Childcare is bloody expensive!

tooldle

Comms69, i don’t know how to quote, but i can say that things have not changed in my experience. I’ve worked in male dominated work places ever since.

Comms69

tooldle wrote: »

Comms69, i don’t know how to quote, but i can say that things have not changed in my experience. I’ve worked in male dominated work places ever since.

Hiya, that’s not what I meant. Engineering is male dominated- though I don’t nevessarily see that as a negative- as long as colleagues are qualified I don’t really care what gender they are.

I meant though that career services are different.

tooldle

Comms69 wrote: »

I’m sorry but it says exactly that, that different portions of the brain activate when men and women experience compassion.

It goes on to say how compassion is expressed can be different.

Ah, done it. I don’t think things have changed at alł over the past thirty years. I have worked in male dominated workplace for my whole career. I have seen women asked about their plans to have kids, and have known these matters to influence the outcomes of interviews. People are just cleverer at hiding things these days.
I could give you a long lists of the happenings that i have either witnessed or experienced.

VJsmum

Until the industrial revolution, men and women worked in or around the home, together. The introduction of work away from the home, necessarily meant that 'men's work' took them away from the home as the women (due to lack of contraception) were pretty well forced to stay at home with the kids. This is not true everywhere - cotton mills of Lancashire for example were staffed largely by women.

Women were not allowed to study medicine, law etc (the ancient professions) as men coerced to prevent them. Read up on Elizabeth garret Anderson, and what happened after she became registered as a doctor. Fascinating stuff. Nursing was seen as a gentile occupation and one suitable for women - and a route that allowed them to practice medical stuff without imposing on the brotherhood of being a doctor. Occupations / professions such as architecture and surveying, for example, similarly conspired to keep women out.

Women are supposedly the weaker sex, yet are expected to carry children and shopping, and nurses were expected to lift heavy patients. There are bigger, stronger women and smaller weaker men.

Not all women choose to have children, not all women who do choose are able and not all women who choose and are able want to be the primary caregiver and yet many (usually male) employers assume that all young women will have children and so they resist employing them...

Hegemony is still alive and well, I am afraid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_masculinity (And I know Wikipedia isn't exactly an academic source, but it's a good starting point.

tooldle

Comms69 wrote: »

Hiya, that’s not what I meant. Engineering is male dominated- though I don’t nevessarily see that as a negative- as long as colleagues are qualified I don’t really care what gender they are.

I meant though that career services are different.

Well, if careers services are different, how do we explain the absence of women in stem subjects. The push towards ‘caring’ starts very young and the battle is often lost by the t8ne kids start primary school.

ViolaLass

Comms69 wrote: »

Is there something fundamentally wrong with gender dominated careers? Will having more women computing students be a better outcome?

Yes, it's a bad thing. We want the best people for each job. To find them, we need to be able to consider 100% of the population.

Also, think about fairness. Why should a women have to push harder to get into computing than a man does? Why should a man have to push harder to become a nursery worker than a woman does? Why would you WANT to keep the status quo?

Savvy_Sue

Comms69 wrote: »

I suspect so, but I doubt that men deliberately missed out on well paid jobs to avoid marriage

I believe lumberjacking was quite well paid. :-)

fred246

I started my current job at the same time as another colleague. My wife gave up work on the birth of our first child and has never worked since. My colleague and his wife both work at our place of work. He nearly bought my house but he thought the mortgage was too big (it wasn't) so he bought a smaller place. I just did my job while my wife looked after the children. No stress. They were always so stressed. Late getting to work. Having to leave on time. Constantly trying to work out who was picking the children up. I went to their house one evening. She had worked all day and had a bag of microwave meals. She was shouting at the kids. I used to get home and my wife and children would be making pizzas with smiley faces. They sent all their children to private school which has been a massive drain on their money with no obvious gain. The private school seems to churn out incredibly materialistic kids who are a nightmare. Our kids have done much better at A levels and have gone on to better university courses. I just found it interesting to compare the two families. We seem to have had a much easier life and don't seem to have lost out at all. My wife always wanted to be at home with the kids though and loved spending time with them talking about every subject under the sun. For me that was key.

sulphate

fred246 wrote: »

I started my current job at the same time as another colleague. My wife gave up work on the birth of our first child and has never worked since. My colleague and his wife both work at our place of work. He nearly bought my house but he thought the mortgage was too big (it wasn't) so he bought a smaller place. I just did my job while my wife looked after the children. No stress. They were always so stressed. Late getting to work. Having to leave on time. Constantly trying to work out who was picking the children up. I went to their house one evening. She had worked all day and had a bag of microwave meals. She was shouting at the kids. I used to get home and my wife and children would be making pizzas with smiley faces. They sent all their children to private school which has been a massive drain on their money with no obvious gain. The private school seems to churn out incredibly materialistic kids who are a nightmare. Our kids have done much better at A levels and have gone on to better university courses. I just found it interesting to compare the two families. We seem to have had a much easier life and don't seem to have lost out at all. My wife always wanted to be at home with the kids though and loved spending time with them talking about every subject under the sun. For me that was key.

Well, lucky you. :wall:

fred246

sulphate wrote: »

Well, lucky you. :wall:

I am indeed lucky. Thank you.