Why is it usually the woman who gives up work?

[Firedoll]

I'm on mat leave and have been asked 30+ times if I'll be going back to work and, when I say yes, if I'll be part time.

My DH has never once been asked about his working hours since our DS was born.

And if I say yes I am going back to work I get "oh, will your DS go to nursery/will you get a nanny?" The idea that my DH could look after DS for some of the time while I'm at work just doesn't even enters people's heads.

I don't blame people for asking because they're just making conversation. And it seems they are making a reasonable assumption as if one of the couple is going to give up work/reduce their hours, most of the time it will be the woman. In my experience at least.

But why is this? I see so often on here people saying that their OH couldn't go part time or is the higher earner. But all the latest reports suggest women in their twenties are now out earning men so that can't be true for the majority.

Is it just a cultural thing?

Ah ok Minesnot. In that case I totally agree with you - I would love it if DH had been able to go to a 4 day week like I did, and us to have shared domestic stuff equally. Sadly his employer would have laughed (and then quickly edged him out) if he'd asked for it.

Katharina and Stealth I agree. I think the reason is because men are trained from birth to want and expect to be the main breadwinner, to hang a lot of self worth on their job title and earnings and not to want or expect to play the main role in raising children, whereas women are trained from birth to be the opposite. This inevitably influences the career choices they make and how they feel about the importance of that career.

As I said in my previous post, I guess it could be down to "natural maternal instinct" (and the equivalent for men - what's that, "natural career instinct"? "natural provider instinct"? ) but we will never know what our "natural" instincts our while there is so much societal influence pushing boys and girls into thinking their roles are different.

^are not our. Gah.

Makes you wonder, how come so many women seem to be doing boring jobs that they hate that pay very little, while all the men are in well (or at least better) paid positions, where they don't mind doing full time?

Yep, I also find this really surprising, especially as my impression is that MN has a relatively high proportion of women who were older when they became mums.
I don't really recognise this dynamic, but maybe I am just in a London bubble where most families need two salaries to pay the mortgage!

I also reckon more women would enjoy/succeed in their careers if their DH did a fairer share of the domestic stuff, so the woman had time and energy to really focus on her job. After a few years of juggling 90% of the domestic stuff PLUS a career it's easy to think "fuck this, I'm not enjoying this job as I'm constantly juggling it with home stuff, why don't I just give up and stay at home". Whereas if DHs picked up 50% of the domestic stuff from the start, the woman's career would be more fun and more manageable.

Or is that just me projecting...

It was a practical decision for us.

I earned a fair bit more than DH. BUT my job was tied to London - where we didn't want to be. His was flexible on its location. My employers were also offering very generous voluntary redundancy packages.

I didn't have an overwhelming desire to SAH, but DS1 has ASD and finding suitable childcare was impossible.

minipie - I think that's you projecting. More people dividing the home work 50/50 is just more people thinking thinking that both high flying career and home life are too much to juggle. Besides, couples often have very different views on what needs juggling and what is irrelevant or bordering on obsessional. Take differing attitudes to present giving, tidying away of toys, decorating, diy, bedsheet changing, vacuuming, homework supervision, dusting, toilet cleaning, meal preparation etc... Some women set tiresomely high/neurotic standards for some things and some men dangerously low standards (and less often vice versa). Very few couples genuinely see eye to eye on what is truly important in the domestic sphere, making 50/50 sharing quite difficult! I wouldn't want to share housework 50/50 with someone who thinks it is reasonable to change their bedsheets several times a week, let alone the average male!... If Mumsnet is anything to go by, quite a few women go totally Ott on the domestic cleaning front and I have every sympathy with any man not wanting to do that 50/50.

If you're not maternal and desperate are to keep plugging away working then maybe don't have children?

What kind of shit is that? Paul and Mary are siblings. Both are very smart, talented and capable. Paul is working on a new drug for a particular cancer therapy. Mary is working in genetics where she is on the verge of a breakthrough with regard to stem cells. Both are really keen to push through the hurdles and get this research off the ground. Both want to be parents as well. Going by this logic above - Paul can go ahead and find a body with a uterus become a dad, but Mary should just "plug away working"??!?!?

I don't think minipie is projecting in the least, and her point about more women being able to devote themselves to their careers if they're not in swingeingly unequal relationships in terms of childcare and domestic work seems to me plain common sense.

But then I have never in my generation of human beings, met in RL with the dynamic that crops us so depressingly often on Mn, where harried women take on an overwhelming majority of the domestic labour and appear not to find this odd or unequal, or where women's careers appear to be suddenly strangely 'optional' after they have a child, whereas those of their male partners' were unaffected. DH and I have demanding FT jobs, no local family, and are occasionally unavoidably out of the country at the same time, which means we need to import a grandparent from our home country for a few days of childcare - but figuring it out is both our problem, and just as work is a non-negotiable thing for both of us, keeping the house from descending into a filth-pit and keeping on top of phonics and school projects is also a joint thing. That's what I see among our friends, and three couples we know have had the male partner as SAHP for lengthy periods, in one case for their son's entire childhood. I see that around me in our various circles far more often than what on Mn seems to be regarded as the norm.

There you go, Mondegreens - all you want is to stop the house becoming a filth pit. I'm sure there are plenty of men who would stretch that far.

The town Where i work i see a lot of younger dads hurrying their kids around in the mornings and at work dads often have to leave early coupke of times of week to do the pick ups so perhaps things are slowky changing

Ah the good old 'why have them' chestnut.

My mother is one of those non-maternal women. She has a successful career and when they recently made a TV program about her, she said that she has 3 children, 2 daughters and [the project]. We had a happy childhood, we are functioning members of the society and have happy families of our own.

But according to some people we should not have been born, as mum did not feel the maternal urge to spend her days doing fingerpainting with us?

And of course nobody has ever questioned if my dad should have had children for that reason.

What does being maternal mean, anyway? Why lower it to fingerpainting? Not everyone is capable of doing a full time, stressful job and then going home and being even tempered with their children and able to give them full attention and energy in the time they are with them. Some people can, some people can't. If you can't, then something has to give. It is fairly unmaternal to think that whilst you and/or your dh could afford to cut back on paid work, you won't, because your careers are more important than giving needed time and attention to your children. If your children are apparently happy and secure, however, and the time you have with them is positive, loving and constructive, then that is not unmaternal, is it, just because you don't like fingerpainting? You are either responsive to your children's needs or you aren't. You either make them feel loved and secure or you don't. Some children are less needy than others, some can thrive with two full time working parents, some do less well. Good parents respond to the varying needs of their children. Sometimes children's needs get in the way of careers.

My father was very maternal...

According to several posters on this thread, maternal = to get all necessary satisfaction from spending all your time with your children. Finger painting was specifically mentioned in the same post as maternal instinct a few pages earlier.

So if that's the definition, I'm not maternal and neither was my mum. If maternal is making sure my children are safe and loved then that's of course a different matter, and at least in some cases it's possible to be maternal and have a career.

The other old MN (and societal) trope is that of the "career woman" who slavishly prioritises her job over the needs of her children, with the SAHM at the other end of the spectrum and nothing in between. It is possible to have a balance. I love my two DC more than anything in the world, they light up my life, but I also like my job and the sense of self it gives me, not to mention the financial security.
However this balance is dependant on having a partner who is willing to pull his weight. minipie is right, if the woman is still doing the majority of the 'wife work' and emotional labour in the home it will be very difficult which is why I think a lot of women find it impossible.

I think the problem with asking women (and it's really only women) why they had children if they wanted to go out to work is that in many societies, when women aren't given the opportunity to do both, too many choose work over children. If you look at very patriarchal societies like Japan and Poland for example, they are faced with a demographic time bomb because women don't want to risk their independence, job satisfaction and enjoyment they get from their job to give all that up to have babies, so they don't do it.Whereas when there is a possibility that women can do both, they are more likely to have children, and some may decide they want to stay at home after the baby is born, or some like me, decide that actually, they prefer the balance. I come from a culture where women are pressurised to have children as their sole purpose. My career isn't really valued by my mother over my abilitiy to give birth, so I would have had children in any case probably. What I would have been would be resentful, depressed, tied to doing housework that I hate and am terrible at and a terrible mother if I did not have my career as well.

A lot of women also do not want to delegate childcare to someone else, because that makes them feel uncomfortable. If they don't really know what has been done to or with their children all day, they may feel they have less of an understanding of their children's needs and moods and won't even know if they are letting them down or not. Going against what you feel to be right for you is difficult.

I think 'maternal' in the way people generally use it is a bit of a sliding scale and can mean lots of different things, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist as a concept. At one end of the scale there are women who have no desire to have children at all and don't have any or have them unintentionally and do not enjoy being a mother at all. At the other end there are women who were always desperate to have children and, once they do, they see motherhood as being almost their sole purpose in life. Most women are somewhere in between. What I find fascinating is the extent to which those feelings are in-built or learnt.

My father was very maternal...

Why are we continuing to describe a set of feelings/priorities as "maternal"? Why are these feelings/priorities described with a word deriving from mother - so much so that describing a parent with these qualities, even if he is a dad, has to use this word? because the moment we ascribe all of this to the act of being a mother we have tilted the balance by making home and children the realm and primary responsibility of the woman.

This is a good article about how parental leave policy changed things in Sweden. Once it made sense financially for the family that dad took some of the leave, they started taking it

www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html

I agree it's a generation thing.

I have friends who both work at 80% or do one day from home each on different days and the baby is with granny another day and they only need a little bit of nursery time.

I think my generation are more comfortable breaking out of traditional gender rolesb and asking for flexible working without too much concern of the impact on careers.

But each generation pushes things forward in various ways, I remember reading an article by a woman about her dad and how he was a pioneer at the time -- because he pushed the pram in public! At the time it was very unusual apparently and very much seen as women's work.

re impact to career of working 4 days a week or other cut backs like no overtime, not travelling: that does vary by sector, seniority, particular company culture among other things. I choose not to travel week in, week out as many colleagues do and I do not get plum jobs on (IT) projects accordingly because I'm not client-facing and can't get onsite much. That's fine to me, but saying there is no impact to career of working 80% etc is not quite true.

Well, dh really struggled with breastfeeding. I told him he was making too much fuss about doing it and if he put his mind to it then he could...

That's where he went wrong, Witchend - he needed to put his nipple to it, not his mind.

it's possible to breastfeed and work.

It's not always possible to breastfeed and work.