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The 10-Year Baby Window That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap

95 points by polarbear5 9y ago

poster123 9y ago
The U.S. educational system is needlessly slow and expensive. In other countries you don't need to pay for four years of college before starting medical school or law school. For example, I think in India a woman can finish medical school at age 23, whereas in the U.S. it would be age 26, assuming she graduates high school at 18. If women and men complete their education earlier, it is easier to have both a high-powered career and a family.
- kohanz 9y ago
  > For example, I think in India a woman can finish medical school at age 23, whereas in the U.S. it would be age 26 Do they emerge with the same level of training & experience? Difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    In India, medical school is 5 years. In the US it is 4 years. Beyond that, I do not know. I will note, however, that when Indian doctors move to the US, do their USMLE and try to get into a residency program, they do not do any special training to "catch up".
  - 8ytecoder 9y ago
    The first four years in the US is actually not in medical school. Basically you'll need the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in biological sciences to go to medical school. Most students do 4-yr college and then med. A total of 8 years. Then residency and on and on. If the biological sciences requirement is simply folded into a five year course that's the Indian model. MBBS - Bachelor of science and Bachelor of medicine.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    It's really bizarre the way that pre-professional undergraduate programs in the US work. Pre-med is basically a smorgasbord of random stuff, with a slight inclination towards biology and chemistry, although from my remembrances with premed classmates, they didn't take a whole lot more sciences than the general requirements mandated. Pre-law is even worse, with people taking the most generic possible collection of liberal arts classes, usually ending up with Econ or History almost by default. There's some perverse incentives to take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs. If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US.
    - eesmith 9y ago
      Your description "random stuff" is what in the US is considered a "well-rounded education." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/why-university-students-need-a-well-rounded-education/article4610406/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/w... (picked mostly arbitrarily from a DDG search for 'well-rounded education') states the usual reasons for that approach. For example, is the goal only 'to produce medical professionals in an efficient way'? Or does education also include 'acquiring general knowledge' and 'training in citizenship' (quoting that link). There's also a complaint about 'what Duke University professor and interdisciplinary-studies expert Cathy Davidson describes as "the duck, duck, goose model."' I had an odd exchange once, over lunch at a UK research site with mostly European graduate students. I found out that I knew more about European history than the others. My education in the US included a European history course, while most of the Europeans had specialized in science since they were teenagers. Not that that knowledge has really proved useful ... but then again, neither has my training in quantum mechanics.
      - megaman22 9y ago
        It's a luxury, and a remnant of outdated conceptions of what the purpose of university education is. As much as some hate reality, and wish for some never-existent golden age of well-rounded liberal arts education, people engage in higher education because it is the gateway to a career, and as such, what they really want is relevant vocational training, which, outside of a few rare disciplines (engineering, namely) they rarely get, and instead faff around with trivialities for most of four years, at a toll of 35-60k per year.
- randomdata 9y ago
  The long process to becoming a medical doctor (or lawyer) plays a large part in why they tend to be high-powered careers. Not being able to start a career until later in life is a disincentive to follow in that path, and the fewer people willing to still go through with it, the more power those careers will possess. There are other ways to limit the numbers, like a lottery, but not all of those are given the same social acceptance in North America. We are socially okay with extending time in academia. Not that everyone would become a doctor even if it were easier to attain, but to take it to the logical extreme, if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity.
  - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
    > if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity. This is only true if every doctor coming out of med school is exactly the same or if you can't tell the difference in skill among doctors.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      It still holds true. If this were the case, the scarcity of those who have observably more skill will hold the power. But there is an expectation that med school produces doctors who are sufficiently equal in their ability (in that you should not need to worry about which doctor you end up with). That you are suggesting this is not the case is quite interesting.
      - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
        I think there are large differences in ability between doctors even within specialties, but most doctors meet a minimum level of competence because the requirements for med school effectively filter out people who are not intelligent and conscientious enough to become doctors. If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
- ardit33 9y ago
  The problem is that people don't fully mature until 25-ish. I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books. Also, a huge chunk of tech's HR issues are mostly created by startups having very young founders and young managers that don't have real life experience. (to me, young is anybody younger than 30). Half of the firing/issues I have seen in real life could have been easily avoided if the people in the room had more experience.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Way back when, there was some limited experimentation in the US with 6-year combined college/MD programs. They still exist but very few are 6 year--and they're schools you've probably never heard of. My understanding is that part of the issue was that there was a general feeling that students benefited from the additional time even if it wasn't strictly necessary with respect to coursework.
  - heliostatic 9y ago
    While I think your contention is valid in 2018, it's important to consider how much of this is culturally and historically contingent. Consider the ages of some key figures in the American Revolution in 1776 (https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding-fathers-on-july-4-1776 https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding...) Marquis de Lafayette, 18 James Monroe, 18 Gilbert Stuart, 20 Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 Betsy Ross, 24 James Madison, 25
  - nailer 9y ago
    > I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books. I wouldn't trust a 26 year old or 40 year old newly graduated doctor either, for the same reasons.
  - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
    This is a good point, but I don't think that means we should stick young people in schools while we wait for them to mature. It seems more useful to have them doing some sort of productive work, where they can start learning by experience.
- andrewl 9y ago
  Freeman Dyson has commented on how long and wasteful it is for most people to get a doctorate I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem...
  - asabjorn 9y ago
    I took one, and although it gives me a great advantage to be trained in research when exploring complex problems it feels like it took too many years that I could have spend on my passion for creating things.
- Eire_Banshee 9y ago
  Yeah... but nobody books a trip to India just for medical care either.
  - ranko 9y ago
    "Foreign patients travelling to India to seek medical treatment in 2012, 2013 and 2014 numbered 171,021, 236,898, and 184,298 respectively" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism_in_India)
    - Eire_Banshee 9y ago
      Yeah, and 500,000 seek treatment in the US every year. https://www.imtj.com/news/bringing-medical-tourists-usa/ https://www.imtj.com/news/bringing-medical-tourists-usa/
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    There are many people that do, and they save thousands. It is especially good for common procedures, like LASIK, dental work, etc.
    - Eire_Banshee 9y ago
      You save thousands for a reason.
      - nugi 9y ago
        By not paying non-negotiated rates for medical care? Sounds like a good reason to me.
- rayiner 9y ago
  It's not just India. A law degree is a 3-year undergraduate degree in the U.K. as well. It works fine. In the U.S., in contrast, there has been a push towards extending the process that has a disparate impact on women. Now, it is typical for a lawyer to get a 4-year college degree, spend a year or two working, spend three years in law school, and graduate around 27 or 28, putting them into their mid to late 30s by the time they are established enough for many women to feel comfortable having kids. It's an enormously sexist feature of the profession, caused by the fetishization of schooling and academia.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
    >It's an enormously sexist feature of the profession Just because something may have an impact that differs based on sex doesn't make it sexist. Would we call pregnancy sexist because it works differently for each sex?
    - rayiner 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact.
      - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
        >This form of discrimination occurs where an employer does not intend to discriminate; to the contrary, it occurs when identical standards or procedures are applied to everyone, despite the fact that they lead to a substantial difference in employment outcomes for the members of a particular group and they are unrelated to successful job performance. Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance? If I require my developers to have a degree, it doesn't violate this concept even though a degree isn't required to be a good programmer.
        rayiner 9y ago
        > Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance? Yes. E.g. in the U.K., you can start practicing law around age 21. In the U.S., typically it's 25 if you go straight through. Somehow the U.K. still manages to be a center of commerce and finance.
- clairity 9y ago
  i'd be ok with medical/law training to start as early as 16 (for those who can finish high school early). for med school, you could still have 5 years of academic training (as with the Indian model) and then do 4 years of apprenticeship (internship /residency) and be a fully qualifed doctor by 25. for law school, 4 years of academic training and 3 years of apprenticeship and be a fully qualified lawyer by 23. these are professional trades, so the apprenticeship piece is a crucial transition period to learn from those who came before you.
greggeter 9y ago
Having babies is problematic now, because wages.
gimmeDatCheddar 9y ago
How is this a surprise to anyone? Children require time and effort, and this usually means one of the parents works less or not at all. Considering 25 to 35 are prime child-rearing ages, the reason for this gap seems quite obvious.
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  The result indicates that 25 to 35 is prime career age, not prime child-rearing age (the latter may well be true, but this study doesn't answer that question). It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect. I would have probably guessed that any hiatus in your professional career (including education) would result in a proportionally-delayed career advance throughout your career. I. e.: spend 2 years with children from 23-25 and your income at 60 is what you'd have made at 58 without children.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    The article is comparing pay gap between married partners. Those who have children when they are younger are much less likely to be highly educated or be in high paying careers to begin with, and they're not likely to be in a relationship with someone who is either. Lower pay in general implies lower variance since they're not likely to be moving up the ranks into $100k, $150k, $200k+ careers.
  - tomp 9y ago
    > It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect Not really. My hunch is that it's due to two reasons: (1) education is often much less intensive than a competitive career, so it's much earier to study while having a child (in many cases, you don't even need to attend the lectures, just pass the exams!); (2) probably the much bigger reason is that the "have children before 25" sample includes mostly people in non-professional careers where there isn't a lot of room for advancement anyways... someone with 2 years of experience as a store clerk or receptionist is worth about the same as someone with 4 years of experience, whereas the worth is significantly different in something like medicine, investment banking, programming, ...
bitL 9y ago
Aren't single working women <30 on average paid 8% more than men of the same age?
- lmcnish14 9y ago
  Where did you get that number?
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - ardillaroja 9y ago
    Not OP but this guardian article mentions some figures supporting that from UK, compiled by Press Association based on on ONS data. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
  - mattmcknight 9y ago
    Probably here: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274...
- ggggtez 9y ago
  My guess is that it doesn't account for job title. One of the articles below says: >He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. So yeah, if you are sampling 3:2 women:men with college education, then what you say is true if and only if that is the distribution in reality. I don't think that baseline assumption is supported by the evidence [1]. In actuality, they've just identified that college educated women tend to move to cities for work in greater numbers than men. However, if you compared only women with college degrees to only men with college degrees, then the difference would reappear. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
blattimwind 9y ago
"problematic" If you're a woman and you have non-standardized interests, you are "problematic" for society. If you're a woman and want to raise your own children, you're "problematic". If you're a woman and the number on your paycheck is not priority #1 in your life, you're "problematic".
- Eire_Banshee 9y ago
  Im pretty sure 'problematic' here is just that this is problematic for women. Not that women are problematic...
- sgslo 9y ago
  Article subtitle mentioned 'problematic', searching the rest of the article found one other usage: > This seems to be particularly problematic for women building their careers, when they might have to work hardest and prove themselves most, and less so for women who have already established some seniority or who have not yet started careers. There is no mention of women being problematic for society.
zeveb 9y ago
> Research has shown other policies that would help: programs to help women re-enter the labor force; flexibility in when and where work gets done; subsidized child care. I'm not certain what a 'programme to help women re-enter the labor force' would look like, so I won't comment on that. Flexibility is awesome, and in many jobs (particularly our own) it's possible. But in many other jobs (the majority, perhaps?) it's impossible, or has extreme costs. I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by strangers will have various physical & psychological issues compared to those raised by their own families; while it's necessary in some cases I don't think that we want to encourage it as a society.
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  There are multiple definitions of flexibility: the ability to quickly change one's schedule, the ability to to continuously work a non-standard schedule, and the possibility to easily work part-time (and return to full time). All three are useful for parents of young children. And, interestingly enough, the first tends to be anti-correlate to the latter two among professions. Consider jobs where it's hard to reschedule work at the last minute: pilot, surgeon, lawyer, cop, cashier (at smaller stores), etc: all these jobs tend to allow people to choose schedules other than 9-5 rather easily. In any case: I think these are all solvable problems, and the old saying that if men where responsible for childcare, we'd have more day cares than Starbucks and mandated home office policies for every company comes to mind. Your last point of parent's being the only ones capable of raising a child is idle conjecture not supported by any research. And in any case, it would still allow to distribute child care more equally among both parents. Flexible schedules
- harryh 9y ago
  I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by stranger... This has been studied. There is very little evidence for your hypothesis.
  - tomp 9y ago
    Do you have any links to any more extensive explanation?
deleted 9y ago
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tjansen 9y ago
Like so many others, the article fails to acknowledge that some women (and some men!) don't mind earning less if that allows them to take are of their children. I could certainly earn more than I do today. But that would mean spending even less time with my children, so I don't. Does it hurt my career? Probably. But it's worth it.
- IAmEveryone 9y ago
  And these women who prefer to earn less money just happen to be the ones that get children between the ages of 25 and 35, but not before or after?
  - tjansen 9y ago
    Given the choice of either focusing on your career or your children, yes. If you'd want to focus on your career and maximize your income, would you take off a few years to take care of your children? Certainly not.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    Further study is warranted, I'm sure, but it seems reasonable on the surface. Those who have their children earlier have children that are older during their prime working years. Those who have children later already have established careers. 25-35 does seem to be a critical period in setting the course for one's career, so those who opt to focus on children during that time are giving up the gains they could be making in the workplace.
    - IAmEveryone 9y ago
      That's not the point. You're just providing an intuitive explanation for the study's empirical findings, which I agree with. OP's point was specifically that the wage gap may be caused by women's focus on child care instead of career advancement. Yet, as I was trying to say: that idea is hard to square with the study's findings. Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25. But in that age group, the study did not find a sustained reduction in income.
belorn 9y ago
I would be very interested to know if there is a correlation to how often men file for divorce and the amount of time the wife spends on child care and related responsibilities. We already know that the rate in which women will file for divorce is directly related to the income of the husband, which would then make this a directly symmetric incentive model and possible a form of nash equilibrium which the solution that the article suggest are not addressing.
- kennywinker 9y ago
  > We already know that the rate in which women will file for divorce is directly related to the income of the husband Do we know that? I see a study suggesting that women who earn more relative to their male partners will be more likely to divorce (so called "independence effect"). I see a study that suggests that lower income families are more likely to divorce. These two bullet points alone make me think there is not a clear cut story about how the income of one partner effects marriage and divorce rates.
  - vowelless 9y ago
    There is a study that shows rates for different industries too. I think entertainment industry has the highest divorce rates where as engineering is among the lowest? If someone kind find a link I'll be grateful
    - cosmotron 9y ago
      I believe this is the article: http://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation http://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - belorn 9y ago
    > A study at Ohio State University found 75 percent of women don’t want to marry an unemployed man. It also found that a man’s unemployment has a negative effect on whether a couple goes through divorce. >Results showed a woman’s employment status has no impact on whether she chooses to divorce, but an unemployed man faces a greater increase his wife will file. (https://www.themarkslawfirm.com/marital-problems-linked-to-unemployment/ https://www.themarkslawfirm.com/marital-problems-linked-to-u...) > A Harvard University study declared “job loss” the biggest factor in divorce. > she learned that divorce is more likely when husbands are not employed full-time. In fact, those without full-time jobs increase their odds of divorce by roughly 30%. (https://thebigsmoke.com/2016/12/29/harvard-study-finds-job-loss-number-one-reason-divorce/ https://thebigsmoke.com/2016/12/29/harvard-study-finds-job-l...) > Others looked at the how income affects the marriage and divorce decisions of young Americans; they found that high earnings capacity increases the probability of marriage and decreases the probability of divorce for young men. (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...) It feels pretty well established.
kennywinker 9y ago
> The study found that over all, women earn $12,600 less than men before children are born and $25,100 less afterward. If two working people have a child, and one is going to partially leave the work force to care for the child, who's salary would you pick? The uneven salary, on top of the cultural biases we all absorb, mean it's practically a given the man will stay in the workforce and the woman will become the caregiver. Equal pay for women means more men will get to take on childcare roles. Feminism is humanism.
- 84Winston 9y ago
  What if there's a biological difference that makes women way more apt to take care of small children?
- kimmeld 9y ago
  > The group of women who had the biggest post-baby pay gap compared with their husbands was, paradoxically, women who earned more than their husbands before having children. Yet you ignore that the article goes on to state that the biggest gaps were the ones that started with the women making more. It seems on average the couple is picking the wife to absorb the hit regardless of the paychecks.
  - kennywinker 9y ago
    I did mention something about cultural biases, yes? Culture has its hooks deep. Given complete freedom economically, we still choose things based on what is "normal" or "expected".
    - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
      And equal pay won't fix things like each gender having difference qualities they prefer in partners, on average. Nor will it fix things like career choice (studies have found that places with less economic freedom have better gender parity in picking careers). It may be possible some of this isn't cultural at all. Every other species on the planet has sexually dimorphic characteristics, so to we shouldn't assume that humans either don't, or even that the ones we do have would have no impact on any factors related to pay (including things like impacting what careers a person finds desirable).
api 9y ago
Wouldn't lengthening the human life span solve a lot of this? Or even lengthening our span of peak performance? What if we lived to an average of 90-110 and had peak performance until 70-80 instead of living to 70-80 with peak performance until 40-50? That 10 year gap would mean a lot less.
- feistypharit 9y ago
  Well, you can't move a biological clock. Women that get pregnant after age 35 are deemed high risk, advanced maternal age. The risk of downs syndrome and other defects goes way up. Men having children after age 35 also have some poor outcomes, but not quite as bad or likely. There sure is a lot of assumptions here too. More and more men are becoming stay at home dad's...myself included. Guess what, it impacts our career too. Possibly more so...I can't tell you the number of people that seem shocked to hear I stay home. Some literally are speechless.
  - api 9y ago
    Sure. My point was that with an extra 20 years of peak time taking time off from mid 20s until mid 30s would not be so devastating. You'd have a lot more time to make up for it later.
clairity 9y ago
from a pure economic perspective (which is the slant imposed by "pay gap"), a core piece of the problem is that household care (as a broader category that includes child care) is not adequately specified and appropriately valued monetarily. if household management was a good to be bought and sold, we could discover its price curve through market mechanisms. since women do more house work, we would be able to appropriately account for that gap. but do we want a society where household care is simply another market good?
- weberc2 9y ago
  What is meant by "is not adequately specified and not appropriately valued monetarily"? My question isn't meant to sound skeptical, I'm genuinely curious.
  - clairity 9y ago
    i meant that we don't buy and sell it in the ways we would buy and sell plumbing services, for example. we don't have a professional organization that sets standards and issues credentials. we can't compare the quality of one provider against another. there isn't a market to buy and sell household care, with the concomitant prices that implies. but the real question is, would we want to?
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Presumably we don't do these things because the market indicates that they aren't valuable, right? In other words, we don't do them because we don't want to do them, or at least we lack the ability to do them at a price that is better than doing it ourselves? Also, we do pay some people for some of these tasks--childcare, for example. And increasingly I think we're seeing more penetration by the market--grocery shopping and other direct-to-home services. Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
      - clairity 9y ago
        i think we don't do those things, not because they're not valuable--in fact, we've shown they're immensely valuable by dedicaitng whole groups of people for decades of their lives to the task--but because patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power. we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be. the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is. that's my take on it, at least. =)
hirundo 9y ago
I am informed that gender is entirely socially constructed. So then motherhood must be too. Therefore the solution is straightforward: Require that men give birth to half of the babies.
- rev0lutions 9y ago
  ever read donna haraway's cyborg manifesto? :)
deleted 9y ago
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throwaway92224 9y ago
People have careers today for the same reason they had farms or shops or a regular practice of hunting and gathering in former times: to support their own lives and those of their families. Whereas the motivation towards a career is conditional on its support of survival and the more adaptive urges, the twin motivations of survival and reproduction are invariant. Viewed in this light, the article is confirming a truism well known to anthropologists: men work so women can have children. Our society is little different from others. So much male parental investment is an unusual arrangement among primates, but it’s well documented among humans. Men produce roughly 2/3 of the calories consumed across a broad range of the societies ([Marlowe2001]). This is due to both: * The difficult, dangerous and demanding nature of human birth and gestation, which is quite different from that of other primates. * The enormous amount of energy expended in gestation, nursing and early childhood to support growth of the human brain. The benefit of this arrangement is human brain development: we have larger brains than other primates, and the brains undergo considerably more training before functional adulthood. We are able to have these arguments about women’s careers precisely because of the situation we are complaining about: that women set aside so much to have children, and men set aside so much so they can. Nothing about the energetics of pregnancy, nursing or early childhood has changed as a result of our transition from working mostly outside to working mostly inside, save that the length of “childhood” is now considerably longer, as long as thirty years in some cases. That women and men do not work equally well when pushed to live the same life course is no surprise, when we consider human history and the lives of the other primates. Should men and women be pushed to live the same life course, it’s not clear how it would be stable: men must bring something to the relationship to balance the large and fixed metabolic cost of gestation and nursing, which they can’t do if they can’t earn more than women. Men who failed to find some way around this would not have offspring and consequently later generations of men would be descended from — and have not just the genes but also the habits of — those men who found a way to obtain superior renumeration. This is no doubt how men got to be what they are in the first place. [Marlowe2001] Male Contribution to Diet and Female Reproductive Success among Foragers

95 points by polarbear5 9y ago

The U.S. educational system is needlessly slow and expensive. In other countries you don't need to pay for four years of college before starting medical school or law school. For example, I think in India a woman can finish medical school at age 23, whereas in the U.S. it would be age 26, assuming she graduates high school at 18. If women and men complete their education earlier, it is easier to have both a high-powered career and a family.

kohanz 9y ago
> For example, I think in India a woman can finish medical school at age 23, whereas in the U.S. it would be age 26 Do they emerge with the same level of training & experience? Difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  In India, medical school is 5 years. In the US it is 4 years. Beyond that, I do not know. I will note, however, that when Indian doctors move to the US, do their USMLE and try to get into a residency program, they do not do any special training to "catch up".
- 8ytecoder 9y ago
  The first four years in the US is actually not in medical school. Basically you'll need the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in biological sciences to go to medical school. Most students do 4-yr college and then med. A total of 8 years. Then residency and on and on. If the biological sciences requirement is simply folded into a five year course that's the Indian model. MBBS - Bachelor of science and Bachelor of medicine.
- megaman22 9y ago
  It's really bizarre the way that pre-professional undergraduate programs in the US work. Pre-med is basically a smorgasbord of random stuff, with a slight inclination towards biology and chemistry, although from my remembrances with premed classmates, they didn't take a whole lot more sciences than the general requirements mandated. Pre-law is even worse, with people taking the most generic possible collection of liberal arts classes, usually ending up with Econ or History almost by default. There's some perverse incentives to take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs. If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Your description "random stuff" is what in the US is considered a "well-rounded education." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/why-university-students-need-a-well-rounded-education/article4610406/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/w... (picked mostly arbitrarily from a DDG search for 'well-rounded education') states the usual reasons for that approach. For example, is the goal only 'to produce medical professionals in an efficient way'? Or does education also include 'acquiring general knowledge' and 'training in citizenship' (quoting that link). There's also a complaint about 'what Duke University professor and interdisciplinary-studies expert Cathy Davidson describes as "the duck, duck, goose model."' I had an odd exchange once, over lunch at a UK research site with mostly European graduate students. I found out that I knew more about European history than the others. My education in the US included a European history course, while most of the Europeans had specialized in science since they were teenagers. Not that that knowledge has really proved useful ... but then again, neither has my training in quantum mechanics.
    - megaman22 9y ago
      It's a luxury, and a remnant of outdated conceptions of what the purpose of university education is. As much as some hate reality, and wish for some never-existent golden age of well-rounded liberal arts education, people engage in higher education because it is the gateway to a career, and as such, what they really want is relevant vocational training, which, outside of a few rare disciplines (engineering, namely) they rarely get, and instead faff around with trivialities for most of four years, at a toll of 35-60k per year.
randomdata 9y ago
The long process to becoming a medical doctor (or lawyer) plays a large part in why they tend to be high-powered careers. Not being able to start a career until later in life is a disincentive to follow in that path, and the fewer people willing to still go through with it, the more power those careers will possess. There are other ways to limit the numbers, like a lottery, but not all of those are given the same social acceptance in North America. We are socially okay with extending time in academia. Not that everyone would become a doctor even if it were easier to attain, but to take it to the logical extreme, if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  > if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity. This is only true if every doctor coming out of med school is exactly the same or if you can't tell the difference in skill among doctors.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    It still holds true. If this were the case, the scarcity of those who have observably more skill will hold the power. But there is an expectation that med school produces doctors who are sufficiently equal in their ability (in that you should not need to worry about which doctor you end up with). That you are suggesting this is not the case is quite interesting.
    - jeffreyrogers 9y ago
      I think there are large differences in ability between doctors even within specialties, but most doctors meet a minimum level of competence because the requirements for med school effectively filter out people who are not intelligent and conscientious enough to become doctors. If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
ardit33 9y ago
The problem is that people don't fully mature until 25-ish. I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books. Also, a huge chunk of tech's HR issues are mostly created by startups having very young founders and young managers that don't have real life experience. (to me, young is anybody younger than 30). Half of the firing/issues I have seen in real life could have been easily avoided if the people in the room had more experience.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Way back when, there was some limited experimentation in the US with 6-year combined college/MD programs. They still exist but very few are 6 year--and they're schools you've probably never heard of. My understanding is that part of the issue was that there was a general feeling that students benefited from the additional time even if it wasn't strictly necessary with respect to coursework.
- heliostatic 9y ago
  While I think your contention is valid in 2018, it's important to consider how much of this is culturally and historically contingent. Consider the ages of some key figures in the American Revolution in 1776 (https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding-fathers-on-july-4-1776 https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding...) Marquis de Lafayette, 18 James Monroe, 18 Gilbert Stuart, 20 Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 Betsy Ross, 24 James Madison, 25
- nailer 9y ago
  > I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books. I wouldn't trust a 26 year old or 40 year old newly graduated doctor either, for the same reasons.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  This is a good point, but I don't think that means we should stick young people in schools while we wait for them to mature. It seems more useful to have them doing some sort of productive work, where they can start learning by experience.
andrewl 9y ago
Freeman Dyson has commented on how long and wasteful it is for most people to get a doctorate I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem...
- asabjorn 9y ago
  I took one, and although it gives me a great advantage to be trained in research when exploring complex problems it feels like it took too many years that I could have spend on my passion for creating things.
Eire_Banshee 9y ago
Yeah... but nobody books a trip to India just for medical care either.
- ranko 9y ago
  "Foreign patients travelling to India to seek medical treatment in 2012, 2013 and 2014 numbered 171,021, 236,898, and 184,298 respectively" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism_in_India)
  - Eire_Banshee 9y ago
    Yeah, and 500,000 seek treatment in the US every year. https://www.imtj.com/news/bringing-medical-tourists-usa/ https://www.imtj.com/news/bringing-medical-tourists-usa/
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  There are many people that do, and they save thousands. It is especially good for common procedures, like LASIK, dental work, etc.
  - Eire_Banshee 9y ago
    You save thousands for a reason.
    - nugi 9y ago
      By not paying non-negotiated rates for medical care? Sounds like a good reason to me.
rayiner 9y ago
It's not just India. A law degree is a 3-year undergraduate degree in the U.K. as well. It works fine. In the U.S., in contrast, there has been a push towards extending the process that has a disparate impact on women. Now, it is typical for a lawyer to get a 4-year college degree, spend a year or two working, spend three years in law school, and graduate around 27 or 28, putting them into their mid to late 30s by the time they are established enough for many women to feel comfortable having kids. It's an enormously sexist feature of the profession, caused by the fetishization of schooling and academia.
- PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
  >It's an enormously sexist feature of the profession Just because something may have an impact that differs based on sex doesn't make it sexist. Would we call pregnancy sexist because it works differently for each sex?
  - rayiner 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact.
    - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
      >This form of discrimination occurs where an employer does not intend to discriminate; to the contrary, it occurs when identical standards or procedures are applied to everyone, despite the fact that they lead to a substantial difference in employment outcomes for the members of a particular group and they are unrelated to successful job performance. Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance? If I require my developers to have a degree, it doesn't violate this concept even though a degree isn't required to be a good programmer.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        > Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance? Yes. E.g. in the U.K., you can start practicing law around age 21. In the U.S., typically it's 25 if you go straight through. Somehow the U.K. still manages to be a center of commerce and finance.
clairity 9y ago
i'd be ok with medical/law training to start as early as 16 (for those who can finish high school early). for med school, you could still have 5 years of academic training (as with the Indian model) and then do 4 years of apprenticeship (internship /residency) and be a fully qualifed doctor by 25. for law school, 4 years of academic training and 3 years of apprenticeship and be a fully qualified lawyer by 23. these are professional trades, so the apprenticeship piece is a crucial transition period to learn from those who came before you.

greggeter 9y ago

Having babies is problematic now, because wages.

gimmeDatCheddar 9y ago

How is this a surprise to anyone? Children require time and effort, and this usually means one of the parents works less or not at all. Considering 25 to 35 are prime child-rearing ages, the reason for this gap seems quite obvious.

IAmEveryone 9y ago
The result indicates that 25 to 35 is prime career age, not prime child-rearing age (the latter may well be true, but this study doesn't answer that question). It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect. I would have probably guessed that any hiatus in your professional career (including education) would result in a proportionally-delayed career advance throughout your career. I. e.: spend 2 years with children from 23-25 and your income at 60 is what you'd have made at 58 without children.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  The article is comparing pay gap between married partners. Those who have children when they are younger are much less likely to be highly educated or be in high paying careers to begin with, and they're not likely to be in a relationship with someone who is either. Lower pay in general implies lower variance since they're not likely to be moving up the ranks into $100k, $150k, $200k+ careers.
- tomp 9y ago
  > It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect Not really. My hunch is that it's due to two reasons: (1) education is often much less intensive than a competitive career, so it's much earier to study while having a child (in many cases, you don't even need to attend the lectures, just pass the exams!); (2) probably the much bigger reason is that the "have children before 25" sample includes mostly people in non-professional careers where there isn't a lot of room for advancement anyways... someone with 2 years of experience as a store clerk or receptionist is worth about the same as someone with 4 years of experience, whereas the worth is significantly different in something like medicine, investment banking, programming, ...

bitL 9y ago

Aren't single working women <30 on average paid 8% more than men of the same age?

lmcnish14 9y ago
Where did you get that number?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ardillaroja 9y ago
  Not OP but this guardian article mentions some figures supporting that from UK, compiled by Press Association based on on ONS data. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
- mattmcknight 9y ago
  Probably here: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274...
ggggtez 9y ago
My guess is that it doesn't account for job title. One of the articles below says: >He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. So yeah, if you are sampling 3:2 women:men with college education, then what you say is true if and only if that is the distribution in reality. I don't think that baseline assumption is supported by the evidence [1]. In actuality, they've just identified that college educated women tend to move to cities for work in greater numbers than men. However, if you compared only women with college degrees to only men with college degrees, then the difference would reappear. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

blattimwind 9y ago

"problematic" If you're a woman and you have non-standardized interests, you are "problematic" for society. If you're a woman and want to raise your own children, you're "problematic". If you're a woman and the number on your paycheck is not priority #1 in your life, you're "problematic".

Eire_Banshee 9y ago
Im pretty sure 'problematic' here is just that this is problematic for women. Not that women are problematic...
sgslo 9y ago
Article subtitle mentioned 'problematic', searching the rest of the article found one other usage: > This seems to be particularly problematic for women building their careers, when they might have to work hardest and prove themselves most, and less so for women who have already established some seniority or who have not yet started careers. There is no mention of women being problematic for society.

zeveb 9y ago

> Research has shown other policies that would help: programs to help women re-enter the labor force; flexibility in when and where work gets done; subsidized child care. I'm not certain what a 'programme to help women re-enter the labor force' would look like, so I won't comment on that. Flexibility is awesome, and in many jobs (particularly our own) it's possible. But in many other jobs (the majority, perhaps?) it's impossible, or has extreme costs. I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by strangers will have various physical & psychological issues compared to those raised by their own families; while it's necessary in some cases I don't think that we want to encourage it as a society.

IAmEveryone 9y ago
There are multiple definitions of flexibility: the ability to quickly change one's schedule, the ability to to continuously work a non-standard schedule, and the possibility to easily work part-time (and return to full time). All three are useful for parents of young children. And, interestingly enough, the first tends to be anti-correlate to the latter two among professions. Consider jobs where it's hard to reschedule work at the last minute: pilot, surgeon, lawyer, cop, cashier (at smaller stores), etc: all these jobs tend to allow people to choose schedules other than 9-5 rather easily. In any case: I think these are all solvable problems, and the old saying that if men where responsible for childcare, we'd have more day cares than Starbucks and mandated home office policies for every company comes to mind. Your last point of parent's being the only ones capable of raising a child is idle conjecture not supported by any research. And in any case, it would still allow to distribute child care more equally among both parents. Flexible schedules
harryh 9y ago
I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by stranger... This has been studied. There is very little evidence for your hypothesis.
- tomp 9y ago
  Do you have any links to any more extensive explanation?

deleted 9y ago

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tjansen 9y ago

Like so many others, the article fails to acknowledge that some women (and some men!) don't mind earning less if that allows them to take are of their children. I could certainly earn more than I do today. But that would mean spending even less time with my children, so I don't. Does it hurt my career? Probably. But it's worth it.

IAmEveryone 9y ago
And these women who prefer to earn less money just happen to be the ones that get children between the ages of 25 and 35, but not before or after?
- tjansen 9y ago
  Given the choice of either focusing on your career or your children, yes. If you'd want to focus on your career and maximize your income, would you take off a few years to take care of your children? Certainly not.
- randomdata 9y ago
  Further study is warranted, I'm sure, but it seems reasonable on the surface. Those who have their children earlier have children that are older during their prime working years. Those who have children later already have established careers. 25-35 does seem to be a critical period in setting the course for one's career, so those who opt to focus on children during that time are giving up the gains they could be making in the workplace.
  - IAmEveryone 9y ago
    That's not the point. You're just providing an intuitive explanation for the study's empirical findings, which I agree with. OP's point was specifically that the wage gap may be caused by women's focus on child care instead of career advancement. Yet, as I was trying to say: that idea is hard to square with the study's findings. Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25. But in that age group, the study did not find a sustained reduction in income.

belorn 9y ago

I would be very interested to know if there is a correlation to how often men file for divorce and the amount of time the wife spends on child care and related responsibilities. We already know that the rate in which women will file for divorce is directly related to the income of the husband, which would then make this a directly symmetric incentive model and possible a form of nash equilibrium which the solution that the article suggest are not addressing.

kennywinker 9y ago
> We already know that the rate in which women will file for divorce is directly related to the income of the husband Do we know that? I see a study suggesting that women who earn more relative to their male partners will be more likely to divorce (so called "independence effect"). I see a study that suggests that lower income families are more likely to divorce. These two bullet points alone make me think there is not a clear cut story about how the income of one partner effects marriage and divorce rates.
- vowelless 9y ago
  There is a study that shows rates for different industries too. I think entertainment industry has the highest divorce rates where as engineering is among the lowest? If someone kind find a link I'll be grateful
  - cosmotron 9y ago
    I believe this is the article: http://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation http://flowingdata.com/2017/07/25/divorce-and-occupation
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- belorn 9y ago
  > A study at Ohio State University found 75 percent of women don’t want to marry an unemployed man. It also found that a man’s unemployment has a negative effect on whether a couple goes through divorce. >Results showed a woman’s employment status has no impact on whether she chooses to divorce, but an unemployed man faces a greater increase his wife will file. (https://www.themarkslawfirm.com/marital-problems-linked-to-unemployment/ https://www.themarkslawfirm.com/marital-problems-linked-to-u...) > A Harvard University study declared “job loss” the biggest factor in divorce. > she learned that divorce is more likely when husbands are not employed full-time. In fact, those without full-time jobs increase their odds of divorce by roughly 30%. (https://thebigsmoke.com/2016/12/29/harvard-study-finds-job-loss-number-one-reason-divorce/ https://thebigsmoke.com/2016/12/29/harvard-study-finds-job-l...) > Others looked at the how income affects the marriage and divorce decisions of young Americans; they found that high earnings capacity increases the probability of marriage and decreases the probability of divorce for young men. (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...) It feels pretty well established.

kennywinker 9y ago

> The study found that over all, women earn $12,600 less than men before children are born and $25,100 less afterward. If two working people have a child, and one is going to partially leave the work force to care for the child, who's salary would you pick? The uneven salary, on top of the cultural biases we all absorb, mean it's practically a given the man will stay in the workforce and the woman will become the caregiver. Equal pay for women means more men will get to take on childcare roles. Feminism is humanism.

84Winston 9y ago
What if there's a biological difference that makes women way more apt to take care of small children?
kimmeld 9y ago
> The group of women who had the biggest post-baby pay gap compared with their husbands was, paradoxically, women who earned more than their husbands before having children. Yet you ignore that the article goes on to state that the biggest gaps were the ones that started with the women making more. It seems on average the couple is picking the wife to absorb the hit regardless of the paychecks.
- kennywinker 9y ago
  I did mention something about cultural biases, yes? Culture has its hooks deep. Given complete freedom economically, we still choose things based on what is "normal" or "expected".
  - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
    And equal pay won't fix things like each gender having difference qualities they prefer in partners, on average. Nor will it fix things like career choice (studies have found that places with less economic freedom have better gender parity in picking careers). It may be possible some of this isn't cultural at all. Every other species on the planet has sexually dimorphic characteristics, so to we shouldn't assume that humans either don't, or even that the ones we do have would have no impact on any factors related to pay (including things like impacting what careers a person finds desirable).

api 9y ago

Wouldn't lengthening the human life span solve a lot of this? Or even lengthening our span of peak performance? What if we lived to an average of 90-110 and had peak performance until 70-80 instead of living to 70-80 with peak performance until 40-50? That 10 year gap would mean a lot less.

feistypharit 9y ago
Well, you can't move a biological clock. Women that get pregnant after age 35 are deemed high risk, advanced maternal age. The risk of downs syndrome and other defects goes way up. Men having children after age 35 also have some poor outcomes, but not quite as bad or likely. There sure is a lot of assumptions here too. More and more men are becoming stay at home dad's...myself included. Guess what, it impacts our career too. Possibly more so...I can't tell you the number of people that seem shocked to hear I stay home. Some literally are speechless.
- api 9y ago
  Sure. My point was that with an extra 20 years of peak time taking time off from mid 20s until mid 30s would not be so devastating. You'd have a lot more time to make up for it later.

clairity 9y ago

from a pure economic perspective (which is the slant imposed by "pay gap"), a core piece of the problem is that household care (as a broader category that includes child care) is not adequately specified and appropriately valued monetarily. if household management was a good to be bought and sold, we could discover its price curve through market mechanisms. since women do more house work, we would be able to appropriately account for that gap. but do we want a society where household care is simply another market good?

weberc2 9y ago
What is meant by "is not adequately specified and not appropriately valued monetarily"? My question isn't meant to sound skeptical, I'm genuinely curious.
- clairity 9y ago
  i meant that we don't buy and sell it in the ways we would buy and sell plumbing services, for example. we don't have a professional organization that sets standards and issues credentials. we can't compare the quality of one provider against another. there isn't a market to buy and sell household care, with the concomitant prices that implies. but the real question is, would we want to?
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Presumably we don't do these things because the market indicates that they aren't valuable, right? In other words, we don't do them because we don't want to do them, or at least we lack the ability to do them at a price that is better than doing it ourselves? Also, we do pay some people for some of these tasks--childcare, for example. And increasingly I think we're seeing more penetration by the market--grocery shopping and other direct-to-home services. Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
    - clairity 9y ago
      i think we don't do those things, not because they're not valuable--in fact, we've shown they're immensely valuable by dedicaitng whole groups of people for decades of their lives to the task--but because patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power. we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be. the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is. that's my take on it, at least. =)

hirundo 9y ago

I am informed that gender is entirely socially constructed. So then motherhood must be too. Therefore the solution is straightforward: Require that men give birth to half of the babies.

rev0lutions 9y ago
ever read donna haraway's cyborg manifesto? :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throwaway92224 9y ago

People have careers today for the same reason they had farms or shops or a regular practice of hunting and gathering in former times: to support their own lives and those of their families. Whereas the motivation towards a career is conditional on its support of survival and the more adaptive urges, the twin motivations of survival and reproduction are invariant. Viewed in this light, the article is confirming a truism well known to anthropologists: men work so women can have children. Our society is little different from others. So much male parental investment is an unusual arrangement among primates, but it’s well documented among humans. Men produce roughly 2/3 of the calories consumed across a broad range of the societies ([Marlowe2001]). This is due to both: * The difficult, dangerous and demanding nature of human birth and gestation, which is quite different from that of other primates. * The enormous amount of energy expended in gestation, nursing and early childhood to support growth of the human brain. The benefit of this arrangement is human brain development: we have larger brains than other primates, and the brains undergo considerably more training before functional adulthood. We are able to have these arguments about women’s careers precisely because of the situation we are complaining about: that women set aside so much to have children, and men set aside so much so they can. Nothing about the energetics of pregnancy, nursing or early childhood has changed as a result of our transition from working mostly outside to working mostly inside, save that the length of “childhood” is now considerably longer, as long as thirty years in some cases. That women and men do not work equally well when pushed to live the same life course is no surprise, when we consider human history and the lives of the other primates. Should men and women be pushed to live the same life course, it’s not clear how it would be stable: men must bring something to the relationship to balance the large and fixed metabolic cost of gestation and nursing, which they can’t do if they can’t earn more than women. Men who failed to find some way around this would not have offspring and consequently later generations of men would be descended from — and have not just the genes but also the habits of — those men who found a way to obtain superior renumeration. This is no doubt how men got to be what they are in the first place. [Marlowe2001] Male Contribution to Diet and Female Reproductive Success among Foragers