The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Even in very liberal sf bay, there are not so subtle exclusionary biases against fathers as primary caregivers which I have experienced on parental leave. In passing in the grocery store, there are nods and acknowledgments, but in classes, the local "mothers group", and the support infrastructure for new parents, there is a lot of non-inclusive language. As a most privileged person, I take this all as a very gentle lesson in what it is like to be not in a position of privilege, but I do think it contributes to men opting out of primary caregiving. Also, breast feeding.
Choosing to prioritize children over career reasonably impacts career trajectory. I'd prefer if we had more gender oblivious parental policies and expectations instead of reinforcing gender essentialism through overly targeted programs.
I'd like to see moms and dads choosing who the primary caregiver will be in their own families. I don't see why it's the business of government programs, Hacker News commenters, "society" or anybody else.
I identified as a feminist when feminism was about correcting obvious inequalities between the sexes. Nowadays it seems to be more about behavioral engineering and how we can coerce people to behave in a manner which matches our definition of a perfect society. I no longer identify as a feminist.
I haven't noticed this, are you sure it's not your attitude that's changed, not society?
Not that I think working hours aren't too long, considering modern technology, but that's another story.
It seems like all you're saying is, "I supported feminism when things i didn't like were criticized. Now things I dont care about are criticised, I don't like it."
I don't think there is a threat, but it does ignore the fact that men and women are different. For example, men tend to be more competitive, negotiate harder for pay rises. Women tend to like more flexibility in their work.
Some of us think that the fact that there are fewer male primary caregivers isn't a problem to be solved, but natural given the natural preferences of men and women in general. I think there are many more women than men working in pre-school education for a reason. Furthermore, many women are made to feel ashamed of their desire to be housewives, think it is some failing on their part, and end up seeking a life-consuming career -- not because they want to, but because society tells them they should.
How much of that is that we (1) socialize women to be that way; and (2) impose disproportionate parenting obligations on them to begin with, which causes them to seek more flexibility?
I cannot speak to (2), but cross-cultural studies suggests that differences in the way women are raised across different cultures don't influence women in the way you suggest. In fact, in more prosperous societies, there are greater sex differences, not less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3JuaIg99X0
Everything that's been said in this thread follows from each commenter's position on this question.
In the world of policy, we often have to run with an assumption before we can prove it. The question is, what presumption do we apply? The logical thing to do is to make an educated guess from observation. Look at history: Women have long been excluded from the professional world, and been socialized to accept non-economic societal roles. This is recent history: Had my grandmother gone into my field (law), she would've started her career at a time when firms openly refused to hire women regardless of qualifications; had my mom done the same, she would've started at a time when the practice was still widespread and the federal government was fighting to stamp it out. We can also look cross-sectionally. In countries with strong communist influence, the representation of women in science/engineering is much higher than in the U.S.: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/stubborn-obstacle....
If you're a doctor treating a patient who had cancer 10 years ago and it went into remission, you're committing malpractice if that's not the first thing you check for if new troubles arise. Given the above observations, it is disingenuous to start with the presumption that observed differences have biological rather than sociological explanations.
There are all manner of research findings about the biological differences in the sexes. And reasonable people can in good faith build cases from that research just as you've done from the observable evidence.
Would I be wrong to conclude that you have a strong preference for the socialization explanation? I feel like this debate is held back by the illogical and erroneous belief that a socialization explanation is Good, while the nature explanation, should it turn out to be true, would be Bad. Or, that anybody who believes the nature explanation is themselves Bad or at the very least has bad intentions.
Sure, mothers need a bit more time to physically recover, but you almost garentee the mother will be the one staying home for the kids: they get several times as much time to practice. Then they'll just ride the wave.
This seems like such an obvious and trivial thing to fix that would get us a large part of the way to solving this problem. It would solve a lot of others, such as the subconscious "fear" a company might have when hiring a young woman that she might vanish for a few months if she gets pregnant, while a man would not leave for as long.
Let's just make it equal already.
The laws give them the same amount of time off, twelve weeks. There is a serious parental leave problem in the US, attacking the few places at least taking steps in the right direction doesn't seem smart.
I don't even mind that they do it, so much as they really think they're OMG super pro diversity and pro women by doing so, when in a way they're hurting them.
While companies may not explicitly divide parental leave up the same way, they may be driven by similar concerns when creating unequal leave policies.
not 3x as much though.
For a man who's left home with refrigerated mother's milk bottles, the ordeal involves getting the bottle out of the fridge, warming it to exactly the right temperature via one of those monstrous bottlewarmer thingamajigs, giving it a good shake and then performing a few samplings to ensure it's properly warmed, not too cold or too hot in some places. Most of the time the temperature is inconsistent and the bottle requires a little more warming or time to cool off.
Finally a proper-temperature bottle is presented to the baby, who meanwhile is crying his socks off, pretty convinced at that point that a 3-minute delay means eternal starvation for the rest of his short life. Getting the baby back to the happy state is significantly more involving and time-consuming at this point.
This also assumes that baby will be perfectly fine with 1 bottle, and not 1.3 or 1.7 bottles (which doubles the time requirement for the procedure).
Breastmilk can be kept at room temperature for up to 6 hours.
I usually had a bottle ready for an hour or two before my child was hungry.
Also since it lasts for so long, if the baby doest finish it at that point I can usually give it a few hours later with the second batch. But I usually wasted 20-30ml a day, as I preferred to err on the side of my baby not being hungry.
Getting a child on a schedule, or close to it, is very possible and relieves all.the problems you mentioned, except when he is on a growth spout, but thats a problem even with breast feeding.
That said you make a good point that with careful planning and measurement, and with an adequate supply of milk, you can do a pretty decent job. But it still doesn't equate with my wife's no-muss no-fuss ability to roll over at 3AM and pop the crying baby on her breast, or the oxytocin she gets from the experience.
My wife was usually pretty mad at me for wasting even the little I wasted, but the alternative is to warm up only a bit at a time- that gets the baby angry very quickly.
Frankly the nights are extremely hard with bottles, but my wife breastfed in the nights, so it I didn't get to experience that part much. That said it doesn't have to be bottles exclusively, just when the mother isn't home.
Also breast feeding doesn't work for all women either.
And there are bottle warmers that work quite well. (For formula, I've heard that there are devices that do measuring, mixing, and warming, do it all quickly, and do it well, but I've not personally used them.)
8 pound baby investing a less than 3oz feeding at room temperature is really not an issue. 100f vs 70f = 30 degrees * 3 oz / 128 oz ~= at most 0.7f temperature drop however this is spread out over time and a fairly extreme example to begin with.
That said cold milk is a larger issue.
We didn't came up with warming it to 34-37c for no reason. Serving it at 10-15c colder than body temp puts a lot of stress on the infants digestive system and prevents proper nutrient absorption.
A lot of people do it because their parents did it. After you've trained your baby to prefer warmed bottles, they will likely throw a fit with room temperature bottles. I don't see how you could construct a sound study on this (because it's pretty hard to double blind warmed vs cold bottle), but you could probably do a correlation study on reported bottle temperatures vs miscellaneous infant maladies.
I was able to find that there are at least some studies on temperature in preterm infants (where better feeding response certainly justifies maximum hassle), but I couldn't find anything for infants that reached full term.
We couldn't switch to formula because after the initial few weeks my son refused to take it. We tried various ways but couldn't make it work except breastfeeding. If we could, I wouldn't have minded preparing formula, considering how much work my wife has done for pregnancy and delivery.
>who meanwhile is crying his socks off, pretty convinced at that point that a 3-minute delay means eternal starvation for the rest of his short life
[1] The benefits ascribed to breastfeeding tend to evaporate when you account for socioeconomic factors: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614...
I don't think the impact is reasonable. Try taking a year or two off work while your kids are little. The reaction you'll get to your resume gap is completely out of proportion with whatever atrophy your professional skills might suffer in that time.
People get paid extra for credibly signaling that they'll be there for their employer or their colleagues in a partnership.
Paraphrasing:
"What did you do in these two years since 2015?"
"I was raising my son whilst my wife worked"
"But, didn't you do any work? Did you just sit around for two years?"
In this case, the bias against people returning to work is based more on prjokections about what will happen than anything concrete. Those projections, in turn, are based on traditional notions that once a woman has kids and has become a mother, she can never again be relied on to prioritize work. That ignores the basic fact that parenting is only really time-intensive for the first couple of years.
People returning from paternity leave are not banned from any jobs.
The question is still: why can businesses get away with paying less? It would seem that their demand for these workers is not high enough, or they can enough workers without the missing experience. Otherwise, they would be competing for these workers and wages would go up.
There were no laws against hiring women/jews/black people into professional positions in the 20th century. The market chose to categorically exclude them until the government made it illegal to do so.
> The question is still: why can businesses get away with paying less?
Because businesses can engage in irrational hiring behaviors so long as the irrationality is widely shared.
I don't know that much about the history of the US, but it seems Jim Crow laws were in effect till 1965? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
Women, as I said, had other things to do, before the invention of the washing machines.
The question remains, why not found a company hiring those supposedly cheaper workers, and blow the competition out of the water?
I suppose a company hiring only blacks in the early 20th century would have been unable to sell it's wares because of racism?
Are software developers on a "market for lemons"? Because employers presumably can't know how good a developer is, they bid too low, which in turn makes good developers avoid the market altogether? (ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons )
Also, there seems to be a market rate for developers, which is usually not a bad salary. What is the reasoning for assuming most of them are underpaid? Because a lot are 10 times developers?
Is it about information asymmetry, or worse, complete unknowns because even the developers themselves don't know how good they are?
Would helping developers discover how good they are help their cause? Do sites like HackerRank help, or are the problem sets not relevant enough to the real world?
Why someone who chose to work and pay taxes instead of having kids have to pay for raising someone elses kids? I am assuming you expect "the government" or some other non-participating entity to compensate, right?
What the hell are you talking about? Your taxes now are not to finance your future social security when you retire.
You're in dream land if you think you have no cost to society because you have a 401k to live on when retired.
On a planet of 7 billion people, the urgency of making more is simply not a problem that we as a species face. It's a lifestyle choice and nothing more at this point in history. And at some point, say 10 billion, I predict that it will be actively discouraged in most of the world.
But let's keep a hold on reality here. Women carry babies, not men. Women breastfeed, not men. Women have higher trait agreeableness and exhibit maternal behaviors at all ages in all cultures ever [1]. These aren't "gender essentialism", they're biology.
There is a difference between saying "this kind of person usually does this" and "this kind of person must only do this". The first is often correct, the second is the one that's problematic.
Women will always be more linked to children, and that's fine. We shouldn't try to hammer humans into an ideologically-defined artificial shape, even if it's "equal". That's a recipe for great sadness. Just let people be.
It is the socialogical and economic disadvsntages that mothers have as a result, if they exist and lead to the paygap, then it might be poasible to fix that.
Men don't seem to take nearly as much total time off as women, but many - even most - professional men seem to take 6 months off, and perhaps 1 day off a week for years.
My sample is from offices. I know of friends at factories etc who also took 6 months off, but I don't know if its as pervasive.
Why would you like to see this?
You would also have to assume that domestic labor has less value than corporate employment.
Of the $40,000, the government will take some $10,000 in federal and state taxes, another $10,000 in disqualification from income-based social assistance programs and you lose another $10,000 to transportation expenses to get to the job. The domestic labor still needs to be done (and having your spouse do it instead is just square one), so now you need to hire a nanny, a housekeeper, a tutor and a landscaper and pay more to eat less healthy takeout food more often. While spending less time with your children and having a much less flexible schedule.
The people who choose differently are not inherently behaving irrationally or producing any inefficiency.
It's from 2014, and basically says that an increase in $40,000 in parental income (that is, incoming money today) would translate to an increase in the child's expected income at age 30 of about $13,000. If you're going to say that choosing domestic labour over a $40,000 job is economically rational, that's what it's got to beat.
There are, of course, other drivers for parents. No parent is perfectly rational in an economic sense. That's why I qualified my comment.
That paper is measuring parental income, but it's comparing e.g. a person who makes $30K against a person who makes $70K even if they both work the same number of hours. Obviously the second person will then be better off, because there is no opportunity cost for the extra money, even if they lose most of it to government and other costs. There is no additional transportation expense or childcare expense or anything like that, it's just comparing janitors with lawyers, and on top of that not even accounting for parents with marketable skills passing them on to their children.
And it's measuring averages against instances. There are people -- especially higher income people -- who don't lose as much of their additional income to costs. If you already make a lot your real marginal tax rate is lower because you already don't qualify for income-based assistance, and you would have bought a second car either way, you would have eaten in restaurants either way, etc. And at the other end, unemployed single parent or two unemployed parents vs. one parent with any job is going to be a huge difference.
But that isn't the question. It isn't that it never makes sense for both parents to take a job, it's a question of whether it ever makes sense for one parent not to. Because if it ever does, that affects the average.
For each person, you have to measure the value of the wages they could earn against the value of the domestic labor they could perform. It's quite plausible that the average value of wages is higher than the average value of domestic labor, but that does not lead to the result that 100.000% of people are better off working for money.
It most plausibly leads to the result that most of the people who do work for wages are better off to do so and most of the people who don't are better off not, because members of the second group are below average at wage labor or above average at domestic labor or have economic circumstances that cause money to be less valuable than time. Which is why they choose the way they do.
This is well in accord with the fact that the majority of working-age women do work for wages. But a large plurality do not, and averages provide no evidence that they are behaving irrationally. Half of everyone will be below average at one thing and a different half of everyone will be above average at the other thing.
"The Retro Wife: Feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home."
If less women and more men were primary caregivers, then the outcome would be exactly the same as it is now, because skill is independent of sex.
This is very likely a 180 degree wrong conclusion.
"assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men," the breakdown of the allocation of workers by sex is mostly irrelevant.
It's also still a little socially strange for a dad to go to group of moms and try to get their phone numbers to arrange play dates.
But there are other dads that stay at home, it can be done, and everything has its challenges. We do need more men to stay at home, IMHO. In particular, young girls really benefit from strong paternal relationships.
I think there's a growing stigma in the US against being a parent. I think that has grave consequences for our children. It's hard to show compassion for others if nobody has ever shown compassion to you.
There's a growing stigma against women who choose to stay at home too.
My wife reports that women who don't stay home are (at minimum) condescending about SAHM and often say very nasty things. I won't venture a guess as to why because it doesn't matter. It's not right.
When women at work find out my wife stays home I've heard the most bizarre comments.
I'm pretty disgusted by everyone's desire to politicize my happy little home. It's just gross.
Most people I know were somewhere between surprised and jealous, more or less impressed that we were able to not go bankrupt with just me working and my wife at home.
Mothers especially told me they wished they could have stayed home when their children were young. I was shocked how many people I worked with had to go back to work days or weeks after giving birth.
Then again I'm a guy, so maybe it comes off as being a good provider versus taking the "easy" way.
The popularity of reducing complex issues down to gender warfare tires me. Variances in pay due to availability to focus on career are entirely logical and reasonable.
You're suggesting to fix something that isn't a problem by demanding unnecessary changes in behavior. It's like suggesting that we should eliminate gender height differences by decapitating men. It serves no purpose, wastes energy, and doesn't address the true problem:
How do we equitably manage the impact of childbearing/caregiving on career growth and earnings? This is a nearly impossible problem if we want fairness at the individual level, as population averages don't apply to people. Contrast a CEO vs McDonald's clerk taking a year off. Problems like these aren't sexy and don't make headlines.
There are already attempts to address this issue, such as alimony.
Women tend to be the primary caregivers because they choose so, and they are able to choose because it is their privilege because they are the ones giving birth to the children.
It is funny to me that male feminists think they are heroes if they take over primary care, while in reality they are robbing mothers of their privileges.
Of course it is up for every couple to decide who takes care of the children, so in the rare cases where the mothers prefers her career, sure, fathers can step up.
For instance, when I look at the homeless people in the US, 95% are male. I'm sure the prison population is also skewed toward males.
What if ... men just are over represented on both ends of the curve but the low end isn't given attention?
However that doesn't explain why in many industries for many jobs, apparently equivalent men and women are paid differently.
Since both of these things seem to me to suck anyway I figure we might as well fix them and see what happens. Of course, exactly how 'fix them' works is a tricky question.
Or the low end is bounded, by say minimum wage. That would skew/artificially alter the distribution from an e.g. Gaussian by effectively cutting off the low tail.
95% of workplace deaths are men, so yes, it could simply be that more dangerous jobs have a higher pay.
Where can I fund a journalistic investigation into the matter right away?
[1] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost...
This does however not mean that there is a vast majority in either extreme, rather that if you look for the extreme ends of the spectrum, you will find that one sex is over-represented.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
Also, assume that higher risk results in more variance. More of the riskier group will end up on the far ends of the curve.
Now, what happens if the riskier group's left side of the curve is ignored?
I once worked at a startup where we'd established product-market fit, and all our problems boiled down to tech debt. The codebase simply needed to be rewritten. Doing so wasn't so intellectually hard that you needed to be a genius; you just needed a decent mastery of general programming, and to be willing to put in the hours. I worked a couple 90-hour weeks to get it done in time for our largest client's launch, and became the person on our team who knew the most about our codebase. This gave me enormous leverage in salary negotiation.
How do we stop me from doing that?
I've heard folks insist a lot of times that they get extra productivity from putting in more than 40-50 hours / week. From those who I've actually worked with, I have been able to verify that it's more of a psychological conviction than anything. You say that your 90-hour work weeks got you familiar with the codebase so that you became the person on the team who knew the most about it. But, a more experienced professional could have done it in even less time if than you, without such absurd hours.
If you have so much tech debt that you absolutely need to refactor a bunch of things, 90% of the work should be grokking the original codebase (mostly reading and comprehension), as well as redesign. Of the remaining 10% of the work, 5% of that 10% should be writing tests. The remaining 5% is slicing and dicing the old code.
If I was your manager (and I've had to talk engineers away from the ledge in similar situations before), you would likely be running this plan by me before you did it, and I would very strongly recommend you to take a different, less risky strategy to get whatever changes we needed for the client launch. If you decided against that, it's likely I would fire you for poor performance, although it's likely I wouldn't have hired you in the first place. Solid engineers don't need >50 hr workweeks to hit their deadlines, and they can sustain productivity reasonably indefinitely at healthily run organizations.
I'm relatively inexperienced, so I can't comment on the rest of your comment. There's a good chance you're right.
Beyond my own anecdote, the larger allegory I was trying to get at was: I can't think of any real way to stop someone who really wants to work long hours; and at least some of the time, those extra hours will translate into more pay, resulting in a pay gap.
Edit: I like your username! I yowl, I yowl.
"To me, the most important concept brought in by Feathers is seams. A seam is a place in the code where you can change the behaviour of your program without modifying the code itself. Building seams into your code enables separating the piece of code under test, but it also enables you to sense the behaviour of the code under test even when it is difficult or impossible to do directly (e.g. because the call makes changes in another object or subsystem, whose state is not possible to query directly from within the test method).
This knowledge allows you to notice the seeds of testability in the nastiest heap of code, and find the minimal, least disruptive, safest changes to get there. In other words, to avoid making "obvious" refactorings which have a risk of breaking the code without you noticing - because you don't yet have the unit tests to detect that.".
As you get more experience under your belt, you'll begin to see these situations again and again of code becoming large, difficult to reason about or test, and similarly having low direct business benefit for refactoring. But crucially, learning how to refactor as you go is a huge part of working effectively with legacy code and by virtue of that, maturing into a senior engineer -- to strain a leaky analogy, you don't accrue tech debt all at once, so why would it make sense to pay it off all at once? The only reason that would occur is if you didn't have a strong culture of periodically paying off tech debt as you went along.
I'm not going to insinuate that it was necessarily wrong that you decided to solve the problem as you did, and the desire to be proactive about it is certainly not something to be criticized. But it wasn't necessarily right, either. Your leadership should have prevented something like this from occurring, because in all likelihood, you wasted those extra hours and naively thought that extra hours equal extra productivity. They don't. You ought to aim for maximal results for minimal hours of work, so that you can spend as much time as you can delivering results. And, unless you're getting paid by the hour instead of salaried, you're actually getting less pay. So to recap: you're getting less pay, you're giving the company subpar results (by definition, because you're using more hours to achieve what a competent engineer could do with only 40 hour workweeks so you're 44% as efficient), and everyone's losing a little bit. Thankfully, you still managed to get the job done, and because you were able to gain authorship and ownership over the new part of the codebase, you were able to politically argue for better compensation. Good for you, you should always bargain for what you deserve. But, just because you got a more positive outcome doesn't mean you went about it the most efficient way.
The best engineers (and I would argue workers in general) are efficient. They approach every engineering problems they can with solutions so simple and effective that they seem boring, only reaching for the impressive stuff when it's really needed, and with chagrin. If you can combine that with self-advocacy, you'll really be cooking with gas as far as your career is concerned. And, it'll get you a lot further than this silly childish delusion that more hours equals more results, or more pay. Solid work, solid negotiation skills, solid marketing skills and solid communication skills earn you better pay. The rest is fluff.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe... [1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1220...
I think you make a good point; we shouldn't fight that pay reflects time/effort put in.
But I think that when we 'engineer' society, we want to make sure we make it as easy as possible for people to make the decision between work or other endeavors. There's nothing we can do to get around that women give birth and men don't, but we can at least afford them both the same generous paternity leave. And on the other hand, the more we empower women to have educated careers, the less men will feel pressured to make as much money as possible just to support their family.
People who want to complete tasks with ruthless efficiency will struggle immensely with the waste at union (and government) orgs.
Sorry for the rant, but you're question isn't worth worrying about because people that would want to work from home wouldn't be working in a union shop that barred work.
The union working rules make sense for the company. It's not sustainable to work that much. Worker burnout and churn is bad for the company. Fostering a culture that forces people to work until they drop if they want to get ahead is toxic.
If they are willing to do that once, rewriting everything using a coding pack animal, it is pathological and they WILL be willing to do it twice, regardless of whatever reassurances to the contrary they give you on a death march.
The 40 hour workweek as a standard isn't arbitrary, it's about preventing workers from creating a race to the bottom on hours worked, because that ends with anyone unwilling to be driven like a slave becoming unemployed.
Do your part and defend your right to your personal time and to go home unmolested after your workday ends.
(As for why I'd be so masochistic, I'm weird in that I actually enjoy mundane work like refactoring and rewriting abstractions. It's interesting to me.)
And though this is conjecture on my part, even if you find refactoring and rewriting interesting, if you had the 50 hours back from doing these things and were instead rewriting and refactoring your own personal projects, I suspect you'd be equally as happy and would be something like 30x as likely to get fair remunerations for your work, rather than either enjoying the pittance they're going to give you or feeling the eventual heartbreak when they realize you're demanding a lot of money and they could just hire another passionate drone to pick up where you left off.
But the point is, even if working 90 hour weeks was a stupid thing to do, for better or worse it positioned me to negotiate more pay. Not because the company somehow had a fetish for long-hour workers, but because of what I learned during those hours. Is there a real way to prevent that? If not, is part of the pay gap inevitable?
By not hiring somebody who isn't a team player? Look, I don't know you, and sometimes there's a real deadline. But on a big project, I'd rather take two guys working 35 hours a week than one guy working 70 hours a week (all other things equal).
And while most cooperations don't care about ethics, societies should. How the hell are you going to be a good parent after a 90 hour week? So we're going to rely on underpaid teachers to teach our kids everything? Hmm, I guess Adderall is the next best thing to parenting.
All in all, nobody would stop you from being so stupid, and when you end up burned out, your fault. In a country with decent labour laws though the business might end up paying your salary during sick leave. Suddenly overtime is a massive liability.
We could also make managers responsible. For example, somebody has a crash on the way home because he fell asleep at the wheel after weeks of overtime. The manager should have some blame for not managing the workload of his employers better.
Of course, this is all moot as long as there's some asshole out there who thinks he needs to one-up everybody else and put in massive amounts of unpaid extra work. Generally though teams wise up to this quickly, and code written at 2am isn't an asset - it's a liability that somebody else needs to fix. I'll bet that's how your code ended up laden with technical debt, and I'll bet the next guy who inherits it from you will curse at the technical debt, maybe rewrite it in a frantic effort - and so the cycle begins again.
It's always easy to make more money with a short-sighted view. In the long run, it's usually not worth it. But you only hear the stories about the exceptional successes, and rarely the tragedies.
Not everyone has offspring. Stop projecting your insecurities about not working overtime onto the rest of us about how people who choose to work extra with their time are a detriment to society.
Some people work well in grinds, particularly when it is pretty mindless refactoring and they have a strong grasp of the language. If this person put in the extra mile and actually delivered something that wasn't a turd, good for him/her for choosing to use the asset of time to boost the company and his/her career.
That extra few years of career growth can provide a strong financial incentive for the woman to become the primary caregiver, after which the salary differences snowball.
I'm not sure any of the proposed solutions will address this source of imbalance.
Why is it important to do so?
Time spent at work is traded off against free time. Your first hour of free time in a day is worth more to you than your 20th hour of free time in a day. So on average, people are going to need to be paid disproportionately more to do work more in a given day, on a marginal basis: the marginal value of free time increases as you have less of it.
This has nothing to do with the sex of the worker, although if women and men value free time differently one would expect that to be reflected in overall compensation.
The problem I see is that businesses are not agnostic to the lifestyle choices of their employees. Rather, they're antagonistic to them.
If not for our collective efforts, I'm sure a business would happily force people to work over the weekend for a pittance, break down the work/leisure barrier even more, and possibly have us sign away the right to our souls and bodies upon employment.
The parent comment said:
"As long as they are offer equal pay for equal work they should be largely agnostic to the lifestyles choices of their employees"
But that's the rub: in many jobs you can actually accomplish more by working long hours, and often those are exactly the jobs that carry prestige and high salaries (banking, surgery, etc.) So employers can't be agnostic with respect to that particular lifestyle choice and still offer equal pay for equal work.
If women are trading off work hours for free time, what people are really asking for is increased pay for women and decreased pay for men, based on faulty understanding of the marginal value of free time.
"The population of Athos is sustained using uterine replicator technology. [ ... ] Through military and community service, Athosians earn "Social Duty Credits" towards reproduction. Regulations also allow for a "Designated Alternate Parent" who can earn Social Duty Credits by coparenting a partner's sons. Homosexuality is generally the norm on Athos, and while partnerships are typically romantic and sexual, some are merely mutually beneficial arrangements based on finances and child-rearing."
"... while there are many examples of "Planets of Women" in fiction, Athos is the only "Planet of Men" she can think of. She writes that "I couldn’t have imagined what a feminist notion a planet of men is, and how tied up with nurturing children Athos is, accounting for the costs in a way that doesn’t dismiss it as 'women’s work.'”"
In their economy, child-raising is an economic activity that's accounted and paid for by society.
1. The great Thomas Sowell addressed this directly in the long long ago (1980s?). His challenger reported a discrepancy in remuneration for women over 40. He correctly identified an additional dimension: never married. 40+ never married women experienced no income discrepancy.
2. The recent resurgence of this issue has been debunked, most notably to my knowledge by feminist economist Christina Hoff Sommers. Again, it's as simple as child rearing.
Suitably terse explanations from ReasonTV and PragerU may be easily found on YouTube.
Well, I know a guy who had quite close contacts with high-wealth/high-achieving individuals due to his work in startups. He himself came from a upper middle class with a degree from an Ivy League.
What he commented about how high wealth individuals balance family life and still kick ass in their professional life was quite amusing.
He basically said, it's the nannies.
From the time the kids are born till they go to junior or high school, a parent basically has to deal with dropoff/pickup for daycare/school/activities. And it's non stop when school's in session.
If a parent happens to be a homemaker, great. But these days high achievers rarely seem to marry a homemaker as their friends/contacts are from college/grad-school/work who also have capacity/desire for achieving something in professional life.
And of course if you are in a high income bracket, you also tend to have more activities (private lessons for this and that) for kids. And this means more rides to give.
If you have nannies that can handle feeding/rides/laundry(omg, the laundry)/etc, then the parent(s) can put in long hours in office without interruption, fly to other cities/nations for meetings with little hassle, etc, all of which is required to kick ass and takes names in one's professional life.
The question is, can you build your income level high enough, and fast enough, so that you can afford nannies when you have kids?
As someone that has used au pairs, nannies (both live in and out), and daycare, we finally decided one of us staying home was the best for our children. I'm male, I've been home with the kids since September 2015. I don't know yet if it was the best decision for me, but studies seem to show it is the best for my children. I'm going for happy kids that contribute to society, I don't define their or my success by amount of money in a bank account.
Haha, I meant that to be a sarcasm but I guess I wasn't clear enough. No it's great that one of you decided to spend more time with kids. Kids grow up fast.
If I as a person decide I only want to work 2 days a week and my coworkers are all doing 5x8hr days. Why should I doing less work be paid the same?
This seems easily solved. Women should stop having kids if earning the same is important to them.
1. The mother has to take time off (probably at least 2 weeks or so), to recover from childbirth. So there's more of an impact on the primary earner's career if that's the father.
2. If the mother breastfeeds, she spends some time doing that. If the father breastfeeds, the mother spends some time pumping the milk, then the father spends some time feeding the baby, so the time spent feeding the baby is approximately doubled.
Let's say we don't reward people for working longer hours and aggressively seeking better opportunities, what is their motivation for trying harder? Should we say "you're not allowed to work longer hours because many people out there can't compete with it"?
Is it just for women to earn less over their lifetimes due to their biological drive towards motherhood and the downtime that entails? Is it just for men to be rewarded for their biological drive to compete and provide a better life for their loved ones?
That is, one can view a wage not as a reward, but as a retainer. If companies aren't paying you to be nice to you for what you've done in the past, but are paying you on past performance as in indicator of what you'll do for them in the future, then it would be rational for them to take more factors into account when estimating your future output. Estimators of your probability of leaving the workforce would be one such factor.
It's not fair, but it might be rational.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HB3xM93rXbY
PS: I have always thought that mothership should be rewarded much higher by society, e.g. through tax breaks, or even real money payout. In the end, people with no kids have an unfair advantage as they can earn more money while mums are at least contributing at the same level to society and should thus be rewarded.
Women choose to engage in different productive tasks than men do. It's why you generally don't see women working oil fields or cutting trees or building buildings or being DJs or yes, spending 16 hours straight coding. It's also why you generally don't see men being homemakers, teaching young children, nursing, etc. More power to the people who CHOOSE to go against these norms, if they so desire.
Why tell women to do things they don't want to do? Why imply that what they've chosen to do isn't good enough?
Some of these possible reasons are obviously more concerning than others. If the gender wage gap is 100% due to less concerning reasons, such as women simply making the choice to prioritize motherhood over their career, then you could argue that while the gender gap exists it's not a societal problem that we need to address since it's not caused by institutional discrimination of any sort. The reality is a lot more complicated and nuanced, and it's probable that there are several reasons that can explain the gender gap, that don't necessarily compete with each other.
Not for the same work it does not.
When you actually look at the data the vast majority of the so called gap is directly attributable to field of work. Right or wrong Teaching, Social Work,Child Care and Nursing pay less than Executives, Programming, STEM Fields, etc.
There is now more than ever more opportunities for women to enter these higher paying fields, many many many still choose not to. Do you advocate for forcing Women into STEM vocation against their will?
But when we only look at nursing we still see a gender pay gap.
When you look at nursing, specifically midwifery (surely the most feminised sector of nursing) we see that at lower pay bands the ratio of men:women is almost no men to almost all women. As we go up the pay bands we see that ratio changing.
We see this for many different types of health care staff. Ambulance workers start with a 60:40 male:female ratio at the lower bands, and end up at band 8d with a 95:5 male female ratio.
So, for the English NHS when we only look at eg midwifery (we see it when we look at other HSCS staff too) we still see a gender pay gap.
Have a look at the English statistics here: http://content.digital.nhs.uk/article/2021/Website-Search?pr...
NHS Workforce Statistics - September 2016, Provisional statistics
Publication date: December 20, 2016
We want this file: HCHS staff in NHS Trusts and CCGs in England, Equality and Diversity, September 2016 [.xlsx]
Hospital and Community Health Services Staff statistics.
Midwives
Payband Men Women Total Ratio men:women
Band 5 11 2301 2312 0.00:1.00
Band 6 57 18294 18351 0.00:1.00
Band 7 36 4663 4699 0.01:0.99
Band 8a 2 183 185 0.01:0.99
Band 8b 1 31 32 0.03:0.97
Band 8c 2 15 17 0.12:0.88
Ambulance staff
payband men women total ratio men:women
Band 4 2222 1479 3701 0.60:0.40
Band 5 5986 4072 10058 0.60:0.40
Band 6 3553 1889 5442 0.65:0.35
Band 7 610 202 812 0.75:0.25
Band 8a 85 25 110 0.77:0.23
Band 8b 49 10 59 0.83:0.17
Band 8c 14 1 15 0.93:0.07
Band 8d 14 1 15 0.93:0.07Could you explain the gender pay gap in these midwifery statistics please? I am struggling to find that information.
I see that as people get higher bands (probably get older) they get paid more. I see one or two men in the higher bands which to me raises some statistical significance queries. I see that the Ratio of men to women increase from incredibly small to very small, but that doesn't (to me) indicate a gender pay gap. Unless the "gender pay gap" here is that men are paid less compared to women as there are less men in the profession? Perhaps it's about the definition of "pay gap" - does it just refer to unequal outcome? Does it mean that we should expect the same ratio to occur in all pay bands, equally (e.g. not allow men to have pay grade 8), and if we do not see the same ratio that there is a pay gap by virtue of unequal representation?
So, if hardly any men enter the profession and very many women enter the profession I'd expect to see no men at band 8x (because the tiny number of men have to compete against a huge number of women at each promotion). Instead we see a higher percentage of men at band 8x than at band 5 or 6. This shows one of the mechanisms of the gender pay gap: men get promoted faster and further than women. This debunks one of the points some people are making in this thread that the gender pay gap disappears if you only look at one profession.
I've added the numbers for ambulance staff.
At the entry level positions we see a split of 60% men to 40% women.
As you go up the paybands you see the percentages changing - you see men being promoted more readily than women, until you get to the band 8ds where we see 95% men to 5% women.
Why are the ratios changing? Why do we see a higher percentage of men in senior roles in health care professions?
Correlation does not equal causation
In my opinion, it would be worth while to tackle the adjusted wage gap in the short term, and the unadjusted wage gap in the long term, as the latter requires more dramatic changes in society, I think.
Women do productive things that are harder to account for in standard GDP metrics. Does GDP count the implied value of rearing a child? The years of care that go into motherhood? Does GDP go up $40 when a mom teaches a young child some words for an hour? It would if it was a tutor but it doesn't when it's just a parent.
The frame of "women earn less than men" is used to implicitly degrade the life choices of women. I personally just learned that a friend's mom is a foster mother. That is an incredible level of generosity that is outside of my comprehension. Is her being a foster mother worthless because it isn't in wage statistics? She earns a modest income by accounting standards, but the actual value she creates is much higher. Should we tell her to learn to code instead?
Think about it: if pay were based on how much value a person creates, why do different people on the same team doing the same job sometimes have wildly different salaries? Why do people often get raises after threatening to quit? How can salary negotiation ever work?
Sure, there are obviously exceptions to this calculation in both directions: how else can you explain Marissa Mayer's severance package? How else can you explain DHH's wage of $0 for maintaining Ruby on Rails?
If you can make a compelling case on this topic you can probably get published in major academic journals.
Are you saying this based on data? The actual labor market is very different from the abstract, perfectly competitive microeconomics model. It's hard to even figure out what the marginal value of a person's work is, not to mention the lack of perfect information, the difficulty of firing, the expectations around raises and pay cuts, people's varying self-conceptions of their own worth, …
Construction is male dominated and pays more than an elementary school teacher. Why is that? Are men pressured to risk their health in order to earn more? Are women expected to earn less than their full potential for some reason? Does society simply devalue "womens work" regardless of it's importance (it's hard to argue educating children is unimportant for society).
None of these explanations are great, we can do better as a culture.
> It's also why you generally don't see men being homemakers, teaching young children, nursing
You seem to be saying that if you look only at a single profession you'll see men and women being paid the same.
This is incorrect.
You seem to be saying that if we look at, say, nursing, we'll see many more women, but that those women will be paid the same as male nurses.
This is incorrect.
When we look at health care staff by profession, gender, and payband we see that the entry level have a high number of women to men, but that as you go up the pay bands we see the ratio changing. This happens even for midwifery, but is especially marked for ambulance staff which starts at 60:40 male female split at band 5 but ends at a 95:5 male female split at band 8d.
See this comment for a link to a dataset from the English NHS.
But there are clear and obvious corporate drivers for encouraging women into the workplace. Firstly, it broadens the pool of labour as far as possible to depress salaries and lower corporate costs. Secondly, women negotiate less assertively, which tends to lower wages in industries where they're more common.
Instead, the widely quoted 77 cents to the dollar (now 79) is simply the median earnings of (all) men compared to the median earnings of (all) women, not accounting for any confounders[1], such as hours worked, experience or field. So the name is also a misnomer (almost certainly intentional), because it is not a "pay gap", but an "earnings gap". An actual pay gap is illegal, illogical and grounds for lawsuits.
Why is it illogical (in addition to illegal)? For a lot of companies, pay is their major cost factor. If you could save 20% on that without any other negative consequences, at least some companies would hire all women and make a killing. And if you assume that people's support of "The Patriarchy" trumps their greed...well I don't really know what to think, and I'd also point out that there are female company owners (in fact, women own more than 50% and control an even larger portion of wealth in the US)
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gende...
"Even when comparing the sexes with the same job title at the same company and using similar education and experience, the gender pay gap persists: Men earned 2.4 percent more than women on average, down slightly from last year"[1]
"Procurement Leaders recent research shows that female buyers are paid less than male buyers. That is, women are earning less for the same work." [2]
"After accounting for job, industry, education and experience, Blau and Kahn determined that 38 percent of the wage gap comes from factors “unexplained.”" [3]
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/05/men-still-earn-more-than-wome... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2016/03/31/women-are-stil... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/08/its-2...
Only in a Motte-Bailey sense [1][2].
PM: "77 cents to the dollar, it's a crime!!"
DO: "That's complete BS".
PM: "Well, you're right, here is more reasonable data"
DO: "But that doesn't actually show a gap"
PM: "Oh my god, 77 cents to the dollar!!"
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...
This comment links to a rigorous English dataset.
Band 5 staff earn between £21k and £28k. Band 8d staff earn between £65k and £81k.
When we restrict ourselves to a single healthcare profession (in this example I used widwives) that has many more women than men at the entry level jobs we still see men being promoted above women.
It doesnt change the fact there is no general wage gap when experience and accurate jobs comparison are taken into account.
In 2017, equal work DOES have equal pay.
The "accounting for job, industry" is very rough, so "social science" lumps together economists (66% male, $70k median income) and social workers (68% female, $40k median income).
"Hours worked" is also almost certainly not accounted for properly, as that is not a linear relationship of you get %x more for %x more hours. Instead, being willing to put in extra hours is seen as a token of submitting to the dominance hierarchy and key factor towards advancement. Saying something like "I structure my work so I get everything done in 40 hours" is not the correct answer when asked about your willingness to put in extra hours, because that's not what this is about. And men are generally more willing to do this than women, and men that are not are shut out of promotion just as much (or probably more) than women.
Also there is risk-taking. A study reported on in the Süddeutsche Zeitung[1][2](German) shows that even in controlled laboratory conditions, women chose low-risk strategies even when the "risk" is almost entirely theoretical and the advantages of a higher risk strategy clear. As the high-risk strategies on average lead to greater rewards (as in real life), the authors report there was a 23% gap in male/female earnings within that study.
Finally, it turns out that the lives of the top earners actually aren't all that great. They more or less suck. Women are more savvy about this, and have more alternatives, whereas men are much more motivated to stay in such negative environments for the status/money rewards[3].
When you put these factors together, they actually appear to over-explain the gender wage gap, and of course that isn't entirely unlikely[4]
[1] https://allesevolution.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/frauen-risik...
[2] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/karriere/gleichberechtigung-das-g...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gddjMm3Q3l0
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Women_are_wonderful%22_effe...
The version stubbornly pushed is simply that median_salary(all women) != median_salary(all men).
You can find a definition on Wikipedia [1].
> Noting that the raw wage gap is the result of a number of factors, the report said that the raw gap should not be used to justify corrective action, adding that "Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
One thing I think jecjec has neglected to consider, at least in writing, is that the history of our society and the roles women have played in it do have an impact on what fields women consider. There are always those who go against the grain (read: against what our culture "expects") -- women in technology, men in early childhood education, but they are outliers. Perhaps there is sound reason for some of these differences, but I suspect their could be a lot more even distribution between genders for many fields if we had the opportunity to hit the reset button. Perhaps that's what the gender pay gap is about.
For example, a recent BBC article asked "Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?"[1] Fortunately, the article contains the answer: economic necessity.
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects."
So women in Russia follow the money, women in the west follow their passion.
I think they will, in time. There are still CEOs around who remember when women were mostly (almost exclusively?) secretaries. I think it's fair to want equality now, but not necessarily fair to expect society to move towards it in such a rapid fashion. Not to mention, even though we're a free society there are still endless reminders that men have these specific jobs, and women have those specific jobs. It's getting better (because people are pushing for it) but films are a usually an example of this: mostly male main characters, most business/finance/tech movies revolve around male characters. Most people to idolize in tech are male. I guess it would be hard to measure, but I'd be surprised to learn this pattern didn't have an impact on a young mind, male or female.
But they don't, regardless of your beliefs. This isn't about expectations or wishes. That data is in, and the most developed and most egalitarian countries (scandinavian) have the greatest self-segregation. And the less developed and the less egalitarian the country, the less the self-segregation, pretty much linearly.
Incidentally, this also explains the drop in female CS enrollment over time. I think we can all agree that the past was less equal than the present. So if your theory were correct, CS enrollment of women would have increased, compared to the past. However, CS enrollment of women has decreased, and people have been twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain this via the "oppression" narrative. However, no such pretzel-logic is required if you accept the data: men have, on average, different preferences than women, and as societies get more free, those differences express themselves more. Easy peasy.
> mostly male main characters
But why is that? Is it because people don't want to look at women? Or is it because males tend, strongly, towards riskier behavior that makes for more plausibly interesting story lines? I think you are confusing cause and effect.
> Most people to idolize in tech are male.
Most people in tech are male, because of self-segregation, and therefore the ones that people will idolize will also be predominantly male. Factor in the fact that males tend to be much more prone to risk-taking, and the effect should probably be even larger than it is.
> an impact on a young mind
The "Blank Slate" hypothesis. Please read Pinker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
I have personally seen wide pay discrepancies between 2 people of the same gender for a variety of reasons. Timing in the market, Nepotism/Favortism due to personal connections, better negotiating skills etc