in my experience raising two kids women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career. My wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but many of her friends, and especially online, thought she was "too good for that" with some even being hostile to the very concept. If a woman has an established career and then chooses to be a stay-at-home mom she's likely to pay a heavy price socially.
It’s just economics IMO. It’s mostly double income now.
Men only pay it when choosing stay-at-home dads.
I don't doubt this at all, at least in certain circles. I suspect it's not limited to small circles, either. My wife's office culture is somewhat accepting of women leaving to raise families, but many of the women in management have totally forgone that option or have/had their kids in daycare very, very early on. I'm certainly not judging as I have no idea why, or what would necessitate that, or if it's necessarily good or bad. It's too complicated to judge in any meaningful way.
It certainly generates expectations and pressures though, and they're very harmful to people like my wife. Many of the women my wife has talked to feel distinctly anxious about managing their family life with women like that in charge. Further, many of the men in management are quite old and tend to think of leaving to raise a family as a distinct lack of commitment to the work – something which gets you excluded from "serious" work like field deployments where high reliability and commitment is considered crucial to the role.
Many women are already excluded from much of field work because some older dudes think women aren't strong enough to make the work safe. For example, under-water installations of equipment are almost exclusively performed by men because the men running the deployments believe a woman would be incapable of supporting a man if his safety was compromised. As such, the women on the team who want to progress need to fully commit in all other possible ways in order to appear viable. Leaving to have kids is essentially 3 strikes at once against your reputation in field work.
It's tough to watch.
I don’t mind the flagging - I don’t expect anything more from people unwilling to take a look at things objectively.
You have an incredibly toxic, misogynistic, and incel-based worldview that is very unhealthy. Virtually every ill you stated was the fault of women, even consumerism and violence. How many women were mass shooters again? Started wars?
It is frightening that you really think that way, and I worry for those in your orbit after hearing that you are entirely serious.
The reason why I don’t mind the flagging and the downvotes is because I don’t expect a single individual on HN to publicly agree with me. Anecdotally and privately, women and men have both echoed these things to me in a slightly more nuanced, forgiving tone. My take is more brazen, and unpalatable for this site and many others.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to the manosphere, MRAs, MGTOWs, the Andrew Tates or anyone inbetween. These are all symptoms of a societal illness.
Yet you are healthy with your beliefs? What you say is in some cases much worse than them, I can't speculate on what you have acted on/done:
"Our increasingly decadent society wouldn’t be so if men realized they hold the keys to building and maintaining prosperous societies, and can refuse the corrupt inclinations of women hellbent on ruining it all for materialistic, personal gain. And that of other men who desire power and money and materialistic things for the sad approval of women."
More of you blaming women for all of societies problems. A guy with less extreme opinions than you did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massa...
and others like him will read your extremist words and feel right at home with that kind of mindset, the same way you learned to see the world how you now do.
People don't really know what to do when you demonstrate you don't have total devotion to an organization. Even if it's for a "higher calling," in the case of care, it still feels like they see it as not fully devoted. There's also this weird undercurrent that your career must be the focal point at all times in your life and that you must be constantly growing and fulfilled in it.
> In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.
Yeah, this is really gross. And the norms are pushed by those who made the choice to not have a family, or to outsource/ignore theirs. In effect, it becomes a game of, "who can sacrifice the most to capitalism?" And games like that favor those who are broken/not smart enough to throw more of their lives away.
> Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to wealth generation.
This drive objectifies men, and men are smart enough to realize they can't fight it, so they instead try to channel it. But it's not at all the same as an intrinsic motivation, it's an extrinsic threat of sorts. It dehumanizes men to see themselves primarily as providers rather than people. This makes it easier to prioritize their career at the expense of other things.
You get around 1 year of parental leave here in my country - it starts 28 days before expected birth for the mother and lasts for 105 days, the father also gets 30 days, but 15 have to be used during the parental leave, and the other 15 in the next few years. After the 105 days of "mothers leave" are over, both parents get 260 days to divide between themselves however they want).
The norm is for the mother to take the full 260 days, and the father goes to work. On one hand, fathers complain because they're not with their kids, on the other side, usually feminists complain about women losing a year of their carrers (because women still have a choice to go to work and let the dad use those 260 days), and hiring a could-be-soon-pregnant woman is a risk, because she might be gone for a year.
If we atleast split the 260 evenly, and made it mandatory for both parents to be atleast a bit more equally absent from work, that would solve a lot... but since women would lose the 260 day, and there's no money for both parents to be absent from work, this won't ever be implemented.
Women are increasingly treated this way too though. Women were shunned for choosing their career. Now if they choose family, their career still suffers. How can they win? At least men have a clear expectation from society. In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.
We have a serious problem here. It doesn’t strike me as a problem of gender roles so much as cultural priorities (perhaps at the core of this is the pursuit of wealth and growth over focusing on family). I was as capable as my wife in caring for our son so that wasn’t a problem. The problem was that anyone ever saw something wrong with that picture, I suppose.
We also took an enormous financial hit in order for her to continue working, because there was a very real concern than her career would suffer beyond repair if she took off, but I’d presumably be able to return fairly easily with my decade or so of software development experience. This happily turned out to be true. But still, what a strange situation to have to navigate.