US women continue to spend more time caring for children, and there is no clear change of trend in the last decade
US women continue to spend more time caring for children, and there is no clear change of trend in the last decade
Women still spend more time caring for children compared to men, as evident from the US survey carried out between 2011 and 2021.
Interestingly, while levels of employment affected child care time for both men and women, for men the effect was less pronounced.
One other interesting finding is that the difference between men and women is minimal when both work full-time, suggesting a more equal distribution of duties due to lack of available time.
For context, Finland is the happiest country in the world:
Also, from the article… what happened in 2017:
I'm not saying that equal share of childcare responsibilities is necessary the single key to happiness in the country - but it is important, and if there are good reasons for such a distribution aside from tradition and outside of newborns, I'd like them to be found.
Also, it's important to figure out what you mean by happiness, because world rankings on "happiness" commonly include economic variables, life expectancy etc., which is great, but does not necessarily reflect the level of, well, happiness. Finland in particular is one of the countries with highest prevalence of depression in the world:
As per 2017 in the US - I wonder as well, but I guess that's some outlying data point.
Yea my intention was only to show that even in happier countries there can be natural differences in self assigned care giving duties. I wasn’t disagreeing with anything just trying to add to the conversation. Yea happiness is a strange metric I hear you, but the Nordic countries are generally high up in the list of “gender equality” or equity or what not.
Is this related to sexism or just economics and racism (in policing)? It seems like the main reason why mothers are opting to stay at home is because child care is too expensive compared to how much they could earn if they worked. That's an economic problem, not sexism.
Also, 90% of the single parent households being run by mothers in Washington, D.C. is a well-known symptom of racism in policing, arresting black men, throwing the book at them, and basically ruining their lives over crimes where whites are regularly given a slap on the wrist.
My layman's analysis is that the overwhelming lobbying power of big business childcare providers has resulted in regulatory capture within that industry. Making it exceptionally expensive and legally risky for small businesses to perform that function. Furthermore, the exceptionally low minimum wage and exploitation of workers in that industry has lead to worker shortages and increased costs, where almost all the money being paid into a childcare facility is being funneled to the top of the org chart instead of being used to reduce costs.
The mere fact that publicly-traded childcare providers exist is a strong indicator of the problem. Consolidation in that industry should never have been allowed and they all need to be broken up because it's the only way costs will come down.
Just another example of the wealth gap resulting in practical, real world problems that hurt society.
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?
How do you know it’s not an effect of preference?