A Two-Income family also is a significantly less mobile family.

When you want to move, both partners need to find better jobs at roughly the same time. And that just doesn't happen very often. And, if you are already established with support networks because you already have kids, rebuilding those networks can be almost insurmountable without one of the parents literally taking time off to put that support network back together.

Holy shit I never thought about it like this.

yah, that's good supporting evidence for the 2-income trap.

incidentally, my first foray into student loans made me realize a similar trap formed by government guaranteed student loans combined with the inability to discharge them via bankruptcy. those factors practically guarantee rising educational costs due to risk-free money flowing to both educational and financial institutions.

As a Northern European it does seem a bit of a bad deal that women are expected to work but there isn't much of a guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation. But I guess there isn't that much precedent for such things.

That expectation is rather cruel. For decades, women who make motherhood their "careers" have been looked down on as somehow inferior to women who pursue careers. Even the terminology used to describe such women is disparaging and loaded with shame and disappointment, as if the woman in question had chosen or had been forced to choose an inferior option. That she is in some sense a failure for prioritizing her children over her career.

It’s perverse that in our (supposedly) liberated world the standard that women are held to is men.

Isn't that what equality was supposed to be?

EDIT: Anecdotally, it seems that equality was strived for and it's not turning out as great as a lot of folks hoped for. Educated women don't date down like men did/do which makes finding a partner in itself much more difficult [1], women want the same career opportunities as men while also taking leave that puts them at a disadvantage, which is unavoidable; you will be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to not take their leave to focus on their career, regardless of gender, and men usually take less or no paternity leave even when offered [2]. A lot of people raced to find success and actualization in the workplace, and it is turning out poorly [3]. We have housing, childcare, and education cost inflation due to more dollars chasing the same amount of those necessities. [4]

I want to be absolutely clear that I support woman having equal rights, equal pay, and should never, ever be discriminated against. I shouldn't have to say that, but you know, the Internet. The above paragraph are my observations as an armchair anthropologist.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19878117 (HN Thread: After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468767 (HN Thread: The Loneliness Epidemic)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20474292 (My HN comment above citing the Two Income Trap)

That's how everything turns out, though. Once you achieve all the things that you thought will make you happy, you'll find new things to be unhappy about, usually in the details of the stuff you just achieved. That's the nature of emotions - they couldn't actually cause motion if you just sat there content with your lot in life. Only thing that'll do that is drugs, and even then you tend to build up a tolerance to them.

The real test for whether something is good or bad isn't whether people are happy, it's whether they would choose to go back. And I think you'll find that most women are not all that eager to go back to the 1950s. If they are, there are subcultures within the U.S. that can provide that, but those subcultures aren't really flourishing in terms of growth rates.

In the context of race would you measure equality against the standard of “white?”

I should hope not. For the same reason measuring women against the standard of “men” isn’t equality.

Yes, race equality is measured against the standard of "white" - people advocate for blacks to become richer and less harrassed by the police, not for whites to become poorer and be harrassed more (btw, both would achieve the same amount of "equality").

Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.

> Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.

Indeed. My wife is not a stay at home mom because I force her to be. It it her voluntary choice (and I am happy to support her decision and be the sole income earner in the family) that she gets more happiness and joy from raising our children than as a drone at a desk job or climbing an unfulfilling and meaningless career ladder (her words, not mine).

I think what isn't reasonable is when both parents want to work and expect to achieve similar results. You can't have it all, and you're going to be deeply disappointed when you try and fail.

What are the standards?

“Person”...

I apologize. I don’t understand. My understanding was women were fighting to be equal, but men were the bar. What rights are being fought for by women that men don’t have (“people”)? What is the “baseline” for “people”?

I think that the point being made is that in a world with true equality, there is no bar, because each person's perspective is as valuable as any other's. The existence of a baseline necessarily requires choosing a perspective and enshrining that as an ideal to be aspired to, which is a power play on the part of the person setting the standard. There's nothing inherent about reality that requires that: the alternative is that you do your thing, I do mine, each of those things is as valuable as the other, and if our things conflict we work out our differences amongst ourselves (or if necessary, bring in a neutral third party to adjudicate that is mutually acceptable to both of us).

This whole "equality" thing is a big pickle. IMO governments should actively subsidise kids, both via parents (e.g. paying for childcare, school, etc.) and via companies (e.g. giving a company extra money/tax cut for each worker on parental leave, to equalize the amount of value (to the company) of a worker on leave vs. a worker actually working).

All of this assuming we (as a society) actually want people to keep having kids (which, at least in the West, societies/governments seem to want).

None of those things ("guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation") seem to help. If anything, the evidence suggests the opposite: there are very few births in the European countries with the greatest amount of those things.

Making it easier/possible for women to join the workforce doesn't necessarily mean that married women will in addition to their spouse, so what made them do that?

I think answering that is more important than focusing too much on what made it possible. Making it possible and easier for women to join the workforce is overall a good thing, it means that single women can compete (hopefully) equally with single men in terms of income and as a result enjoy the same economical freedom without being forced into marriage. But going from that to having homemakers suddenly decide to also work in addition to their spouses is the missing connection, because theoretically just because it was possible/easier doesn't necessarily mean that they needed to. Was it because now couples wanted to earn more money? So it was "greed" that in the end created the inflation and the prisoner's dilemma?

When few women are working, it’s attractive to some because it adds an incredible amount of disposable income. When most women are working, it becomes a necessity in order to get by (because the cost of housing, which is the single largest household expense, depends on what other households are willing to pay). It’s a ratchet that only goes in one direction.