I can't help but wonder if this is significantly influenced by an imbalance in compensation.

When my daughter was born, my wife and I decided that one of us would stay home, and income was certainly a large factor in determining that she would be the one to stay home. If our incomes had been reversed, then I would have become a stay-at-home dad.

As soon as a man becomes married this switches. A man is more likely to take on extra hours/responsibilities and a woman is more likely to work part-time at this point. It's the over-time and hazard pay that is associated with the wage gap. A person working 80 hours per week should not have the same hourly-wage as someone working 30 hours per week regardless of gender.

Also from what I have heard is that in the sciences, it is extraordinarily hard to succeed as a professor and a mother at the same time unless you simply don't want to take time off to spend with your newborn and expect your kid to be factory-farmed.

Edit: What's up with the downvotes? It seems like they go up and down this thread largely randomly. Are people just downvoting things they disagree with?

I am sure that that is not what you are trying to say. Could you maybe explain why it is that man cannot have an equal (or larger) part in raising their children?

This means that never-married fathers have few if any rights that are not contingent first on responsibilities, while never-married mothers control the legal process every step of the way. In fact, the mother is not (and cannot be) legally required even to inform the father that he is a father and can hence give up the child for adoption without the father being able to assert custody.

There is no solution to this problem (of equality in parenting for never-married couples) that we as a society can live with, so it is then obvious that fathers cannot be legally or socially equal parents.

Now among married couples this comes into play too but differently. If a woman has an affair and gets pregnant by another man and the husband doesn't find out about it for, say, 3 years, the child is legally his and even if they divorce he may have to support someone else's child.

This means that for women, motherhood is both a biological and social fact, but for men fatherhood is purely a social/legal fact.

BTW, this also raises interesting issues--- it means that because as men and women can never be equal parents in our society, the ways in which we enforce this also mean that same-sex couples can not be fully equal to opposite-sex couples--- they either end up legally favored or disfavored depending on how presumption of paternity works in a given state.

It would be far better to ensure that taking a year or two off would allow smooth resumption of the tenure track. That's the fix.

Of course, then einhverfr went on to the whole abortion/child-support/false-paternity thing, so I don't know anymore.

The thing is, our economy is based on two fundamental assumptions:

1) Labor and capital are separate. Capital hires labor. 2) Labor works outside the home, capital can control things.

The second problem arises pretty clearly (and intractably) from the sort of worker protection laws that Belloc describes in "The Servile State." I.e., by treating employees as the responsibility of the employer, you have serious issues regarding workers comp and so forth when an employee is working outside of an environment that the employer controls.

The example Belloc gives is this:

A farmer hires two men to dig a well. The first is being lowered into the hole by the second and he lets the rope slip and the first worker is injured. If all three were independent agents, the first worker's lawsuit would be against the second worker, but instead it is the employer who is responsible. So this leads to an employer legally compelled to control the workplace. Things like telecommuting are challenging this but only seem to work in certain narrow domains.

So a lot of kinds of work cannot be done in the home for this sort of reason. This means that family life cannot be integrated with work life and therefore must be separate.

To me the answer is to recognize that a labor/capital divide in context with fundamental differences in the nature of motherhood and fatherhood, leads to economic discrimination against women. If we recognize that, then we can challenge that divide and build a more just economy based on smaller units where work life and family life are not so separate.

So these are all pieces of a very complex cultural phenomenon.

Has anyone advocated against this?

Even if this were true, it doesn't mean that men get more stuff done. I' be interested in a study that measures the difference in job performance for equal compensation levels between men and women. Even that study might be biased because there's some evidence that if a woman and a man perform at exactly the same level, men get better ratings, but it would be better than simply measuring hours "worked".

I also think throwing in statements that disparage women with the caveat that "I don't have the facts to back this up" is irresponsible and contributes to the sexism problem.

In my opinion, pointing out my own lack of a citation is a better practice than making uncited claims of fact. It's an invitation to prove me wrong, but the lack of a citation in itself doesn't make me wrong.

There's a difference between these three statements:

1. Women and men are different - obviously true and too vague to be meaningful.

2. Women have breasts while men do not - obviously true and mostly (and hopefully) irrelevant to this discussion.

3. Women work fewer hours than men - A specific claim about women that may be used by some to justify their prejudices against women. I don't doubt that you made the claim without malice, but unfortunately these are the kinds of remarks that reinforce sexist stereotypes. For this reason, I wish people wouldn't make such claims unless there is watertight evidence backing these claims.

"Women work fewer hours than men - A specific claim about women that may be used by some to justify their prejudices against women."

From my original comment: "Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave." Choosing a man over a woman based on gender alone isn't just bad for society; it's poor reasoning.

Women do often end up taking much more time off, but it is absolutely not clear that has anything to do with "breasts and uteri". I would argue it's cultural.

The lower bound for men is zero.

Maybe it is zero for men who expect their wives to do all the parenting. It's certainly not zero for everyone else.

Objectively, his bounds make sense. You may not like what that data means, but that in and of itself doesn't make him sexist.