Antisexism
This community is about Antisexism, a joint movement of men, women and nonbinary people against gender stereotypes and all sorts of gender-based discrimination.
Here you can share useful materials (articles, research, statistics, opinions...) on gender-based discrimination against men, women, and nonbinary people, and participate in common discussions and activities.
Rules:
1. No promotion of patriarchy (or matriarchy)
Systems based on dominance of one gender harm everyone, including, often times, people in the dominant group. They are intrinsically sexist and therefore strictly forbidden in this community.
2. Be civil and listen before you speak
The issues of gender equality often come as contentious. Remember - there are no enemies here! The purpose of this place is to discuss and find solutions together.
3. Respect personal experiences
All of us have different history and issues regarding gender stereotypes. Every experience is valid! Don't try to belittle it.
4. Everyone is welcome!
Antisexism is about everyone: men, women and nonbinary, cis- and trans-people. Every group and every person individually have unique experiences that we need to address.
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It is related to sexism. For the purpose of testing whether it's just mothers trying to save money on babysitters, the linked research breaks parents down into three groups by their employment: unemployed, part-time and full-time workers. In all three, men spend less time with children than women (although in case both parents work full-time, this difference is much smaller).
Accessibility of child care, on its hand, is absolutely an economical issue.
Is it the position of this community, or your position, that any difference based on sex is sexism and sexism is bad? In this case, that the childcare workload should be 50/50, and any other distribution is wrong? Could 60/40 be acceptable (in either direction) if that maximized some other value, say, life satisfaction, or child development, or even some productivity metric?
The community doesn't have a position, it consists of different people, mainly united by the idea of combating sexism.
A different distribution, in my opinion, isn't necessarily bad in and of itself, but may signal of systemic issues within a society - namely, women are expected to prioritize child care higher than men merely by the virtue of being women, and men are not held to a similar standard (which is sexist). This forces women into roles they may not want to play, and at the same time this may affect the child's development.
Men absolutely are held to a higher standard.
With reasonable exceptions (grooming, manipulation, etc), relationships are a choice. Simply do not partner with a man that does not respect women as an equal.
If the man is trash, leave them and do not start a family with them. It’s that simple.
Aside from grooming, manipulation etc. there are also such things as general trends and societal pressures.
As men are, on average, caring less of their children, women have harder time finding male partners that would do enough of it, and it gets normalized. As it does so, society starts to see women who want an equal partner in terms of child care as too picky and unrealistic, and indeed, it might be hard to find a partner that fits this criteria along with other ones any person has.
It's important to remember that finding a good partner is hard for everyone.
I appreciate the leeway to take a different approach here. I'm not generally impressed with studies where the issue is broken down into men do this thing X%, women do this thing Y%. And then everyone just fills in their own preferences as the preferences of their entire gender, and the shit flinging commences.
The key here is centering preferences as the target metric. For example, I found this slightly dated research from Pew
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-4-how-mothers-and-fathers-spend-their-time/
Which has a section titled, "How do parents feel about their time." To paraphrase, women are happier with the amount of childcare they do than men. Many men wish they were doing more childcare. But among the small number of parents who wish they did less childcare, there are over twice as many women.
I think getting those distributions to look more similar is a much better target, than trying to equalize the hour balance.
"May be it's due to preferences" is not really a counterargument to the correlation being caused by sexism. Human preferences are heavily influenced by societal pressures such as assumed gender roles which fall under the scope of "sexism".
Fair!
How do you know it’s not an effect of preference?