[Arete3141]

1. Many women want the option to stay home and raise their own children, at least for a few years. If a woman marries an otherwise-wonderful man who earns half her salary, she will not be able to easily stay home with her own child while maintaining their former standard of living. So there are some logistical concerns here that just aren't there for men. Perhaps in a country with a lot of paid maternity leave, these issues would not be as pronounced.

2. I have trouble with the blanket statement that women "want established males" "biologically and evolutionarily speaking." We live in a society. Peoples' behavior in a society is not some mystery that can only be deciphered by looking at chimpanzees. Our society has some very messed up rules about who gets to have the most power. People respond to and strategize around their current reality. If that reality were to change -- like, if we had free childcare or 4 years paid maternity leave, or some other radical shift -- many of these calculations would "magically" fall away.

[taejo]

> Many women want the option to stay home and raise their own children, at least for a few years. > So there are some logistical concerns here that just aren't there for men.

It's true that more women want this than men, certainly in the U.S., but you can't say the concerns "just aren't there for men" -- already in this thread there are men saying they want to be stay-at-home dads.