Do you believe that biological differences exist between men and women? If so, do you believe that there is any possibility that innate biological differences between men and women could possibly cause women to - on average - be better suited as the primary child-rearing parent?
Looking around me, I would say the split between male and female for better suited to primary child rearing is 50/50 (this is looking at temperament only). If I only looked in my extended family, that would tilt in favor of the men. However, I would say the training and practice on how to be the primary child rearing parent definitely tilts in favor of the females. That's not a biological difference, that is a society difference.
+1
Biological differences definitely exist between men and women.
They include things like: genital morphology, physical secondary sex characteristics, and hormone levels. This may cause qualitative differences in traits like strength or height, at least when outliers are excluded from both groups.
I am less convinced that "nurturing" is a sex-linked biological trait. On a macro level, little girls are given baby dolls and play kitchens; little boys are given science kits and engineering toys (legos, Kinect, etc). There is a fairly recent trend away from this, but it is still what's considered normal. It's what's marketed to parents and children, from a very very young age.
Your wife, as an individual, is more suited to be a SAHP than you are, as an individual. That doesn't mean that all women or all men share your characteristics, and it doesn't mean that either of you came by those characteristics in a biological or societal manner.
The following is a general statement with extreme versions of societal expectations and I understand that a majority of people aren't necessarily raising their kids in this sort of black and white manner, but it has been the norm for a very long time:
Women are taught, from an incredibly young age,
how to be mothers. They're taught to care about the feelings of others (often over their own), to be patient, not be too demanding or assertive ("bossy") or intellectual, not to question authority. Men aren't taught these things -- they're taught that real men don't cry, or talk about their feelings (or even think about them, in some cases), that they have to provide for their families, be tough, not show fear or worry or pain. Is it any wonder that men seem to gravitate towards rational/logical type fields, while women seem to gravitate towards fields requiring a higher emotional intelligence?
-----Anecdote again:
In my personal case, I distinctly remember my mother throwing away Barbies I was given, and making my little sister give a hand-me-down Gameboy back to the friend who had given it to her. They were pretty progressive parents back in the day (lol I'm 23, but still, early 90's). My father, a very mechanically inclined man, was blessed with two daughters and no sons. I spent a lot of my childhood in machine shops running lathes, climbing around on drill rigs and helping to rebuild complex hydraulic systems, helping him work on cars, etc etc. The rest of it was spent in a horse barn or with my nose in a book. My parents like to joke that, when I was born, and my dad saw the nurse with a pink blanket wrapped baby, his reaction was "Nope, I ordered the other kind."
I didn't give two shits about
anything feminine (refused to wear skirts or dresses, played with toy horses instead of dolls, never cared about getting dirty, etc .) until well into middle school or even high school. I actually distinctly remember one of my "friends" telling me in freshman year of HS that I needed to start plucking my eyebrows. I literally had no idea what she was talking about and she didn't really explain it to me, except for to say something about how they were pretty hairy. So mean! I went home and tried to shave them to make them smaller, and ended up shaving off half of one...my mom had to pencil it on every morning for months. After that, I started giving a shit about femininity and acting like a proper girl. I started caring about how I looked and how I made others feel (before that I was always that super smart bossy kid that couldn't understand why everyone else couldn't see the "obvious" answer). I stopped raising my hand for every single question the teacher asked me, and I started spending more time on learning how to do makeup and less time on reading for fun.
Despite
loving high school biology, I never considered it as a career, because I was positive that I couldn't be a biology teacher (see above about obvious answers, lol). I didn't want to be a doctor, and it literally never occurred to me that I could be a scientist. Maybe that's a personal failure on my part, or maybe it's got something to do with the fact that I was trying really hard to fit into society's definition of a proper girl, which I didn't think included things like lots of studying or putting your career above family and relationships.
I struggled with that for a long time and bounced around to a lot of schools and majors before a psychology class with a unit on brain anatomy reminded me how much I loved biology. Now I'm at a top 25 R1 university finishing up my BS in Molecular Bio, and I
still struggle with the decision to put career above family, and to put my needs above the needs of others. The lab I really really really really want to do my PhD in is at Stanford, and I was wavering on even applying because I know what COL is like around Palo Alto -- with DH only bringing in VA disability, and two big dogs that require a sizable yard, it didn't seem feasible to actually move out there. DH had to sit me down and tell me he was fine with living 2+ hours outside the city and me commuting on a weekly basis between there and grad student housing before I would even make it an option. Maybe you can view that as an entirely individual personality flaw, but I know what I was like before I realized what society expected of me, and I wasn't concerned with those kinds of things.
I have always been the kind of person who is miserable without a busy schedule involving something intellectually challenging me. Even when I wasn't sure what I wanted to pursue as a career, I never considered not having a career. I could never be a SAHM, because it absolutely does not suit my personality. I am a total bitch if I spend more than a day or two in a row relaxing -- this is not to say that SAHP'ing isn't a challenging, busy, non-relaxing venture; just providing evidence of the basis of my decision on my personal suitability for it.
I don't see anything in my female peers that indicates they are more innately suited for parenting than our male peers. I do, however, see men dominating classroom discussions by interrupting women, ignoring women and then repeating the valid points the women just made, interrupting the end of a professor's question to answer before anyone else can (manners--which women are taught to place much more emphasis on). I see the same men consistently getting erroneous results in labs, and then falsifying their data by copying off their female peers in lieu of redoing the experiment (classroom labs, so not really a big deal ethically, unless you believe it indicates they would do the same in a research environment). I see the women who barely participate in class discussions getting much higher scores on exams than their male peers. And yet, the men who are most vocal are the ones who a professor remembers and likes enough to give lab research opportunities and write a letter of recommendation for (basically the most important qualification for grad/professional school). All because little girls are taught not to be bossy and raise their hands before speaking and have manners.
There's several studies where faculty in charge of research labs (and therefore undergrad research opportunities/grad admissions/post-doc hirings) are sent several CV's with the same exact information, except for the name. The CV with the white male name is universally better received, by every race/gender of PI. When asked why they chose to hire that person over all others, they say things like "seems more competent." If that's not evidence of a societal bias, I'm not sure what is.
I was about to apologize for the incredible length of this reply, but then I realized that I'm not actually sorry for inconveniencing anyone who took the time to read it, because this is an issue that I feel very strongly about, and I would hope that what I've said here could have an impact on at least one person's view of the issue.
PS -- to be clear, I do not believe these societal pressures are only in the direction of men->women. Everyone is under pressure to conform (that's actually the only reason civilization functions at all, if you consider that not murdering/raping/stealing is conforming to societal pressure to not do those things). Men definitely face stronger pressures in some respects, and both genders place pressure on both genders. I'm not trying to frame this as a female victim thing; it kind of comes off that way but that's just because my personal experiences have more to do with what pressures a woman faces, though DH's disability has recently opened my eyes a lot to what pressures men are faced with.
TL;DR -- It's asinine to think women are more biologically suited to primary child-rearing when our entire system conditions women for that suitability. Everyone is conditioned by society throughout childhood and pressured to conform to expectations throughout adulthood. Conforming doesn't imply a biological basis, it just implies that the conditioning was successful.
