> > This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
> How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids.
So... you're saying the exact same thing. There is a social pressure for the women to be in careers where they are caring for kids, and for men not to be.
So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe?
The framing does make a difference, as it sets the perception of which gender is being "wronged".
I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.
Well put. Likewise, you can reframe the difference as 'women are paid less overall than men' or as 'men get less leisure time and less time with their families overall'. It would be interesting to see a campaign for shorter hours for men without changing pay.
I understand that people want a different work-life balance, but I do not understand why they expect higher compensation per unit of output while working less. Increasing the number of workers a company will need to achieve the same product will add overhead and a great deal of ancillary costs; if your goal is to get people to spend less time at work, you should be willing to accept a pay cut (at least proportional to the decrease in output). Labor is the largest cost for most companies, and expecting them to remain in business while dramatically increasing their costs is unrealistic.
To be clear, this is not about being 'fair' to the companies, it is about having realistic expectations of the results of our actions.
People who work less and have a better work-life balance can get more done in less time.
Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks.
I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers to focus on improving 'output per worker hour' in addition to 'output per worker'.
To be clear, if we want this we have really only have one option: Increase demand (for jobs or products from) companies that do this well. Good work-life balance is a non-salary perk like many others that companies offer.
You can't legislate this focus on the part of employers, all you can do is incentive it.
I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year.
I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years.
Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers.
My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.
> they are usually less productive per week/month/year.
You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?
> "you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less
I am not. I said "if we want this".
However, I think I would have a much easier time backing up the assertion "people want to work less" than you would have backing up " happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year" as a causal relationship.
>"You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?"
I never said low stress and low happiness cause low productivity; I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
>"I said "if we want this"."
You imply that less work and more play is 'better' work-life balance, which assumes that people want to work less.
> I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead.
Working fewer hours is correlated with higher productivity, possibly high enough that the increase in efficiency is high enough to overcome the reduction in hours when it comes to total output:
>"> I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead."
That is actually what I said originally, as can be seen from the following quote:
>>>>"I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year."
Worker productivity is usually defined as work per year; I refer to specific or hourly productivity as the amount of work you get done per hour in the office.
Both are true and both need to be fixed. Yes, men are often pressured to be the breadwinner of the family. That is a problem too, and it should be less stigmatized for the women to be an equal breadwinner.
You are implicitly assuming that there are no differences between male and female preferences (on average). It seems plausible that biologically-originated gender differences may extend beyond genitalia. Is there any reason to believe men and women have the same priorities, abilities, and preferences, and that we should expect them to attain the same outcomes?
You'd need to show that our incredibly complex artificially created environments are built with biological gender differences at their core, or acknowledge that a huge part of human existence is learned behaviors.
The fact is, huge amounts of "gendered culture" have swapped genders over the centuries.
For example, everything you learned from a book, or from spoken language is not part of your innate biology. Only a part of how you gravitate toward that material may be biologically gendered.
If you believe that gender-correlated differences in life outcomes are largely due to societal norms, there are some issues which should be much higher priorities than (relatively) small differences in earnings due to choices of professions. For instance, almost all inmates on death row are male, and 90-95 percent of the prison population are male; this is a terribly disparate outcome with a much greater impact on the lives affected (and likely due mostly to mens' life choices, not a biased legal system). Perhaps you might argue that we should encourage men to stop committing crimes, but alas, we already do that, and it does not seem to work. Should we then use affirmative action to start encouraging women to take risky decisions to be more like men and be imprisoned at similar rates (or perhaps just imprison women at random if we are only after equality of outcome)? I don't know that this would work, but it would be 'fairer', would it not?
I believe that men are affected by a great number of factors including their biologies, and struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise.
Does that support the narrative that caregiving is shunted onto women against their will/without their say?
For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for.
Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.
The word "foist" does imply coercion to do something that is against the target's will or interest. Would you be equally okay with the statement being replaced with "self-sacrificial status climbing is more often foisted upon men in our society"? Add to that the common narrative* that men are in charge in our society and therefore social pressure is essentially equivalent to pressure exerted by men, and you quickly get a statement that amounts to "[the problems we observe] are caused by men forcing women to care for family members".
* Even if you don't actually subscribe to this position yourself, it's unfortunately in the nature of debate on a politicised topic like this that the moment you take a position associated with one of the standard camps ("the American Left" or "the Blue Tribe" here, I guess), people will assume that you also hold other opinions typical of that camp. Certainly, "men hold the power in American society" is one of those typical opinions.
> So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe?
Have you considered that most women actually prefer spending more time with their children and therefore prefer men that earn more to finance this? (therefore men focus on their career to attract women that usually at some point prefer to work on flexible schedules)
Except that we are talking about why women on average don't make as much during their careers. You are punting and saying, well men have pressure to work more. You are absolutely right, and it should be part of the conversation, but you've not somehow proved that the women being encouraged to prioritize family isn't a problem.
Those pressures are not independent. Any time you say "women are pressured" to do something, there is an implicit "relative to men" added at the end. The same goes for the reverse.
Think about it this way - there are two constant, fixed pressures we are talking about: the pressure to make good money to raise a family, and the pressure to take care of the kids.
We have no way to change the TOTAL pressure - both of those things are fairly fixed (we need to make money and we need to take care of family). The thing we are talking about is HOW those pressures are distributed. Traditionally, the money pressure is more on men and the childrearing pressure is more on women. You can't change any one of those without changing the rest. If you decrease pressure on women to raise children, that in turn raises pressure on men to raise children. This, in turn, would also increase pressure on women to make money, and decrease the pressure on men.
You can choose which angle you come at for the problem, but all of them result in the same thing.
It's two sides of the same coin – women are pressured to pay more attention to family with the exact same mechanisms (society, older relatives, media etc.) that men are pressured into working long hours and being primary breadwinners.
Unfortunately, most comments only mention one side of the problem (that of women being pressured to focus on family), and that leads to reflexive "But what about the pressure on men?" indignant replies. Therefore, it would be good to acknowledge this as a dual issue every time it's brought up, or make it more gender-neutral ("pressure from society to retain outmoded family roles") so friction like the above does not ensure.
Great point—the context of both roles in a partnership is important to the discussion. Having said that, what about single parents who now must do "both" jobs? Women are at a systematic disadvantage in this scenario.
Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures. Melinda Gates talks about this at length in their recent letters for 2016[1], and it's a pretty damning picture that whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.
There is nothing about cleaning, or laundry, or sick care, or <other thing women are expected to do because they're women> that makes them not like doing unpaid work anymore than men. Nobody likes doing thankless work, and everybody likes getting paid to do work (and enjoy the freedoms that having money permits). This distribution of work is bullshit, especially in this day and age of increased automation where wages based on dual earners is the norm if you want a middle class existence and are average.
> A man who is expected to work 60 hour weeks is much less likely to get custody of his kids.
We're not comparing custody results, here. We're comparing a full custody woman against a full custody man, across all cultures, not whatever intuition you have about custody battles (in the US, seemingly)?
After doing a bit of reading[1], it's not even clear that any of your statements are true.
"In other words, 91 percent of child custody after divorce is decided with no interference from the family court system. How can there be a bias toward mothers when fewer than 4 percent of custody decisions are made by the Family Court?
What do these statistics tell us?
1. Fathers are less involved in their children's care during the marriage.
2. Fathers are less involved in their children's lives after divorce.
3. Mothers gain custody because the vast majority of fathers choose to give them custody.
4. There is no Family Court bias in favor of mothers because very few fathers seek custody during divorce."
> "In other words, 91 percent of child custody after divorce is decided with no interference from the family court system. How can there be a bias toward mothers when fewer than 4 percent of custody decisions are made by the Family Court?
I live in the UK, so I can't comment on how things are in the US, but here it's so completely understood that men won't get the kids that it's relatively rare to try. The only person I know who did (who had a partner who was quite plainly unsuitable to be a parent) still lost out. In such an environment, why would it be surprising that men don't pursue custody?
Further, if the argument goes that mothers spend more time with their children, and therefore ought in general to be more likely to get custody, I don't necessarily argue against that. What I don't understand is why it's okay to say 'Mothers typically spend more time/attention on their children, therefore it's natural that they (on average) should get custody', but it's not okay to say 'Fathers typically spend more time/attention on their careers, therefore it's natural that they (on average) earn more money'.
> Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures.
This is true.
> ...whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.
I have no idea how that conclusion is drawn. Men, for example, are significantly more likely to get killed in the course of their work. For example, men accounted for 92% of all workplace fatalities in 2014[1]. To me anyway, getting killed sounds at least as bad as, if not worse than not getting paid for your work.
Overall, my opinion is that men and women face different kind of pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. What addresses one must address the other.
>you've not somehow proved that the women being encouraged to prioritize family isn't a problem.
I never said it wasn't a problem. I said in a different comment:
>But gender roles are still a problem, especially for the people who are forced into the roles they do not like.
Now, as someone who does value work life balance more than making a lot of money working long hours, I do personally judge one social pressure as not as bad as the other. But I also understand that there are man who have different priorities who see other social pressures as worse, and I understand that there is a 'grass is always greener' effect.
It isn't a problem. Women generally should prioritize family. Women are generally more nurturing than men. Why are you making this out to be a problem?
I don't understand the argument here: the previous poster said women are pushed to take care of kids and elderly parents (for no pay, often prompting a reduction in work hours or a desire to stay at a more flexible but lower-paying job, or for me staying in a particular geographic region with lower pay on average) while men are pushed to be primary breadwinners (so they're pushed to make more money, perhaps doing shitty jobs or trading in time with family and community that they would value). It's pretty clear that the people pushed to do work for no money make less money then the people pushed to do work for money, and in fact pushed to make more money when possible. What's the disagreement?
I think you misread the parent. They were saying that specifically family care is foisted on women (more often). In just the previous sentence they assert that men face an equal but opposite pressure.
> How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids.
So... you're saying the exact same thing. There is a social pressure for the women to be in careers where they are caring for kids, and for men not to be.
So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe?