each family makes their own decision how to split responsibilities at home. Its possible that men take care of children, while women work more.

my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap, and on balance it all comes down to individual choices, division of labor at household level.

Using motherhood as a wedge issue between genders is an artificial issue that ignores incomes and choices at the household level.

> my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap

Time to turn off the “Leave it to Beaver” reruns, I think.

It seems logical that if either partner has to stop working for childcare, whichever partner earns the most keeps their job, unfortunately that just creates a feedback loop where gender gap means women are more likely to tale on child care, which in turn is used to justify the gender gap.

I don't think there is any real agency there. That said I also don't think parenthood is the root of the issue.

Just from my casual observation, it seems like these days, lots of women complain about having to do a lot more household work than their husbands, while also holding a full-time job just like the husbands. But no one ever seems to ask these women: "why did you marry this guy then?"

Of course, I've been in a bad marriage myself, so I understand how someone can make a really poor decision about their marriage partner (esp. when young!), but it seems to me that a lot of people are in lousy marriages, and are only still in them because it's easier to put up with a crappy partner, especially when you have kids, than to divorce and try to deal with the huge challenges that life as a divorced parent presents. I suspect many, many people (primarily women) are just waiting until the kids are out of the house until they finally end their marriages.

All in all, this makes me wonder how viable traditional marriage as an institution really is any more.

This is patently false. The USA does not have any regulations around equal parental leave for example. Very few companies allow employees to split their leave however they want, like some other countries do.