I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.
To be clear, this is not about being 'fair' to the companies, it is about having realistic expectations of the results of our actions.
Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks.
I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers to focus on improving 'output per worker hour' in addition to 'output per worker'.
To be clear, if we want this we have really only have one option: Increase demand (for jobs or products from) companies that do this well. Good work-life balance is a non-salary perk like many others that companies offer.
You can't legislate this focus on the part of employers, all you can do is incentive it.
I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years.
Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers.
My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.
You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?
> "you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less
I am not. I said "if we want this".
However, I think I would have a much easier time backing up the assertion "people want to work less" than you would have backing up " happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year" as a causal relationship.
I never said low stress and low happiness cause low productivity; I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
>"I said "if we want this"."
You imply that less work and more play is 'better' work-life balance, which assumes that people want to work less.
That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead.
Working fewer hours is correlated with higher productivity, possibly high enough that the increase in efficiency is high enough to overcome the reduction in hours when it comes to total output:
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...
That's just a correlation, and there are tons of confounding factors, but this question is not as straighforward as you seem to think.
That is actually what I said originally, as can be seen from the following quote:
>>>>"I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year."
Worker productivity is usually defined as work per year; I refer to specific or hourly productivity as the amount of work you get done per hour in the office.
Let us accept that I read your claim too literally and move past the semantics.
Do you have any data to back up what you are claiming?
The fact is, huge amounts of "gendered culture" have swapped genders over the centuries.
For example, everything you learned from a book, or from spoken language is not part of your innate biology. Only a part of how you gravitate toward that material may be biologically gendered.
I believe that men are affected by a great number of factors including their biologies, and struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise.
For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for.
Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.