10 ms·

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

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
  Not all females exhibit maternal behavior, some are even pretty damn bad at it. Some males are within the range of women at maternal behavior. All these things are on a spectrum and when you think male and female you are thinking of archetypes, i.e. individuals that are at the far end of the spectrum. The so-called "biological" assumptions you mention, fall short when observing egalitarian hunter gatherer societies in which males participate a lot more in infant care. A lot of studies never bother to control for what happens in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies and are therefore often worthless in establishing whether something is cultural or biological. And let's not forget, the more monogamous a species, the more paternal care of offspring. This is even why monogamy exists. Given that humans are on the lower end of sexual dimorphism compared to other apes and have a lot of features of pair bonding species, humans males should be on average pretty damn good at infant care.
searealist 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. Why would you like to see this?
- aaronblohowiak 9y ago
  assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men, the current system under utilizes potentially highly skilled women. I believe that I and my loved ones would benefit from a system that fully utilizes our best and brightest.
  - jhcsugdijvcf 9y ago
    what about oh you know, evolution?
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Indeed, as well as underutilizing men who might be highly skilled at child care.
    - Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
      I suspect the brilliance of your comment will be unappreciated.
  - searealist 9y ago
    Are you assuming men and women are not choosing these roles freely or are you suggesting to force them to do things they do not want to do?
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Along those lines: "The Retro Wife: Feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home." http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/ http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/
shados 9y ago
Almost no one will bat an eye at how fathers get a fraction of the time off mothers get in the US at "pro parents" companies. Eg: Mothers might get 3 mothers, fathers might get 1. 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.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  >Almost no one will bat an eye at how fathers get a fraction of the time off mothers get in the US at "pro parents" companies. Eg: Mothers might get 3 mothers, fathers might get 1. 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.
  - shados 9y ago
    federal law gives 12 weeks unpaid leave. Companies may give paid leave, and usually make it uneven and pat themselves on the back by how pro-women they are, when they are effectively screwing them over long term for a short term benefit by promoting this inequality. 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.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      Even state law paid leave is often uneven in aggregate, but for arguably good cause (e.g., California has equal paid bonding leave for natural or adoptive parents, but women giving birth also have paid pregnancy disability leave.) While companies may not explicitly divide parental leave up the same way, they may be driven by similar concerns when creating unequal leave policies.
prostoalex 9y ago
The breast feeding should not be dismissed a minor reason. Faced with a crying (so likely hungry) baby, a woman can just offer her breast, and have a happy and quite possibly sleepy individual a few minutes after. 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).
- Illniyar 9y ago
  I've given bottled breastmilk to my son for almost a year while my wife worked. 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.
  - prostoalex 9y ago
    Yeah, schedule brings some method into the madness, but the counterparty still likes to throw a curveball or two by refusing to follow the schedule, spilling the bottle, etc.
  - ad_hominem 9y ago
    Not every mother produces adequate supply where you can just leave extra milk out and if the baby doesn't drink it, say "oh well" and toss it out. Not every baby gets on a predictable schedule either - my 6 month old didn't fall into a regular nightly feeding schedule until he was about 4 1/2 months old. 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.
adrianN 9y ago
At my company here in Germany nobody bats an eye if a male chooses to go on parental leave.
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Ditto Sweden. 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.
apatters 9y ago
> I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 9y ago
  Feminism is about behavioral engineering because we live in a winner-take-all society, and even sexism that falls short of "obvious inequalities" can hold people back dramatically. We live in a world where it's just easier for couples to have the woman be the primary caregiver, because of social pressures. Every school, doctor, etc. has my wife and I write down our work numbers. Nobody ever calls me first. I did the entire application process for my daughter's pre-K, and they still called my wife first to remind us to submit the enrollment contract. Merely not leaving your family makes you an above median father in society's eyes. But god forbid you're a mother who doesn't think it's a priority to shuffle your kid from activity to activity all week.
  - qb45 9y ago
    > it's just easier for couples to have the woman be the primary caregiver Yes Sherlock, it is. > Every school, doctor, etc. has my wife and I write down our work numbers. Nobody ever calls me first. Complain to them, not HN. Maybe they could add a note to call you. > I did the entire application process for my daughter's pre-K, and they still called my wife first You are not a special snowflake, how many other parents do they have?
    - sctb 9y ago
      Comments on Hacker News should say something besides being just personally rude. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
WhiteSource1 9y ago
Besides breast feeding, the problem is as much as womn take a hit for caregiving, men take a larger hit. They are punished more than women for caregiving roles, perhaps because there is still an expectation (so women still more slack even if they do take a hit) for taking care of children.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 9y ago
> Choosing to prioritize children over career reasonably impacts career trajectory. 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.
- anothercomment 9y ago
  So you think there is a market failure in pricing these workers? What do you think is causing it?
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Prejudice is stronger than the market. We had a market economy in the US for two centuries before social change forced businesses to stop categorically excluding more than half the potential workforce (women and black people). Prejudice caused businesses and schools to exclude people like Jews in the grounds that they were too successful. 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.
    - anothercomment 9y ago
      I don't think that is the same thing - preventing Jews from visiting business schools is not amenable to market forces, if there is a law against Jews visiting schools. Women had other things to do - Black people were working, too, but I suppose they were also banned from getting a proper education and from doing certain jobs. 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.
urahara 9y ago
I think that the global root of the problem is that we as a society do not recognize raising children as an extremely important work that should be respected and compensated. All the gaps will be fixed once there will be the way for women to get compensated for taking risk of child birth and linked reduction of career opportunities. Women do take a lot of risk, just not of the type companies pay for, and there is probably no way to make companies fully cover it. So the question is who and how should do it. Maybe some kind of basic income especially for this purpose would work. It is actually weird that while the idea of the basic income is so widespread, there are no equally popular ideas of using it to fix the gender wage gap problem.
- ssambros 9y ago
  > extremely important work that should be respected and compensated 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?
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Because those kids will work and pay taxes, and you'll need that tax income to keep you alive and looked after when you're older.
  - dgudkov 9y ago
    Why would provide social care for disabled people or homeless children?
    - ssambros 9y ago
      That is not the same thing and is not what is being discussed.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    A kid born, raised, and educated in a modern western country will generate far more economic value over its lifetime than it cost to raise and educate it. If tomorrow it was found that all the 18-35 year olds that will ever be born have already been born, what do you think would happen to the stock market? It would crater--stock prices are built on the assumption that there will be new generations of consumer to sell and advertise stuff to.
anothercomment 9y ago
Would you say it is more of a privilege or more of a burden to be able to spend time with your own children? 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.
feistypharit 9y ago
As a stay at home dad, I agree. Everything is still very gender biased. I cannot tell you how hard it is for our piano teacher to start to say "mom" or "mom's", then remember I'm in the room and also say "dad". 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.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  > I think there's a growing stigma in the US against being a parent. 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.
  - YCode 9y ago
    I'm sure it depends heavily on your country, career field, age, income level, etc... 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.
abandonliberty 9y ago
As a society we need to attempt to align the individual/family/social costs/benefits of rearing children and make them as equitable as possible for people regardless of gender. 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.

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
Not all females exhibit maternal behavior, some are even pretty damn bad at it. Some males are within the range of women at maternal behavior. All these things are on a spectrum and when you think male and female you are thinking of archetypes, i.e. individuals that are at the far end of the spectrum. The so-called "biological" assumptions you mention, fall short when observing egalitarian hunter gatherer societies in which males participate a lot more in infant care. A lot of studies never bother to control for what happens in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies and are therefore often worthless in establishing whether something is cultural or biological. And let's not forget, the more monogamous a species, the more paternal care of offspring. This is even why monogamy exists. Given that humans are on the lower end of sexual dimorphism compared to other apes and have a lot of features of pair bonding species, humans males should be on average pretty damn good at infant care.

searealist 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. Why would you like to see this?

aaronblohowiak 9y ago
assuming the distribution of potential aptitude for each profession is roughly equal between women and men, the current system under utilizes potentially highly skilled women. I believe that I and my loved ones would benefit from a system that fully utilizes our best and brightest.
- jhcsugdijvcf 9y ago
  what about oh you know, evolution?
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Indeed, as well as underutilizing men who might be highly skilled at child care.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
    I suspect the brilliance of your comment will be unappreciated.
- searealist 9y ago
  Are you assuming men and women are not choosing these roles freely or are you suggesting to force them to do things they do not want to do?
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Along those lines: "The Retro Wife: Feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home." http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/ http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/

shados 9y ago

Almost no one will bat an eye at how fathers get a fraction of the time off mothers get in the US at "pro parents" companies. Eg: Mothers might get 3 mothers, fathers might get 1. 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.

boomboomsubban 9y ago
>Almost no one will bat an eye at how fathers get a fraction of the time off mothers get in the US at "pro parents" companies. Eg: Mothers might get 3 mothers, fathers might get 1. 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.
- shados 9y ago
  federal law gives 12 weeks unpaid leave. Companies may give paid leave, and usually make it uneven and pat themselves on the back by how pro-women they are, when they are effectively screwing them over long term for a short term benefit by promoting this inequality. 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.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Even state law paid leave is often uneven in aggregate, but for arguably good cause (e.g., California has equal paid bonding leave for natural or adoptive parents, but women giving birth also have paid pregnancy disability leave.) While companies may not explicitly divide parental leave up the same way, they may be driven by similar concerns when creating unequal leave policies.

prostoalex 9y ago

The breast feeding should not be dismissed a minor reason. Faced with a crying (so likely hungry) baby, a woman can just offer her breast, and have a happy and quite possibly sleepy individual a few minutes after. 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).

Illniyar 9y ago
I've given bottled breastmilk to my son for almost a year while my wife worked. 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.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  Yeah, schedule brings some method into the madness, but the counterparty still likes to throw a curveball or two by refusing to follow the schedule, spilling the bottle, etc.
- ad_hominem 9y ago
  Not every mother produces adequate supply where you can just leave extra milk out and if the baby doesn't drink it, say "oh well" and toss it out. Not every baby gets on a predictable schedule either - my 6 month old didn't fall into a regular nightly feeding schedule until he was about 4 1/2 months old. 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.

adrianN 9y ago

At my company here in Germany nobody bats an eye if a male chooses to go on parental leave.

willvarfar 9y ago
Ditto Sweden. 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.

apatters 9y ago

> I'd like to see more fathers as primary caregivers 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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 9y ago
Feminism is about behavioral engineering because we live in a winner-take-all society, and even sexism that falls short of "obvious inequalities" can hold people back dramatically. We live in a world where it's just easier for couples to have the woman be the primary caregiver, because of social pressures. Every school, doctor, etc. has my wife and I write down our work numbers. Nobody ever calls me first. I did the entire application process for my daughter's pre-K, and they still called my wife first to remind us to submit the enrollment contract. Merely not leaving your family makes you an above median father in society's eyes. But god forbid you're a mother who doesn't think it's a priority to shuffle your kid from activity to activity all week.
- qb45 9y ago
  > it's just easier for couples to have the woman be the primary caregiver Yes Sherlock, it is. > Every school, doctor, etc. has my wife and I write down our work numbers. Nobody ever calls me first. Complain to them, not HN. Maybe they could add a note to call you. > I did the entire application process for my daughter's pre-K, and they still called my wife first You are not a special snowflake, how many other parents do they have?
  - sctb 9y ago
    Comments on Hacker News should say something besides being just personally rude. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WhiteSource1 9y ago

Besides breast feeding, the problem is as much as womn take a hit for caregiving, men take a larger hit. They are punished more than women for caregiving roles, perhaps because there is still an expectation (so women still more slack even if they do take a hit) for taking care of children.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 9y ago

> Choosing to prioritize children over career reasonably impacts career trajectory. 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.

anothercomment 9y ago
So you think there is a market failure in pricing these workers? What do you think is causing it?
- rayiner 9y ago
  Prejudice is stronger than the market. We had a market economy in the US for two centuries before social change forced businesses to stop categorically excluding more than half the potential workforce (women and black people). Prejudice caused businesses and schools to exclude people like Jews in the grounds that they were too successful. 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.
  - anothercomment 9y ago
    I don't think that is the same thing - preventing Jews from visiting business schools is not amenable to market forces, if there is a law against Jews visiting schools. Women had other things to do - Black people were working, too, but I suppose they were also banned from getting a proper education and from doing certain jobs. 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.

urahara 9y ago

I think that the global root of the problem is that we as a society do not recognize raising children as an extremely important work that should be respected and compensated. All the gaps will be fixed once there will be the way for women to get compensated for taking risk of child birth and linked reduction of career opportunities. Women do take a lot of risk, just not of the type companies pay for, and there is probably no way to make companies fully cover it. So the question is who and how should do it. Maybe some kind of basic income especially for this purpose would work. It is actually weird that while the idea of the basic income is so widespread, there are no equally popular ideas of using it to fix the gender wage gap problem.

ssambros 9y ago
> extremely important work that should be respected and compensated 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?
- DanBC 9y ago
  Because those kids will work and pay taxes, and you'll need that tax income to keep you alive and looked after when you're older.
- dgudkov 9y ago
  Why would provide social care for disabled people or homeless children?
  - ssambros 9y ago
    That is not the same thing and is not what is being discussed.
- rayiner 9y ago
  A kid born, raised, and educated in a modern western country will generate far more economic value over its lifetime than it cost to raise and educate it. If tomorrow it was found that all the 18-35 year olds that will ever be born have already been born, what do you think would happen to the stock market? It would crater--stock prices are built on the assumption that there will be new generations of consumer to sell and advertise stuff to.

anothercomment 9y ago

Would you say it is more of a privilege or more of a burden to be able to spend time with your own children? 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.

feistypharit 9y ago

As a stay at home dad, I agree. Everything is still very gender biased. I cannot tell you how hard it is for our piano teacher to start to say "mom" or "mom's", then remember I'm in the room and also say "dad". 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.

ryanmarsh 9y ago
> I think there's a growing stigma in the US against being a parent. 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.
- YCode 9y ago
  I'm sure it depends heavily on your country, career field, age, income level, etc... 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.

abandonliberty 9y ago

As a society we need to attempt to align the individual/family/social costs/benefits of rearing children and make them as equitable as possible for people regardless of gender. 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.