I don't know your sister so I won't comment on her particular case. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of these "quality of life" career choices often involve a partner - men, more often than not - swallowing the trash in a corporate job.
Sad but true. The publishing industry (think Penguin books) is full of independently wealthy white women - “This unpaid internship is a fantastic career opportunity!”
Historically and today, a sought-after job for a young woman out of college who has majored in, say, English with wealthy parents is in publishing/media in NYC, with the parents paying the bills (publishing doesn't pay very much at the entry level). It's a genteel job that the parents can tell their friends about, and the daughter can meet suitable men; the classic marriage among these types has the husband working in finance and the wife in media.
Sadly enough, independently wealthy people are virtually the only ones who could actually publish consistently and thus possibly earn something out of the whole endeavour — under the assumption that any single book by an unknown / non-celebrity author has equal probability of being a hit.
Reality seems to be that most books are failures, publishers prefer celebrities as that reduces marketing costs, and they prefer established audiences.
I want to find the equivalent of HN for healthcare, where I think you’d find a ton of women MDs and highly specialized nurses who are women expressing frustration with their adjunct or artist men. This community is not the whole story.
I had a minor procedure a while back - enough that I had to be put under - and asked my nurse if she was happy with her job. She said yeah, she loved it, but she made more money as a barkeep! I was completely shocked, especially considering the hours nurses are expected to work. This was a real nurse, not an aide. I think healthcare is a not-so-great career anymore, again because corporate profits are all that matter.
Such relationships exist. But in no way are such anywhere as common as those relationships in which men earn more than women. And that disparity is primarily because, as IdiocyInAction said, women don't want to be in relationships with men who earn less, not because men don't want to be in relationships with women who earn more.
"because men don't want to be in relationships with women who earn more."
This on it's own may be a correct statement however as you phrase it makes it sound like this this is the defining reason.
It's not, there are anecdotes of (insecure) men not wanting this dynamic, but a majority of cases the opposite is true. Women seek men of higher value (earning potential), not less. Men seek youth/beauty.
Good luck finding that. Women tend to not be interested in men who earn less than they do. I think the closest you may find are women temporarily supporting their husbands while they finish their degree or something like that, but again, the plan is for the husband to become the main earner.
It is sometimes presented under the myth of "men threatened by women who have a big career", but I have never seen researches supporting that. Men don't care if women earn a lot, note that they don't prefer it, they literally don't care. It is not a criteria when choosing a partner. Women do care a lot though about finding a partner who earns more than they do.
Yeah, I'm a man working a low paying job that I enjoy. Almost everyone I know seems to look down on me for it. 'When will you get a real job', 'when will you start your career?'
What dating life? I was at a grocery store today and wound up flirting with a cutie, but I don't make enough money to pay for myself to go out for dinner more than once a month. The expenses a typical woman expects (from my experience) are beyond what I can afford.
Good for you! You should do what makes you happy and revel in the knowledge that you provide many different kinds of value and you yourself extract value from something you like doing in multiple ways. The way I think about it: no one else has to be me and work my job. Since im going to so the work then I will choose how and what I do so long as I can. It took time for me to build the emotional strength to do what I love and not care about what others think but working on that intentionally has brought so many unforeseen, manifold benefits that I wouldn’t change that path for any other opportunity.
I disagree. Granted, they are less likely to earn money on OnlyFans etc., but apart from that they can do the same things: they can be artists and do low paying jobs that they like.
What I agree though is that if they do chose a low-paying job, it might be more difficult for them to find a partner, which is not necessarily true for women. We are still by and large living in cultures where the male has to bring home the bacon ("a real man knows how to take care of his family") and it will take decades for it to change, if ever.
The phenomenon is cross cultural, meaning it's biological not cultural. Women tend to prefer men who can provide. Men tend to prefer women who are young fertile caregivers. Mythological stories across cultures reflect this general tendency. It's not something we made up recently or locally. It's a global timeless phenomenon.
I think men are looked down on if they go back to study, take an unpaid internship, become house-husbands (IE; non-breadwinners), exclusively attempt a creative endeavour (high risk enjoyable pursuits are seen as self-indulgent and lazy) or if they change career later in life (after 28~).
If I think the same of women, I do not believe that we would typically look down on them or consider them bad people in the same way for being somehow deficient in capability (IE; "a loser") or shirking responsibility if they decided to do those things.
In this sense, those opportunities can be considered effectively closed to them.
I went back to study, took on an unpaid internship, and changed careers later in life. It was awesome and it seems to make a lot of people who stuck to their first career jealous. You may look down on men such as me, but most people appear not to do so.
I admit I don't know too much about the house-husband or the creative endeavor.
It is an option; I remember an article on HEMA that mentioned a participant who was idle and supported by his wife.
But it's a much more competitive option for men than it is for women. (That is, a man attempting to fill this role will face much tougher competition than a woman trying to do the same thing. It's not that the option is competitive with other options.)
These types of discussions where people are very careful to be politically correct seem to always break down.
Of course you will find some outlier situation where one gender can do the same as another. This is not helpful and not the course of discussion. We're talking about what actually happens statistically, now and for generations.
Men are not the same as Woman, they aren't now, never have been and never will be.
Wow this tuned into a different narrative quickly. The above comment did not blame women for men’s plight but did not compare apples to apples. Gender pay gaps usually involve different wages for same work, not downgrades that all genders do.
The “great” thing about cutthroat paring down by groups like private capital in management is all genders get downgraded at the same rate. So equity will even out in the race to the bottom, and we can enjoy more balanced stories of men contributing less to the household income.
> Gender pay gaps usually involve different wages for same work
That's not true, the oft-touted statistics are "77cents on the dollar", which is taking median women's earnings when employed with median men's earnings when employed, without regard to hours worked or responsibility[0].
In fact when accounting for hours worked, years of experience, responsibility and before maternity age women typically out-earn men[1][2], though mostly in large urban environments.
I don't think anyone is blaming women here, but I think we should speak with factual information, lest we continue to propagate myths or erroneous talking points.
Please keep in mind that women seem to be disproportionately disadvantaged after having children, which is what the study from pew research concludes after noting the early advantage for women.
> Please keep in mind that women seem to be disproportionately disadvantaged after having children
That’s because children are a full time job — the hours, the energy required, but especially the cognitive load. If the woman takes on some or most of that responsibility, then any other job she has becomes a second job.
It should be noted in this context that women are individually more likely to have children then men. Men with multiple children with multiple women do not generally spend the same amount of time as the sum of all the women.
Well, my brother is a musician and rents a room in a large house. He doesn't have a sugar mama/papa, music pays the the bills because he's actually frugal. For decades my dad implored him to "get a job" but in his mid-40s he's still is still happy with his life. Some other working musicians have partners with a higher income, but many don't; it's more common for them to be happily single or coupled with other musicians.
If you don't like swallowing corporate trash, don't. If you want to bring somebody along on your quest for enrichment, recognize that your choice there is yours.
Yep, at least in my case. My wife is able to pursue her fiction writing career full-time right now because I'm still working a corporate job. Just before deciding she was too burnt out and had to quit she was working a 130k/year proposal management job and self-publishing a book a year on the side.
Right now she's making a little over 1k/month with her fiction writing (and just recently started offering editing services on the side, which she's gotten a few customers already), so it's definitely been shock to our finances ($140k -> ~$12k), and our emergency savings have been steadily draining every month, although we have been able to tighten the belt on several things so it hasn't been as steep as it would if we had maintained the same lifestyle.
But she's a lot happier, and she's very talented, and she's had multiple millions of page reads on Kindle unlimited already and her books are highly rated, so hopefully this takes off (there are writers in her genre making hundreds of thousands, including a couple writers she's friends with, maybe she'll become one herself, although I'd be happy if she can get it to the point where it's like $60k/year).
I also wouldn't mind a break from my own corporate job so I can hopefully work on my own creative works fulltime as well (I code video games and design board games in my spare time), but obviously we can't both afford to do this at the same time, we'd be homeless pretty quick.
But yeah, in the meantime, I'm 'swallowing the trash' in a corporate job.
> hopefully this takes off (there are writers in her genre making hundreds of thousands, including a couple writers she's friends with, maybe she'll become one herself, although I'd be happy if she can get it to the point where it's like $60k/year)
That might be more difficult than becoming a runaway success. I don't think the distribution of author earnings peaks in the middle.
I can see that. A lot of things tend to be bimodal in their distribution. Let's hope she becomes a runaway success then :).
And if not, it's not like she lost her ability to do proposal management. If it gets to that point, I'm sure she could find a well-paying job again if need be.
She's got a lot more practice with those interviews than I do, in fact, since she would interview when recruiters contacted her with a potentially better-paying job even if she wasn't really looking at the moment, whereas I tend to ignore recruiters when I'm not actively looking (or at least debating if I should start looking).
Not necessarily a partner, parents are often where the extra income comes from. Though I suspect parents are more likely to support a grown daughter than a grown son.
To chime in, I see a lot of women supporting their men as well, probably more often tbh. But yeah, one stressed out breadwinner, one struggling x isn’t that uncommon. For some reason I’ve seen a lot of breadwinners go into the trades rather than corporate
How often do you actually see people go „oh we have enough, we’re going to take lower paying jobs”? People work these jobs regardless of their partner's income.
I recently switched from a 15 year programming career to becoming an apprentice woodworker at an architectural millwork shop, and I could do it because I have a partner with income that can support us both. Might not be often, but it certainly happens
My father took a 1 dollar pay cut from 16 CAD/hour to 15 CAD/hour. Working in furniture repair he wanted to transfer from house calls (driving everyday) to in-shop repairs
My mother's a secretary (they call them administrative assistants now to be correct). She could advance her career by becoming a clerk, which mostly does more of the same, only more. Instead she's happy where she's at
I used to work for Microsoft. I left for a startup (peerdb) & while my pay didn't go down, that meant leaving behind >50k USD in unvested stocks & my salary growth at Microsoft was pretty fast (hired as junior in 2019, was one promo away from principal when I left in 2023) which I don't expect a startup environment to match
> Junior in 2019, was one promo away from principal when I left in 2023
I'm broadly unfamiliar with Microsoft's promotion culture, but this strikes me as incredible. But in the "something seems incorrect" sense of the word. Were you hired at an incorrectly low level, were you a one-in-a-million talent, or is there huge title inflation at Microsoft now?
Incorrectly low level (tho I'd like to think I'm uniquely talented too)
Had ~10 years of experience working at small companies (pointerware, mldsolutions) after dropping out of college (had internship with pointeware where I correctly guessed they'd hire me if I dropped out). Interviewed at Citus a week before they announced being acquired, got shooed in. Junior pay at MS was still 2x salary increase
That choice happens all the time, it's wild to me you never had it come up irl.
It's really clear when someone is invited to step up in their job and refuse because it would entice more working hours, but it happen as much when people leave full time position because it doesn't give them enough time.
About two months into this job, they offered me a promotion since "you would be perfect for this position." I looked at the schedules of the people who also had that job and they were booked solid all week. It was pretty obvious to me that it would be basically 40+ hours/week of meetings and tons of stress for pretty much the same pay. The bonuses were probably higher, but nothing about it was worthwhile. Yeah, I like money but you'd probably have to double my salary for me to even think about it.
Had two successive managers suggest the job to me. After about a year, the newest one finally took the hint and left me alone.
I am planning to switch to 90% allocation from next year, which effectively means cca 50 days yearly of paud vacation.
We have 4 mortgages on 2 properties, by no means we have 'enough' (whatever that means). QOL is for me by far of important metric, especially with kids.
This point would have been better made without involving gender. Who cares if it’s more often than not the man? That’s completely irrelevant. Unless your point really was about the gender, in which case you should elaborate.
what's to elaborate on? Women are much less likely to "date down" econmically than men. Hence, women are less often the "breadwinners" and as such may be more likely to either spend their time as a full time parent or chasing jobs for passions over compensation. These aren't novel phenomenon.
You may want to try widening your social circles if this is a recurring theme in your life. Making friends as an adult is hard and making intimate connections sometimes even harder. The best thing I did for myself and my dating/personal life was get involved in charity work. You get to give back, meet people and improve your community. Who knows —- you might even fall in love with your community.
I am currently celebrating one year since my last layoff with no real job lead in site. Plenty of dead end interviews despite 8 years of experience. I have some part time freelance work but it is not sustainable.
I literally lack the time and energy for free labor. I looked into it a bit last year and honestly, what I saw in the community was depressing. lots of healthcare for sick (often terminal) elders, homeless soup kitchens, and lots of work with kids (I hate kids). Maybe I'd help make the world a little better but I'd lose myself in the process.
The previous comment wasn't a personal reflection, I know I'm not viable for modern dating and I'm not puting myself out in the market. I was simply pointing out a persistent societal statistic. It's not really one localized to any location, demographic, or time period. It's always been true.
I’m aware of this but I still don’t understand what your point is. Some men are hard done by because they allow their partner to pursue a career which is unlikely to be economically fruitful? I want you to elaborate on what exact message you’re trying to deliver. I’m not being facetious, I really don’t get it.
There's not really a larger point. You asked for a clarification from the comment upchain (which by the way, was not me), and I explained the reasoning that may have it come up. It was a small aside, but the comment's main point was gender-agnostic: it's easier to pursue low paying passions when you have a safety net. Be it a spouse, parents, or a small loan of a million dollars.
You asked "who cares", and I answered "women" because sadly, yes. Financial status is a bigger barrier for men dating women than women dating men, which may affect why women feel less pressure to pursue a non-profitable passion when in a relationship. It's an answer that invites more and more questions, but I don't necessarily want to turn this into a modern dating thread.
bro your comment hits a bit too close to home. my partner took her master's degree yet she couldn't find a matching job in our area. at the very least, she now has better grasp on some things that actually matter to our life and her input is really valuable for me. so all in all, it's fine I guess.
Men aren't supposed to make more money and the wage gap is in favour of women when you look at recent male vs female graduation rates simply because there are more educated women.
Hahahahaha… no. You can argue that the wage gap is an imperfect metric and that it can't take into account certain advantages but it has not ever been in favor of women.
I saw stats in the UK that for women who had not had kids yet the average pay was slightly higher in the same job than for blokes. Kids are the main thing that makes the difference.
You're talking about the adjusted wage gap, not the wage gap. The adjusted wage gap measures sexism on an individual basis — all else being equal. The wage gap measures sexism on a societal basis, this is where the "explained" parts fall away.
If 10% of the gap is explained by women having lower paying roles then that's good. Women aren't getting paid (that much) less for the same work. But it doesn't fix the issue of women systematically working lower paying roles or roles typically held by women being seen as less valuable.
The straight wage gap has never been in favor of women. "Men and women make the same when you control for the variables that cause them to make less" isn't as applicable when you're talking about group dynamics.
What are you on about? People demand data and statistics in order to verify claims.
>a lot of x often involves y
is a broad claim which warrants more than a few anecdotes. GP may have an unpleasant tone but they're not wrong for asking that a sweeping generalisation come with something more solid than 1 person's perspective.
>People demand data and statistics in order to verify claims.
I don't like the "educate yourself" dismissal for answers like these, but the divides in income and gender isn't exactly a niche topic. If you can believe that women often won't date men who make less and that women more often become stay at home parents than men, you can derive why woman may be more likely to pursue passions that pay a pittance compared to men in a relationship.
If any of those 2 points feel contentious, all I'll say is Google it. I'm not interested in digging up such common facts for someone else.
To be a little more helpful, I'll add that people DO take “quality of life” careers "without either inheriting or getting rich first".
Just ask your average gigging musician, writer, designer, and so on.
People who run "lifestyle" business and refuse to grow them outside a living income.
People who opted out of the rat race, from the start, or mid-career, and downsized, without being rich, to have more time with family, reduce stress, etc.
useless swipe and naive advice, especially in this day and age. I can barely make friends who share my hobbies, what hope do I have in breaking the ice with someone completely different? I'm not going to specifically crash other meetups just to "expand my horizons".
>Speak less, learn more.
yes, that's why inroverts dont make as many friends, and are instead arguing with each other on Hacker News.
I know someone who was a great EE and quit at about 30 to become a park ranger. He was even better at that and is still doing it 30 years later and he couldn't be happier. He always had a bohemian & ecological mindset so it didn't seem like a surprise when he made the shift.
It's easy to find examples within a career though, if you find that relevant. I'm a (US) physician that chooses to work a federal government job rather than private / for-profit sector, making about half as much money in exchange for numerous QoL benefits.
Best of luck with your upcoming release. It looks pretty fun. You seem to be getting some pretty decent buzz as well from a couple things I've seen elsewhere. You definitely have the hook down (modern guns versus medieval battles).
I think I'd be super happy with like, 10% of your buzz for my game's release (whenever that is, I'm only working on it part time), but it's a fairly small puzzle game (and still only programmer art at the moment) without a strong hook (it's just a sequel to an old free game of mine that did well in the past), so it has nowhere near as broad of an appeal, so it's to be expected.
What's your situation that allowed you to be able to go full time on the game?
Best of luck. I'm planning on doing the same in the near-ish future, without anywhere near as much buzz and no staff. I accept that I'll probably need to step back into industry if I don't make a huge splash. It's a rough industry.
