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My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. There's a conundrum where you either have to respect

My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny.

daenz 5y ago
I've seen the argument that women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings.
- jldugger 5y ago
  Probably the better faith argument is that it should impact both genders equally, but it's a lot harder problem to solve, with multiple layers of interaction in a dynamic system.
  - godelski 5y ago
    If it affects both equally that's equivalent to no effect when comparing the difference. I think if we're discussing in good faith then you and the parent agree but are using different perspectives.
    - DFHippie 5y ago
      > women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings is different from > affects both equally Perhaps the first should have been "women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater than those experienced by men".
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        >women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater than those experienced by men". Greater than men in general, or men who make the the same choices as the impacted women?
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    Well, if the parents are married all the earnings typically accumulate as common assets. In the event of a divorce those common assets are divided, and usually for a period of several years or more the higher earner is required to transfer further income from their paycheck to the lower earner. This doesn’t show up in the statistics I assume. It’s possible this doesn’t create a 100% balance, but it’s also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to spend far more time with the children (and usually both parents want to despite what some debate participants will say), and other non financial costs and benefits. One way to solve this would be to require all marriages to have a pre negotiated divorce agreement with experienced advisors on both sides to discuss what would be fair compensation in case of divorce.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      > but it’s also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to spend far more time with the children That can easily be balanced via legislation. What cannot be balanced is one partner having to take on all the health risks and lifelong consequences of childbirth and breastfeeding, etc.
      - odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
        So you are ok that Ukranian women atm to also not be able to leave the country and have to fight? Because there are also a lot of consequences for being a man that just keep being ignored (famous Hillary Clinton's quote that the real victims of war are the widows of the fallen soldiers springs to mind)
      - scarmig 5y ago
        In general, men get the short end of the stick with the current setup of household gender roles. They work more hours, at jobs they like less and are more stressed at, and experience far more on the job fatalities and permanent disabilities than women do. The net result of this is that men are more likely to die any given year during their careers and have a life span shorter by several years than women do.
      - epicureanideal 5y ago
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Even, you would need to define a specific problem. If you are talking about overall career impact post birth, you would only expect equal outcomes if men and women are making the same choices and have the same preferences. If the "problem" is simply different numeric outcomes between men and women, it ignores any differences between the wants of men and women.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  How do we fix this when the underlying cause is workers who prioritize their job more and have more years of experience get paid more?
  - daenz 5y ago
    This is what "equity" refers to. It means that the playing field must be deliberately tilted to "counteract" any natural tilting. If that feels unfair, that's because it is, intentionally. But the counter argument is that it was already unfair from the start.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Is it unfair if choosing to prioritize career, working longer/harder at it, and becoming more skilled/productive at it is rewarded in the market?
    - tomp 5y ago
      Paying more productive people the same as less productive people is a great way to ensure there are no productive people.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    What does it mean to prioritize a career? There are a lot of career obligations that aren't fundamental to productivity. For example, people are largely expected to go to an office and be physically present for eight consecutive hours. This makes certain kinds of childcare activities impossible. But if instead flexible hours or work-from-home were the norm, this choice would no longer be necessary and it no longer becomes a "one or the other" situation. Consider something like the idea that pumping at work is unprofessional. This is a 100% cultural thing. Pumping does not make somebody less productive. But if we don't consider this cultural influence we might just say "well women just choose to stay at home when they have infants and there is nothing we can do about that."
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    If and individual makes the personal decision that some priority is more important to them than money, society should tell them they're wrong and give them the money anyway?
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  I have seen companies where having and raising children result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings: I personally know 2 women in my office that were promoted while in maternity leave and one after she left the company: some companies bend backwards to promote women. I also have a colleague in the team in US that took a 15 year break to be a stay at home mom, the kids are now teenagers so she came back to work; she was automatically promoted to a position similar with having the past 15 years working. My point: it depends on the company, country, field of work etc.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Do your male coworker get promoted while on bonding leave? Is that typical?
    - AdrianB1 5y ago
      Males are rarely, if ever promoted, in the past 10 years the ratio was 10 to 1 female to male.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    What does someone getting promoted after they left the company mean, in practice?
    - AdrianB1 5y ago
      An announcement was posted the person is leaving the company (she gave notice). 2 weeks later, another announcement was posted that the person was promoted. The person did leave the company as planned.
  - Fargoan 5y ago
  - bertjk 5y ago
    > ...and one after she left the company This honestly sounds pretty fishy-- like they wanted to goose their diversity stats for free while not actually changing any part of their org chart.
- smugma 5y ago
  It shouldn’t. If you have 10 Years experience and take a year off to birth and raise a child, you should be able to come back and be paid similarly to a man or woman who has 10 years of experience and not be penalized 2-3 years of experience for it. People may have different commitments to work after having kids, and compensation can and should be adjusted based on that. I definitely work much less than I did pre-kids, but my compensation has gone up significantly. I think this is typical for men. My wife also works less for more money post kids (but she had kids while doing postdoctoral work, and then moved to private industry).
  - nightski 5y ago
    I'd take this a step further and argue that any gaps in employment history should not be looked on nearly as negatively as they are today. It really invokes a wage slave mentality.
    - freedomben 5y ago
      At least in tech, I think we're mostly there already, particularly if the applicant has some explanation for it (and even then it's getting rarer to ask about it). With the large amount of no-child/one-child families and waiting until mid 30s to start having kids, it's very common for people to have enough income/savings that they can take a few months or even a couple years off to travel the world or try a startup, or something else.
      - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
        I'd be careful stating this, as the reason why this isn't happening might be as simple as "there aren't enough experienced tech workers to make such a demand". Considering tech recruitment is still willing to do many other things which aren't empirically proven or even have empirical evidence suggesting against the act, there is room for skepticism here.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Following this to its logical conclusion, would you say that devs with 10 years experience shouldn't earn any more than someone fresh from college?
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Yeah, I've encountered multiple feminist types who feel this way. Sorry, the market pays based on experience, not on age! You're asking for a subsidy.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    At what point are we as a society going to call out this self interested promotion and self entitled freeloading for what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- david38 5y ago
  This is laughable. For this to be true, * raising children would require zero time and overhead * or people who don’t have children should be barred from working more hours than a working mother can reasonably work. Of course this entire discussion is mostly classist to such a degree many people literally don’t see it. For a mother to work full time with young children requires a lower paid (usually a woman) person to take on the child rearing role. So it’s sexist for a woman to take a few years prioritizing her children, but it’s equality for another woman to raise those children?
godelski 5y ago
> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. This is a common misconception. The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this. It does affect the glass ceiling though, even if the women don't choose to have kids. I really do mean there's no smoking gun. You can even account for worse negotiations, prioritization of work life balance, work flexibility, family, and you don't fully explain a gap (albeit it does get smaller, but remember that even a 1% difference is significant here). I really suggest listening to Rebecca Greenfield's The Paycheck. The first season goes into all this. I think it's a lot more convoluted and surprising to many. It's also not focused on median earnings and so I think is really good if you want to understand fairness (glass ceiling is also discussed). And I don't think anyone disagrees with your second paragraphs. Women should have choice. But there's still gaps that aren't explained and we shouldn't just easily dismiss them. I should also mention that this gap is in no way a phenomena strictly in America. It's global. A lot of economists have put in a lot of work trying to understand this and there really is no agreement on what does cause it. So don't dismiss things so easily. Most problems in our modern and complex world have many casual factors and large casual graphs.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  I think there was a miscommunication > My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. >The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this Articles like this are where I get my understanding. https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
  - godelski 5y ago
    On thing to note here is that this article discusses only University of Chicago MBAs. You'll see some pretty biased data. Not many people make $250k-$400k/yr with MBAs. And I want to quote something from this article that you may also find from my above comment > As Goldin put it recently to Freakonomics, "It's hard to find smoking guns."
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
thathndude 5y ago
It does feel like society is swinging towards the latter. I think there’s a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on women’s desire/choice to stay In the home and make child rearing their job.
- proc0 5y ago
  That's what they're good at??? It's the same reason only men get drafted to a war, at least for most of human history. Why is that a men's burden? Because we're better at it. I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go out on the field and score a goal, and when they start doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then your team loses.
  - worik 5y ago
    > That's what they're good at??? It's the same reason only men get drafted to a war, at least for most of human history. Why is that a men's burden? Because we're better at it. Sigh. No. IMO the reason men are drafted is men are disposable. Much less valuable than women.
    - proc0 5y ago
      > Much less valuable than women. Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women to war then your population dies. This just reinforces what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying they can't change or evolve. I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily just biological, but they are requirements of some kind) that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs. "disposable".
      - sgath92 5y ago
        Maybe that was true in the pre-firearm era. You'd have a hard time arguing that in today's world "if you send women to war your population dies." Israel, since its conception has proven that this antiquated viewpoint is no longer valid. Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.). The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries. Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?
scarmig 5y ago
Another option would be to respect and valorize men who want to focus on things like home life over career success.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  Maybe that would make sense if that was the trend, but it isn’t.
  - scarmig 5y ago
    Trends have to start somewhere. But I'm convinced that as long as a male teacher's aide is considered a less desirable prospect than a male CEO, we're going to see shitty gender roles that limit and oppress us.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      One question is why try to start a trend if that isn't what men want? It seems like trying to manipulate desires to meet some other goal. If men want to care for children, then good! We should respect their wishes, but why try to change desires?
      - scarmig 5y ago
        Men do not collectively want things, as collective entities don't have psychological experiences like desire. Individuals of whatever gender exist within incentive landscapes, and they act within those landscapes to result in the best life for them. Many men and women wish they had different incentive landscapes to navigate through. My argument would be that creating a world where men and women can choose their paths according to their individual dispositions without penalty would result in one where more men and women are happy, which is why I'd like to nudge our existing world in that direction.
        s1artibartfast 5y ago
        If you want freedom and equality of choice, we should focus on breaking down barriers that stop people from doing what they want, not pushing them to do something different. Adding incentives, nudging, and valorizing specific actions puts equality of outcome over equality of choice. We shouldn't push a trend to respect and valorize men who stay home more than those who work. We should push a trend to respect them equally
Zpalmtree 5y ago
>raising a child instead of slaving for corporations is misogyny wow
rayiner 5y ago
> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. This phrasing is bizarre and reflects a cramped notion of gender equality. Child rearing is something that has to happen. We will already face economic challenges due to our increasing ratio of retirees to workers, and bad things will happen economically if our population begins to contract. Now, Americans can allow the fertility rate to drop below 2, and bring in immigrants, but that’s not a sustainable equilibrium. You’re just outsourcing the burden to immigrant families from cultures that don’t have the same notions of gender equality. At the end of the day, women (as a group, not necessarily individually) have an indispensable role as mothers. They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. We should approach discussions of how to keep women in the workforce long term recognizing those facts.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  You're implying a lot I didn't say. Do I think American society needs to incentivize having children through government intervention because of our falling birth rate? Yes Do I think those women are making the right choice for both themselves and society by choosing to at the margin spend more time with their kids than working? Yes >They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    My point is that your framing of it as a “choice” is inapt: > From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap. This isn’t a “choice” like deciding what car to buy. Fully 56% of women with kids under 18 would prefer to not work at all and stay home instead: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-wome.... Only 39% would prefer to work outside the home. Meanwhile only 26% of men would prefer to stay home. When society has two groups, and one group is biologically capable of reproducing the species, and expresses strong preferences for caregiver roles, and the other isn’t and doesn’t, it’s not just about individual choices. It’s about accommodating reality—just like we design airplane seats around real humans and require buildings to have bathrooms for men and women. There’s concrete things we could do. For example, right now, it’s extremely difficult for women who take time off to raise young kids to return to the workforce. We could, for example, make it illegal for employers to consider childcare-related resume gaps in hiring decisions. There’s a whole universe of system-level things we could retool if we went in with the assumption that women would want to take a few years off work at some point to attend to child rearing without permanently downshifting their careers.
throwaway6532 5y ago
>There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny. There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(
- sgath92 5y ago
  Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
  - throwaway6532 5y ago
    >Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for. Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide. Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced. I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age. TL;DR - hope for the best, plan for the worst.

daenz 5y ago

I've seen the argument that women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings.

jldugger 5y ago
Probably the better faith argument is that it should impact both genders equally, but it's a lot harder problem to solve, with multiple layers of interaction in a dynamic system.
- godelski 5y ago
  If it affects both equally that's equivalent to no effect when comparing the difference. I think if we're discussing in good faith then you and the parent agree but are using different perspectives.
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    > women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings is different from > affects both equally Perhaps the first should have been "women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater than those experienced by men".
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      >women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater than those experienced by men". Greater than men in general, or men who make the the same choices as the impacted women?
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Well, if the parents are married all the earnings typically accumulate as common assets. In the event of a divorce those common assets are divided, and usually for a period of several years or more the higher earner is required to transfer further income from their paycheck to the lower earner. This doesn’t show up in the statistics I assume. It’s possible this doesn’t create a 100% balance, but it’s also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to spend far more time with the children (and usually both parents want to despite what some debate participants will say), and other non financial costs and benefits. One way to solve this would be to require all marriages to have a pre negotiated divorce agreement with experienced advisors on both sides to discuss what would be fair compensation in case of divorce.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > but it’s also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to spend far more time with the children That can easily be balanced via legislation. What cannot be balanced is one partner having to take on all the health risks and lifelong consequences of childbirth and breastfeeding, etc.
    - odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
      So you are ok that Ukranian women atm to also not be able to leave the country and have to fight? Because there are also a lot of consequences for being a man that just keep being ignored (famous Hillary Clinton's quote that the real victims of war are the widows of the fallen soldiers springs to mind)
    - scarmig 5y ago
      In general, men get the short end of the stick with the current setup of household gender roles. They work more hours, at jobs they like less and are more stressed at, and experience far more on the job fatalities and permanent disabilities than women do. The net result of this is that men are more likely to die any given year during their careers and have a life span shorter by several years than women do.
    - epicureanideal 5y ago
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Even, you would need to define a specific problem. If you are talking about overall career impact post birth, you would only expect equal outcomes if men and women are making the same choices and have the same preferences. If the "problem" is simply different numeric outcomes between men and women, it ignores any differences between the wants of men and women.
JamesBarney 5y ago
How do we fix this when the underlying cause is workers who prioritize their job more and have more years of experience get paid more?
- daenz 5y ago
  This is what "equity" refers to. It means that the playing field must be deliberately tilted to "counteract" any natural tilting. If that feels unfair, that's because it is, intentionally. But the counter argument is that it was already unfair from the start.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Is it unfair if choosing to prioritize career, working longer/harder at it, and becoming more skilled/productive at it is rewarded in the market?
  - tomp 5y ago
    Paying more productive people the same as less productive people is a great way to ensure there are no productive people.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  What does it mean to prioritize a career? There are a lot of career obligations that aren't fundamental to productivity. For example, people are largely expected to go to an office and be physically present for eight consecutive hours. This makes certain kinds of childcare activities impossible. But if instead flexible hours or work-from-home were the norm, this choice would no longer be necessary and it no longer becomes a "one or the other" situation. Consider something like the idea that pumping at work is unprofessional. This is a 100% cultural thing. Pumping does not make somebody less productive. But if we don't consider this cultural influence we might just say "well women just choose to stay at home when they have infants and there is nothing we can do about that."
- missedthecue 5y ago
  If and individual makes the personal decision that some priority is more important to them than money, society should tell them they're wrong and give them the money anyway?
AdrianB1 5y ago
I have seen companies where having and raising children result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings: I personally know 2 women in my office that were promoted while in maternity leave and one after she left the company: some companies bend backwards to promote women. I also have a colleague in the team in US that took a 15 year break to be a stay at home mom, the kids are now teenagers so she came back to work; she was automatically promoted to a position similar with having the past 15 years working. My point: it depends on the company, country, field of work etc.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Do your male coworker get promoted while on bonding leave? Is that typical?
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    Males are rarely, if ever promoted, in the past 10 years the ratio was 10 to 1 female to male.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  What does someone getting promoted after they left the company mean, in practice?
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    An announcement was posted the person is leaving the company (she gave notice). 2 weeks later, another announcement was posted that the person was promoted. The person did leave the company as planned.
- Fargoan 5y ago
- bertjk 5y ago
  > ...and one after she left the company This honestly sounds pretty fishy-- like they wanted to goose their diversity stats for free while not actually changing any part of their org chart.
smugma 5y ago
It shouldn’t. If you have 10 Years experience and take a year off to birth and raise a child, you should be able to come back and be paid similarly to a man or woman who has 10 years of experience and not be penalized 2-3 years of experience for it. People may have different commitments to work after having kids, and compensation can and should be adjusted based on that. I definitely work much less than I did pre-kids, but my compensation has gone up significantly. I think this is typical for men. My wife also works less for more money post kids (but she had kids while doing postdoctoral work, and then moved to private industry).
- nightski 5y ago
  I'd take this a step further and argue that any gaps in employment history should not be looked on nearly as negatively as they are today. It really invokes a wage slave mentality.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    At least in tech, I think we're mostly there already, particularly if the applicant has some explanation for it (and even then it's getting rarer to ask about it). With the large amount of no-child/one-child families and waiting until mid 30s to start having kids, it's very common for people to have enough income/savings that they can take a few months or even a couple years off to travel the world or try a startup, or something else.
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      I'd be careful stating this, as the reason why this isn't happening might be as simple as "there aren't enough experienced tech workers to make such a demand". Considering tech recruitment is still willing to do many other things which aren't empirically proven or even have empirical evidence suggesting against the act, there is room for skepticism here.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Following this to its logical conclusion, would you say that devs with 10 years experience shouldn't earn any more than someone fresh from college?
LorenPechtel 5y ago
Yeah, I've encountered multiple feminist types who feel this way. Sorry, the market pays based on experience, not on age! You're asking for a subsidy.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  At what point are we as a society going to call out this self interested promotion and self entitled freeloading for what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
david38 5y ago
This is laughable. For this to be true, * raising children would require zero time and overhead * or people who don’t have children should be barred from working more hours than a working mother can reasonably work. Of course this entire discussion is mostly classist to such a degree many people literally don’t see it. For a mother to work full time with young children requires a lower paid (usually a woman) person to take on the child rearing role. So it’s sexist for a woman to take a few years prioritizing her children, but it’s equality for another woman to raise those children?

godelski 5y ago

> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. This is a common misconception. The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this. It does affect the glass ceiling though, even if the women don't choose to have kids. I really do mean there's no smoking gun. You can even account for worse negotiations, prioritization of work life balance, work flexibility, family, and you don't fully explain a gap (albeit it does get smaller, but remember that even a 1% difference is significant here). I really suggest listening to Rebecca Greenfield's The Paycheck. The first season goes into all this. I think it's a lot more convoluted and surprising to many. It's also not focused on median earnings and so I think is really good if you want to understand fairness (glass ceiling is also discussed). And I don't think anyone disagrees with your second paragraphs. Women should have choice. But there's still gaps that aren't explained and we shouldn't just easily dismiss them. I should also mention that this gap is in no way a phenomena strictly in America. It's global. A lot of economists have put in a lot of work trying to understand this and there really is no agreement on what does cause it. So don't dismiss things so easily. Most problems in our modern and complex world have many casual factors and large casual graphs.

JamesBarney 5y ago
I think there was a miscommunication > My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. >The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this Articles like this are where I get my understanding. https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
- godelski 5y ago
  On thing to note here is that this article discusses only University of Chicago MBAs. You'll see some pretty biased data. Not many people make $250k-$400k/yr with MBAs. And I want to quote something from this article that you may also find from my above comment > As Goldin put it recently to Freakonomics, "It's hard to find smoking guns."
LorenPechtel 5y ago

thathndude 5y ago

It does feel like society is swinging towards the latter. I think there’s a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on women’s desire/choice to stay In the home and make child rearing their job.

proc0 5y ago
That's what they're good at??? It's the same reason only men get drafted to a war, at least for most of human history. Why is that a men's burden? Because we're better at it. I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go out on the field and score a goal, and when they start doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then your team loses.
- worik 5y ago
  > That's what they're good at??? It's the same reason only men get drafted to a war, at least for most of human history. Why is that a men's burden? Because we're better at it. Sigh. No. IMO the reason men are drafted is men are disposable. Much less valuable than women.
  - proc0 5y ago
    > Much less valuable than women. Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women to war then your population dies. This just reinforces what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying they can't change or evolve. I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily just biological, but they are requirements of some kind) that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs. "disposable".
    - sgath92 5y ago
      Maybe that was true in the pre-firearm era. You'd have a hard time arguing that in today's world "if you send women to war your population dies." Israel, since its conception has proven that this antiquated viewpoint is no longer valid. Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.). The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries. Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?

scarmig 5y ago

Another option would be to respect and valorize men who want to focus on things like home life over career success.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago
Maybe that would make sense if that was the trend, but it isn’t.
- scarmig 5y ago
  Trends have to start somewhere. But I'm convinced that as long as a male teacher's aide is considered a less desirable prospect than a male CEO, we're going to see shitty gender roles that limit and oppress us.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    One question is why try to start a trend if that isn't what men want? It seems like trying to manipulate desires to meet some other goal. If men want to care for children, then good! We should respect their wishes, but why try to change desires?
    - scarmig 5y ago
      Men do not collectively want things, as collective entities don't have psychological experiences like desire. Individuals of whatever gender exist within incentive landscapes, and they act within those landscapes to result in the best life for them. Many men and women wish they had different incentive landscapes to navigate through. My argument would be that creating a world where men and women can choose their paths according to their individual dispositions without penalty would result in one where more men and women are happy, which is why I'd like to nudge our existing world in that direction.
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        If you want freedom and equality of choice, we should focus on breaking down barriers that stop people from doing what they want, not pushing them to do something different. Adding incentives, nudging, and valorizing specific actions puts equality of outcome over equality of choice. We shouldn't push a trend to respect and valorize men who stay home more than those who work. We should push a trend to respect them equally

Zpalmtree 5y ago

>raising a child instead of slaving for corporations is misogyny wow

rayiner 5y ago

> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career. This phrasing is bizarre and reflects a cramped notion of gender equality. Child rearing is something that has to happen. We will already face economic challenges due to our increasing ratio of retirees to workers, and bad things will happen economically if our population begins to contract. Now, Americans can allow the fertility rate to drop below 2, and bring in immigrants, but that’s not a sustainable equilibrium. You’re just outsourcing the burden to immigrant families from cultures that don’t have the same notions of gender equality. At the end of the day, women (as a group, not necessarily individually) have an indispensable role as mothers. They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. We should approach discussions of how to keep women in the workforce long term recognizing those facts.

JamesBarney 5y ago
You're implying a lot I didn't say. Do I think American society needs to incentivize having children through government intervention because of our falling birth rate? Yes Do I think those women are making the right choice for both themselves and society by choosing to at the margin spend more time with their kids than working? Yes >They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
- rayiner 5y ago
  My point is that your framing of it as a “choice” is inapt: > From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap. This isn’t a “choice” like deciding what car to buy. Fully 56% of women with kids under 18 would prefer to not work at all and stay home instead: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-wome.... Only 39% would prefer to work outside the home. Meanwhile only 26% of men would prefer to stay home. When society has two groups, and one group is biologically capable of reproducing the species, and expresses strong preferences for caregiver roles, and the other isn’t and doesn’t, it’s not just about individual choices. It’s about accommodating reality—just like we design airplane seats around real humans and require buildings to have bathrooms for men and women. There’s concrete things we could do. For example, right now, it’s extremely difficult for women who take time off to raise young kids to return to the workforce. We could, for example, make it illegal for employers to consider childcare-related resume gaps in hiring decisions. There’s a whole universe of system-level things we could retool if we went in with the assumption that women would want to take a few years off work at some point to attend to child rearing without permanently downshifting their careers.

throwaway6532 5y ago

>There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny. There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(

sgath92 5y ago
Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
- throwaway6532 5y ago
  >Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for. Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide. Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced. I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age. TL;DR - hope for the best, plan for the worst.