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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Would they still fight for workforce accessibility/equality or accept that stay at home mom is better than working a full time job and not seeing their kids grow up? Did it provide the happiness it promised?

Saw this question being asked and I know what I would choose[/quote]

[b]You realize that when a woman stays home her partner has to work longer hours to support her lifestyle, right? [/b]By your own logic, partners to a SAHM don't see their children grow up either and yet I never see anyone asking similar questions to men as if their time with children doesn't seem to be equally important.

I also think you've got a rosy view of the past. Even though most women stayed home they didn't live like wealthy housewives do today because most of them were married or average earning men who had to work very long hours while the wife did manual unpaid labor at home and did not have much quality time for her children. I'd be a working woman today a d share childcare with my husband.[/quote]

DP but the bolded is not a factual statement.[/quote]

It's still a relevant statement. If a woman who works doesn't see her children, neither does a man who works, so why questions like this are only directed to women?[/quote]

Men are not working different/longer hours whether their wives stay at home with the kids or not. It's a stupid argument. Men get to spend exactly the amount of hour with their kids that they want to. They have choices that women do not.[/quote]

If a woman is earning a good income, then the husband has more of a choice to take a job with more flexibility that may have lower pay. Of course he may not choose to do that, but with the wife working it’s more of an option.[/quote]

Ideally they’d talk and discuss and decide as a team.

I know I’ve asked my spouse to take a less crazy job - which also isn’t good for his poor communication and executive functioning skills- and then be home more and more involved. He has not. [/quote]

The point is that it is possible to support a family on ONE full time (i.e. 40 hours per week) income, and many families do it this way despite what all the UMC strivers of the DMV can grok, so the question of whether or not dad works MORE is disingenuous.  The couple is not going from 2 full time jobs to 1.5 full time jobs, they’re going from 2 full time jobs to 1.  Dad (and we’ll stick with dad since that’s the norm and this thread is about moms working or not, but obviously this can apply to either partner) was going to be working the very SAME job with the SAME hours regardless.  The amount of time he spends with his kids DOES NOT CHANGE.  But if mom stays home, the kids now have mom for an ADDITIONAL 8 hours per day.

This is not a difficult concept to understand.[/quote]

I don't know what kind of men you know, but with our friends, the women and the men mostly both work and work around the same so yeah, the dads can step back a bit because their wives work.[/quote]

Those guys step back because that’s what they want to do.  If their wives didn’t work, they would live on less income.  If they didn’t want to step back, no amount of work their wives did would make them step back.

[/quote]

And the same goes for women. They don't have to step back, but they are expected to.[/quote]

Stop.  There is no societal expectation for women to step back, or stay at home, or be the primary caregiver.  Staying home, stepping back, daycare, nanny - this is a personal decision for each individual family.  If your husband EXPECTS you to step back that is a personal issue that you need to work out between the two of you (and ideally you should have been on the same page before voluntarily procreating).[/quote]

I think that you are in some kind of super special bubble where women aren’t expected to step back.  
Statistically, women’s income goes down significantly after having kids (because they step back).  And, unlike men, it goes up again later in their lives (because they step back up).

I have heard this mentioned on job interviews (well, hiring a mom isn’t the same as hiring a dad), by my coworkers, sitting on volunteer boards for foster placement, etc.

This is absolutely a societal expectation and not something that is an INDIVIDUAL decision.

[/quote]

Your data on income does not indicate whether women step back because they are expected to or because they choose to.  You are projecting your own biases onto the data.

But even if we agreed that it is an “expectation” , it is NOT a requirement.  There is a crucial difference.  If you don’t want to step back, grow a backbone and keep on leaning in or whatever.  No one is going to force any woman to stay home, so everyone should probably stop pretending that other women’s choices are any of their business.[/quote]

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