A major factor driving the gendered division of labour and household effort is technology. Tiny differences in comparative advantage such as in child rearing immediately after birth can lead to large differences in specialisation in the market work and in market-related human capital and home production related work and household human capital (Becker 1985, 1993).
These specialisations are reinforced by learning by doing where large differences in market and household human capital emerge despite tiny differences at the outset (Becker 1985, 1993). This gendered division of labour and household effort is hard to change because large payments must be made to influence choices about care giving by highly specialised people with large but different accumulations of market and household human capital.
From a luck egalitarian perspective, many of the differences in earnings and occupations flow accidents of birth in deciding gender and who parents might be. Social inequalities that flow from brute bad luck call for interventions to put them right, if they work.
Many laws already make up for brute bad luck such as job protections while on maternity leave, and government funded parental leave pay and child care subsidies. Employers can do little to redress these accidents of birth nor do they have sufficient resources to put them right. For this reason, for example, parental leave pay is usually taxpayer funded rather than employer funded.
When some Malaysian and Indonesian Muslim classmates were living in Japan, they just got used to the fact they had to shake people’s hands including men and women shaking each other’s hands. They realise that Westerners would find it unfriendly not to do so.
When I was holidaying in Malaysia, I did not go around trying to shake people’s hands because that is just not their way of interacting.
I never bowed to anyone in Japan either. Japanese accepted handshaking because they knew bowing was just not something that Westerners could live with given their liberated upbringings.
Malaysian holiday resorts are interesting because you can see women in bikinis standing next to women in those burkas that the apologists for Muslim social backwardness say liberate women even more.
Burkas were made of the finest materials. The Malaysia ladies did not wear something as conservative but they were highly colourful as well.
Women liberated from #ISIS take off their veils and burn them. Freedom rings louder than fascist oppression. pic.twitter.com/YUmzYy0OmT
I even saw a woman in a burqa holding her husband’s hand while queueing. I did take any photos of this because I thought that was rude. You must remember the manners mother taught you including not making other people feel awkward.
Doug Allen argues that marriage is an institution designed and evolved to regulate incentive problems that arise between a man and a woman over the life cycle of procreation.
The real problem with same-sex marriage is same-sex divorce according to Allen. Marriage includes a set of exit provisions in terms of the possible grounds for divorce, rules for splitting property, alimony and child support rules, and custody rules. Allen also argues that:
Many institutional rules within marriage are designed to restrict males from exploiting the specific investments women must make upfront in child bearing;
Since same-sex marriages are not based as often on procreation, these restrictions are likely to be objected to and challenged in courts and legislatures;
To the extent divorce laws are changed, they may hurt heterosexual marriages, and women in particular; and
Given that same-sex relationships are often made up of two financially independent individuals, there will be litigation and political pressures for even easier divorce laws since the problem of financial dependency will be reduced.
Alterations in divorce laws to deal with issues of same-sex divorce necessarily apply to heterosexuals, and these new laws may not be optimal for heterosexuals, making marriage a more fragile institution for them. The actual outcomes of no-fault divorce laws, as an example, could hardly have been more different than what was expected and intended. The most obvious outcome was large increases in divorce rates.
No fault divorce laws influenced the rate at which women entered the workforce, the amount of hours worked in a week, the incidence of spousal abuse, the feminisation of poverty, and the age at which people married. No-fault divorce influenced a series of other laws related to spousal and child support, child custody, joint parenting, and the definition of marital property.
Marriage may provide a poor match for the incentive problems that arise in the relationships of gay and lesbian couples. Doug Allen is also of the view that putting all three relationships under the same law could lead to a sub-optimal law for all three types of marriages.
Do you need to disclose your income or assets to an ex-wife?
Should your income be taken into account when assessing child maintenance?
Should child maintenance change when you and your husband have children of your own?
2nd wives clubs are natural allies for higher income gay divorcees wanting to pay less alimony. Nothing I have sent here is an argument against same-sex marriage willing as long as you are willing to live with the fact that it may have a few unintended consequences.
The first three bars in each cluster of bars are for men. in almost all countries mothers with dependent children spend less time commuting than childless women. This might suggest that working mothers have found workplaces closer to home than women without children. The gender gap in commuting where it is present in the country is larger than the gap between mothers and other women in their commuting time.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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