Allow me to simply rip the juicy bits from the Wall Street Journal editorial page (where the Left fears to tread, the Right is a bit uneasy as well):
So men are hit harder with unemployment, when they DO work they work longer hours, and among the younger set women are making more.
Resolved - things suck all over, and gender is no longer the critical issue that it used to be in regards to pay levels.
Without conceding the other issues, the problem with limiting the analysis to 20-30 age range is that it will underaccount for the earnings differential that occurs when women take time off to start families—something that benefits (hedonically, obviously) men and women both, but which adversely affect the earnings of women, and, IIRC, has a positive effect on the earnings of fathers.
Sure, but if I walk from my job for 1 - 10 years (The ranges of a couple of women I know well) my wages will get nailed as well when I try to come back.
Right, the problem is this. It’s almost always Mom who takes the time off. So the question of whether this earnings differential strikes you as inappropriate turns on where on the spectrum between (1) “Hey, it’s a free country, lady. Have and raise kids if you want, but don’t expect to make as much as the bros who stick around” and (2) “Well, we kind of don’t want to discourage people from having kids, because maybe we want them too, it seems like it is a fundamental human drive, and it’s cool to have them around when we’re tottering off into old age. So maybe we need to do something about this earnings differential.”
There’s money in claiming sex discrimination - money from politically active folks, money from lawsuits, money from government agencies. *That *is the critical determining factor of whether the “men earn more” meme will die out - not the truth-value of the claim.
That’s a valid viewpoint. Three points:
Women are not getting nothing in return for sacrificing some earnings to have children. They are getting in return much stronger bonds with their children, generally. We as a society generally allow people to choose to sacrifice one thing in exchange for another, and don’t feel we have to skew things so that one segment of society can have a set of advantages without any sacrifice.
It’s not a coincidence that men work harder than women. (Men also tend to commute longer, and work in more dangerous and physically demanding jobs.) The reason they do this is because this is what society expects of them, and this is how society judges their worth. Women can take less demanding and less rewarding jobs (or no jobs) but still be socially successful if they are good in other ways, e.g. personal attractiveness, or skill as homemaker or child rearer etc. A man does not have that option. If he’s not making big bucks, he’s a loser. The upshot of this is that if we artificially force women’s pay to equal men’s, all we are doing is further skewing the work imbalance between men and women. Because men have to earn more than women, and they will be driven to do what it takes to accomplish that (note: this is obviously a generality).
Even if we agree that women should be compensated, that’s not how it’s presented. Differences in pay between men and women are frequently presented as creating a rebuttable presumption that there is some type of discrimination involved (and there’s a high bar in rebutting it, too.)
But the usual context (at least so far as I’ve heard) of the wage gap discussions is that the gap represents evidence of discrimination against women. I haven’t heard too many arguments that acknowledge there are legitimate reasons and call upon employers to correct the gap as a matter of social responsibility towards encouraging procreation.
I’d actually be amenable to hearing that argument develop a bit; on its surface it seems colorable.
Yeah, the color I’m seeing is a sort of brown . . .
If you like that argument, then here’s another one you may like. Send me $10,000 and I’ll do something with it to benefit society. That’s all you need to know–give me the cash and society is better. So when should I expect your check?
It might be true that the wage gap has closed, but the article quoted in the OP isn’t good evidence for it. You need to control for all other variables, and there are a heck of a lot of variables to control for. And it’s not even necessarily clear what would constitute fair. For instance, suppose that male teachers earn the same amount as female teachers (for a given school system, level of experience, and so on), and that male engineers earn the same amount as female engineers (again, for some given value of all the variables). But if 90% of teachers are female, and 90% of engineers are male, then men will, on average, earn more than women. Is this fair? Well, that depends on why there are gender disparities in those professions. If a female engineer has a harder time getting hired than a male engineer with the same qualifications, that’s a problem. If both truly have all the opportunities available to them and women just happen to like teaching better than engineering, that’s fine. If the hiring process is gender-blind but social pressure tends to discourage women from being engineers, regardless of their aptitudes, then that’s a problem, but a different problem than in the first case.
So private employers are responsible for footing the bill for an employee’s private choice, however laudable?
What if I want to take a year off to help Habitat for Humanity? That’s a worthy goal. Should my employer be required to pay me my regular wage for a year or keep my job open for me when I return?
Do men enter higher paying careers after grad school?
Do men not also choose to have children? Most children are brought into this world by two willing parents.
What I see is that if I chose not to have a family, I may, in the early stages of my career, make slightly more than men. If I chose to have a family, I will probably earn much less than men. This is not a choice that men generally have to make- they manage to have a family and a career. Why is this a possibility for men, but somehow less possible for women?
Anyway, I don’t think raising children- even as a primary caregiver- is inherently incompatible with having a career. For example, right now 28-35 or so is the critical period of a career, where you either wil or will not rise. But there is no god-given reason for that. I wouldn’t be surprised if in women-dominated careers you see a slightly different career arc.
As for leave- I’m a fan of Sweden’s method, where fathers also get leave and are expected to take it.
Generally, I suppose. Men and women with more education generally earn more than those without it. I have a feeling that this question was meant to be pointed however, but I am not quite sure I see what you’re driving at.
Sure, and men make a sacrifice by working instead of staying at home. They don’t have as close a relationship with their children as the mother, and if the marriage goes pear shaped they’re less likely to be named primary caregiver to the children in a family court. Looking at only one issue (wages) only tells half the story.
I’m pretty sure that even controlling for education men tend to enter higher paying fields. I’ll try to find a cite.
Right, but what if the woman wants to work more and the man wants to stay at home with the child? It seems like the solution to all these problems is more flexibility about parental leave, not “well men are screwed over in some ways too, so stop whining, ladies”.
What is currently stopping the husband from being a stay-at-home dad and the wife working?
Significantly better maternity leave/pay than paternity leave/pay in nearly every country in the world, plus the fact that (as above) men in full-time employment tend to earn more than women in full-time employment. When a couple is deciding who should go back to work, it makes more sense to have the partner making £45,000 go than the one making £36,000. Systematic inequality tends to perpetuate itself.
I’ll have a crack. Starting from the basics:
People have children. Generally, they have them in couples. Generally, nowadays, both partners are employed and intend to/have to work for most of their adult lives. Let’s make the crazy assumption that we want our society to encourage procreation, and that therefore it’s worth organising ourselves in such a way that having children is an attractive option. Let’s go further, and say that we want children to have a stable and loving home life.
Children, and babies in particular, tend to require full-time care. This can be given by others, but generally it’s acknowledged that there are real benefits to having the primary carer of an infant be one of its parents. But to take that time off has a detrimental effect on one’s career. This in itself is entirely reasonable - someone who has taken, say, three years out of work in the past five will be less experienced and less up-to-date in their sector than someone who has not, and a business is quite right to pay more for, or offer promotion to, the latter rather than the former. However, there’s no question that this is something aspiring parents have to consider when weighing up whether to have a child.
Currently, the role of primary carer is generally filled by the mother. Ostensibly, there are sound biological reasons for this. But this doesn’t really bear scrutiny. Women tend not to leave their jobs while pregnant - only at about 8/8.5 months. So the question of who gets pregnant is irrelevant. Breastfeeding is indeed something that can only be done by a mother but a) it is possible to express sufficient milk to feed the baby in the mother’s absence and b) the breastfeeding period is relatively short. (According to the CDC, only 1/3 of US babies were exclusively breastfed up to 3 months, and only 14% up to 6 months. The figures are somewhat similar in the UK, I believe.) And of course, c) many babies are formula-fed in part or whole. So let’s say that by 3 months, most babies could be looked after throughout the day by a father - bottle-feeding and nappy-changing not being exclusively female skills.
Nevertheless, the role of primary carer (and the attendant sacrifice of earning power throughout the career) tends to fall on women, and the job of breadwinner tends to fall on men. This is because of a) the inertia of tradition - it’s the custom of our tribe; b) women are permitted to take parental leave and men are not; c) financially speaking, couples tend to sacrifice less by foregoing the woman’s earnings rather than the man’s. But a) is no reason at all; b) is begging the question. As is c) where it is true, and it is becoming less true - pre marriage and childbirth, women’s earnings in major cities are equal to or even greater than men’s. Note that married, childless women earn less than married, childless men. Why is this? Are employers pricing in the “risk” of future children and absence from the role? If so, is this prejudice or good business sense?
If there were an expectation that the role of primary carer in, say, the first year of a child’s life would be split more or less equally between both parents then the following things would happen: women would be able to invest more time in their careers, and increase their value to employers; employers would have less disincentive to employ or promote women whom they suspected might become mothers; women who value their career would be more likely to procreate.
There’s a flip-side of course. If men are taking time off from their career to look after children, then they can expect to see their earning power decline. But there are two points to consider here. Firstly, as things stand we expect the earning power of the household to be reduced in any case - that it now falls upon both partners doesn’t necessarily increase the overall cost to employers and to parents. Secondly and more importantly, I would argue that earning power doesn’t decrease in simple proportion to time taken off. I.e. someone who has taken a year off their career is has lost more than twice the value to their employer than someone who takes off 6 months. They’ve missed more, their relationships with their colleagues have degraded more, there have been more changes in the organisation and the industry - it’s more than twice as hard to get back up to speed. So it’s probably better to split time off between partners - better for them, and better for their employers.
I have some direct experience of this. In my company at least, men who take off from work to tend to their children face a much higher penalty in terms of income, job security and advancement than women who do the same thing. Under pressure from a group of women at our company, the HR department looked into the working arrangements of men and women. They found that women were afforded much more flexibility than men. So this really backfired. There were many more controls put on “flexible work arrangements” because they found that 100% of flexible work arrangements were for female employees, and all except a handful were approved by female supervisors. They also found that the workload for males in a group went up in the period following a female employee being approved for a “flexible working arrangement”.
Flexible working arrangement means either work from home some or all the time or being allowed to work outside the 9-5 window. People who had flexible work arrangements worked less, achieved less, and received better job evaluations than those who didn’t. The last isn’t the least bit unsurprising. The only way to get approved for a “flexible work arrangement” is to work for someone who is a good friend of yours.
The buddy system works for men in many ways as well, and perhaps overall to a greater effect. But in this particular area it is huge for women.