It is not an expectation. It's been part of human behavior across all cultures since history. Men are the workers and women are the care givers and home makers. The behavior is seen so consistently across cultures that it's safe to say it's more then social conditioning. It's biological. Humans are flexible enough to behave outside of biological parameters but you are in utter denial if you deny the evidence that spans across ancient history and all cultures across the world.
But this is besides the point. The point is if I run a business, my objective is to succeed. My objective is not to hire some women who wants to do a 4 day work week to support a child. It may be beneficial to the mother to give her advantages but it is not beneficial to me as the person who spent my hard earned cash paying her.
>It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion.
As a person who risked all my resources on a business how the hell does house hold chores apply to me? If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me?
It's asking for a handout. And sure if the government wants to force me to give a hand out to make society a better place than great. I support this. What I don't support is this lie that what was given out is anything but a hand out. It is extra help and it is not something that was earned with fair trade. The person who devotes the most effort and has the best results deserves the most reward.
>If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous.
If you're asking me what I think is ridiculous I would say your response to me is ridiculous. Not being snarky here, your hypothetical implies ridiculousness and I respond with another hypothetical about your statement.
What does Elon have to do with anything? If Elon sired 50 children and abandoned them, that's evil and wrong, but that's completely orthogonal to my business. I pay someone for results and Elon delivers. What he does outside of that is a completely different thing.
In general Men spend more time and more effort at work so they tend to deliver better results and thus they get more senior positions. It's obvious if women choose a 4 day work week they're just not as into it as men and thus they get paid less and get less senior positions.
Not all women make the choice to take care of children. A good number of women choose to do what the men do and when you control for that the data shows that the gender pay gap largely disappears. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende...
I support equal pay and standards for the women who deliver equal results as men. Are you saying you don't support this? You support unequal standards? You support handouts for women when they raise kids? It's a valid thing to support. But don't call it what it isn't. It is a gift and not something women are entitled to.
It's valuable to you as a person who has kids.
You will note the majority of people in the US will not have kids.
Why should I pay for your kid? You have to put yourself in the shoes of the person who doesn't have kids. Or the business owner who actually has to hand out the money. I support the payment because I have kids, but at the same time I'm able to play the devils advocate and see the other side of the equation rather then blindly support something in my own self interest.
To further the point, the decision whether to have a kid can be influenced by how that affects someone’s own finances. These programs put a finger on the scale to encourage having children, something that financially to the individual doesn’t make sense with modern jobs. Many countries have negative pop growth today and that *will* be a national financial problem
Why make me pay for that?
Negative population growth has benefits. Japan doesn't have a housing crisis like the US.
Like I said two sides to every story. I'd rather have flat population growth not positive growth and helping me pay for child care in a cause I don't believe in is not fair.
The fairness argument is just a general argument against all redistribution of wealth, if you are against all redistribution then many popular programs and policies are already failing your moral test.
What do men not take care of kids? Don't we already give benefits to people who are married?
Except that's not true, is it? It's somewhat consistent "across cultures" today, as are many things that are barely decades or centuries old. If you look at isolated peoples that are likely closer to "our biology", you see something very different. This makes sense if you consider that the atomic family is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even agrarian societies did not necessarily have a division of labor across the gender binary: harvest meant everyone had to help, including children. Even the idea of blood kinship breaks down in agrarian Europe with farmhands being part of the family "unit" in a way more resembling adoption than employment.
> If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me?
I don't know what strawman you're trying to construct here but I never said someone working 4 days a week is entitled to the same pay as someone working 5 days a week if their contribution is entirely measured in hours. In fact I said nothing about pay or social welfare at all.
I do think it's funny you seem to value "more hours worked" as a measure of entitlement on a website that's literally all about "working smarter not harder"(what did you think a "hack" is?) but it sounds like you're more invested in evopysch nonsense and 2010s era pay gap discourse so I don't see any point in continuing this conversation.
You can't quantify working smarter. It's a vague term.
What we do know, (and you know this as well you're just not thinking critically) is that over a large population those that generally work more hours get more done and do better across the board. That's a statistical and data driven metric. Not some hand wavy "work smarter" bullshit.
What are you implying? that women are smarter than men so of course if they put less hours in their smartness suddenly makes up for the stupidity that is men? Come on.
This isn't a strawman, it's called common sense.
>Except that's not true, is it?
You ask, so I answer: It is true. There are enough exceptions that someone can construct a counter argument/research paper via miscellaneous examples but the general majority across current cultures and past cultures that men take on the bread winner role.
If you're so violently opposed to the notion that hours spent "butt in seat" is a good metric for entitlement to compensation, why exactly are we having this conversation on HN?
> What we do know, (and you know this as well you're just not thinking critically) is that over a large population those that generally work more hours get more done and do better across the board.
Interestingly there are studies demonstrating that the absolute loss of productivity from 4 day weeks compared to 5 day weeks is negligible in most jobs. Even for 25 hour weeks (i.e. 5 hour days) the absolute loss of productivity is not even remotely proportional to the difference in hours. There have even been examples of one full time job being split into two part time jobs resulting in greater productivity. Turns out most jobs (and especially knowledge work or creative work) don't function like conveyor belt manufacturing.
> This isn't a strawman, it's called common sense.
I'm starting to believe you don't know what either of these two things mean given that those two things aren't mutually exclusive nor do they apply to the same thing. Also common sense is a heuristic, not an empirical source. It's just a fancy way of saying "gut feeling" rather than looking at actual research.
> What are you implying? that women are smarter than men so of course if they put less hours in their smartness suddenly makes up for the stupidity that is men? Come on.
Again your unstated prejudices are showing. And again I have to remind you that at no point did I say two people working doing the same work for different amounts of hours should be paid the same wage. This is your strawman you seem to want to attack, not something I said.
> There are enough exceptions that someone can construct a counter argument/research paper via miscellaneous examples but the general majority across current cultures and past cultures that men take on the bread winner role.
Because god forbid someone debunks the renaissance era myth of the hunter-gatherer division of labor, I guess, despite zero archeological evidence for it and plenty of counter-evidence from looking at isolated indigeneous communities still in existence at the time. I guess it's just "common sense" that things have always been as they are and there's no such thing as a cultural bias that may inform our interpretation of data about the past, especially during the early stages of modern science when we tried to interpret the past through the lens of understanding ourselves to be at the pinnacle of human evolution.
Sorry, you're of course right. Historical studies and archeology never evolved past 19th century navel-gazing and if it feels true to you that is the absolute standard for empirical evidence we should all adhere to. Men always won the bread, whatever that means for a pre-agrarian society. One man, one woman, barefoot and pregnant at the stove as god intended. All of history just incidentally happens to reflect the cultural mores of early modern European aristocracy that rediscovered it. Sorry, I really have to tap out now. You've won this debate with facts and logic.
Tap out after writing a looong essay? That's another common strategy for geniuses who want the final word. Spend sooo much energy spilling your thoughts and then running away not wanting to deal with the fallout of the effort spent writing your retort. Why? Because you're insecure about it. Yeah no point in arguing your points if you're scared. I truly am sorry that you're scared. HN shouldn't be a place where people are like that.
Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider".
It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion. And as a reminder: Musk holds several official positions including multiple C-tier ones and still spends an ungodly amount of time shitposting on Twitter. If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous.