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The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood

163 points by shawndumas 9y ago

jhcsugdijvcf 9y ago
what pay gap? it's a myth
shawndumas 9y ago
"It is logical for couples to decide that the person who earns less, usually a woman, does more of the household chores and child care, Ms. Kerr said. But it’s also a reason women earn less in the first place. “That reinforces the pay gap in the labor market, and we’re trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle,” she said."
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  Hmm. Does that make sense? If wages are fair, a (particular) woman's wage shouldn't drop until _after_ she drops out of the workforce, at least temporarily. Which means there shouldn't be a bias in who is earning less, at least for the first child.
  - KMag 9y ago
    If companies are investing wages, training opportunity cost, and other resources into having a productive workforce some time in the future, it would be rational (though not fair) to invest less in those workers who were less likely to be in the workforce in a couple of years. 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.
  - aaronblohowiak 9y ago
    The article suggests that the initial pay gap is due to a flight risk adjustment based on the expectation of "motherhood" (but what they really mean is becoming a primary caregiver)
- harry8 9y ago
  There's a social norm thing going on there too. Regardless of what laws say there's what you can get from your employer. Employers are more flexible with women than men when children arrive. At a cost, sure, but if for whatever reason you want the man in the relationship to go part time to devote more time to kids, it's hard to be taken seriously in the face to face negotiation. Women are almost always taken seriously when making such a request. This expectation of the norm reinforces the norm too.
jecjec 9y ago
I can't click because I don't want to seem like a pleb: ?referer=https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/
pfarnsworth 9y ago
My wife makes almost 2X what I make, and I earn a great Silicon Valley wage. So I end up doing a lot more of the child rearing for our kids, which is fine with me. However, we are currently dealing with the situation where she might be able to catapult her already great career, which would entail us moving to a less desirable location of the country, and I would likely lose my job and would need to find a lower paying remote programming job, so I'm definitely in the situation that is talked about in the article.
ebola1717 9y ago
I'm confused by this title. To the extent the article supports the title, it places blame not on motherhood, but the larger imbalance in expectations toward domestic responsibilities. However, it also notes that raises are lower, and lateral transfers are less productive for women.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Looks like the problem is too complex to boil it down to a catch phrase, but 'motherhood' is maybe a reasonable proxy if it doesn't imply that there's nothing to do about it. It would be interesting to compare outcomes with countries that have very progressive parenthood vacation policies.
aaronblohowiak 9y ago
I agree that the gender pay gap is troubling, but I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers instead of looking for ways to make primary caregivers also earn as much as primary earners. 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.
- Banthum 9y ago
  I certainly agree with the goal of giving individuals their freedom and to have the right to act in an atypical way. 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. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
  - beberlei 9y ago
    I think No one disagrees with you on biology. 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.
  - cjsthompson 9y ago
epx 9y ago
Well, who wants the expensive wedding, the n kids and the white picked fence?
- rlabrecque 9y ago
  I'm a guy and I do, my gf doesn't really want any of that. I'm not sure what you're getting at.
safek 9y ago
So, people sometimes suggest deemphasizing long hours as a solution to the wage gap. 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?
- scryder 9y ago
  Trivially: fire you, and hire another poor shmuck at your starting salary to spend 90 hour weeks in time for the next launch. 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.
  - safek 9y ago
    Wait, but it wasn't like they forced me. In fact the founder openly talked about the importance of work-life balance. Believe it or not, I actually wanted to do it. (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.)
    - scryder 9y ago
      If I can be extremely frank, you don't HAVE to force someone gullible enough to do it willingly. 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.
carsongross 9y ago
> Even when mothers cut back at work, they are not paid proportionately less. When their pay is calculated on an hourly basis, they are still paid less than men for the hours they work, Ms. Goldin has shown in previous work. Employers, especially for jobs that require a college degree, pay people disproportionately more for working long hours and disproportionately less for working flexibly. 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.
- TearsInTheRain 9y ago
  It seems weird to me that eliminating the "gender pay gap" is something businesses need to be actively concerned about. As long as they are offer equal pay for equal work they should be largely agnostic to the lifestyles choices of their employees
  - mercer 9y ago
    You're right, and that's exactly why we have these discussions, push for legislation, put (social) pressure on businesses, etc. 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.
    - carsongross 9y ago
      The problem I see is that businesses are not agnostic to the lifestyle choices of their employees. 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.
afpx 9y ago
What if gender pay gap was just a result of men being pressured to take on more risks in life (i.e. a wider gaussian). And, the ones that have failed (or died) are no longer included in the data? 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?
- safek 9y ago
  This actually borders on being a rather comical point. People in prison have an income of zero. So if we're going to arrive at 0.77 by dividing one average by another, I for one would like to know, is the prison population being included? Where can I fund a journalistic investigation into the matter right away?
  - njarboe 9y ago
    I would say the income of a person in prison is a large negative. "According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the average cost of housing an inmate in the U.S. was $31,286 in 2012." [1] [1] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost-to-house-inmates-in-prison/ http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost...
    - safek 9y ago
      That's funny, but the pay gap is about how much people receive in compensation, not the net amount that goes into sustaining their existence.
  - jplayer01 9y ago
    0.77 isn't actually the pay gap. It's much, much smaller than that, below 10%. It's one of the biggest victories of feminists that they have been able to shape discourse around a completely wrong number.
- qwerrtytest 9y ago
  No, that's not true. If it was true, it would mean that the vast majority of the stupidest people are man and the vast majority of the smartest people are man. And the later statement will get you into lots of trouble...
BadassFractal 9y ago
Seems the classical political/economic/philosophical divide of meritocracy versus providing based on people's needs. 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?
jecjec 9y ago
The wage gap just doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because different occupations create different amounts of value. Why can't people accept this fact? Why can't people accept that women may want to live their lives differently from men? 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?
- wanderr 9y ago
  That's not what the gender pay gap is. It's about inequal pay for the same work.
  - fsaneq2 9y ago
    That has been proven false, negligible or within noise over and over. The version stubbornly pushed is simply that median_salary(all women) != median_salary(all men).
  - _bearMountain 9y ago
    sitation?
    - abetusk 9y ago
      Did you mean "citation"? You can find a definition on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap
      - lwansbrough 9y ago
        I'm thankful that the wikipedia entry makes a point of separating the two definitions. While I generally nod along with the sentiment provided by top level comment, it's important to understand that there are different definitions; however irrelevant (IMO) one of the definitions seems to be (for the reasons again mentioned by the top level comment.) 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.
salmonet 9y ago
Well yeah, obviously. It surprises me that an idea as basic as this is newsworthy. Could someone please fill me in on what people thought was playing a larger role than this?
- fsaneq2 9y ago
  Many people find it more convenient to instead believe the difference is caused by people in charge automatically offering women less than what they would offer a man. Of course, studies controlling for the type of job, credentials, experience, ability, etc., show that to be a poor hypothesis, but it is nevertheless a phrasing that makes it easy to make people angry (and vote for you).
red023 9y ago
Surprise surprise!
Kluny 9y ago
This article makes me think of the sci-fi book Ethan of Athos. "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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_of_Athos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_of_Athos
gdix 9y ago
I'm pretty sure the ACTUAL reason is that sometimes people say "you guys" instead of "y'all" in work emails and on slack.
- tnone 9y ago
  But the fact that their movement for equality is called feminism and their satan is called patriarchy is absolutely not relevant, please look the other way.
watwut 9y ago
Why was this downvoted, seriosly. That is pretty usual problem through the genders are normally flipped.
- dang 9y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334303 and marked it off-topic.
coned88 9y ago
So there is no pay gap. Certain people, mostly women choose to not work as much and make less. They should make less. 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.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  So the only options are is to not have kids. What about the option where the man gives becomes the care giver, or if they both do it equally. I think the real issue here isn't so much that "there's a pay gap", but rather that this second options is usually missing. That's where the lack of equality is. Why does it always have to be women that are the caregiver and have to give up on their career?
  - tomp 9y ago
    Because of biology, it makes more seonse for the mother to be the primary caregiver (everything else being equal). Two reasons that I can think of: 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.
  - gd1 9y ago
    They have to gestate the child for 9 months. This is unavoidable. They have breasts. Figure it out.
dba7dba 9y ago
We often read interviews of high achievers talk about how they balance their family-life/kids/work and yet still accomplish so much in their professional life. It's tough but they can manage, and we assume, of course, they are intelligent/hard workers. 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?
- feistypharit 9y ago
  The better question is how will you feel when your children starts calling the nanny "Mommy". 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.
  - dba7dba 9y ago
    > The question is, can you build your income level high enough, and fast enough, so that you can afford nannies when you have kids? 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.
josephh 9y ago
And here's me thinking why nobody is talking about the elephant in the room that is the massive gender pay gap in the straight pornography industry.
baxtr 9y ago
Today's Mother's Day. Call your mums people https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HB3xM93rXbY 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.
moconnor 9y ago
Men are on average a couple of years older in a relationship (https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/whats-the-average-age-difference-in-a-couple/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/whats-the-average-age-di...). 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.
- dom0 9y ago
  > will address this source of imbalance. Why is it important to do so?
mrslave 9y ago
Not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. 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.

163 points by shawndumas 9y ago

what pay gap? it's a myth

"It is logical for couples to decide that the person who earns less, usually a woman, does more of the household chores and child care, Ms. Kerr said. But it’s also a reason women earn less in the first place. “That reinforces the pay gap in the labor market, and we’re trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle,” she said."

bpodgursky 9y ago
Hmm. Does that make sense? If wages are fair, a (particular) woman's wage shouldn't drop until _after_ she drops out of the workforce, at least temporarily. Which means there shouldn't be a bias in who is earning less, at least for the first child.
- KMag 9y ago
  If companies are investing wages, training opportunity cost, and other resources into having a productive workforce some time in the future, it would be rational (though not fair) to invest less in those workers who were less likely to be in the workforce in a couple of years. 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.
- aaronblohowiak 9y ago
  The article suggests that the initial pay gap is due to a flight risk adjustment based on the expectation of "motherhood" (but what they really mean is becoming a primary caregiver)
harry8 9y ago
There's a social norm thing going on there too. Regardless of what laws say there's what you can get from your employer. Employers are more flexible with women than men when children arrive. At a cost, sure, but if for whatever reason you want the man in the relationship to go part time to devote more time to kids, it's hard to be taken seriously in the face to face negotiation. Women are almost always taken seriously when making such a request. This expectation of the norm reinforces the norm too.

jecjec 9y ago

I can't click because I don't want to seem like a pleb: ?referer=https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/

pfarnsworth 9y ago

My wife makes almost 2X what I make, and I earn a great Silicon Valley wage. So I end up doing a lot more of the child rearing for our kids, which is fine with me. However, we are currently dealing with the situation where she might be able to catapult her already great career, which would entail us moving to a less desirable location of the country, and I would likely lose my job and would need to find a lower paying remote programming job, so I'm definitely in the situation that is talked about in the article.

ebola1717 9y ago

I'm confused by this title. To the extent the article supports the title, it places blame not on motherhood, but the larger imbalance in expectations toward domestic responsibilities. However, it also notes that raises are lower, and lateral transfers are less productive for women.

m_mueller 9y ago
Looks like the problem is too complex to boil it down to a catch phrase, but 'motherhood' is maybe a reasonable proxy if it doesn't imply that there's nothing to do about it. It would be interesting to compare outcomes with countries that have very progressive parenthood vacation policies.

aaronblohowiak 9y ago

I agree that the gender pay gap is troubling, but I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers instead of looking for ways to make primary caregivers also earn as much as primary earners. 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.

Banthum 9y ago
I certainly agree with the goal of giving individuals their freedom and to have the right to act in an atypical way. 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. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
- beberlei 9y ago
  I think No one disagrees with you on biology. 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.
- cjsthompson 9y ago

epx 9y ago

Well, who wants the expensive wedding, the n kids and the white picked fence?

rlabrecque 9y ago
I'm a guy and I do, my gf doesn't really want any of that. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

safek 9y ago

So, people sometimes suggest deemphasizing long hours as a solution to the wage gap. 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?

scryder 9y ago
Trivially: fire you, and hire another poor shmuck at your starting salary to spend 90 hour weeks in time for the next launch. 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.
- safek 9y ago
  Wait, but it wasn't like they forced me. In fact the founder openly talked about the importance of work-life balance. Believe it or not, I actually wanted to do it. (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.)
  - scryder 9y ago
    If I can be extremely frank, you don't HAVE to force someone gullible enough to do it willingly. 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.

carsongross 9y ago

> Even when mothers cut back at work, they are not paid proportionately less. When their pay is calculated on an hourly basis, they are still paid less than men for the hours they work, Ms. Goldin has shown in previous work. Employers, especially for jobs that require a college degree, pay people disproportionately more for working long hours and disproportionately less for working flexibly. 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.

TearsInTheRain 9y ago
It seems weird to me that eliminating the "gender pay gap" is something businesses need to be actively concerned about. As long as they are offer equal pay for equal work they should be largely agnostic to the lifestyles choices of their employees
- mercer 9y ago
  You're right, and that's exactly why we have these discussions, push for legislation, put (social) pressure on businesses, etc. 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.
  - carsongross 9y ago
    The problem I see is that businesses are not agnostic to the lifestyle choices of their employees. 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.

afpx 9y ago

What if gender pay gap was just a result of men being pressured to take on more risks in life (i.e. a wider gaussian). And, the ones that have failed (or died) are no longer included in the data? 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?

safek 9y ago
This actually borders on being a rather comical point. People in prison have an income of zero. So if we're going to arrive at 0.77 by dividing one average by another, I for one would like to know, is the prison population being included? Where can I fund a journalistic investigation into the matter right away?
- njarboe 9y ago
  I would say the income of a person in prison is a large negative. "According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the average cost of housing an inmate in the U.S. was $31,286 in 2012." [1] [1] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost-to-house-inmates-in-prison/ http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost...
  - safek 9y ago
    That's funny, but the pay gap is about how much people receive in compensation, not the net amount that goes into sustaining their existence.
- jplayer01 9y ago
  0.77 isn't actually the pay gap. It's much, much smaller than that, below 10%. It's one of the biggest victories of feminists that they have been able to shape discourse around a completely wrong number.
qwerrtytest 9y ago
No, that's not true. If it was true, it would mean that the vast majority of the stupidest people are man and the vast majority of the smartest people are man. And the later statement will get you into lots of trouble...

BadassFractal 9y ago

Seems the classical political/economic/philosophical divide of meritocracy versus providing based on people's needs. 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?

jecjec 9y ago

The wage gap just doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because different occupations create different amounts of value. Why can't people accept this fact? Why can't people accept that women may want to live their lives differently from men? 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?

wanderr 9y ago
That's not what the gender pay gap is. It's about inequal pay for the same work.
- fsaneq2 9y ago
  That has been proven false, negligible or within noise over and over. The version stubbornly pushed is simply that median_salary(all women) != median_salary(all men).
- _bearMountain 9y ago
  sitation?
  - abetusk 9y ago
    Did you mean "citation"? You can find a definition on Wikipedia [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap
    - lwansbrough 9y ago
      I'm thankful that the wikipedia entry makes a point of separating the two definitions. While I generally nod along with the sentiment provided by top level comment, it's important to understand that there are different definitions; however irrelevant (IMO) one of the definitions seems to be (for the reasons again mentioned by the top level comment.) 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.

salmonet 9y ago

Well yeah, obviously. It surprises me that an idea as basic as this is newsworthy. Could someone please fill me in on what people thought was playing a larger role than this?

fsaneq2 9y ago
Many people find it more convenient to instead believe the difference is caused by people in charge automatically offering women less than what they would offer a man. Of course, studies controlling for the type of job, credentials, experience, ability, etc., show that to be a poor hypothesis, but it is nevertheless a phrasing that makes it easy to make people angry (and vote for you).

red023 9y ago

Surprise surprise!

Kluny 9y ago

This article makes me think of the sci-fi book Ethan of Athos. "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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_of_Athos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_of_Athos

gdix 9y ago

I'm pretty sure the ACTUAL reason is that sometimes people say "you guys" instead of "y'all" in work emails and on slack.

tnone 9y ago
But the fact that their movement for equality is called feminism and their satan is called patriarchy is absolutely not relevant, please look the other way.

watwut 9y ago

Why was this downvoted, seriosly. That is pretty usual problem through the genders are normally flipped.

dang 9y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334303 and marked it off-topic.

coned88 9y ago

So there is no pay gap. Certain people, mostly women choose to not work as much and make less. They should make less. 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.

ehsankia 9y ago
So the only options are is to not have kids. What about the option where the man gives becomes the care giver, or if they both do it equally. I think the real issue here isn't so much that "there's a pay gap", but rather that this second options is usually missing. That's where the lack of equality is. Why does it always have to be women that are the caregiver and have to give up on their career?
- tomp 9y ago
  Because of biology, it makes more seonse for the mother to be the primary caregiver (everything else being equal). Two reasons that I can think of: 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.
- gd1 9y ago
  They have to gestate the child for 9 months. This is unavoidable. They have breasts. Figure it out.

dba7dba 9y ago

We often read interviews of high achievers talk about how they balance their family-life/kids/work and yet still accomplish so much in their professional life. It's tough but they can manage, and we assume, of course, they are intelligent/hard workers. 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?

feistypharit 9y ago
The better question is how will you feel when your children starts calling the nanny "Mommy". 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.
- dba7dba 9y ago
  > The question is, can you build your income level high enough, and fast enough, so that you can afford nannies when you have kids? 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.

josephh 9y ago

And here's me thinking why nobody is talking about the elephant in the room that is the massive gender pay gap in the straight pornography industry.

baxtr 9y ago

Today's Mother's Day. Call your mums people https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HB3xM93rXbY 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.

moconnor 9y ago

Men are on average a couple of years older in a relationship (https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/whats-the-average-age-difference-in-a-couple/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/whats-the-average-age-di...). 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.

dom0 9y ago
> will address this source of imbalance. Why is it important to do so?

mrslave 9y ago

Not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. 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.