Reply to What makes a golddigger anyway?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Oh irony of ironies.

It is actually easier to be a working mother if you have a higher earning spouse. Having a spouse whose income can help pay for the support necessary to have a career is often the difference between a woman continuing to work or becoming a SAHM, between staying FT or going PT, between pursuing a more ambitious career path or getting mommy-tracked.

There are other things that can really help facilitate keeping your career as a mom, but they are harder to access. For instance, having family who will help with childcare (even something as simple as having a parent or IL who will pick your kid up from daycare on days you can't) is a huge boon, but you either have this or you don't, and it's much easier to screen for partners with higher incomes than for partners with family members who will be willing to help in this way.

Also, since women are more often in lower paying careers (lots of complex reasons for this, and misogyny is one of them), marrying a high earner versus a middle earner might allow you to continue to work even if childcare actually equals or exceeds your income during the early years. While of course couples should not base a decision of whether to become a SAHM by comparing just the woman's income to the cost of childcare, if the woman is the lower earner, this can be inevitable. A higher earning partner might make it easier to accept that a woman chooses to work even if it would technically "save" the family money if she stayed home. Once the early years are over this will pay dividends for everyone, since the woman will have those additional years of work. But this is a situation where you might have to spend money to make money, and families with lower earners often cannot make this work, which is what leads to a lot of women dropping out of the workforce because it is actually "cheaper" for them to stay home in the short term.

But we don't openly talk about any of this and we don't educate young women on these facts because of the stigma against women "marrying for money". Though some women do get this education, but I've found it is most likely to be wealthy or UMC women because there is less stigma on these women since they bring more generational wealth and assets into a marriage. So basically, women with dowries still have better "prospects" because they are from the class that sets the rules.

The dirty secret is that if we created a social safety net that better supported mothers and especially working mothers, the financial benefits to women of marrying men with more money would be mitigated. If you knew you'd have access to quality childcare that accommodated your job no matter your income, for instance, you wouldn't have to worry about marrying someone who could facilitate paying for enough childcare to ensure you could work FT. Plus if childcare was subsidized, you would see far fewer women dropping out of  work to SAHM because their childcare costs exceed their income.

But sure, okay, let's punish women for trying to marry men with enough resources to make up for all the resources we deny to working women as a society. Many women are just choosing not to have kids or simply not to marry instead, that's how crappy this tradeoff is for working moms. But we are still using words like "gold digger." SMDH.[/quote]

TL;DR gold-digging is good when women do it.  :roll: [/quote]

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