)

Mostly because California has prop 13 -- the $30B per year transfer of wealth from the young or new into the pockets of Native Sons of the Golden West.

There's a lot of sneering and judgment by women, toward women who choose to be a stay at home mom and not have a career.

Another well-educated women who choose to give up her career and stay at home, without a corresponding man doing the same, is just another data point that makes MY career look invalid, and sees MY career as optional.

Like, more power to her, but it does make me sad at the state of society.

Do you think they would feel differently if the bar to owning a home was lowered to one-income household, 20% DTI, 20-year mortgage, no more than 3% interest, 10% down, no PMI? I suspect a lot of distortions come from a very misaligned house purchase requirements to income availability picture.

It's not just about 'snazzy careers'. It's about self-realization. When given the choice in countries with tons of generous child welfare policies like in much of Europe, women still defer pregnancy and prefer to get an education or a job, and I don't blame them because honestly most people grow tired of being a stay-at-home parent very quickly. It's just a menial, not really inspiring, and not very social job.

I know a lot of guys who said the same thing you said, that they'd love to stay at home. All who did now work again full-time, some even admitted directly to me how much they hated it after only a few months and how much they missed work.

I think this attempt to romanticize stay-at-home parenting is basically cultural nostalgia. It's also interesting that you frame it as a women's job as others have pointed out, because the only reason women had to do it in the past is because they didn't get much of a say in the matter.

So your idea makes sense, but not in today's economy.

I would offer one amendment: in the US at least, disagreement on this theme is probably one of the major dividing lines between liberals and progressives (and their fellow travelers). Liberals (like Elizabeth Warren, who has labeled herself a progressive but is generally liberal in her policy positions) prioritize free child care and other policies that would make outsourcing childcare less financially onerous, freeing people to work more; progressives and their fellow travelers (like Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang) prioritize paid family leave, UBI, and other policies that would minimize the need to outsource childcare in the first place by allowing people to work less.

The reason for this unhappiness is then portrayed as the inability of the women to not have a career. it is often, the other way around.

Bomb some more countries. Make some more refugees. Problem solved.

In England, when the aspiring middle classes started finding it impossible to afford servants (which was a problem, because that was a key mark of their status), they started taking in kids from workhouses to serve them, and made it out to be some kind of charity. When that ran out they started up guest worker programs. A notable one took poor Jewish women fleeing a certain German government. Win-win, right?

Incidentally this is orthogonal to if men raise the kids or women.

You can’t equate the two. The stigma is not entirely irrational. Raising kids is the default thing humans do, graduating at the top of your law school and becoming a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore is not.

Nor should we stigmatize those that do not have a career and do not have children. Because that's a thing too. So it rather seems that the stigma depends on having a career than having kids. Having kids is just a common reason for why many women might not have the time to have a career but not the only one.

I completely agree.

I think this is a poor framing for the rest of your comment, which is essentially a feminist critique of patriarchy and capitalism, and how patriarchy/capitalism is a harmful structure to men as well. Progressives are totally on board with this.

It’s just way easier to help women achieve success in a way that helps capitalists than it is to push for better working conditions for parents. But pushing for better working conditions isn’t impossible either, and the US is an extreme outlier in how hostile it is to working parents.

If the US had a viable left it would be different; but we don’t. Other countries have solved these problems to some degree. We need to stop acting like taking care of people and funding social programs is the next step to Stalinism (but again, think of who is saying this and how it threatens their power).

I couldn't do that in Manhattan of course, so I don't live in Manhattan.

I think that many women do actually have the desire to be mothers in their hearts, and that they repress this desire in the current social context because having children is no longer something that confers high status upon you.

Changing that would fix the birth rate. As a man, I do actually feel empowered and somehow more complete and grounded by virtue of having a family; but I know that before I had kids, I didn't really look at dads that way. Changing that perception, returning the family to a position of honor rather than just portraying it as a drag that stops you from doing all the great fun stuff out there in the world, would do wonders on that front.

Sometimes it feels like a concerted effort has taken place to knock the family off of the pedestal.

I switched to a 4-day week to find a better work-life balance and couldn't be happier. Time with my kids is more valuable than the salary cut.

Very envious of your 4-day week! I do 6-7 days worth of work in 5 days and it's slowly killing me. Still finding time for the kids somehow, but the result is no sleep or recreation time for myself... the switch from office to WFH life has not been a blessing in terms of work/life balance.

Eventually learned that I can't achieve everything I want on every facet of my life. I am not superhuman. The day only has 24 hours.

Something had to give. I was in a position in which I could afford to work less, so that's what I did. Now I'm mediocre at a few things in my life rather than being great at one at the cost of everything else, and I couldn't be happier with that decision.