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The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the

The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.

ars 9y ago
Is that bad? Is pay more important than raising children? Is the best plan, to make money, then to pay other people to raise your children?
zaroth 9y ago
As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Obviously with unlimited resources this doesn’t have to be the case, but it will always be the average case. This result isn’t surprising, nor does it seem something that society should be overly concerned with fixing. Choices have all sorts of positive and negative impacts, usually foreseeable ones at that. Work less to raise a family and someone in that household will earn less outside the household. Economically both parents are still probably producing the same value, arguably the woman is producing significantly more economical value, just the economists aren’t accounting for and valuing properly the work being done inside the household so the graph is scewed. You create a stacked line chart which tries to account for the net value of the cost-reducing housework performed by men and women in addition to the outside income producing activities, and I would bet the curve shows women driving significantly increased economic value after having children. It’s the premise that the only metric we should be looking at is outside income which is completely flawed.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Weirdly, there's still a household chore gap between men and women. My position on this is pretty well inline with John Green's: The pay gap is down to a single digit difference, but there is a difference in the unrenumerated work which goes into keeping society going in the context of raising children. (We might disagree on what to do about it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI
  - unremunerated 9y ago
    Dont know why you're being downvoted. Chore gap is a big issue in hetero-couple households (the majority), and chores and household caring/tending work _is_ a big support for capitalism which capitalism refuses to acknowledge (by refusing to remunerate it). But, capitalism still benefits from it. Guess who usually does this work? Clue: not men. Most probably downvoted by men who refuse to acknowledge the value provided by unremunerated work to society. > unrenumerated - you mean unremunerated, right? (I'm what traditional/conservative society would call a "man")
    - unremunerated 9y ago
      Is the fact that my comment was so downvoted as to get flagged an example of men -majority of hn readers- refusing to acknowledge unremunerated work, and the fact that men are privileged from having to perform this unremunerated household work in our society?
- Jare 9y ago
  This is so intellectually dishonest it borders on insult. > the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane Here you talk about the "career of raising children" > only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed And then you proceed to justify it with an activity that on average probably lasts for about a year and can in large part be made compatible with a professional life. The average SV hacker brags about taking longer sabbaticals than this.
  - belorn 9y ago
    Should be a fairly easy social experiment to do. Take a good sample size of families (>20000) and provide compulsory paid leave (and counselors that checks that no extra work is being spent at home or the government pay is taken away) so that both parents are away from home at exactly equal amount from inception until the kid moves out. After 20 years, compare the control with those families that successful follows the trial (and for fun, throw in people who take sabbaticals as a third group) and see the results. Have poll questions about the size of social support networks, social status, income, carer, stress, perception of self worth, and so on. Last make a follow up in 50 years for life span and final carer, pensions and social support networks. I have some predictions for all of those, backed by the research I have seen so far, but it would make for a very interesting read if such study would be made.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    That first quote was someone else's comment, but I don't see anything wrong with the premise. Trajectory and velocity are absolutely properties of career advancement. There's also the question of whether women with children at home are working the same number of hours at the office as men, even after they return to work. Let's throw in the average willingness of a male partner to limit their own career by prioritizing taking care of children over needs of their employer as a factor as well. Children take an enormous amount of time and money to raise. And the amount of time and money we spend raising our children has increased significantly, as the age of maturity continues to increase (anecdotally this has gone well past 18 years old now, it seems children on average are being taken care of by their parents well into their 20s now). Someone in the family needs to be able to get home to make dinner every night. If you mostly can't travel for your company, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you can't stay past 5 oclock without it being an issue that needs to be planned for, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you get called away from an important meeting because your child is sent home from school with a cold... It's reasonable for employers to pay more to employees which can offer a higher level of service and flexibility and accommodation for work schedule and travel requirements. One (or more) parental figures in the household need to elect to be on-call, and whoever makes that choice is going to see less outside income because of it. Equality doesn't mean that men and women need to make the same choices, just that a man and woman who do make the same choice should see the same outcome. What the statistics are showing us is merely that men and women, on average, tend to have different preferences and make different choices.
fixermark 9y ago
That's to be expected if most mothers become full-time caregivers to the children, right? If caregiving were split father-primary or mother-primary 50/50 among families, I'd expect we'd see the pay gap drop. (Unfortunately, I suspect that because of gains from specialization, doing something more elaborate like both parents juggling career and childcare equally leads to net-worse outcomes in terms of both care given and revenue for household).
billti 9y ago
The most amazing thing to me was that the male income didn't budge after childbirth. Even ignoring taking time off work, my free time in the evenings and mornings, when I would often do some of my best focused work, has almost entirely vanished since having kids.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  You adapt. Those things are really luxuries.
bduerst 9y ago
This is correlated with a Harvard study of Booth MBA graduates: >The presence of children is associated with less accumulated job experience, more career interruptions, shorter work hours, and substantial earnings declines for female but not for male MBAs. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_the_gender_gap_for_young_professionals_in_the_financial_and_corporate_sectors.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_th...

The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.

ars 9y ago

Is that bad? Is pay more important than raising children? Is the best plan, to make money, then to pay other people to raise your children?

zaroth 9y ago

As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Obviously with unlimited resources this doesn’t have to be the case, but it will always be the average case. This result isn’t surprising, nor does it seem something that society should be overly concerned with fixing. Choices have all sorts of positive and negative impacts, usually foreseeable ones at that. Work less to raise a family and someone in that household will earn less outside the household. Economically both parents are still probably producing the same value, arguably the woman is producing significantly more economical value, just the economists aren’t accounting for and valuing properly the work being done inside the household so the graph is scewed. You create a stacked line chart which tries to account for the net value of the cost-reducing housework performed by men and women in addition to the outside income producing activities, and I would bet the curve shows women driving significantly increased economic value after having children. It’s the premise that the only metric we should be looking at is outside income which is completely flawed.

stcredzero 9y ago
As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men. Weirdly, there's still a household chore gap between men and women. My position on this is pretty well inline with John Green's: The pay gap is down to a single digit difference, but there is a difference in the unrenumerated work which goes into keeping society going in the context of raising children. (We might disagree on what to do about it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI
- unremunerated 9y ago
  Dont know why you're being downvoted. Chore gap is a big issue in hetero-couple households (the majority), and chores and household caring/tending work _is_ a big support for capitalism which capitalism refuses to acknowledge (by refusing to remunerate it). But, capitalism still benefits from it. Guess who usually does this work? Clue: not men. Most probably downvoted by men who refuse to acknowledge the value provided by unremunerated work to society. > unrenumerated - you mean unremunerated, right? (I'm what traditional/conservative society would call a "man")
  - unremunerated 9y ago
    Is the fact that my comment was so downvoted as to get flagged an example of men -majority of hn readers- refusing to acknowledge unremunerated work, and the fact that men are privileged from having to perform this unremunerated household work in our society?
Jare 9y ago
This is so intellectually dishonest it borders on insult. > the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane Here you talk about the "career of raising children" > only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed And then you proceed to justify it with an activity that on average probably lasts for about a year and can in large part be made compatible with a professional life. The average SV hacker brags about taking longer sabbaticals than this.
- belorn 9y ago
  Should be a fairly easy social experiment to do. Take a good sample size of families (>20000) and provide compulsory paid leave (and counselors that checks that no extra work is being spent at home or the government pay is taken away) so that both parents are away from home at exactly equal amount from inception until the kid moves out. After 20 years, compare the control with those families that successful follows the trial (and for fun, throw in people who take sabbaticals as a third group) and see the results. Have poll questions about the size of social support networks, social status, income, carer, stress, perception of self worth, and so on. Last make a follow up in 50 years for life span and final carer, pensions and social support networks. I have some predictions for all of those, backed by the research I have seen so far, but it would make for a very interesting read if such study would be made.
- zaroth 9y ago
  That first quote was someone else's comment, but I don't see anything wrong with the premise. Trajectory and velocity are absolutely properties of career advancement. There's also the question of whether women with children at home are working the same number of hours at the office as men, even after they return to work. Let's throw in the average willingness of a male partner to limit their own career by prioritizing taking care of children over needs of their employer as a factor as well. Children take an enormous amount of time and money to raise. And the amount of time and money we spend raising our children has increased significantly, as the age of maturity continues to increase (anecdotally this has gone well past 18 years old now, it seems children on average are being taken care of by their parents well into their 20s now). Someone in the family needs to be able to get home to make dinner every night. If you mostly can't travel for your company, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you can't stay past 5 oclock without it being an issue that needs to be planned for, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you get called away from an important meeting because your child is sent home from school with a cold... It's reasonable for employers to pay more to employees which can offer a higher level of service and flexibility and accommodation for work schedule and travel requirements. One (or more) parental figures in the household need to elect to be on-call, and whoever makes that choice is going to see less outside income because of it. Equality doesn't mean that men and women need to make the same choices, just that a man and woman who do make the same choice should see the same outcome. What the statistics are showing us is merely that men and women, on average, tend to have different preferences and make different choices.

fixermark 9y ago

That's to be expected if most mothers become full-time caregivers to the children, right? If caregiving were split father-primary or mother-primary 50/50 among families, I'd expect we'd see the pay gap drop. (Unfortunately, I suspect that because of gains from specialization, doing something more elaborate like both parents juggling career and childcare equally leads to net-worse outcomes in terms of both care given and revenue for household).

billti 9y ago

The most amazing thing to me was that the male income didn't budge after childbirth. Even ignoring taking time off work, my free time in the evenings and mornings, when I would often do some of my best focused work, has almost entirely vanished since having kids.

Spooky23 9y ago
You adapt. Those things are really luxuries.

bduerst 9y ago

This is correlated with a Harvard study of Booth MBA graduates: >The presence of children is associated with less accumulated job experience, more career interruptions, shorter work hours, and substantial earnings declines for female but not for male MBAs. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_the_gender_gap_for_young_professionals_in_the_financial_and_corporate_sectors.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_th...