R4 Womens Hour, young women preferring to stay at home?

When women who do work outside the home are still expected to do much more housework than their also-working husbands when "equality" just means "get a job plus keep doing what you were doing" is it any shock that some women would prefer the "old" arrangement?

I'm a feminist and see nothing wrong with women making such choices.

Neither do I. But I grow increasingly tired of this discussion never asking whether men want to make those choices. In the case of this piece on Woman's Hour the question is irrelevant since they seem to have forgotten to survey any male parents.

However, despite the headline the discussion on R4 focused much more on barriers to young people finding work, rather than a side question about the role of SAHP.

Maybe some young women don't want to be parted from their young children for several hours every day. Maybe they don't think a nursery is a good environment for young children to spend a large part of their day. Perhaps they don't want to pay another woman to look after their child when they'd rather be doing it themselves.

I'm a feminist and see nothing wrong with women making such choices.

It hugely frustrates me that women's hour confuses parenting issues with women's issues. That aside, doesn't it depend on how we define a young woman?

I got too annoyed by it and turned it over.

I've got nearly to the end and I'm flabbergasted to hear one of the speakers casually mention that the of the surveyed group 24% of the women were parents and 1% of the men were. This strikes me as a hugely flawed piece of research - we're making comparisons between parents and non-parents and calling them comparisons between women and men.

That said, since only 24% of the women were parents, the more relevant findings may be the anecdotal evidence of women being funnelled into a narrower range of career options, and ones where progression (and indeed flexible working) may be limited.

There was no discussion of the apparent finding that the women surveyed thought working mothers were irresponsible and both speakers seemed more interested in discussing how employment opportunities for young men and young women could be improved - good for them. I was expecting at least one of them to be of the opinion that women should want to stay at home but this didn't seem to be the point of the discussion.

Here is the episode - you can fast forward specifically to this article using 'Chapters' further down the page. Just listening to it now.