And so it has come to this
March 31, 2017 10:17 AM   Subscribe

Do millennial men want stay at home wives? [NYT]. In the U.S., studies seem to indicate so. Or is this just a reflection of inadequate US policies supporting working parents?
posted by Mchelly (143 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fuck this generation.
It’s not just the youngest millennials who seem resistant to continuing the gender revolution. Overall, Americans aged 18 to 34 are less comfortable than their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men. And millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or baby boomer men to say that society has already made all the changes needed to create equality in the workplace
Seriously wtf?

I guess I'm cloistered in a world of peers with MAs and PhDs and given Trump + reddit I should've realized this was true but I honestly thought that we were better than this.
posted by dis_integration at 10:35 AM on March 31, 2017 [30 favorites]


I'd like to see the breakdown by education, religion, and region. I am fairly sure most of my male peers don't think this way. I think men need to stop thinking masculinity is founded on power over women and other men. (Notice how the article didn't mention stay-at-home husbands.)

I wonder if Trumpianism is sort of trying to encourage this by gutting leave policies.
posted by actionpotential at 10:35 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


Some of the data underlying the NY Times article. Responses by men and women track each other closely-ish.
posted by jpe at 10:35 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


A recent study of 22 European and English-speaking countries found that American parents report the highest levels of unhappiness compared with non-parents, a difference the researchers found is “entirely explained” by the absence of policies supporting work-family balance.

No wonder some young people think that more traditional family arrangements might make life less stressful. Tellingly, support for gender equality has continued to rise among all age groups in Europe, where substantial public investments in affordable, high-quality child care and paid leave for fathers and mothers are the norm.

The availability of such options increasingly outweighs cultural support for traditional gender arrangements. When young Americans are asked about their family aspirations, large majorities choose equally shared breadwinning and child-rearing if the option of family-friendly work policies is mentioned.
So. There's that.
posted by gwint at 10:37 AM on March 31, 2017 [82 favorites]


The article's framing (making this about "millenials") is problematic. But it does speak to something I have been feeling, without realizing the statistics are quite as stark. I do think I have a unique perspective on this - I grew up in an India which is obviously far behind the US in terms of gender equality along many dimensions. On the other hand, because gender equality is so obviously, so overtly not present, I had far fewer frustrating discussions with male friends of roughly the same socioeconomic status (educated, middle-class). Whereas here there is a certain strain of post-feminist Reddit bro-ness that is absolutely virulent among college-educated young people.
posted by peacheater at 10:38 AM on March 31, 2017 [21 favorites]


This blows my mind:
In 1994, only 42 percent of high school seniors agreed that the best family was one where the man was the main income earner and the woman took care of the home. But in 2014, 58 percent of seniors said they preferred that arrangement. In 1994, fewer than 30 percent of high school seniors thought “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” By 2014, nearly 40 percent subscribed to that premise.
All the important decisions? Nearly 40 percent? Who are these people? This is so at odds with what I anecdotally felt was true from the way that people at, say, Buzzfeed discuss gender roles. Guess the left-millennial bubble is less reflective of millennials generally than I thought it was.

I feel like this article conflates a lot of things. Male breadwinners with stay-at-home mom arrangements, paid parental leave with family-friendly workplaces, etc. There's also some connection with the way that they talk about things to the "opt-out generation" idea that is percolating in my mind, though I can't quite articulate it.
posted by R a c h e l at 10:38 AM on March 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


I also wonder how much the factors in this attitude change are similar to the factors that led to the stagnation/regression of women and girls in STEM since the 90s as well.
posted by R a c h e l at 10:39 AM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


Fuck this generation.

Don't buy this crap, it's just a way for lazy journalists to generate stories
posted by thelonius at 10:40 AM on March 31, 2017 [56 favorites]


Keep in mind that there are an awful lot of these kids with Fox News-listening, prosperity doctrine-believing parents. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and we have a pretty good idea now of how many apples there are in this country.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:40 AM on March 31, 2017 [16 favorites]


But most young parents will not be able to sustain egalitarian values and practices without better work-family policies.

I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 10:41 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


My takeaway from this is less "snake people are terrible," and more "men are terrible, though there was a short-lived trend after first-wave feminists started having kids where they were less terrible, which trend is now reversing itself." Which... actually squares pretty well with what I've seen.
posted by Mayor West at 10:41 AM on March 31, 2017 [33 favorites]


"The kids are all right" is only true if you make it happen. And most of these kids grew up in the Bush era, when we were very much committed as a society to ensuring that the kids would not, in fact, be all right.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:41 AM on March 31, 2017 [15 favorites]


I feel like the lede was a bit buried, if you read more than 2 paras down, it starts to unpack how the US's abysmal lack of structural support for work-life balance is very likely influencing these attitudes.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 10:43 AM on March 31, 2017 [43 favorites]


I dunno, I'm not particularly surprised that younger people care less about gender equality. I've felt for some time like it's something people have stopped thinking about when raising/interacting with/making things for kids. Toys are more gendered than they were when I was a kid. Commercials, including both toy commercials and commercials for everything else are more gendered. Non-kids TV is full of sexist tropes (I'm not really sure if that's more than before). We're reaping what the marketers have sown. That's obviously not all of it, and I'm sure family friendly policies matter, but I think the way many people raise kids to think about gender has changed and not necessarily for the better.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:43 AM on March 31, 2017 [23 favorites]


Yeah, I was going to come in here and blame shitty work-family policies for some of this (with maternity leave and childcare in the US being what they are, it makes economic sense for one parent to leave the workforce and take care of the kids a lot of the time), but that only explains some of it.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:44 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think it's another example of the got-your-cookie thing. American capitalism puts us into a position where everything seems impossible to balance even before you have kids, and then someone comes around selling this idea that the problem is gender roles. Blame something, anything other than capitalism. I don't think that all the kids are buying what they're selling by any stretch, but this attitude is definitely out there on the market right now. And, unfortunately, it's not that hard a sell to young people who're struggling with trying to just afford to not have roommates before they turn 30. Everybody can see that the system is broken, and the people who're breaking the system have been working very hard on figuring out how to keep it that way.
posted by Sequence at 10:44 AM on March 31, 2017 [16 favorites]


The point about work-life balance, as it is euphemized, is likely the crux of the matter. In Europe, having children and spending time with your family is (AFAIK) considered part of life, and businesses accommodate that, because why the #@$# wouldn't you, right? But in the US, children and family are seen as an impediment to profit and career growth, so businesses do very little in the way of accommodation, leading to financial disincentives towards dual income parenting. Adding to that shitstorm is the decline of public education and, notably, the weird lottery systems you see in ever-more-popular urban environments where maybe 1 out of 10 schools is good.

And, also, wage stagnation coupled with inflation and the fact that there is a lower bound to the cost of child rearing means that unless you make more than a certain amount, dual incomes result in a net loss.

Smear on the icing of traditional gender roles and, blammo, you have the trend the NYT article is seeing.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:45 AM on March 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


Yeah, so it's hard to comment on this particular story without going into a hole of questioning the underlying data and assumptions, neither of which are really given. So let's just do what we all usually do and freestyle the first things that pop into our heads.

1 - maybe snake people are reacting to negatives experiences in their childhood caused by overextended two-working-parent families and a lack of structured, institutional support for childcare in the US, resulting in chaotic childhoods and a reactionary desire to return to what's perceived as a more stable family dynamic

(upon refreshing the thread...)

it starts to unpack how the US's abysmal lack of structural support for work-life balance is very likely influencing these attitudes.

exactly.

2 - maybe this is a rational economic decision driven by low wages for snake people as they enter the workforce and a messy, expensive "system" for childcare where it's simply easier and cheaper to rely on a single working parent and a stay-at-home parent to raise children. If childcare is going to cost $20K+ a year then the second working parent contributes next to nothing to overall family income and everyone has a much more complex life getting the kid(s) to and from childcare.

The real question IMO is whether snake people men will stay home to be the child rearers at a higher rate than preceding generations.
posted by GuyZero at 10:47 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


There's the terrible American work-life balance, combined with at least twenty-five years of terrible public and charter education, no real significant sex or family education in schools, and the rise of the aggressively misogynist red-piller culture on the internet.
posted by Squeak Attack at 10:49 AM on March 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


I think I've mentioned this before, but when my daughter was born, I stayed home with her for three months after my wife went back to work. I am also planning to do the same thing later this year when #2 arrives. I am a dude. When I inform people of my plans, the reaction is invariably "Oh, it's so nice you're in a position to be able to do that!" Which, while true, is... a weird kneejerk reaction. Like, of course the kid's mom is going to stay home, and of course it'll be unpaid or under disability coverage or some other weird patchwork thing because the US is horrible, but that's the woman's role in the family, obvi. But DAD is going to stay home? He's gotta go to work! Bring home that bread! See the kid for twenty minutes after getting home and then turn it back over to its REAL parent. Anything else would be deeply unnatural.

Meanwhile, my coworkers respond with anything from bemusement/disbelief, all the way up to "But what're you going to do at home for 12 hours a day with a baby?" I dunno, guy, probably the same thing my wife did, except without the lactating.

The patriarchy is deeply fucked up.
posted by Mayor West at 10:51 AM on March 31, 2017 [105 favorites]


He's gotta go to work! Bring home that bread! See the kid for twenty minutes after getting home and then turn it back over to its REAL parent. Anything else would be deeply unnatural.

I dunno, for me it really is just that it's nice to be in the position to do that. For the majority of men in America there's literally no way to do that. You aren't even allowed unpaid leave. Like you'll be fired for just not showing up for 12 weeks.

For example: "To qualify for leave under the FMLA, an employee must have worked for over 12 months for the state or federal government, a public school or private employer with more than 50 employees." (from here)

So if you work at a business with less than 50 employees, no paternity leave is required. Rough.
posted by GuyZero at 10:56 AM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


The arc of the moral universe is long, and bends to become a flat circle.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 10:58 AM on March 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


So if you work at a business with less than 50 employees, no paternity leave is required. Rough.

Yeah, but that's the case for maternity leave too, and a lot fewer people react to 'I'm taking maternity leave' with that sort of surprise.

Most of the stay-at-home parents I know are dudes, but I've got a weird social circle.
posted by dinty_moore at 11:00 AM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


In Europe, having children and spending time with your family is (AFAIK) considered part of life, and businesses accommodate that, because why the #@$# wouldn't you, right? But in the US, children and family are seen as an impediment to profit and career growth, so businesses do very little in the way of accommodation, leading to financial disincentives towards dual income parenting.

This is framed as though it's a cultural difference between "Europe" and the US, but it's not like capital in Europe is magically nicer or more humane. There are laws holding them back that do not exist in the US. The solution is political and Americans can change this by pushing our government enforce the same protections.
posted by indubitable at 11:04 AM on March 31, 2017 [57 favorites]


Another anecdotal truth: a lot of people I know - college-educated millennials mostly - have reacted to the lack of US family support by deciding that they don't want kids. The studies described here seem to confirm that pattern: "the percentage of students planning to have children dropped from 78 percent to 42 percent [between 1992 and 2012]". That worries me, though, because if fewer professional people - especially professional women - have children, I'm worried that they will advocate even less, not more, for family-friendly policies. And without buy-in and informal support from managers and executives, legal protections for parents can only go so far.

Also - family-friendly policies in the workforce don't just mean children! I hate that other caregivers, like those caring for other adults or the elderly, don't make it into the conversation half the time especially considering how common that type of caregiving is.
posted by R a c h e l at 11:06 AM on March 31, 2017 [63 favorites]


I dunno, for me it really is just that it's nice to be in the position to do that. For the majority of men in America there's literally no way to do that.

Totally with you, and I didn't even start to unpack the economic privilege involved in our decision-making. But, to dinty_moore's point, I've never heard someone react to a woman's birth announcement by expressing such sentiment--it's just expected that she'll stay home and absorb the economic/social/work-advancement setbacks.
posted by Mayor West at 11:08 AM on March 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


This is framed as though it's a cultural difference between "Europe" and the US

There are laws holding them back that do not exist in the US


You are 100% correct, but politics, law and culture are all intermingled. Capital may not be more humane, but European society and culture is, and enforces that humanity through legislation.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:08 AM on March 31, 2017 [4 favorites]


How about this: People want incomes high enough that one spouse could stay home if they desire?
posted by blue_beetle at 11:09 AM on March 31, 2017 [14 favorites]


Toys are more gendered than they were when I was a kid. Commercials, including both toy commercials and commercials for everything else are more gendered. Non-kids TV is full of sexist tropes (I'm not really sure if that's more than before)

I had to elide the word "sissy" while reading to my daughter from a goddamn children's book that was written sometime in the last decade. What the fuck, world?
posted by uncleozzy at 11:10 AM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


I would really not underestimate the influence of Reddit and its ilk in this. It's like Russian propaganda trolls have been pushing sexism for over a decade and no one thought it mattered.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:12 AM on March 31, 2017 [30 favorites]


hehe I have a word-substitution plugin that replaces 'millennial' and 'boomer' with person. I was very confused why person men want stay at home wives.
posted by Dmenet at 11:12 AM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


Alls I'm gonna say is that every negative trait ascribed to Millenials is a direct result of the generation that formed them.

If you beat and starve a dog, it's your fault when they bite you.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 11:15 AM on March 31, 2017 [28 favorites]


The point about work-life balance, as it is euphemized, is likely the crux of the matter.

I think so, too. I'm a feminist, and I'm all about egalitarian marriages and equal opportunities, but we are right in the midst of the young-kids-who-need-lots-of-help-and-attention phase of parenting, and with two people who work (at least) full-time jobs, that's exhausting and expensive. It's easy to look enviously at families who have one parent at home--something we used to be able to do, and can no longer afford. A very clear thinking person would logically say "we need more societal support for families" or "all families should be able to make it on one income so that either parent can stay home with the kids if they choose." But in America, we've never had that kind of societal support, so for most people it's hard to imagine or consider as a real possibility. And the vast majority of our cultural models of one-parent-at-home are mothers, so I suspect that without easily comprehensible alternatives, people think "we should go back to the way it used to be." It's pretty hard to argue that my grandparents, raising kids in the 50s, weren't less stressed by family life than my wife and I are. To be clear: I'm dead set against returning to the gender restrictions of the 50s, but I certainly understand that we can picture the less frenetic life of the 1950s much more easily than we can imagine a less frenetic family life in the 2020s.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:17 AM on March 31, 2017 [18 favorites]


I would really like for society to remember that queer people exist and that very very few of us think the way straight people do about gender issues
posted by Automocar at 11:18 AM on March 31, 2017 [44 favorites]


My spouse is a homemaker and stay-at-home mother; we are Gen X (people don't write about Gen X that much because it's the Boomers who, as senior columnists and managing editors, still get paid to write drivel, and it's Boomers obsessing and fussing about their children which is why we have so many stories about lizard people) .

Anyway, we're a cross-cultural relationship, and I suppose part of our setup is indeed based on perceived cultural roles for men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. There are benefits: we don't have to worry about daycare or pre- and after-school childcare. I also work from home and so makes it a lot easier for me to participate in childcare and stay connected with my kids, rather than commuting.

I suspect one of the reasons for a supposed switch to single-income households is because part-time work absolutely sucks in terms of wages. If you want to work in a big box store or a shop, there are plenty of jobs, but it barely covers childcare expenses.

There are career-track positions available here as well, but it's hard to get those jobs--generally, the labour market is split between low-wage service jobs, and highly-paid technical and managerial jobs. Nothing much in the middle. Of course, my partner could have got on a career-track job by going back to work a year after having kids (Canada has paid maternity and parental leave), but it was not an attractive option for her. Culturally, there can be an emphasis on "focusing on motherhood" and homemaking.

From my point of view, there is a lot of pressure being the sole earner, especially in a country as expensive as Canada. There are long-term challenges too, such as home ownership and, eventually, retirement.

My partner will actually return to school next year to study computer science, and hopes to get a QA job a year after that based on a professional connection of hers. So there is light at the end of the tunnel.

But I can't really fathom how dual-income households do it. It seems like it would be a frenetic life
posted by My Dad at 11:19 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh man I'd love a stay at home spouse! Wife, my current husband, whomever! We pay below the average for childcare in our city which is still over $15,000 a year and it'd be great not to have to spend that. Too bad we both have to work and have no idea what we're going to do when the muskrat is in regular school and we have to pick her up two hours before work ends! Gee it sure would be great to have a stay-at-home person to do that for us. Too bad 1) it's assumed it would be the female partner in a male/female relationship 2) it's not really a choice because whether you can't afford childcare or you can't afford not to work these decisions are generally more made based on economic factors than on what works best for the people involved.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:19 AM on March 31, 2017 [13 favorites]


Toys are more gendered than they were when I was a kid.

Yes, the "pink section" of Wal-Mart and Toys 'R Us is really disturbing. I thought our generation would have moved away from it, but I guess Faludi's Backlash was not just some academic tome...
posted by My Dad at 11:22 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


But I can't really fathom how dual-income households do it. It seems like it would be a frenetic life

Oh yeah it definitely is! The situation is entirely sub-optimal! Thank you for noticing!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:22 AM on March 31, 2017 [19 favorites]


How about this: People want incomes high enough that one spouse could stay home if they desire?

Well, sure, but that is not the pattern I'm seeing. Rather, even when people would like two incomes, they have to have one partner staying at home because there's no other way to make the complicated and expensive childcare arrangements work out, at least in the short term.

We are in an extremely privileged demographic (top 3% household income) and childcare arrangements for our child due in September are still a huge hassle, even when we literally can throw money at the problem. We're able to say - it's worth throwing money at this right now, so that both of our careers can grow and it will work out better financially in the long term. But that requires us to have the liquidity right now to be able to do this, and have flexible jobs that will accommodate each of us taking sick days to take car of a kid / WFH if needed. That's a huge ask for most American families so most couples are defaulting to having the mother stay at home. There are even poorer families where both have to work just to make ends meet, and childcare is a patchwork network of family care and other sources. But what I'm seeing among lower middle-class and above families is that it's having both parents be able to work full-time that is the privileged position.
posted by peacheater at 11:23 AM on March 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


Well, at least part of this is the result of decades of aggressive work by the right wing in the US trying to make the word "feminist" an insult and convincing people that there is no sexism in American life.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:25 AM on March 31, 2017 [34 favorites]


I mean, looking forward, what do we do about this? Places like Reddit and various websites and gaming communities clearly serve as incubation chambers for virulent strains of bigotry -- we have an infestation or literal Nazis now, moving into the mainstream, and misogynist hate groups aren't far behind. So what do we do about it?

Our civic and legislative norms weren't set up to deal with something like this. No one conceived of something like this. Except it's quite obviously causing real damage, beyond those websites. The cesspools are leaking, and that's going to make it ever harder to enact the sort of structural policy reforms that would provide more social support for everyone.

What do we do?
posted by schadenfrau at 11:30 AM on March 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


How about this: People want incomes high enough that one spouse could stay home if they desire?

I'm a millennial man, and I'm definitely skeptical that it's a good thing that two incomes has become the norm for the middle class. I very much do not have a strong feeling about who should be responsible for bringing in that income in a relationship. Without a doubt society is still structured such that it's much more likely for women to end up in a domestic role and men in a breadwinner role in practice though, even if your convictions are egalitarian. In fact this kinda has happened in my life (in a complicated way) and it was not something I expected or went looking for.

For the record, my own mom was on a professional career track for the better part of a decade, quit for the better part of another decade to have kids - I think she might not have had it been a different job - and then switched to a lower-pressure occupation when we were older.

Anyway I guess I'm saying some of the questions asked here are hard to untangle from the economic issues, but some easier and more obviously concerning like "the husband should make the important decisions."
posted by atoxyl at 11:30 AM on March 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


I find this attitude had to square with the more recent generations also experiencing a higher rate of divorce than previous, because in a divorce the non-working parent typically gets screwed.
posted by soren_lorensen at 11:38 AM on March 31, 2017 [12 favorites]


I am rather surprised and disappointed how fast people are going from "men should make all important decisions" to "economics!" My mother stayed at home, yet that meant she made many of the majoe decisions -- after all, she ran the household finances and could meet with people during the workday! I also wonder just how many high school students are thinking of how they will raise children when they judge ideal household structures.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 11:40 AM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


I am rather surprised and disappointed how fast people are going from "men should make all important decisions" to "economics!"

I don't think there is any debate about that particular metric being rooted entirely in patriarchy.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:42 AM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


the reaction is invariably "Oh, it's so nice you're in a position to be able to do that!"

Honestly, this sounds more like they are a little jealous than that they think you're shirking somehow. Like, they think you must be rich or have an unusually good job or something.
posted by amtho at 11:42 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Divorce rates have declined since a spike in 1980, when divorce laws were revamped.
posted by My Dad at 11:43 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't think there is any debate about that particular metric being rooted entirely in patriarchy.

My point is, this answer should color the way people evaluate every other answer. Because those people aren't talking about single income families based up work life balances. They're answering other questions based upon how they feel about women making decisions.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 11:47 AM on March 31, 2017 [31 favorites]


They're answering other questions based upon how they feel about women making decisions.

Bolded for fucking truth.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:52 AM on March 31, 2017 [36 favorites]


It's curious to me that discussions about the cost of childcare in the US rarely mention grandparents. What kind of cultural expectations are there across the US, on grandparents caring for / raising grandchildren?
posted by bring a tuba to a knife fight at 11:54 AM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


What kind of cultural expectations are there across the US, on grandparents caring for / raising grandchildren?

I think it depends, but a lot of people live far from family or have much older parents. Or parents who are still working themselves. Or just aren't close in that way. Bowties Spouse and I have been talking about reproducing, but his family lives many states away, and mine is only a few hours away but were abusive, and I wouldn't trust them unsupervised. His folks are still working full time, and will still be by the time we have a kid, barring any disasters. Mine are retired or will be in the next sevenish years, but might not be in good enough shape to do that kind of work. If we have a kid, we're on our own.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 12:03 PM on March 31, 2017 [6 favorites]


I work(ed) with mainly (female) millennials in the greater NYC Metro. These young people planned their weddings despite not being in relationships, they discussed wanting babies while still living with their parents, they worked hard to meet the beauty standard expected by their future spouses. They had a negative view of feminism until Beyonce adopted it. Some of them voted for Trump. They all hated Hillary Clinton. I'm at the tail end of GenX, I entered adulthood with the expectation of working my entire life, children or no. It never occurred to me that anything else would be preferable. I can't think of anyone I know personally in my age group who is a stay-at-home parent or would want to be. The problem is the older conservatives with their puritanical view of women buoyed by the millennials' unrealistic vision of womanhood are making life considerably more complex for those of us who aren't in either generation.
posted by palindromeisnotapalindrome at 12:03 PM on March 31, 2017 [20 favorites]


They're answering other questions based upon how they feel about women making decisions.

I think there are two questions - single breadwinner families vs wanting stay-at home wives.

The proof will be if snake people men stay at home at higher rates than Gen X and Y did.
posted by GuyZero at 12:10 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't have much to contribute to this, but I thought maybe I'd just throw a data point in there.

Right now I'm a millenial (well, born 1982) stay-at-home dad, and have been for 7 months and counting. We're about to hire a nanny because the waiting list for our desired daycare is moving at a snail's pace. It's financially a pretty rediculous balancing act, but I think we're going to make it, and hopefully I can get back to work full-time in a couple weeks. In the mean-time it's using every nap hour (like right now!) to continue my research, and push push push.

I just wanted to say that even though 7 months is getting on the long side, I love my son and I'm really happy that we got to spend all this time together (he's really great, I'll tell you about it sometime). Identity is complicated, but I feel sorry for men who get so programmed by cultural expectations that they wouldn't be able to enjoy what I've had, even if given the chance. In my life I've never given a shit about other peoples' expectations, and it's worked out fine so far. And if I may say so, I think it's worked out for my son, too.
posted by Alex404 at 12:12 PM on March 31, 2017 [7 favorites]



It's curious to me that discussions about the cost of childcare in the US rarely mention grandparents. What kind of cultural expectations are there across the US, on grandparents caring for / raising grandchildren?


This is highly dependent on class and region and even then there's a lot of factors. My son is cared for by grandparents part-time and what allowed that is a confluence of these factors, all or most of which have socio-economic underpinnings:

--My mom and both my inlaws are comfortably retired (you can't do that if you have no retirement savings)
--We live in the same city as them (can't do that if your work forces you to move--and my inlaws are well enough off that they actually bought a condo in our city and kept their other home elsewhere as well)
--All the grandparents are healthy and able to keep up with a four-year-old even in their 70s (requires a lifetime of access to quality healthcare, and luck)
--We have a great relationship with all of them and I am delighted to have them care for my son as much as they want

My mom reports that when she takes my son to the park, there are a lot of grandparents there taking care of their grandchildren, and I know that at my son's preschool there are several other kids who go to a grandparents' for part of the week (they talk about it amongst themselves, it's really cute). But I personally don't know that many other people who have a grandparent heavily involved in childcare for them, usually because they live far away from the grandparents, or the grandparents are still working.

Our arrangement with my son's grandparents has been a HUGE part of what makes our two-income house fairly stress-free. My mom steps in all the time when shit hits the fan. And when my mom goes on vacation or is unavailable, often my inlaws are able to take it on. We have a whole team, basically, and it's all been down to just dumb luck that this is how our lives worked out.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:14 PM on March 31, 2017 [13 favorites]


What kind of cultural expectations are there across the US, on grandparents caring for / raising grandchildren?

It's less about cultural expectations than it is about Americans moving a lot more than people in other countries - see the linked study below. A lot more Americans live far away from their own parents vs people in other countries. It's much less common for grandparents to be a viable option.

Labour mobility in the United States:
"Labor mobility is much higher in the United States than in other developed countries. Over the past decade, three times as many Americans moved to find jobs and better lives than Europeans. On average, an American moves 11 times during his or her life. The reasons span culture and policy. This higher level of labor mobility partly reflects the culture of a country built through immigration. Americans consider mobility an essential ingredient to the pursuit of a better life"
posted by GuyZero at 12:22 PM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


What kind of cultural expectations are there across the US, on grandparents caring for / raising grandchildren?

I don't think it's normal. With my own family here in Canada, there are family politics at play with my parents, and it would not work out.

In Japan it might have worked out, but my MIL experienced a stroke and is obviously unable to provide any help... Although we would consider having her live with us if we did return to live in Japan.

My sister-in-law in Japan is a professional. She's a well-regarded civil servant. But she can only do that because she married a man who was the eldest son of his family. He is the "family head" and his mother lives with their family. She has provided childcare with all three of their kids, and also runs the household. This was a very common scenario in Japan until recently.
posted by My Dad at 12:23 PM on March 31, 2017


How many of these references to "grandparents" taking care of grandchildren are actually all or mostly grandmothers?
posted by naoko at 12:25 PM on March 31, 2017 [39 favorites]


and childcare is a patchwork network of family care and other sources.

Which leads to a heartbreaking situation I see way more often than care to: people maintaining absolutely toxic relationships with adult family members because they can't do without the childcare. Everybody knows the kids are absolutely miserable, and there's not a thing anybody can do about it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:46 PM on March 31, 2017 [12 favorites]


Well, when I talk about my parents coming to take care of my expected child for six months, I really do mean both of them, because while my mom is great at cooking and organizing things, she famously did not change a single diaper during my entire babyhood (my dad and the nanny did, plus assorted grandparents).
posted by peacheater at 12:48 PM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


My dad is a famous baby-and-animal-whisperer and did much more than 50% of my care as a child because he had the more flexible job, but of the four grandparents he's the only one still working.

My husband and I both had full time working moms our entire childhoods, so this is all kind of normal to us.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:08 PM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


What kind of cultural expectations are there across the US, on grandparents caring for / raising grandchildren?

American, Gen X. My husband and I do live in the same city as our parents, which isn't something you can assume about many Americans.

When my husband-to-be and I were talking about kids (we eventually decided on zero), his mother was dying of cancer. His father is an alcoholic narcissist, who "retired" but never stopped working. My mother is an emotional wreck and control freak, and at the time, my father was still working. There was no way any of our parents factored into realistic childcare.
posted by Squeak Attack at 1:14 PM on March 31, 2017 [1 favorite]


Is anybody surprised by this? After 20 years of the WarAgainst Women? After Reddit and Redpills and GamerGate and electing a rapist as President? Do people see why bringing up the sexism of Trump and Pence doesn't work?

The misogyny of our online culture and tat in politics are reinforcing each other. The people who hate women are organized and more and more aggressive. As a result, I don't see any good progress coming in the fight against sexism for the next 40 years or so.
posted by happyroach at 1:49 PM on March 31, 2017 [25 favorites]


My point is, this answer should color the way people evaluate every other answer. Because those people aren't talking about single income families based up work life balances. They're answering other questions based upon how they feel about women making decisions.

I'm thinking about the two-income trap stuff because I was just having a conversation about that side of things. My point here is just that that it's not irrelevant depending on which questions one asks, and that one might want to choose which questions to focus on accordingly. The article itself actually does a pretty good job looking at and distinguishing the implications of gender attitudes versus material factors though. Especially if you follow through and take a look at the surveys they cite.
posted by atoxyl at 2:10 PM on March 31, 2017


The fact that the younger millenials are the most traditional suggests that this isn't about work-life balance or the financial or logisitcal difficulties of a two-income household. If it were about those things then those who had already entered their child-having or seriously-child-considering years would be most affected, but it's the 18 year olds. What does your average 18 year old know about the difficulties of adulting, let alone adulting with children? I really can't imagine they've thought all that much about the cost of childcare or the logistics of daycare pick-up.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:20 PM on March 31, 2017 [21 favorites]


I blame The Game, which convinced many young men that what women secretly want - so secretly that they don't even know it themselves - is to be subservient. I feel like I'm hearing echoes of that argument on a regular basis nowadays, though rarely stated quite as crudely as that. Sometimes, though less often, even from women.
posted by clawsoon at 2:47 PM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


I really would like to see the study separated out between people supporting one parent as a stay-at-home parent, and people who only support that arrangement when the one staying home is a woman. I suspect that some percentage of the amount of ppl this article/study claims support the patriarchy actually are just choosing the option that is closest to supporting one stay-at-home parent. Which makes a lot of sense, and is a very different issue than the questions about who makes the decision.

I dunno, for me it really is just that it's nice to be in the position to do that. For the majority of men in America there's literally no way to do that. You aren't even allowed unpaid leave. Like you'll be fired for just not showing up for 12 weeks.

Also this is frustrating to read, because the same thing is true for the majority of women, and yet "there's literally no way to do that" is not what child-rearing parents are told: they are told you do it anyway because that is the way it is done, and if that means you lose your job/can't also figure out how to feed yourself, well that's too bad (and probably also your fault).

A guy at work just tore his ASL and got 5! whole! days! fully paid sick leave. I don't get a single fully-paid sick day - not even one - despite the documented physical disabilities caused by stretching my vagina to 10 centimeters and pushing a 7-9 pound living thing out of it.
posted by likeatoaster at 3:14 PM on March 31, 2017 [16 favorites]


I agree that lack of a decent parental leave policy is behind much of this - though I would like to see the actual data. One thing that gave me pause, though, was Stephanie Coontz's mention of "a new egalitarian essentialism." The idea that men and women are fundamentally different, and that men are more "naturally" suited to breadwinning and women to nurturing, seems to go hand in hand with the resurgence of scientific racism (aka "human biodiversity") in right-wing circles. The races are different! The sexes are different! Not inferior, mind you, just different. (Of course, that leaves biracial, multiracial, trans and gender-fluid people out of the conversation.)

Younger people, especially, are less likely to be religious and more likely to identify as a "religious none." Unfortunately, racism and sexism have not been left behind with religion, as I think a lot of idealistic people have hoped. It's just now cloaked in pseudo-scientific garb: Women's place is in the home! Black and Latinx people are intellectually inferior rapists! Middle-eastern Muslims are EEEEEVOOOOOLLLLL! Science says so, and if you don't agree, you are Against Science and probably a soft-headed Tumblrina gender-studies major! #NotAllMen, duh, but I think "Because Science" has taken the place of "Because God" in justifying hierarchy.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 3:35 PM on March 31, 2017 [16 favorites]


Whereas here there is a certain strain of post-feminist Reddit bro-ness that is absolutely virulent among college-educated young people.

Yeah, I don't think this effect can be underestimated. The Internet has played an integral part in the explosion of MRA/far-right/white nationalist groups, and these groups target young men online (and push on women to be a "cool girl" and play along). I think it's telling that it's young people who are expressing more conservative attitudes--i.e. the ones most likely to participate in online communities.
posted by Anonymous at 3:37 PM on March 31, 2017


I think a lot of people were fooled into thinking more progress had been made than had actually been made.

When I was real young I lived in a rural area. Our lessons about racism and sexism and equality were along the lines of "None of these things are true, but historically people thought they were and it still carries on today because of tradition and power. Fighting against it is a noble thing, because these untrue ideas hurt people and are used by the evil".

Then I moved across the country when I was 10. Bigger coast city. The lessons changed. "Here is what you don't say or do, don't make fun of X, doing so is wrong/impolite. THEY NEED HELP. First determine what gender and race people are so you can know what to say and when to listen to them". No focus on the fact that white males aren't inherently superior beings, just a set of civilizing rules you were expected to follow.

Here it was rebellious and anti-authority to say shitty stuff secretly, because the teachers told you not to but the subtext was always that white male superiority is true but one doesn't say these things and instead gives a helping hand to the lessers. Good people help the inferior. Racism and sexism were like talking about sex, secret adult things that kids aren't supposed to know yet.

Guess which group would have polled as super woke and then turned into alt-right shitheads when they got tired of the "PC police"?

I doubt it's a reversion of any kind, it's just a result of the complete disgusting failure of the paternalistic neoliberal white bougie feminism and anti-racism campaigns to make anything other than false progress. They actually just reinforced sexist and racist beliefs while teaching people that hiding these "facts" was proper decorum.
posted by Infracanophile at 4:12 PM on March 31, 2017 [10 favorites]


Younger people, especially, are less likely to be religious and more likely to identify as a "religious none."

How much younger are we talking? Because at 18, 19, maybe even 20, my friends and I were still kind of hanging on to our parents' religious beliefs. Even those of us who were questioning were doing so in a way that we hoped was respectful. Then again, I have always been a weirdo, and so have been my friends, so I guess I wouldn't be surprised to not find us at the top of the bell curve.

(I don't think my mother and I are even on the same religious chart anymore, but we still respect each other. That relationship is one of the few things in my life I'm proud of without qualification)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:49 PM on March 31, 2017


I think a lot of people were fooled into thinking more progress had been made than had actually been made.

When I was real young I lived in a rural area. Our lessons about racism and sexism and equality were along the lines of "None of these things are true, but historically people thought they were and it still carries on today because of tradition and power. Fighting against it is a noble thing, because these untrue ideas hurt people and are used by the evil".

Then I moved across the country when I was 10. Bigger coast city. The lessons changed. "Here is what you don't say or do, don't make fun of X, doing so is wrong/impolite. THEY NEED HELP. First determine what gender and race people are so you can know what to say and when to listen to them". No focus on the fact that white males aren't inherently superior beings, just a set of civilizing rules you were expected to follow.

Here it was rebellious and anti-authority to say shitty stuff secretly, because the teachers told you not to but the subtext was always that white male superiority is true but one doesn't say these things and instead gives a helping hand to the lessers. Good people help the inferior. Racism and sexism were like talking about sex, secret adult things that kids aren't supposed to know yet.

Guess which group would have polled as super woke and then turned into alt-right shitheads when they got tired of the "PC police"?

I doubt it's a reversion of any kind, it's just a result of the complete disgusting failure of the paternalistic neoliberal white bougie feminism and anti-racism campaigns to make anything other than false progress. They actually just reinforced sexist and racist beliefs while teaching people that hiding these "facts" was proper decorum.


I uh, gotta say I am somewhat confused by this comment?
posted by atoxyl at 5:32 PM on March 31, 2017


Though actually I do think there was a failure to combat this stuff somehow in the last couple decades?

to go hand in hand with the resurgence of scientific racism (aka "human biodiversity") in right-wing circles

It's hard to articulate exactly what I mean by that - sorta just that it seems like active criticism in scientific terms (in the vein of Gould or Lewontin) at some point gave way to a refusal to engage/assumption that "everyone knew" it was discredited, which with the advent of the internet allowed the race theorists to cast their work as suppressed knowledge?
posted by atoxyl at 5:54 PM on March 31, 2017


"White woman feminism" (the generic term for Second Wave feminism these days, aka the thing that got us abortion rights and the ability for married women to hold property and that nearly got us universal childcare and the ERA) is responsible for these attitudes, of course, because they failed to abolish capitalism and didn't ask for rights in the "right way".

One reason why I am distrustful of the left is because it's amazing how many things people who would have considered themselves to be progressive can be held responsible for when you see everything in terms of economics.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:06 PM on March 31, 2017 [11 favorites]


I know this subthread is kind of stretching the topic but - a lot of people here probably know most of those "race and intelligence" studies come from a pretty small cadre funded by an organization founded in the '30s to promote eugenics. But they sure do have studies to show and present them in an reputable-looking way that appeals to the "rationalist" crowd online. And I feel like somehow there has been a strange failure of contemporary effort to collect the evidence and combat scientific racism in an authoritative way - at least I don't see it much on the web (which is probably where it's most needed).

Which reminds me there is a good recent book questioning scientific gender essentialism.
posted by atoxyl at 6:20 PM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


I long for greater effort to both make stay at home parenting accessible and acceptable. I really disliked feminism for a long time because none of the messages seemed to be for me. They were all targeted to making me someone I don't want to be, competitive, on top of people around me, making more money than people around me, business focused, and basically in the work place instead of caregiving from the heart.

There are strains of feminism (socialist leaning mostly) that were more about respecting women as caregivers should they choose to be and seeing economics through the model caregivers and nurturers tend to see it through (i.e. provide to those based on need, ask people to work based on ability).

People doing caregiving tend to not be in the workplace and not making policies meaning their perspective doesn't get into how the policies are written. And yes that has tended to be women. I really deeply hope that America can adopt policies that permit people to actually spend time rearing their children and participate in the work place as well. We need people who understand human needs to be helping design policies because they understand a lot things in a way those writing policies often have poor grasp and our societies will not flourish unless we design them with in depth understanding of what promotes health and wellness, nurtures the body and spirit.
posted by xarnop at 6:34 PM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


Actually (last contribution to this thread for a bit I promise) two part-time incomes with non-overlapping hours and shared domestic work seems fairly ideal doesn't it? I wonder how many people are actually able to arrange this? How does one make this happen?
posted by atoxyl at 6:44 PM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


I am really, really, REALLY tired of people sing "It's economics" as an excuse for the current wave of misogyny. Do you think the managers in Silicon Valley are hurting so bad economically that they can't hire women? Do you think your average Redditer or 4Chaner or MRA guy would, if offered free childcare say "Oh my, I'm going to stop issuing rape and death threats to any woman who speaks out online!"? When Roe vs Wade is repealed in the next couple years, do you think it's going to be because of economics? Seriously?

The economics argument is bullshit obfuscating the actual problem. The truth is that for the last 20 years there has been a deliberate war on the civil rights of women, and their ability to participate in public life. The cause is not economics, but a basic, deap-seated sexism ad misogyny that promotes the ideal that men should have the only voice in society. It's an ideal that reveres the Victorian Age, and is hell-bent on sending us back.

The misogynists are winning. And things are going to get much, much worse, partially because we are unwilling to admit this is an ideological war.
posted by happyroach at 6:49 PM on March 31, 2017 [58 favorites]


We ALL want a stay-at-home wife! What I wouldn't give for someone to stay home and do the laundry and cook dinner for me.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:24 PM on March 31, 2017 [7 favorites]


I'm a early Gen-X, very late Boomer man I guess.

I've been interested, and shocked, by this for a while. I live in a bubble where I don't have a normal 9 to 5, have been married for decades, and don't have kids, so I only started realizing this in the last couple of years, and mostly from MF. I'd see questions and comments from people that aimed to be enlightened but to me sounded like they came out of the 50's, like people were just discovering feminism.

I'm not sure, because it's only my impression from reading online, but it seems there's more to this than just gender roles. Young people to me seem very conservative and domestic in many ways. People who are barely 20 are making comments like "we just want a good job, raise kids, and be able to afford a mortgage" and I'm thinking most of my friends in their 50's and 60's still can't believe they ended up doing those things in their 30's and 40's, and never dreamed of it when they were that young.

I've mentioned it before, but in the late 80's the young women I hung out with and dated would have been stunned that they would have been expected to do all the cooking and cleaning, or not hold a job, because of their gender, and it's hard to imagine the biggest asshole young men I knew expecting such things. With the people I was around, not an especially enlightened bunch, just suggesting that there was a fundamental difference between men and women would have got you the same reaction making a racist comment would today. There were certainly plenty of problems then, but this is not direction I expected things to go.

When we were in a position where I was the only one working it was very odd for me and my wife to adjust to the idea that she would stay home and take care of the house, and that would be her job. It just seemed weird.

Alls I'm gonna say is that every negative trait ascribed to Millenials is a direct result of the generation that formed them.


It's hard to deny that, or argue. I just haven't heard a totally convincing theory on how this happened. But the world is weird. I haven't heard a totally convincing theory on how Trump got elected, but I'm sure it's related.
posted by bongo_x at 7:39 PM on March 31, 2017 [9 favorites]


People who are barely 20 are making comments like "we just want a good job, raise kids, and be able to afford a mortgage"

I think this has less to do with any inherent conservatism or lack of ambition on young people's part as it is achieving those things being now roughly as difficult and unlikely as becoming a world famous rock musician / astronaut.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 8:10 PM on March 31, 2017 [16 favorites]


I think the 50%/50% is perfect for some people. I know two couples who make it work, and it's refreshing and pretty much ideal for the kids. On the other hand, I'm so tired of the automatic assumption that because I'm a 100% stay at home mom, our relationship isn't equitable and we are somehow...anti-feminist? No. That's just not how any of this works.

Thank you, xarnop, I wish I had more favorites to give. What makes my life as a stay at home mom hard isn't that I'm being oppressed by my husband or somehow not 'allowed' to work...it's that modern liberalism awards exactly zero points to women who chose to work as stay at home caregivers. At least that has been my experience. In general, care work is seen as superfluous and something to be outsourced to the less qualified/cheap labor sector. I'm just not sure that is a good direction for society to take.
posted by The Toad at 8:20 PM on March 31, 2017 [10 favorites]


I think this has less to do with any inherent conservatism or lack of ambition on young people's part as it is achieving those things being now roughly as difficult and unlikely as becoming a world famous rock musician / astronaut.

I wasn't thinking lack of ambition, I was thinking that people seem to imagine that that was something people my age took for granted. It wasn't even something I considered. I didn't buy a house until my late 30's, and then only because the people we were renting from proposed it and set it all up. We had never even thought it was an option. My friends were as shocked as I was, I barely knew anyone that owned a home.

Some have mentioned online culture, but I wonder how much startup culture is a part of this? I'm still not used to the idea that you could be rich and under 50, or even well off and under 40, unless you were an entertainer, athlete, or inherited it. Now we've had 20+ years of an economy, at least in the press, dominated by young people who stumbled onto wealth and decided they know how the world should work.
posted by bongo_x at 8:25 PM on March 31, 2017 [8 favorites]


I live in the Bay Area, and I know exactly 3 people under 40 who own a home. None of them have kids.

Most of the time, when my peers and I discuss home ownership, or children, it is with a wild-eyed look and a list of all the other, cheaper places we will have to relocate to in order for that to even be vaguely possible.

The idea of actually supporting a family on one income seems like a pipe dream. Like, sure, I want a stay at home wife. And a pony. And a talking house that moves around on chicken legs, while you've got your magic wand out.
posted by ananci at 12:24 AM on April 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Thanks. Great article, and the studies cited are very readable and worth a look, especially this one, where they discuss the reversion in high school senior's opinion about whether it should be the norm for men to be breadwinnners at work and women homemakers (Fig. 3).

One interesting thing, from the data alone, is the time-lag of Figs. 3 and 4. In Fig. 3 we can see that the reversion in 18-year olds started around 1993. Subtracting 18 years you get 1975, and from Fig. 4, we can see that starting from around that time, the mother's time with children decreased significantly, while not compensated by the time spent with father, which remained very low. In fact, from '75 -- '85, both parents' engagement decreased, with the mother's in a faster pace comparatively.

I'm tempted to make a guess.

Before c. 1975, the adult-sphere gender equality gradually improved, while the father still mostly spent little time with children. The mother increasingly took on a role as the model of working woman, changing the child's later perception of gender roles towards greater egalitarian values.

Starting from c. '85, workspace gender equality might have worsened, or stopped improving. Men began to spend more time kids because they can, while for women it was because they must. Parents bring home this kind of economical disparity from work to their children. And in aggregate, the parents' total time win children increased, which brought stronger reinforcement of the idea.

And starting from mid. 1990s to early 2000s, the rise of massive, low-cost, instant-access, super-efficient, automated propaganda machine (ahem, social media, I mean) introduced another factor in the formation of young minds. The society at large can penetrate the parent wall and influence children directly. Adult-space ideas can go uninhibited to children without being processed by the filter of family and parents. An older, socially active generation can bypass the parents and act on young people directly. This complicate things enormously. Adding ~16 years, and you get the high school population now and ongoing.

Now my armchair sociologist mode is off, and I must say this: it is inherently dangerous to interpret the causality behind data from the data's correlation feature alone, and this is what I was doing just now. No way am I attempting to say I can even convince myself, and I remain aware of my ignorance.

But I'm totally not convinced that it's not the economy. It's not that simple.
posted by runcifex at 12:35 AM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


That graph ("Young People, Old-School Views") is interesting. For about 30 years, it seems that young men and young women's views of gender roles tracked pretty closely (except for a blip around 1990). In the mid-2000s, they began to diverge dramatically, such that now, there is a 50% relative difference between genders.

To put it another way, young women's worldview has been relatively stable over about 40 years. Whereas something happened about a decade ago that has caused young men's worldview to slide backwards.
posted by basalganglia at 6:12 AM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


I agree that lack of a decent parental leave policy is behind much of this - though I would like to see the actual data. One thing that gave me pause, though, was Stephanie Coontz's mention of "a new egalitarian essentialism." The idea that men and women are fundamentally different, and that men are more "naturally" suited to breadwinning and women to nurturing, seems to go hand in hand with the resurgence of scientific racism (aka "human biodiversity") in right-wing circles. The races are different! The sexes are different! Not inferior, mind you, just different. (Of course, that leaves biracial, multiracial, trans and gender-fluid people out of the conversation.)

Younger people, especially, are less likely to be religious and more likely to identify as a "religious none." Unfortunately, racism and sexism have not been left behind with religion, as I think a lot of idealistic people have hoped. It's just now cloaked in pseudo-scientific garb: Women's place is in the home! Black and Latinx people are intellectually inferior rapists! Middle-eastern Muslims are EEEEEVOOOOOLLLLL! Science says so, and if you don't agree, you are Against Science and probably a soft-headed Tumblrina gender-studies major! #NotAllMen, duh, but I think "Because Science" has taken the place of "Because God" in justifying hierarchy.


If I had a dollar for every time I've had to hunt through the literature and shut one of these Because Sciencers up with actual science, I'd have a few NSF fellowships.
posted by actionpotential at 6:22 AM on April 1, 2017 [8 favorites]


Another thing that occurred to me: since becoming pregnant I've been hanging out a lot on pregnancy and baby focused subreddits. Probably because they're mostly inhabited by women, they're surprisingly progressive and supportive - very pro vaccine, judgment free regarding breastfeeding or not, epidural or not etc.

But pretty much every day I read another horror story about an extremely unsupportive husband or partner. This is especially true on the forums dedicated to life after the baby arrives. The pregnancy forums are full of griping about women's bodies but are relatively optimistic, sunny places. The ones for after the baby arrives are a lot darker, as women grapple with what it means to bring up a child with someone who flat out refuses to wake up in the night ever, or change any diapers or thinks that because they've been hard at work all day they're entitled to play video games all evening.

I think of these forums as the place where you see the outcome of these differing expectations that men and women have been raised with in (mostly) American society. I find it incredibly sad to read.
posted by peacheater at 6:49 AM on April 1, 2017 [17 favorites]


The economics argument is bullshit obfuscating the actual problem. The truth is that for the last 20 years there has been a deliberate war on the civil rights of women, and their ability to participate in public life. The cause is not economics, but a basic, deap-seated sexism ad misogyny that promotes the ideal that men should have the only voice in society. It's an ideal that reveres the Victorian Age, and is hell-bent on sending us back.

The misogynists are winning. And things are going to get much, much worse, partially because we are unwilling to admit this is an ideological war.


There is an amazing knee-jerk response on the part of many, many men when you suggest the idea of a woman holding power over them or exercising complete autonomy over their bodies, when you get to a certain point in the conversation and probe enough below even a superficial pro-choice response. I have strongly suspected for some time that the root of misogyny is in the desire to control the means of (re)production. Consider that uterus-owners, the vast majority of whom are women and all of whom are typically assigned female at birth even if it turns out their gender identity is otherwise, are physically smaller and are the ones who get pregnant, so are the limiting factor in how many babies are born; consider that there are a number of behaviors that we (properly) label misogynist and abusive that have parallels in other animals that we label 'mate guarding' in the sociobiological literature (and I am not implying that these behaviors are okay just because other animals do them); consider that the pregnant individual, in a situation where her body is completely under control, is the final arbiter of whether a sperm-producing individual reproduces and not the aforementioned sperm-producing individual because after the sperm has been deposited, the pregnant person can still terminate the pregnancy.

I'm not suggesting that misogyny is innate on the part of men but that the incentive for men to try to control women is very, very strong, and a whole lot easier and cheaper than doing the right thing if you are looking to get people to make babies, which is encouraging social and economic incentives to get people to want to make babies that do not impinge upon people's rights and bodily autonomy, or if you are looking to make your own babies, which is taking the responsibility upon yourself to be more desirable and find the right mate for you.

I posit that conservative/authoritarian (of which religious groups are but a manifestation and less a root cause, but religion works very well with these notions because many religions are hierarchical, structured, and strict) screaming about this is entirely about control and visceral fear of losing it. Conservatism is about wanting things to stay 'the way they used to be' or backslide to some perceived past that they are comfortable with; authoritarianism is about fear, submission to authority, and law and order.

When people who grew up before women's rights started accelerating in the 60s and 70s start dying, nobody will know what the 50s and earlier were like anymore. This is bad and good.
posted by actionpotential at 6:58 AM on April 1, 2017 [10 favorites]


There's a lot of long comments here and I apologize for skipping over the last few so I can add my two cents. First, the Times article actually did an admirable job of directly linking to the underlying study reports on which these contentions are based, and I know it's a lot of work to actually go read them all but if you do have that time available on this Saturday morning, at least to me it appears that you can't paint a simple picture of a millennial retreat from feminism. For example, the Pepin and Cotter report notes " In reference to the public sphere—employment opportunities and leadership abilities—youth have indeed become more egalitarian, increasing their support for the idea that men and women have equal abilities and should be afforded equal opportunities." And the Fate-
Dixon
analysis found "Since 1994, young women’s confidence that employed women are just as good mothers as stay-at-home moms has continued to inch up, but young men’s has fallen."

Another thing that I think is somewhat lacking from the discussion so far is the shifting demographics of millennial and younger generations may be influencing this particular trend, which speaks to the clear tension these days between mainstream white-led feminism and women of color. We are looking at the last couple of white-majority generations in America. Whatever name they slap on it, the generation comes after "the kids today" will be minority-majority, and to understand those trends you need to start looking at both contemporary and historical experiences and cultural messages that are relevant to demographics other than middle-class whites. Just as an example, I have an biracial/African American identifying niece in her early 20s who is heavily influenced by a certain social media memes that praise "strong black men" who financially take care of their families, take a protective and leadership role in the marriage, idealizing motherhood/family, domesticity. She is coming from a home life where her parents did stay together but in a pretty flawed marriage, and where both parents worked equal hours for equal pay but mom did the classic second shift of being the manager at home and shouldering far more than 50% of domestic labor--and being vocally resentful about it.

Or you could look at how the growing Hispanic demographic may be influencing aggregate beliefs about gender and family. These issues are hinted at in the underlying symposium papers and not addressed at all in the Times article.
posted by drlith at 7:02 AM on April 1, 2017 [10 favorites]


I didn't see where the numbers got broken down for survey takers: how many were in a relationship, how many had kids, how many are working full time, how many are satisfied with that, how many are stringing jobs together to assemble an income.

I'm not that interested in what people want for their wives and children if they have neither, though I suppose I should be. I wonder how much of this is fantasy games playing from a disadvantaged frame of ref or no frame of ref.

I'd like to see these people surveyed again to ask simply how much they value freedom of choice for their SO regardless of their opinions.

(I sadly informed my wife that her three degrees and career had to be shelved though, I need my wife to be available on-call in case I have to have lunch or a meeting with any other woman. Tough times, sadfeels all around but of course it is for the best. Especially if that lunch is HAMBURGER.)
posted by drowsy at 8:21 AM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I know this subthread is kind of stretching the topic but - a lot of people here probably know most of those "race and intelligence" studies come from a pretty small cadre funded by an organization founded in the '30s to promote eugenics. But they sure do have studies to show and present them in an reputable-looking way that appeals to the "rationalist" crowd online. And I feel like somehow there has been a strange failure of contemporary effort to collect the evidence and combat scientific racism in an authoritative way - at least I don't see it much on the web (which is probably where it's most needed).

Which reminds me there is a good recent book questioning scientific gender essentialism.


For scientific studies that are relevant to gender essentialism look at Sari van Anders and her work. I'd read some similar things before but her lab was the first one I was introduced to that tackles the problem explicitly.

The problem with collecting the evidence and combating scientific racism and misogyny in an authoritative way is that those of my colleagues who do this work - just like me - kind of stink most of the time at communication to anyone other than our own colleagues. A lot of us are very much divorced from the mentality of the average American who doesn't have the benefit of at least a bachelor's degree much less in the sciences, the irrational responses of the people making these claims can be infuriating and emotionally taxing to deal with when reasoned, well-cited argument is met with a non-argument that is a laundry list of informal and formal fallacies time and time again, and we are often already very busy because so much of our time is consumed fighting for funding and keeping ourselves afloat and doing our actual research (it's a more than 40-hour-per-week job); we need more dedicated, full-time debunkers who are paid to do this work by organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists or the AAAS.

It is comforting to me, though, that pretty much every scientist I know of who does this work absolutely hate hate hates the 'scientific' racists and misogynists with a passion for grossly misinterpreting their work.
posted by actionpotential at 8:53 AM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


Another point, regarding scientific racism and sexism: the Dunning-Kruger effect is very much relevant here.

I didn't know how little I understood my own topic until I got to grad school. I understood to a good extent, but didn't fully understand the importance of leaving proclamations about things to the experts and not being ultracrepidarian until I actually got involved in research in undergrad and spent time understanding the nature of academia, a good part of which is ultraspecialization.

You learn pretty quickly that if you're an inorganic chemist you leave pontificating about protein biochemistry to the protein biochemists.

Likewise, I don't think enough people have learned the value of leaving pontificating about things to the people who study it. American anti-intellectualism and the notion that everybody's opinion is on equal footing kind of make this difficult to inculcate, as well as the people who scream 'argument from authority!' and 'credentialism!' when it's not a situation of the authority and credential being used in a do-this-because-I-said-so-and-I-won't-explain-why sort of way, but people need to learn some intellectual humility. Sometimes even other scientists do - physicists have a particular problem with this, and the small number of scientists who deny climate change are usually not climate scientists who properly understand the data or who understand that they are not subject-matter experts.
posted by actionpotential at 9:26 AM on April 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


Here's the latest data point (2016) from the survey the NYT cited for the "women making important decisions" stat.
posted by quaking fajita at 9:38 AM on April 1, 2017


adventures in garbage millennial confirmation bias:

"you can’t say a lot about millennials based on talking to 66 men."
posted by My Dad at 11:20 AM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


Another interesting thing about young people today is that there is a lot of defensive writing. I seem to see way more "everyone is always saying millennials are the worst" comments and pieces than I ever do actual criticism.

Besides the fact that that criticism has been heaped on every generation, it seems this one is the one that seems to really be bothered by it. I don't mean that as a insult, it's not a wrong position to take, it's just seems different and interesting that so many young people are offended by the NYT's and others portrayal of their generation.

The criticism, and the defensive reactions, are all over the place though. Here there seems to be a lot of "people say millennials are not ambitious, responsible, or mature" comments when I don't feel like I've really seen a lot of that kind of thing in the wild. And my position is the opposite; I see them as much more ambitious, responsible, and mature than people I knew, myself included, at that age, with much higher expectations to match. That's what I mean by conservative, not big C conservative.
posted by bongo_x at 12:03 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


The problem with collecting the evidence and combating scientific racism and misogyny in an authoritative way is that those of my colleagues who do this work - just like me - kind of stink most of the time at communication to anyone other than our own colleagues. A lot of us are very much divorced from the mentality of the average American who doesn't have the benefit of at least a bachelor's degree much less in the sciences, the irrational responses of the people making these claims can be infuriating and emotionally taxing to deal with when reasoned, well-cited argument is met with a non-argument that is a laundry list of informal and formal fallacies time and time again, and we are often already very busy because so much of our time is consumed fighting for funding and keeping ourselves afloat and doing our actual research (it's a more than 40-hour-per-week job); we need more dedicated, full-time debunkers who are paid to do this work by organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists or the AAAS.

One of the things I was getting at with my earlier comment is actually that when I encounter this stuff online it's often coming from people who are educated or halfway educated or (especially) autodidactically educated in STEM fields - often not quite the directly relevant fields of course. And I think the biotruths crowd are good at convincing such people because they speak the right (pseudo?) scientific language - particularly when they bring statistics, fMRI, you know, numbers - regardless of whether the premises are correct. Whereas it seems like there's a short supply of opponents speaking the same language - or at least they don't make it to the same venues. I do buy that this has to do with people being busy doing actual research - something that people who write pop-sci books about human nature tend not to find a huge amount of time to do.

(I'm not an academic or a biologist but I have a couple people who are one or both in my immediate family so I have some idea how the grant stuff goes...)
posted by atoxyl at 12:57 PM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


This is framed as though it's a cultural difference between "Europe" and the US, but it's not like capital in Europe is magically nicer or more humane. There are laws holding them back that do not exist in the US. The solution is political and Americans can change this by pushing our government enforce the same protections.

At the same time, though, if capitalism has the same influence in both regions, what's the reason we haven't, as a people, demanded these laws in America? Why isn't it politically feasible to advocate for cheap child care and equal parental leave? Isn't that partly cultural?

I currently work at a non-profit biology research institute with a lot of postdocs from around the world. I'm reminded of a comment by a Swedish colleague, who mentioned that she was finding the financial situation very difficult because where she was from, child care was on the order of only a couple of hundred bucks a month. My initial reaction was disbelief. Here (San Francisco), in comparison, child care costs on average literally one postdoc's entire salary. So if you don't have a partner who's either also working or who is that rare unicorn, a stay-at-home husband, caring for a child during your postdoc is simply unworkable. Even then, it reduces you to effectively a one-income household.

And yet Americans seem incapable of actually addressing this problem, or even identifying it as a problem. The closest people seem to get is writing hand-wringy thinkpieces about why "the STEM pipeline" is "leaking" women en route to faculty positions, always with at least some concern-trolling sidebar about how gosh, maybe this isn't really a problem, maybe it's just women's natural preferences for family over career -- as if they're making free, unconstrained choices, and as if those things should even be in opposition in the first place. $200/month childcare seems like an absurd fantasy to Americans. In Sweden that is apparently not only a reality, it is the maximum. (And stay-at-home parents are compensated by the government!)

Unfortunately it's not a full solution: from the article, "the Scandinavian countries, despite their generally uncontested levels of overall equality in the world, have higher levels of vertical segregation in academia than many of their European counterparts." Even there, women are still discriminated against and penalized for taking advantage of time off by having less time to rack up publications. They are still illegally asked if they want children. That linked article (sorry for paywall) concludes, "Thus, while the welfare state facilitates economic activity, it does not challenge the organizing processes that reproduce inequalities. This critique is not to suggest that macro enabling policies should be abandoned, rather that there needs to be a greater critical and policy engagement to confront inequalities at the organizational level."

...Which I think brings it back to the idea that policy is really important, but it also can't be viewed in isolation, and it doesn't necessarily cause cultural change.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:58 PM on April 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


One of the things I was getting at with my earlier comment is actually that when I encounter this stuff online it's often coming from people who are educated or halfway educated or (especially) autodidactically educated in STEM fields - often not quite the directly relevant fields of course.

Unfortunately there are some people vaguely affiliated with the "human biodiversity" (barf) or neo-eugenics movement out there who do actually have relevant STEM backgrounds, though they tend to be more crypto in expressing their beliefs... thinking in particular of people like Steve Hsu and Razib Khan, who kind of position themselves as more respectable "just asking questions", "free inquiry"-style alternatives to outright HBD white supremacists like Steve Sailer. (I feel pretty comfortable calling Steve Sailer a white supremacist, if one who rolls East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews into the category of 'white' when it suits his purposes.)
posted by en forme de poire at 2:09 PM on April 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


I am really, really, REALLY tired of people sing "It's economics" as an excuse for the current wave of misogyny. [....] The economics argument is bullshit obfuscating the actual problem. The truth is that for the last 20 years there has been a deliberate war on the civil rights of women, and their ability to participate in public life.

Can't it be both?

Personal anecdata: I was born in the last year of the Reagan administration -- one year after the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine, and the year in which Rush Limbaugh's radio show became nationally syndicated. Within my lifetime, this is what has happened to wealth distribution in the United States. I, along with every American born after, say, the mid-seventies, have never existed in an economy that has not been engineered to slowly strangle my livelihood and my prospects. Likewise, I have never existed in an America where you can't turn on your car radio and immediately tune in to an endless stream of regressive, woman-hating garbage.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:27 PM on April 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


One of the things I was getting at with my earlier comment is actually that when I encounter this stuff online it's often coming from people who are educated or halfway educated or (especially) autodidactically educated in STEM fields - often not quite the directly relevant fields of course. And I think the biotruths crowd are good at convincing such people because they speak the right (pseudo?) scientific language - particularly when they bring statistics, fMRI, you know, numbers - regardless of whether the premises are correct. Whereas it seems like there's a short supply of opponents speaking the same language - or at least they don't make it to the same venues. I do buy that this has to do with people being busy doing actual research - something that people who write pop-sci books about human nature tend not to find a huge amount of time to do.

(I'm not an academic or a biologist but I have a couple people who are one or both in my immediate family so I have some idea how the grant stuff goes...)


and

Unfortunately there are some people vaguely affiliated with the "human biodiversity" (barf) or neo-eugenics movement out there who do actually have relevant STEM backgrounds, though they tend to be more crypto in expressing their beliefs... thinking in particular of people like Steve Hsu and Razib Khan, who kind of position themselves as more respectable "just asking questions", "free inquiry"-style alternatives to outright HBD white supremacists like Steve Sailer. (I feel pretty comfortable calling Steve Sailer a white supremacist, if one who rolls East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews into the category of 'white' when it suits his purposes.)

This kind of ties back in to what I was saying about ever finer gradations of expertise and people outside academia not necessarily understanding just why trusting some person with a STEM education isn't enough, even with a PhD, or even with a PhD in the appropriate greater field. Steve Hsu and Razib Khan aren't practicing academics and I know Razib doesn't have a PhD (I forget if Steve Hsu has one, but I'm pretty sure he's not a biologist, and I'm pretty damn sure Sailer has no relevant qualifications), and goodness knows I'm educated in STEM with a biology BS and working on a biology PhD and am currently *in* academia, but I'm not as reliable as a scholar of the appropriate topic about anything outside my tiny little subfield (and will be as reliable as any other PhD when I defend my dissertation). One of my informal mentors is a professor emeritus at my university who is a distinguished biochemist, and he made it clear to me many times that outside of biochemistry he wasn't qualified to pontificate on neuroscience or development. Outside the world of academia people think nothing of a chemist saying stuff about engineering, and that is stupid.
posted by actionpotential at 2:27 PM on April 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


Another interesting thing about young people today is that there is a lot of defensive writing. I seem to see way more "everyone is always saying millennials are the worst" comments and pieces than I ever do actual criticism.

literally the first words in the first comment on this thread are "Fuck this generation." It was favorited 27 times.
posted by JimBennett at 2:30 PM on April 1, 2017 [11 favorites]


when I encounter this stuff online it's often coming from people who are educated or halfway educated or (especially) autodidactically educated in STEM fields - often not quite the directly relevant fields of course.

Unfortunately there are some people vaguely affiliated with the "human biodiversity" (barf) or neo-eugenics movement out there who do actually have relevant STEM backgrounds...


/mild to moderate derail/
Hell, Trump's pick for science adviser is a professor of physics at Princeton. His specialties are optics and spectroscopy. He's a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. And, of course, he is a vociferous climate change denier. Why do otherwise brilliant scientists indulge bullshit fantasies? Call it engineer's disease, call it simple arrogance -- what I can tell you is that I work in the fields of chemical oceanography, climatology and earth system history, and most of the scientists who clamor against our research or inject their own unsupported hypotheses happen to be physicists -- to the point that it's kind of a running joke among some of my colleagues. we don't hear a lot of unfounded bullshit from biochemists or ecologists or botanists or archaeologists; it tends to be physicists. your guess is as good as mine.
/mild to moderate derail/
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:49 PM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


i think every generation has probably had it's fair share of "kids these days" but considering the absolute shitshow of a country american millennials have inherited from our elders, yeah, we're absolutely defensive. we refuse to let them offload the responsibility of how they fucked us back onto us. every facile goddamn thinkpiece about how millenials are the absolute worst was written by some boomer fuck who thinks we all want participation trophies even though they were the parents giving those stupid trophies out in the first place. the prevailing attitude among these people seems to be "i got mine so fuck you" and this attitude permeates throughout popular culture.

christ even in this thread millennials are being nicknamed snake people and yes i understand that name is supposedly ironic based on the bad rap our generation is getting as the cause of all the worlds problems but it absolutely infuriates me considering all the snake people who actually fucked us over are still out there, still fucking us all and getting off scott free. our president is a snake person. i am not.

w/r/t this study, i for one cannot say whether my generation is more or less mysoginist than gen Xers. i would argue that it almost doesn't matter because we are never going to be given the keys to the kingdom or even economic prosperity. boomers and the 1% are going to sap away everything they can and any potential milennias have will be drained and drained until the last boomer is dead 25 years from now and then we'll all be middle aged and broke wasting away a shocking number of us probably STILL living with our parents wondering what we could have made with our lives and with this country if we had been given the same shot our grandparents had.
posted by JimBennett at 2:49 PM on April 1, 2017 [9 favorites]


I forget if Steve Hsu has one, but I'm pretty sure he's not a biologist, and I'm pretty damn sure Sailer has no relevant qualifications.

Steve Hsu has an extremely impressive collection of degrees and fellowships - in physics. So of course he seems to regard himself as an expert on genetics, AI...
posted by atoxyl at 3:41 PM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


w/r/t this study, i for one cannot say whether my generation is more or less mysoginist than gen Xers. i would argue that it almost doesn't matter

As a Millennial, it really does matter.

I spent nearly three decades convincing myself that misogyny was going to be a thing of the past. Even the rhetoric around Trump's election hasn't softened the narrative I've seen around me -- even TFA ends on a stupidly optimistic note about how gender attitudes will totally improve with the economy. And I bought into it, naively.

What broke me of it was almost stupid. I was running a discussion for a book club. I was excited about the book we were discussing, and the feedback I'd gotten from people was positive beforehand. The initial half-hour went well ... and then a guy my age -- a guy I'd known for well over a year -- cut in and just started ranting. And arguing with people. And every time I tried to raise an objection, he'd cut me off.

I walked away, and that was when I knew I wouldn't outlive misogyny. I walked away eager for my generation to die, just so that another generation could take our place. Because A was my age.

So I don't buy the crap about economics. None of this is about economics. This is about men.

Outside the world of academia people think nothing of a chemist saying stuff about engineering, and that is stupid.

As a chemist, I've seen far more engineers dismiss chemistry than vice versa.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:44 PM on April 1, 2017 [9 favorites]


then we'll all be middle aged and broke wasting away a shocking number of us probably STILL living with our parents wondering what we could have made with our lives and with this country if we had been given the same shot our grandparents had.

Serious question: Do you think this way of looking at it leaves your generation vulnerable to politicians and thinkers who promise a return to that past?
posted by frumiousb at 3:44 PM on April 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


w/r/t this study, i for one cannot say whether my generation is more or less mysoginist than gen Xers. i would argue that it almost doesn't matter because we are never going to be given the keys to the kingdom or even economic prosperity. boomers and the 1% are going to sap away everything they can and any potential milennias have will be drained and drained until the last boomer is dead 25 years from now and then we'll all be middle aged and broke wasting away a shocking number of us probably STILL living with our parents wondering what we could have made with our lives and with this country if we had been given the same shot our grandparents had.

Well I don't know, as a millenial woman living in this country, whether this generation is more or less misogynist than gen Xers actually really does matter to me.
posted by peacheater at 3:45 PM on April 1, 2017 [16 favorites]


/mild to moderate derail/
Hell, Trump's pick for science adviser is a professor of physics at Princeton. His specialties are optics and spectroscopy. He's a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. And, of course, he is a vociferous climate change denier. Why do otherwise brilliant scientists indulge bullshit fantasies? Call it engineer's disease, call it simple arrogance -- what I can tell you is that I work in the fields of chemical oceanography, climatology and earth system history, and most of the scientists who clamor against our research or inject their own unsupported hypotheses happen to be physicists -- to the point that it's kind of a running joke among some of my colleagues. we don't hear a lot of unfounded bullshit from biochemists or ecologists or botanists or archaeologists; it tends to be physicists. your guess is as good as mine.
/mild to moderate derail/


and

Steve Hsu has an extremely impressive collection of degrees and fellowships - in physics. So of course he seems to regard himself as an expert on genetics, AI...

It's more physicist's disease, really, because ultracrepidarianism has a particular prevalence among physicists. There was this guy who was the chair of a physics department at a small liberal arts college who I told to stick to his field in a Facebook conversation about climate change.

I swear, they do some serious damage with their hubris. Most physicists I know aren't such arrogant assholes, but the ones who are arrogant assholes are often physicists.
posted by actionpotential at 3:57 PM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


As a Gen X (I guess)

That little "I guess" is such a Gen-X thing to say. You're totally one of us.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:02 PM on April 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


"In general, care work is seen as superfluous and something to be outsourced to the less qualified/cheap labor sector. I'm just not sure that is a good direction for society to take."

I've been working in daycares for many years and see so many kids struggle with the long days (some are there 7:00am to 6:00!), and you have four infants per teacher-- meaning if one is needing to be held a lot it's just not going to happen and they are going to be crying a lot.

I see teachers who still tell kids (babies!) to just stop crying and ignoring them while they cry when this is really not recommended-- there is just so much I see even in good daycares, Montessori style, progressive... getting teachers who actually follow those practices as opposed to just saying they do is hard. Especially because the ratios are not realistic to comply with what is known about children's needs and development and the mental and emotional strain of caring for children when you're out of a healthy ratio (the legal ratios are not healthy) the children are strained acting our for attention and it breaks you down. And then that's not even getting to that we want people to go through all this to rear our precious children for such low wages and most often without any health care. While women I know in the lower middle class (i.e. combined household incomes above 20,000 per year) complain how unfair it is trying to find cheap childcare options- the women on whose backs the burden ultimately falls are women who are often working for 8-10 dollars per hour if they are lucky. I'm more worried about their welfare than the women who earn 25,000 or more a year and/or are married to spouse who makes that or more.

There's no incentive to become educated beyond a CDA because the pay just stops increasing regardless of education level at a point, and so very few people in childcare are well educated and why should they be when there is no reward for it at all- if you're going to invest in your own education you might as well go into a field that will actually pay you for your efforts.

Meanwhile the higher paying therapeutic careers are often trying to pick up the pieces of our poor rearing practices that utterly fail attachment needs where they are in early childhood by creating low ratios and personalized care tailored to children's specific needs with people are actually well trained in child development and attachment.

All of this points to investing in subsidized day care with a LOT of money- and once we are talking about spending tax dollars improving childcare options, it's also worth considering just giving parents who want to stay home anyway the money the government would be spending sending their kids to higher quality daycare directly and letting families figure out what works for them.
posted by xarnop at 9:18 AM on April 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


This article has frightened me more than -- and I'm serious here -- more than Trump's election. The election can be explained away in ways that, while terrifying, seem like something we can fight. But this?

This has put a name to something I've been feeling for a while. Things are getting worse. Men are getting worse. And they hate us. They don't even always know that they hate us, but so, so many of them do. It's getting worse, and we can see it happening, and no one fucking cares. No one seems to think it's a big deal that the internet has been allowed to become a literal incubator for hate groups, and that the one group they all seem to agree on is women. No one. Cares.

And we've just learned that we have so few allies. All those Bernie Bros and young "progressive" women who were so easily swayed by obvious fucking lies, just because they wanted a reason to hate a woman? All those "progressives" who insist that "identity politics" is the problem? Bernie fucking Sanders speaking up after the election to blame the Democratic loss on identity politics, completely unaware that he was basically saying the abused didn't talk to their abusers the right way?

We have so few real allies. Most of the men on the left would leave us out to dry tomorrow, if they had to choose between protecting the rights of women or getting some economic concessions. And it's getting worse.

I honestly don't know what to do.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:37 AM on April 2, 2017 [18 favorites]


While women I know in the lower middle class (i.e. combined household incomes above 20,000 per year) complain how unfair it is trying to find cheap childcare options- the women on whose backs the burden ultimately falls are women who are often working for 8-10 dollars per hour if they are lucky. I'm more worried about their welfare than the women who earn 25,000 or more a year and/or are married to spouse who makes that or more.

Pitting women against each other is the way to guarantee we all lose.

$25,000 is not much money. $25,000 is, in fact, very very very little money. It's not enough to guarantee any kind of livable future, especially if one wants to save for things like college. And odds are, many of those women working for $8-10 / hr are married to people (men) who make more than $25,000 per year, because $25k is not much money.

And it says something that, instead of wanting to give day care providers more money, you think we ought to throw the whole system out the window.

People work for many reasons. Some people work because they have to. Others work because they want to.(*) And one reason to work, in either case, is because women who divorce have, historically, been screwed over because they have no work history. And changing that is going to be far harder than making sure that people who work as day care providers make more than the minimum wage, or even than working to subsidize child care.

Also, once again: we have gone from an article which says that young men would like to live in a household in which they alone make all the major decisions to talking about how the real problem is childcare. Again.

(*) And, yes, yes, these people are privileged because they enjoy their work. Or maybe they're not privileged and would prefer to spend some time away from their children.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 10:11 AM on April 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


"And it says something that, instead of wanting to give day care providers more money, you think we ought to throw the whole system out the window."

I think you're reading what you want into my words. I said that we should invest in paying daycare workers more and then give families the CHOICE of whether they want to have a stay at home parent or not.

"odds are, many of those women working for $8-10 / hr are married to people (men) who make more than $25,000 per year, because $25k is not much money."

People often say stuff like this to me. As a childcare worker I have never earned that, nor am I married to a spouse who has ever made nor do most of my coworkers have income like that.

The fact that you are asking me to pity people who make a lot more than I do, and acting like we who are working for so much less are supposed to be focused on people who earn a lot more than we do also says a lot about you. I want people to have a choice of what works for their families and that means subsidizing both improved childcare with lower ratios and trained professionals and parents to stay at home if they choose.
posted by xarnop at 12:04 PM on April 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Xarnop, what this article is about, once again, is young men who think they should be the sole decider in major decisions.

The question is, when you talk about choice, do you want a man to be the only one making that choice about you? Do you really think that would fall to your benefit?
posted by happyroach at 12:14 PM on April 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


That is not ALL the article was about. Of course I don't want a man to be the only one making choices and it's great to be upset about that.

I was pointing out that for women who do want to stay at home, the feminist movement might also be losing them by being so hostile to anyone who so much as mentions they would like empowerment and support for stay at home moms as well and want feminism to encompass the needs of nurturers to be paid well and respected (and offered financial options to be supported while caregiving in the home if desired).

This seems to make a lot people think I hate feminism and is exactly what made me think feminism abandoned women like myself a long time ago who want protections to get to be with our kids instead of being forced into the workplace and told it's empowering. Choice is empowerment, and that is exactly what I said I would prefer. I think for women who want to be stay at home they don't feel like feminism is for them and it might influence how much they read about feminism and how much they therefore understand and advocate for feminist policies.
posted by xarnop at 12:19 PM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


completely unaware that he was basically saying the abused didn't talk to their abusers the right way?

OMG so much this.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:40 PM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


xarnop: I was pointing out that for women who do want to stay at home, the feminist movement might also be losing them by being so hostile to anyone who so much as mentions they would like empowerment and support for stay at home moms as well and want feminism to encompass the needs of nurturers to be paid well and respected (and offered financial options to be supported while caregiving in the home if desired).

It seems like feminism has worked out in different ways depending on where you are. In some western European countries, where socialism isn't a bad word, feminism led to shared parental leave and single parents able to support themselves with reasonable work hours and the ability to split workdays between parents and a bunch of other stuff that seems like unicorns and rainbows. It worked out more-or-less the way that you're describing how you'd like society and feminism to be. But combined with the unholy mix of Ayn Rand capitalism and Republican Jesus, parts of feminism got twisted into "leaning in" and two parents both working 60 hour weeks and twice as much stress on everybody and single parenthood - or even just stay-at-home parenthood - being a financial hellhole.
posted by clawsoon at 2:06 PM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


I just re-read more of the discussion. Please please please don't take my comment as comment on the Democratic primaries. I meant it as a comment on attitudes in American vs some western European societies in general. "Too much feminism" is not the problem.
posted by clawsoon at 2:30 PM on April 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Too much feminism" is not the problem.

I'm pretty sure that's never been a problem, but is a good indicator that there is a problem if you ever hear those words from someone.
posted by bongo_x at 3:05 PM on April 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


But combined with the unholy mix of Ayn Rand capitalism and Republican Jesus, parts of feminism got twisted into "leaning in" and two parents both working 60 hour weeks and twice as much stress on everybody and single parenthood - or even just stay-at-home parenthood - being a financial hellhole.

There's a lot of financial reasons for that drama, and very few of them can be blamed on feminism itself. Women's presence in the workforce in the US (working from my women's history course here, so experts feel free to contradict me) became A Thing pretty much for financial reasons -- during the 1970s, it started to be impossible for most families to afford to have a stay-at-home parent. We came incredibly close to universal childcare (nixed pretty much due to financial reasons) -- which, again, is cheaper than having a parent stay home.

In general (and especially among younger activists on the internet), the successes of Second Wave feminism are taken for granted, while the failures are used as proof that it shouldn't have happened. So feminism is seen as corporate, but it's corporate largely because those are the things that it was successful in achieving -- had it been successful in achieving other things, we would live in a completely different world.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:40 PM on April 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


Let's run down some of the statements we've seen in this thread:

In response to a story about how teenage boys would rather live in a household in which they make all the major decisions and their wives stay home with children, we've seen the following.

- Maybe this reflects diversity! "White woman feminism" cared about women making decisions. Women of color are perfectly fine with men being in charge of everything.
- Clearly, teenage boys care about work-life balance.
- Fuck feminism, because it doesn't care about me.
- None of this matters because millennials don't have power.

If "feminism" is going to be another subject that MeFi can't do, then I have to wonder what this community can do.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:48 PM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


Who on earth said fuck feminism? I get that you're angry but I would gently encourage you to consider rethinking the words you're putting into others mouths.

You're the one asking women making 10 dollars or less an hour to think about how hard it is for people who make 25,000 and thus agree that making childcare cheaper for low income people should be achieved by making EVEN LOWER income women earn even less.

There is nothing feminist about that. I don't think we're even having the same conversation at all here. I like feminism, love feminism, but I had to work hard to find strains of it that were intersectional and challenged capitalism and that were inclusive of women who value caregiving and want to lift up conditions for caregivers or stay at home parents etc.

Nothing in what I am saying amounts of "fuck feminism" but maybe I missed someone else up thread who did say that.
posted by xarnop at 6:55 PM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


- Maybe this reflects diversity! "White woman feminism" cared about women making decisions. Women of color are perfectly fine with men being in charge of everything.

Did we read the same thread? Like, at all?
posted by tobascodagama at 7:45 PM on April 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


In response to a story about how teenage boys would rather live in a household in which they make all the major decisions and their wives stay home with children, we've seen the following.

That's the headline, but a lot of the discussion here of what exactly the question means and what exactly the answers mean is a continuation of things discussed in the article. I'm sorry if I contributed to pulling this too far toward focusing on disillusionment with the idea of two incomes - like I said that's something that happened to be on my mind. I don't mean to claim it's anything like a sole explanation of the results of these surveys. But I think you're unfairly characterizing at least a couple people in this thread.
posted by atoxyl at 7:55 PM on April 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


I mean, we have an article talking about an existential threat to women, a threat that more than one poster here recognized on a visceral level, and that was immediately dismissed and drowned out by lots of abstract talk about structural economic incentives. Like, no, no, you're just mistaken ladies, inequality is the REAL important issue. Where have we heard that before?

And you don't see why that would piss some of us off?

We haven't gotten to talk about what to do about any of it, because so many people rushed into the thread to implicitly or explicitly invalidate the very thing that is so terrifying that we need to do something about it. and now you're shaking your finger at the person who points that out because she was "unfair."
posted by schadenfrau at 6:05 AM on April 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


You're the one asking women making 10 dollars or less an hour to think about how hard it is for people who make 25,000 and thus agree that making childcare cheaper for low income people should be achieved by making EVEN LOWER income women earn even less.

If I were to guess, I don't think anyone complaining about the high cost of childcare wants childcare providers to make less, or to have less education - they want both cheaper and higher-quality childcare. Because children are important and caregiving is essential. Those goals are tough and expensive, when taken together, of course but they don't actually have to be at odds with each other when the real goal is much bigger, better subsidies and generally higher societal value placed on caregiving. Same goes for elder care - it's expensive, and that's a problem, but I don't know anyone (anyone with basic empathy anyways) that is ok with the idea of it getting worse rather than better.

Pitting childcare providers against those making $25k a year - or even those making $75k a year - is how people making billions and still pushing for increased tax breaks get away with it. It's a shitty situation.
posted by R a c h e l at 6:33 AM on April 3, 2017 [8 favorites]


Yeah I am failing to see the comment that said "let's make childcare cheaper by asking childcare workers to work for less." It's all been, "our society needs to use public monies to pay for good childcare with well-compensated workers."

You're getting pushback because in much of the nation a person making 25K per year is struggling mightily to keep a roof over their head and food in their body. In my city with that income I would spend 75% of my earnings just to get unsafe, overcrowded housing. It's less than half of the national median income. Many people earning that little qualify for SNAP benefits.

People making 25K per year are not *anyone's* class enemy, at least in the US. Holy crap, if we get to the point where anyone who isn't literally starving goes up against the wall what do we even have a country for.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:57 AM on April 3, 2017 [6 favorites]


You're getting pushback because in much of the nation a person making 25K per year is struggling mightily to keep a roof over their head and food in their body. In my city with that income I would spend 75% of my earnings just to get unsafe, overcrowded housing.

I don't want to pile on here but just for context, $25K is the current minimum wage in SF, almost exactly. It will be below minimum wage in just a few years. Hell, I make twice that and I still qualify for many low-income housing lotteries here (!).

(The Swedish system also pays stay at home parents, FWIW. Compensating them is not mutually exclusive with subsidized child care.)
posted by en forme de poire at 11:29 AM on April 3, 2017 [5 favorites]


I mean, we have an article talking about an existential threat to women, a threat that more than one poster here recognized on a visceral level, and that was immediately dismissed and drowned out by lots of abstract talk about structural economic incentives. Like, no, no, you're just mistaken ladies, inequality is the REAL important issue. Where have we heard that before?

When I apologized for contributing to pulling the thread too much in that direction I meant it. But it's not something (most) people brought in trying to make a statement about what's the real issue - it's something that was also explicitly in the article, and also struck a nerve with people.

(it's also possible that the responses I'm defending are disjoint from the responses you're criticizing and I jumped the gun)
posted by atoxyl at 12:36 PM on April 3, 2017


25,000 is a lot of money to me. And to the people I work with in childcare.

So you're getting some pushback from me because people who pity those with 25,000 still seem to be incapable of having mercy for those earning EVEN LESS which is the status quo-- people NOW are okay with underpaid struggling women being the vehicle through which we free higher earning people from caring for their children.

And the people who are often complaining about how hard it is are often earning way more than 25,000- I chose 25,000 to point out that to me and my coworkers that's a lot of money and when we are taking care of our own kids on a fraction of what everyone else is and told that it's ok how much we're struggling because of poor higher earning people have it so hard...

it's dehumanizing of how hard we at the very bottom are dealing with it.
posted by xarnop at 1:17 PM on April 3, 2017


In response to a story about how teenage boys would rather live in a household in which they make all the major decisions and their wives stay home with children, we've seen the following. ...

- Clearly, teenage boys care about work-life balance.


The thing is, though, young millenial men -- and only some of the data are from high school seniors, the rest are from millenials 18-25 -- are not getting these ideas in a vacuum. I think it's important to ask where they're picking this stuff up. The article makes the case that it's partly a (misinformed) reaction against the struggles they've seen their parents go through:
But there is considerable evidence that the decline in support for “nontraditional” domestic arrangements stems from young people witnessing the difficulties experienced by parents in two-earner families. A recent study of 22 European and English-speaking countries found that American parents report the highest levels of unhappiness compared with non-parents, a difference the researchers found is “entirely explained” by the absence of policies supporting work-family balance.

No wonder some young people think that more traditional family arrangements might make life less stressful. Tellingly, support for gender equality has continued to rise among all age groups in Europe, where substantial public investments in affordable, high-quality child care and paid leave for fathers and mothers are the norm. (my emphasis)
Work-life balance isn't the entire story, obviously -- I said this before upthread but I think it's worth considering that as a society we could have European policies if "we" really wanted them, so it's hard to tease out chicken vs. egg when we're talking about policy vs. culture; clearly, their beliefs are influenced by misogyny or else they'd be coming to different conclusions about what the problems are and what the right solutions are -- but on the other hand I don't think it's a derail to talk about work-life balance and the policies that do or don't successfully create it.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:44 PM on April 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


people NOW are okay with underpaid struggling women being the vehicle through which we free higher earning people from caring for their children

I think this is perhaps broadly true, but probably not true specifically of the people in this thread who are saying that childcare is unaffordable for working women. It's possible that some people are underestimating how many caretaker jobs are done by people making minimum wage (or less than minimum wage, under the table) without auxiliary means of support, but I certainly don't think that is a situation that anyone is advocating.

It can be true that we need universal or affordable child care and that most child care workers are underpaid; I think those problems are even likely to have common underlying causes (misogyny, bad policy that concentrates wealth in a few hands, a general undervaluing of child care and anything coded as "women's work", etc.) and are likely to require solidarity between people who are "merely" struggling and people living in outright poverty.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:07 PM on April 3, 2017 [5 favorites]


(BTW I hope that didn't come off the wrong way, I can certainly understand why someone would be be frustrated by being in a yet more precarious situation that was being omitted from the conversation.)
posted by en forme de poire at 2:10 PM on April 3, 2017


Dissatisfaction with the possibilities of the present may be a factor that drives the appeal of a retreat into reactionary thinking. That's totally compatible with other theses of how we got here and sure as hell doesn't mean the reactionaries aren't real!

Also if you look at the article right now they add this:

After this article was posted, 2016 data from the General Social Survey became available, adding some nuance to this analysis. The latest numbers show a rebound in young men’s disagreement with the claim that male-breadwinner families are superior. The trend still confirms a rise in traditionalism among high school seniors and 18-to-25-year-olds, but the new data shows that this rise is no longer driven mainly by young men, as it was in the General Social Survey results from 1994 through 2014.

I'm not sure where to find the new results they're talking about here though?
posted by atoxyl at 2:16 PM on April 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Here is the raw data.
posted by quaking fajita at 2:34 PM on April 3, 2017


Oops, direct linking doesn't work. And the data you were asking for isn't there anyway. Sorry.
posted by quaking fajita at 2:49 PM on April 3, 2017


Apologies for he spam. I didn't realize that you need to acquire the previous-to-2016 data and the 2016 data in different files. But, I got it! (RIP my productivity on actual work today)

Here's what I get for the percentage of respondents who answered "disagree" or "strongly disagree" to the “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” statement. The red and blue lines are for females and males older than 25, and the green and purple lines are for females and males younger than 25.

I don't know what the NYT means by "The trend still confirms a rise in traditionalism among high school seniors and 18-to-25-year-olds" unless they are talking about a different statistic.

Overall, though, the numbers for young people (I'm a millennial and I'm definitely over 25) are so low as to be not statistically significant, which is why the 2016 data show such a huge jump--it's just noise.
posted by quaking fajita at 4:17 PM on April 3, 2017 [7 favorites]


Thanks for that quaking fajita. My impression is that this is kinda click bait. Note that--as atoxyl points out--the article was updated to indicate the trend may not be as pronounced as indicated, and that overall this is a bunch of weak synthesis of not-particularly rigorous polling combined with misrepresentation of what more rigorous polling actually indicates.

Like that four-year old Pew Article doesn't actually say what this piece says it does, and paints a much more complex picture.

Anybody have a sense on how legit Council on Contemporary Families is?
posted by aspersioncast at 5:12 PM on April 3, 2017


Thanks quaking fajita! So if "disagrees" are good, it looks like the results for under-25 do suggest an overall decrease for men compared to minimal change for women, though the year-to-year differences are kind of a mess. Whereas the results for over-25 show a modest increase for men and women.
posted by atoxyl at 5:20 PM on April 3, 2017


though the year-to-year differences are kind of a mess

Indeed. The problem is that the number of under-25s of each gender is very small (<100 people went into each datapoint, for the under-25 dataset), which is why there is so much variation year-to-year. The "overall decrease" may not even be statistically significant. (I have not personally looked at the stats but other people have.)

Here's what happens if you expand the data to look at actual millennials (ie, born between 1982 and 2004) instead of just under-25s and go back as far as possible (which for millennials is not very far). Now it looks like it's millennial women who are trending downward. Take that, narrative!

Ok I will stop beating this particular horse.
posted by quaking fajita at 6:03 PM on April 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


And the people who are often complaining about how hard it is are often earning way more than 25,000- I chose 25,000 to point out that to me and my coworkers that's a lot of money and when we are taking care of our own kids on a fraction of what everyone else is and told that it's ok how much we're struggling because of poor higher earning people have it so hard..

Again, I'm pretty sure you're reading some alternate-universe metafilter thread but your comments are being sent through a spacetime rift somehow, because that isn't happening anywhere on this thread. Everyone on this thread wants you and your coworkers to earn much, much, much more than 25K per year to do what you do. Everyone on this thread wants you to be able to support your kids whether you are staying at home or working, and for your kids to have access to high-quality affordable day care if you choose the latter option.

I understand that when we are talking about the existing system, it seems like "more childcare for working parents" means "more underpaid childcare workers". But nobody here is actually advocating for the continuation of the existing system, because it's balls.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:10 AM on April 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


Then I see the issue, people here might be thinking I am accusing mefites of something when I was just talking about general experiences I've had, nothing people at metafilter have done.

I was pointing out that the feminism I first came into contact with (nothing to do with metafilter) was very corporate feminism/capitalist feminism and the organizations I tried begging for help some 15 years ago when I and many other women who lost children to adoption exploitation were begging feminists to recognize reproductive exploitation seemed to ignore focusing on the needs of poor mothers or of mothers who need protections in place to stay home with their children in favor of pushing for more day care.

There have been improvements in intersectional feminism, focusing on needs of diverse women some of whom don't want more incentives to be in the workplace but supports to have time with their infants and toddlers.

I was pointing out that for a person who doesn't know much about feminism but what is loudest and most prominent in media might not understand that there are forms of feminism pushing for women to have more time with their children if they desire, part time work options, and things like this.

And this is a survey of the very young. My comments were meant to talk only about why young women might not think feminism is for them if they want to be stay at home parents- not an excuse of why men would be misogynists. I think people read totally different things into my words than anything I said.
posted by xarnop at 1:01 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


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