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Oh, the irony! I know talking about a lack of context is quite popular currently, and it is occasionally appropriate. If, say, a norwegian guy is dunking on native american casinos and how they totally could have other sources of income, and lists a bunch of options while knowing nothing, it's a rather reasonable charge.
But critically examine my post and your post, and who is lacking context here: The person talking about his own wife, friends & acquaintances? Or the person offering a bunch of possibilities while knowing nothing about us? If anything, you may say that I have an overabundance of context, that I'm steeped so deep in it that I can't see the greater picture. I don't think so, but it would make vastly more sense.
So, to cure you of your fatal lack of context: When my wife got pregnant (which was planned), we both were PhD Students in our first (me) and second (her) year. We both agreed to share obligations perfectly 50/50 and did in fact do so. She was 100% convinced that she would get tired of the little one rather fast and would be thrilled to get back to work. We both finished our PhD's, and we are both Postdocs now, at the same university (in different fields though), earning exactly the same per hour. But she realised that she simply cares much, much less about her work now. Finishing the PhD was an obligation she pushed through. We regularly have the situation that I'm technically obligated to take our daughter from daycare for the day, but she simply WANTS to do it and will hassle me until I agree. Or that I do it, and then she comes home 5 minutes later to spend more time with us. In light of the realisation that her priorities and mine are quite different after all, we agreed that I work full-time and she works ~80%, and that for the next child, she will stay home much more than me. In fact, she has gotten quite anti-feminist recently since she feels betrayed and tricked; All her life, she was told how amazing a career is, how women are held back by children, by wrong-headed social expectation and by unwilling husbands, and how having children should be postponed as far as possible (and if you don't have any, it's fine as well). But now her (and mine) view is the inversion: Women are manipulated into careers they don't really enjoy and talked into having less children later, to keep them in the workforce for longer (similar to the former claims, we don't think this is a conscious conspiracy, merely the automatic and implicit market forces of the modern world at work).
And this isn't just my wife, this is the majority of mothers I know. My wife's current (female) professor has a baby, and the plan originally was for her to stay home only 3 months and then her husband takes over (he has a rather flexible job as a programmer), since there was a large project that she was heading. It's now a year or so, and the project she was heading is now de-facto led by my wife. The professor is working waaaay less and when at work is regularly talking about her baby, how she wants to get back and how unimportant work feels to her now.
Another acquainted couple is a well-earning high-performance physician at a clinic and her husband, a programmer (you may see a pattern here; Yes we have A LOT of programmers, often in home office). They also split up obligations 50/50 when the child was very small, I know because I regularly met him alone with the child in the park or at the playground. But now that the child can go to daycare and it isn't necessary anymore, do you want to take a guess who is pulling back now? By your theory, it should be the husband; His job is less demanding and can easier incorporate a child, he doesn't really earn much more and they generally earn enough that they can afford it either way and he can't weaponise his incompetence since, just like me, he has regularly cared for his child on his own. Also, daycare is both comprehensive - as a shift-working clinician, she would have access to a round-the-clock daycare - as well as ridiculously cheap here, so neither really needs to pull back at all if they don't want to. But no, she decided that she doesn't want to sent him to daycare full-time yet and that she doesn't want to continue her work because family is now more important, so she switched to a part-time government (pre-school checkups etc.) job. He is working significantly more than her nowadays and you usually see her alone with the child.
We obviously also know traditional couples where the man does earn significantly more anyway, but ironically that makes them less conflicted than us.
Yes I know, if you're just doing some context-free pondering you can make up a an arbitrary number of possible explanations. But once you know a bit more, you'll see that they don't hold up.
Btw, don't put words in my mouth; I don't think childcare is a lesser type of work, in fact I think it's under-appreciated compared to its importance (as are having children and families in general).
That is fair; atomization and increased government surveillance (or the perception of it) means that the things that used to keep abusive assholes in check in ages past aren't as strong anymore. There's a greater chance you wind up in prison if you and your friends instruct your sister's husband on why it is not a good idea to be an abusive asshole. There are weaker family and community networks for applying pressure to people defecting from local optimums. So in order to not be vulnerable to certain kinds of exploitation, women need to work and have careers. Taking a couple decades off of work to raise children is admirable, but makes women vulnerable: I knew a woman that had a Master's degree, but could only find minimum-wage unskilled work after twenty years of homemaking. That led her to stay with her rather insensitive but mostly good breadwinner husband instead of divorcing her. Perhaps you can bite the bullet and argue that women need to be in relationships they do not want to be in because of economic and societal pressure in order to continue the species, but that is a rather hard bullet to bite and I sincerely hope that this is not true.
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Sure, I don't disagree with what you said. I even think your anecdotes are actually representative of a trend.
If I read it correctly, you interpreted my text as an speculation about the specific examples you have from your personal surroundings, which it was not. I was questioning the general scenario. So I will not comment on them, as they neither prove nor disprove my claim that, in general, the division of childcare work is strongly (not exclusively) affected by external factors other than taste.
I did not put words in your mouth, in fact you seem to be the one doing it, because I never accused you of claiming that childcare is a lesser type of work. What I admonished you for doing, though, was providing anecdotal support to such claim first made by OP without also adding the criticism that I deem recommendable to include when in a debate with someone who lacks (or at least doesn't show) nuance like OP
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