To ask why women are expected to do everything?

[HolyGuacamole28]

I read a depressing article in the Economist today ‘How Motherhood affects careers’ and it stated how more and more women are not progressing as they should after having children. And SAHP is on the rise as more people opt out of a system doomed to failure. I just don’t understand how mothers are physically supposed to work full time in a career/senior role (I do), manage a household (I have a 4 year old, 2 year old and a husband, also FT) that includes washing, cleaning, cooking etc and do activities with the kids, keep fit and see friends. Is this what society expects? Who is supposed to do the household role if both adults work full time? And why do we need two incomes just to survive? (COL is so painful re mortgages, childcare, energy, food). Rant over, just can’t see how society has evolved, it’s just put more on our shoulders. I’m personally at breaking point.

The actual article isn't about men being useless.
It is about the conflict of interest between family and careers.
Or more explicitly motherhood vs careers.
It's only the Mumsnet misandrists who have hijacked the thread to claim that if men did more housework it would be somehow possible to manage.
40-100 per week hrs career.
Gym.
Pampering.
Playdates.
Spotless house 19 bedroomed home with cricket pitch-sized lawns.
Unlimited free time to socialise with friends.

It's just another endless thread for those with a very skewed opinion of how the world should work rather than how it works.
A logical fallacy.

Dam those pesky men and children.🤔🙄

You only hear the bad news on MN to be fair. Women who aren’t struggling are not going to post/start a thread to tell us this.

That said yes, a lot of women do try to do everything, mental load etc, when really they should just…stop. Of course there are some sexist people (of both genders) out there, who think women live to serve, who may throw a tantrum if you do, but just give them the old eye roll and carry on.

I'm early 50s & still got 2 children at home. Been an unsupported lone parent for years & ex pays no maintenance. I'd just like to be able to work PAYE & not locum but I can't afford to. I work approx 300 days per year, meaning I take around 20 weekends off a year. I'm absolutely on my knees & I feel so guilty because I'm looking forward to my kids finishing education & either leaving home or starting to earn & contribute financially to the household. I can't even enjoy my children! In my situation, a fit for purpose child maintenance system would make all the difference. I feel like the system is saying it's ok for mothers to work themselves to death as long as men's lives aren't affected. It's all misogyny & it stinks. Why should my ex get to enjoy 52 weekends, bank holidays & 6 weeks paid holiday a year when I'm the one doing all of the work? Why is he entitled to 'rest' but I'm not? It's disgusting.

The main point is that The article posted was based on the work of Claudia Goldin discussing the gender pay gap.
I do not believe anyone has read the article or listened to and assessed the conclusions of these various studies.

@Daylightsavingscrime I hear stuff like this IRL. It's embarrassing so people will post annoyamously on MN. The CMS threads are terrible paying ridiculous amounts like £25 a month!

Yes, and many working class women worked evening shifts outside the home when their husband was home, too.

Not to mention taking in ironing/sewing etc.

It's not that women have started working, it's that we are allowed to aim for a greater variety of jobs. Obviously a good thing. Men need to change, it's not womens jobs to make them. If we don't even enforce men paying CMS as a society what chance do individual women have? That'd be the single biggest message society could give to tell everyone that families are men's jobs too.

I'm actually riled up about CMS now and could see it gaining momentum and becoming an electoral issue! In some states of the USA they confiscate driving licences for non payment don't they? It should also 💯 be a stain on a man's credit record. It would change the tone of all of society, not just the lives of single mothers.

@napody yes in USA CMS is taken more seriously. I think if any woman is resorting to have to go down the CMS route it automatically should come off wages and they should have to submitted a yearly bank statement as part of the yearly review. Whenever there's an issue CMS do not hold any real powers it's the courts who end up dealing with it. What is going on they have been going since 1991 and then gain on 1993! Shocking.

Or more explicitly motherhood vs careers.

Fatherhood not being "vs careers" literally proves the point that men don't do enough at home.

@napody Im in the US. Child support is different in each state. I’m in Texas and it’s 30% in the first $150k of earnings. Sounds great until you have medical bills which are $12k so far this year.

Other states, like where I lived before, New Jersey, have it as split by income. My ex would petition and ask for less to be paid and probably win because he earns a lot. Really it’s not fair. He has 50% but doesn’t do 50%. I think the payment should reflect the effort.

The one thing they do here is implied earnings. It’s brilliant. My ex tried to say his income was $100k. I said you have an MBA and you turned down a job with a base of $350k. The judge stopped everything and denied his request.

You are so right about council housing and land rights. I wasn't saying feminists caused the current situation but that it started the ball rolling and nobody could have seen it coming.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia there's plenty of empty land around in UK. I see derlict buildings all over, flats that were OK and are now so run down they are just stood empty and abandoned. I don't really know of any council houses being built in my city where I live. I see lots of building and it is student accommodation or fancy flats.

Sadly most seem to care only about men in changing rooms nowadays - a legitimate issue but likely not the first concern if you're struggling to feed your kids etc. I feel like feminism has always been primarly white and middle class, with obvious exceptions. Seeing droves of them try and defend Amy Cooper, on here was a bit of a hmmm moment for me.

There is, and it costs its owners nothing to leave it derelict until a developer paying a high enough price comes along. This artificially elevates land prices, just as De Beers's long-running (until lab-grown diamonds came along) policy of not selling a diamond at all unless they can get full price for it keeps diamond prices high all over the world.

A land value tax, charged annually, would raise taxes for the public purse from derelict land and incentivise its owners to do something useful with it instead of just leaving it idle.

A land value tax, charged annually, would raise taxes for the public purse from derelict land and incentivise its owners to do something useful with it instead of just leaving it idle.

But it's their land. They should be able to do whatever they want with it.

I'm all for helping the needy but I'm not really onboard with this socialist idea that just because somebody is richer/more successful than you they should pay for you.

If I went out for a meal and my mates expected me to pay the bill just because I earnt more I'd be telling them where to go. Similarly, I'd be a shit CEO as I'm not paticularly organised but I'm not going to argue I should also get paid £150k just because it's unfair that some people are born with those skills.

Georgism 101 time.

It's only "their" land because they, or someone before them, stole it from the commons.

Go back far enough in history and you'll see that all land was unowned and used by everyone until people started putting a fence around bits of it and used a sword or a gun to keep other people out. In the USA, "far enough" is the last 400 years.

This isn't about whether governments should adopt tax-and-spend or not: you can have minimal land value tax and minimal public spending. It's about recognising that what we call a "land owner" is actually a tenant-in-chief from the Crown (or State in republics) and that ground rent on the land that a person is tenant-in-chief of is the fairest form of tax.

Before you say "but I'm a freeholder", that's what tenants-in-chief are called in the UK. If you had absolute title over your land, you'd have the oil, mineral, and treasure trove rights over it (you don't, the Crown keeps those) and you wouldn't need planning permission to build things.

Going over to purely LVT and abolishing all other forms of tax would mean that the people who have money because they inherited estates of land would pay lots of tax, whilst workers would keep 100% of what they work for. And land, unlike profits, can't be hidden in offshore tax havens.

This isn't relevant to a sub-conversation about how the cost of housing has forced women into work because one income no longer covers the mortgage, in a wider conversation about why women come home from work and do a second shift on the house and kids when men don't seem to.

I'm talking about how housing supply could be improved by taxing land, which would lower housing costs and allow women to stop or reduce work, which is relevant to the thread.

Inherited wealth is the least-deserved form of wealth. Heirs and heiresses aren't rich because they were successful in business and didn't work for what they have, they were literally born lucky.

Hmm, I don't know. I feel like all those words are just a fancy justification for saying "oo, you've got too much cake. We're giving some of yours to somebody else".

In real terms, if I work my arse off and manage to buy land or an additional property, I don't want to be told that I've got to share with others that didn't do the same. I'm fine with helping the genuinely unfortunate but there are also a not insignificant number of people that are just unambitious or want to take but not give. I know a fair few and don't really want to share with them to be perfectly honest.

These arguments are always ideologically optimistic but there are unfortunately a lot of feckless twats out there who I won't be rushing to bankroll if I ever become unimaginably rich.

Inherited wealth is the least-deserved form of wealth. Heirs and heiresses aren't rich because they were successful in business and didn't work for what they have, they were literally born lucky.

See, this is what I mean. It doesn't matter whether they 'deserve' it or not. It's theirs, not yours to debate on how to spend it. If we reach the stage of just deciding to take things from people we feel don't deserve them then where does it end? Can somebody with ten kids swap houses with you because they 'need' a nice detached house more than you do?

You "buy" land from someone who took it from everyone at swordpoint. Land ownership is a form of legalised theft.

I have not at any point talked about taking land from tenants-in-chief. I have talked about taxing land value.

How do you think that taxation ought to work? Income tax is stealing the wages of those who are working. If we accept that government spending is needed and hence taxation is needed, land value is the fairest form of tax.

It is very hard. DH and I both work FT and we have two young children - 3 and 1.5 years. We split housework, childcare and life admin evenly (he does hoovering, cooking, washing up, grass cutting, odd jobs and car/house-related admin, I do household cleaning, other gardening, 90% pet care and child-related admin), and each get about two hours a day leisure time after the kids go to bed before we pass out in bed. All hobbies and a lot of our socialising, we have to cram into that.

I would love a world where it was possible for a family of four to survive on one FT income. Then DH and I could each work PT and feel a lot less frazzled.

I do not recognise, however, that it has to be women, specifically, suffering from this. That's up to individual families.

Forgive me though for being sceptical about whether you'd stick to that conviction if you returned from holiday to find a bunch of squatters had taken up residence in your house.

With it not strictly speaking being your property who would you be to ask them to vacate?

I'd have the right to ask them to leave and, if they didn't, call the police to have them removed because the terms of my tenancy-in-chief from the Crown give me exclusive use of the land. Just as my sister's letting agreement with her landlord gives her exclusive use of the flat she rents.

Henry George acknowledges in Progress And Poverty that land ownership is both theft from the commons and at the same time necessary to allow land to be put to a useful purpose. A farmer cannot grow cabbages in a field if his neighbour's cattle can wander in to eat them, he must be able to put up a fence to keep others out. The local NHS trust cannot build a hospital without preventing others from using the land it stands on.

The fairest resolution to this dilemma is a tax on the value of the unimproved land. You take land from the nation's commons, you pay rent to the nation's people for its use. Simples.