Being part of the labor force doesn't stop one from being basically a housewife. A job isn't equal to a career. He's talking about educated women with real careers. You're talking about jobs, we're talking about careers. If you can find labor force statistics that break out low skilled jobs from careers requiring degrees, then you have something to add if that's still over 50%, I highly doubt it is.
And my point is largely, women's equality has a long way to go; it's really not the norm yet.
Ok, you went back and edited your comment to add more detail about what you meant. Yes, you can be a wife who's financially dependent on your husband but still hold a job. It could also happen in reverse, of course.
For the record, I'm not sure how common that actually is vs stay-at-home mom. If you have kids, it becomes glaringly obvious how expensive it is to put kids into daycare. For low-earning mothers with a better-earning husband, it can be really hard to justify working vs staying home to raise the kids. It costs more than minimum wage to put a single kid into daycare.
If you have some stats indicating that most women earn so little as to be financially dependent on their husbands, I'd like to see it.
You act like I'm attacking women, I'm not. Most married couples with kids are financially dependent on each other; single income families are no longer the norm either. I don't think it's a stretch to say that within most marriages, moms still dominate the child care side of the marriage and work when they can while dads still dominate the working full time side. And I've already stipulated that most married couples with kids are financially dependent on each other, so it's not just women. I don't have any data to show you, if you think I'm wrong so be it, I really don't care, but this is what I see all around me and the stats you posted I think basically back me up since it's barely over half counting all jobs and I'm only counting real careers that require education since we were discussing that, not just employment.
You seem to really want to make the point that more than half of women work; ok great, but it's a non-sequitur, we weren't talking about jobs, but educated women with careers and more to the point about how many men care about being with educated women with careers. The OP said who but religious and conservative men want an uneducated women, but religious and conservative men account for the majority of men so it's an odd thing to say.
I'm not saying you're attacking women. I don't think I said anything even remotely close to that. I'm responding to your claims about the prevalence of women dependent on their husbands for financial support.
Bluntly, I think you made a claim you realize is incorrect and you're trying to walk it back to something noncontroversial. The whole thread from imesh down was about women staying at home with the kids so their husbands could have high-earning careers. Arizhel commented that this was a dangerous arrangement and you stated that this was the current norm. After I disputed your claim, you walked it back to just being "financially dependent on their husbands". Now you've walked it back further to couples being mutually dependent.
From high-earning husbands with stay-at-homes wives to couples that can't make ends meet without two incomes. These are vastly different topics and if you were really intending to jump from one to the other, it seems odd to accuse me of dropping a non-sequitur for bringing in some data.
I also think your notions of womens' employment are antiquated. You seem to think that women don't have "real careers that require education" and they "work when they can", but women:
* have 43% of their population working full time (for comparison, 56% of men work full time)
* earn more degrees than men
* are 47% of the workforce
* have lower unemployment than men
* hold 51.5% of professional and management jobs (aka careers)
No, I'm not trying to walk anything back, I stand by what I said, and bluntly you seem to have gotten your feelings hurt and can't let it go even thought the thing you're going on about was tangential to the point I was making to him which was about how many men might be interested in such women. Guest what, if only 40% of people do something, that still qualifies as "normal", I know, it's shocking, but normal is a different word than "majority". Find a dictionary, I promise, it's true, something can be normal without it being what most people do. Women being dependent on their husbands for income is still quite normal. So please take your hurt feelings elsewhere and stop hijacking a threat that wasn't even about that.
I'll happily admit that the 51% number is slightly higher than I expected, hooray, you're made an irrelevant off topic point completely unrelated to why I responded to him in the first place. Do you feel better now? You can return to your safe space and look for the next post where there's one word you disagree with and high-jack another thread to rage on about something completely off topic to the thread.
My feelings are hurt? About what, and how would that even be relevant if it were true? I "high-jacked" the thread that I was part of before you even showed up? Come on. This is you desperately trying to criticize me personally because you cannot defend your own claims.
Your 40% stat is made up and you're trying to assert it as a fact and argue semantics instead. No. You don't get to descend into pedantry about the definition of "normal" when your underlying premise is based on imaginary data.
You're also making a false equivalency between what many men (supposedly) want and what actually happens. Even if 40% of men want stay-at-home wives, that doesn't mean stay-at-home wives (or financially dependent wives, or whatever your current slightly-changed claim is) are the norm. I bet far greater than 40% of men want to win the lottery and yet winning the lottery is decidedly not the norm.
I know, you're going to come in and say this is still not your point. I don't think you actually know what your point is. You've made claims ranging from most men wanting stay-at-home wives to "the majority of women" being "financially dependent on their husbands". You've stated that in "most marriages" wives don't have careers and just "work when they can" and you've claimed that "religious and conservative men account for the majority of men". My point is you have a bunch of preconceived ideas that are not based on fact and in many cases are provably wrong.
And my point is largely, women's equality has a long way to go; it's really not the norm yet.