Isn't the effect that one would use to support this, the same effect one sees if instead "women prefer to look after their children than immediately return to full-time work after child-birth"?

No. Well before there are children, women will fairly often do things like follow her husband or boyfriend to a new city when he gets a job offer there. When a person moves to a new city because they got a job offer there, they tend to be getting a promotion and a pay raise.

When a person moves to a new city to follow someone else and then start their own job hunt, they tend to be hurting their career and will typically get a less prestigious job with less pay than what they left. Do that sort of thing often enough along gendered lines and the cumulative effect is pretty harsh.

(what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work'

Please don't do this. It's hard enough to participate here as a woman without someone intentionally twisting my comment in such an ugly manner.

It takes two people to create a baby. There is a long human history of placing various expectations on both men and women to account for that reality. The expectations related to that are long and varied and tend to be gendered, such as expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men.

The reason for expecting virginity for girls is it's a form of birth control and it's the only one that's really reliable and it wasn't that long ago it was the only one a lot of people really had ready access to.

One college, I think in the UK somewhere, used to give scholarships to "virgin girls" and their test historically was "a girl who had never been pregnant." They had to update their criteria at some point.

The last time I saw data on it, a "normal, healthy fertile woman" was defined as a woman who would get pregnant within a year if she was sexually active and not using protection.

Someone asked explicitly for "a personal perspective" and I gave some of that. The degree to which I am being given crap for having done that is quite aggravating.

You don't have to care what a woman thinks, but I give a woman's take here from time to time simply because this is an overwhelmingly male space and I post as openly female. Sometimes, that goes okay. Sometimes, it's appreciated and respected, but it's never an easy thing to do and it always opens me up to being given a ridiculous amount of crap for making a good faith statement.

It never matters how carefully I word it, someone will inevitably have a problem with a woman daring to give the female side of the equation here.

It always sucks when a baby is conceived that wasn't actively and intentionally wanted and planned by both parties. This is part of why there is so much societal baggage concerning human sexual stuff and why the entire world wants to be judgy about things like how many people you sleep with, did you do it before marriage, is it a serious relationship or a casual one and on and on and on.

That's not because women are awful bitches to men and it's not because men are awful bastards to women. It's because when 1 + 1 suddenly and unexpectedly = 3, that impacts many lives, not just the two poor fools who bumped uglies one night without thinking too much about it (as just one scenario -- I'm well aware there can be others).

I'm already finding this discussion amazingly tiresome on a day when I already feel incredibly raw about men being assholes to me, so I think I probably need to walk away. It's really, really hard to constantly be expected to be the one who worries about the feelings of nine zillion men on this forum while it sometimes seems like not a single soul gives a damn about me, my feelings, my life, my welfare -- anything.

So if people want to just downvote my comments to hell and then have some giant pile on of ugly takes outright twisting my words, I guess y'all can have at it. Because nearly twelve years of posting here in good faith under incredibly difficult circumstances seems to have made not a damn bit of difference in how my words get interpreted here. I can still count on getting openly hated on for simply being a woman who dares to open my damn mouth.