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Comment by ahoy | Hacker News Reader

This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity.

Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a few years after that. Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

That doesn't mean the "gender gap" doesn't exist, or that it isn't an issue to address. It means that the way we tackle it isn't as simple as "pass a law mandating equal pay for equal work".

We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).

*edited for typos

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I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles.

My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.

What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?

Your second question is tricky to answer, so I am going to ignore it. :D

For your first question, I always think the key is choice and support for people who make choices that are counter to the norm. Sure, it might be that when given a choice free of social pressures, more women might still choose to be the primary caregiver for children than men will.

That is fine, and women and men who make that socially traditional choice should be supported and not judged. The key, however, is to make sure we also support and don't judge the people who choose other arrangements for child caregiving. We should not design laws and social conventions that punish those who choose to go against the norm.

Part of my comment was questioning the meaning of support. Are we talking emotional support, and simply being accepting of other's identity? Are we taxing some roles and subsidizing others to normalize economic freedom? What if the market also has inherent preferences that mirror natural preferences? Do we actively recruit youth and try to get them into under-represented roles? What about undesirable roles?

I don't know... maybe this is all moot if we're still working through the "simpler" stuff like balancing laws and getting rid of stereotypes.

In the case of the software industry in the US, the companies themselves have a strong economic incentive to get school girls to choose engineering careers. It'd almost double the pool of hiring candidates. So it's something that the market eventually balances, only maybe not fast enough.

> simpler stuff like getting rid of stereotypes.

That's this part of your comment: "emotional support", "accepting of other's identity", "taxing some roles and subsidizing others", "undesirable roles". Those all come out of stereotypes.

This is anecdata, but I'll tell you something from my experience. All the way until my studies, I met one girl who was interested in programming (more in general tech, but let's limit this to programming). During 5 years of studies I met the next 4. That's compared to probably ~200 guys. That was only around a decade ago.

Nowadays, I see tens of young girls joining local raspberry jams for fun in the UK. My friend's daughters are playing with electrical circuits and installing switch&lamp circuit between beds to chat in Morse code. And none of this comes from pushing for forced equality-in-numbers. This is just kids getting excited about stuff, because nobody is stopping them.

I think the stereotypes played a big part for a long time and we'll see a slow rebalancing of candidates' genders. I think (and hope) the situation will be very much different in ~15 years when current kids finish universities. But I don't believe much active support can change anything for near-future graduates.

I mean both emotional and legal support.

So.. either parent who care gives can get the same leave for that caregiving. Basically, do not write gender specific laws. Write laws based on parenting role, and it can apply to either gender who takes on that role.

I don't think we can try to fix the market demand for the various roles, but we can certainly fix the legal discrepancies.

The emotional support is impossible to legislate, but I think as a society we should not judge negatively men who decide to be the primary child care provider nor judge women who decide to be the breadwinner (although in most families, both parents need to be both... I am a big proponent of day care)

I think that a lot of people approach these sort of issues by constraint propagation from their political axioms - so for instance if they hold that the total work done by all men must be equally valuable to the total work done by all women and there is a set of arguments that together imply this is not the case (such as, for a crude hypothetical setting, "the value of work is proportional to the amount of physical work exerted to perform it" + "men have greater physical strength than women on average" + "men and women exert the same percentage of their strength for the same amount of time while working on average"), they will exercise far greater skepticism than would be warranted by the evidence towards each of those propositions.

i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference".

others perceive racism/sexism everywhere and only read that the 95 percentile and unweighted pays are different.

We can get off the political topic and start with other axioms as well. IE some believe more women need to be involved in tech, while others want less competition in their respective field (lower vs higher salary).

> i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference".

Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.

A huge part of the problem is the "evidence" is terrible. There are so many degrees of freedom and so much entropy in what you're trying to measure that anyone can easily make the numbers say whatever they want.

The answer to "is it society or biology" is both. And it will always be both, because you can't change biology and you can't "balance" society without being able to disentangle biology, and disentangling biology from society would violate both causality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Even measuring how much of each it is has the same problem.

People want to say we just need better evidence. We just need to measure it better or be more diligent or think about it more carefully. But it isn't that. It's that the problem is NP-complete and n is large. It may even be incomputable because some of the necessary information was lost to history and not knowable.

Which is why it's a political football. People choose their team and see how far they can run with the ball, because the score isn't based on science or math.

Ultimately, over the exceptionally long term, as automation removes the need to work, the solution is to move to a leisure-based society in which everyone is given equal stipends and allow optionally working up to, say, 10 hours per week to earn more, thus removing the problem entirely.

Although that solution may be roughly on the scale of "ultimately, the great heat death of the universe will make the problem moot."

I don't think that addresses the problem though. What happens when we see gender imbalances in a post-labor society?

What if we see basket weaving dominated by women and ham baking dominated by men? Is it free choice? Genetics? Physiological? Cultural?

What about the indirect imbalances resulting from the choice of work, like one role creating a reusable tool and one creating a consumable resource?

That argument ignores cultural evolution, which humans have long used to adapt to changing circumstances much more quickly than biological evolution. Just as we evolved culturally to accommodate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we will do the same to accommodate our modern post-physical labor society.

And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this way. People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.

> People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.

The validity of that statement is highly location dependent.

So is any `we live in an <x> society' claim like the one that preceded it.

But the places where that depends are places where PC-ness isn't much of a thing. In Papua new guinea PC isn't on the consciousness of people.

I don't see how you think these questions ignore cultural evolution. I think the question can be rephrased as asking "What causes of gender-biased job funneling/preference are acceptable in our hyper-PC society?"

1) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal opportunity: Bad

2) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal societal expectations: Bad

3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.

4) Gender-biased job preference due solely to genetically determined traits and inherent job qualities. Ok. (I don't think this exists much as most traits that impact job preference have a significant emergent/environmental components).

I think our "hyper-PC" society agrees with me on 1) and 2) and possibly 4).

I think most of the disagreement happens around 3). Is 3) ever OK? How do we tell if society if sufficiently equal for 3) to be Ok?

My personal stance is that it doesn't make sense to argue that 3) is ok until we have done a much better job of eliminating 1) and 2).

edit: layout/typo

They presuppose that if there is an evolutionary explanation for gender rules it's genetic rather than cultural.

I don't see that presupposition. They don't mention any differentiation between 'genetic' vs 'cultural' explanations. I think you are reading that into the use of the terms 'innate' and 'natural'.

Ah yes, the Y chromosome is indeed a culturally manifested construct. Good point.

> 3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.

Isn't expecting "gender-equal expectations and opportunities" strange if you agree with "Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits"?

Why would culture expect a tall thin person and a short muscular person to be equally good at basketball and weightlifting?

I wonder what percentage of all jobs have characteristics that a require a person to have a certain build or physique to be successful in that role?

Who knows... Maybe it's the same white/blue collar worker separation?

On the other hand - I also find it hard to believe that the only difference between the sexes is the body build. Based on my engineers' mindset it would quite surprise me if two bodies which look and work different were wired totally alike. Though this line of thought is quite out of fashion.

What about Gender-biased job preference cause by people choosing jobs based on finding people with similar life experience?

I often see a preference in particular young adults that pick summer jobs or education based on where they can find co-students/workers that has the same gender, age, color, economical status, and life experience as they. Is this Bad, and if so, how do we eliminate that feeling of familiarity and safety that such choice brings?

There is a yearly study in Sweden that polls peoples priority when looking for job. Highest on the list is often the social environment and co-workers, and the pay (ie, the rational argument for picking a job) is often far low on the list.

Cultural evolution definitely does occur, but just like can happen with genetic evolution, and on a greater level because of the faster pace, its progress can have negative effects. A civilization can evolve culturally, and that might allow it to function more effectively than it did prior, but it could also be worse off in other ways. For example the rate of depression could increase.

> Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs?

For that, you would need to hire teachers, who would have to re-educate themselves out of being teachers, first. ;)

My preference as a father would be to spend as much care-free time with my kids as possible (care-free as in not having to worry about earning money). But I fully accept that my wife has the greater claim to having that time. I was present when my kids were born.

Why does everybody swallow the feminist narrative that it is a horrible chore to spend time with children? Note that feminism depends on that evaluation, otherwise a lot of their complaints evaporate.

As I said in another comment, if you don't like spending time with children, you could simply opt not to have one. How do feminists explain that people have kids who they then supposedly hate to take care of? (Of course, it has to be socialization, it never occurs to women that they have a choice because the patriarchy has brainwashed them...Sure thing)

My preference as a person would be to spend as much care-free time as possible (care-free as in not having to worry about earning money).

FTFY.

What do you mean? According to urban dictionary, ftyf means "fixed that for you"? How does your statement contradict mine?

Because that's what everyone wants, kids or not.

Sure, but there is a reason mothers get it and fathers don't. My post was in reply to the assumption that everybody wants to work instead of staying at home with the kids.

I know just by staying at home you are not free of all worries. But for the time being, your responsibility is not worrying about earning a livelihood.

The nurturing roles theory is kind of sexist. I think a better theory is as follows. In almost all metrics men show higher variance than women (sometimes that is attributed to because men lack a moderating effect of an extra x chromosome). As a result the "male" skillet is more varied and men seek a wider range of jobs. Another possibility is that socially men are expected to be riskier, and so are more broadly seeking in their choice of occupation.

Either way, the net effect is a diminished supply of labor relative to the varied demand. By contrast, women seek jobs that often are chock full of other women, creating an increased supply of labor and lower relative wages.

Sometimes I think about how little teachers get paid and wonder why I know so many women going in to that knowing the poor pay in advance.

It's not "sexist" to acknowledge reality.

Men and women (on average) have different hormone levels, and those hormones do effect our emotions and our choices.

But to use those factual physical differences as a way to explain (read: justify) archaic, false beliefs about other differences between men and women? Yeah, that's pretty sexist.

Which raises a question very similar to the one losteric asked earlier: is the idea that women are more nuturing and more attached to children an archaic, false belief, or a biological fact?

I don't know the answer, but merely asking the question as losteric did is not sexist.

Every study on hormones from the last 40 years has shown conclusive evidence that hormone levels within natural occurring levels has very minimal effect on behavior, emotion and life choices. If you want to find differences between gender, look at chromosomes and their effect. The purpose of hormone is to primarily regulate the reproductive system.

Untrue, but rather than link to a few of the many studies that do show an effect, let me ask:

If not hormonal, how do you explain the emotional changes in post-partum depression, menopause, pregnancy, 'roid rage, sympathetic pregancy...?

natural occurring levels. A person who injects steroids to create hormone levels with order of magnitude above normal levels is not natural occurring.

If you take a number of people with different aggressiveness (or as most studies do, look at chimps with picking orders), and you find no correlation with hormone. Add 5% more hormone, and you don't get 5% behavior. Pump in larger amount of hormone, and you see exaggeration of existing behavior. Remove all hormone, and you see a decrease behavior, but the behavior doesn't go away. Its regulative.

post-partum depression, menopause, and pregnancy all cause major changes in a person. Hormone levels, since its regulative, also change with those changes. There were for example a study at women with abnormal amount of testosterone (but within the limit of naturally occurring in humans). The first studies from 1970 showed how there was increased crime, increase aggressiveness, changes in sexuality, emotions, and the ability to keep maintain a job. When people tried to reproduce those studies, everything was shown to be false.

This could be a long debate.

To simplify, do you know of any scientific or medical sources that say "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion" as you claimed earlier?

lets me quote a few different text. The key word that I used was regulative effect.

"Normal estrogen levels vary widely. Large differences are typical in a woman on different days, or between two women on the same day of their cycles. The actual measured level of estrogen doesn't predict emotional disturbances.". (webmd article. not a authoritative but useful as a general summery)

"However, estrogen is not simply a natural "physiological protectant". Some have reported that estrogen administration does not improve mood and even causes fear and anxiety. Therefore, the impact of estrogen on emotion varies and may depend on the individual's current state and the situation. The authors believe that hormones do not exert an absolute and singular effect on the body." (Estrogen Impacts on Emotion: Psychological, Neuroscience and Endocrine Studies)

As an example estrogen effect, it regulated how easy memories of arousals are formed, which also adrenaline happens to do. Both do this for rather logical reasons, ie, to increase or decrease the chance of a similar event to happen again. This can then have an effect of the perception of fearful faces, although the study on mice from 2006 (Jasnow et al) doesn't really give a definitive number on how big impact that has on female mice total emotional state. It is also reported that this effect the perception of pain and the memory of having pain.

"The testosterone increment was associated with detectable but minor mood changes ... Future research should investigate the implications of these minor mood changes."(Effects of Testosterone on Mood, Aggression, and Sexual Behavior in Young Men: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Study)

I will stop here. People like to blame hormones and hormone levels to excuse someones behavior. The data I have seen is quite clear the effect is regulative and thus you don't get an cause-and-effect.

Administered hormones are not equivalent to natural hormones (which is a significant problem with HRT).

And those quotes are not quite "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion".

"the impact of estrogen on emotion varies"

And another quote from the study you quoted (Effects of testosterone on mood, aggression, and sexual behavior in young men: a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study):

"Increased circulating T was associated with significant increases in anger-hostility from baseline (mean score = 7.48) to wk 2 (mean score = 10.71)"

7.48 to 10.71 doesn't seem like a very minimal change.

----

Since you quoted WebMD (perhaps a useful summary) I will as well:

"It's clear that estrogen is closely linked with women's emotional well-being. Depression and anxiety affect women in their estrogen-producing years more often than men or postmenopausal women. Estrogen is also linked to mood disruptions that occur only in women -- premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and postpartum depression."

And from another article:

"Declining estrogen levels associated with menopause can cause more than those pesky hot flashes. They can also make a woman feel like she is in a constant state of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Unfortunately, these emotional changes are a normal part of menopause."

"Some of the emotional changes experienced by women undergoing perimenopause or menopause can include: Irritability, Feelings of sadness, Lack of motivation, Anxiety, Aggressiveness, Difficulty concentrating, Fatigue, Mood changes, and Tension."

----

Perhaps we can agree.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by regulative, but I agree that emotions are complicated and hormones are not the only influence, nor is the relationship a simple cause and effect.

On the other hand, there's significant evidence that hormones do effect emotion, including perhaps the most striking example which I somehow forgot earlier: puberty. And their prenatal effect on the structure of the brain.

Would you agree hormones do effect emotions, but aren't the only factor, and the relationship is complicated, unpredictable, and varies between individuals?

I would use the wording of the article, in that hormone is closely linked and associated with certain behavior. There is very little studies (but feel free to provide them) that shows that artificial reduced estrogen will cause a person to get emotional upset.

By regulative I mean that in order to see a major effect, you already need to have a major state. A person with no aggression is not going to get aggressive based on testosterone. A person that is already aggressive will have that aggression regulated if one artificially increasing the circulating testosterone, most often by exaggerating the aggression in a context aware way. For example, a person who has a tendency for road rage won't be more likely to shoot someone, but they might honk the horn more or yell more loudly. Regulative effects don't cause things to happen, but rather modulate what already exist.

Puberty and pregnancy has an other thing in common, in that it both cause changes in the persons neurons. Its speculated the reason that a womans body during pregnancy do this is in order to make it easier form memories and bond with the newborn baby. Its been suggested that some typical pregnancy behaviors is thus a result of those changes to the neurons. I would strongly suspect that hormone levels have a regulative role in facilitating the rate of the changes, but I doubt if measuring the hormone level would be a predictor for how much of a change actually happened.

To bring out an analogy, taxes has an regulative effect on wealth, but its a not a predictor for it. If I selected random individuals over the world and only looked at where they live and how much percent that they pay in taxes, it will tell me nothing about who is rich and who is poor. I have a better time looking at living expensive and food prices, but even that is a poor method to predict how much wealth someone has. I would thus not describe taxes as having a significant effect on wealth, and that wealth per adult is the result of a complex system.

Are there people with no aggression?

I think you may mean (and if this is the case I generally agree) that when hormones trigger behaviors such as road rage, those behaviors have already been learned. Likewise, testosterone is unlikely to cause someone to shoot another driver because significant inhibitions against that behavior have been learned.

But hormones have an effect even in early childhood and before birth, when no behaviors have been learned yet. Prenatal hormones affect brain structure, and studies have found a link between hormones in children as young as 3 months and their choice of toys.[1]

[1] http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks...

Actually, chromosomes are a worse target for predicting behaviors in terms of sex-linked traits since genes during conception can and will be exchanged between the X and Y chromosomes in humans. This is why sometimes the SRY gene is found in women (XX) despite clearly having an operative uterus and ovaries. Nature loves to pick on us humans when it comes to assuming fixed traits.

How interesting. So using a statistically significant population sample, there will be no phenotypic differences between carriers of X versus Y chromosomes?

If so, science has progressed quite far in the last few years that I've been away.

There won't be much difference beyond reproductive roles and other physical traits, but the brain doesn't seem to be affected all that much, no.

Basically, there's no gene for being a programmer just as there's no gene for being a (good/bad) parent. Why would Nature bother to pre-compute/compile all possible states/outcomes? Better to compute/compile the essentials for a living species then let the rest be handled by history.

> There won't be much difference beyond reproductive roles and other physical traits, but the brain doesn't seem to be affected all that much, no.

Ah so evolution stops at the neck! Genius!

The more you know...

Evolution stops specializing when said specialization offers no beneficial adaptation sufficient for the metabolic cost. It's why the vast majority of living organisms have much simpler brains, body plans, and even reproductive strategies. Humans and other similar animals are rare little things in the vast ocean of simpler, more elegant mutations.

I picked chromosomes and genes mostly because they are at least involved in the creation of the human brain, which was a bit hastily written. I agree that it makes for a poor prediction to determine who is going to have a tendency for mood swings.

Gender, to the degree that gender is not about culture, is quite far down the list of predictors, and even further down on the list would be hormones.

The literature I've read says hormones are "involved in the creation of the brain".

"Steroid hormones are a dominant and pervasive source of sex differences by mediating developmental processes that are enduring and establish adult physiological and behavioural responses relevant to the reproductive constraints of each sex."

From Multifaceted origins of sex differences in the brain, 1 February 2016, an open access article.

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1688/2015...

The same study says:

"Animal models have also allowed us to move beyond hormones and to an appreciation of the important role of sex chromosomes. Study of these mice has revealed important roles for chromosome complement on body weight and feeding, aggression and habit formation, to name a few."

And section 8: "Some argue it is pure folly to study neuroanatomical sex differences with the hope of understanding sex differences in behaviour as the connection between anatomy and behaviour is often weak or even non-existent [50]. Indeed, the most celebrated sex difference in the brain, the SDN, has not been clearly tied to any specific behavioural or physiological endpoint, although see above discussion regarding sexual orientation. While it is true that anatomical or physiological differences in the brain often do not map onto clear differences in behaviour, does this mean they are not important or even, not real? Many studies of sex differences in brain anatomy or neural functioning are perfectly sound, meaning they are fully powered and technically executed using well vetted and accepted approaches, yet a strong correlation between variance in anatomy and variance in behaviour is about the best one can hope for in establishing a causal relationship."

I never said that hormones were the only influence, in fact I agree that genetics is also important.

Regarding behavior, and specifically the SDN, consider, for example:

The volume of a sexually dimorphic nucleus in the ovine medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus varies with sexual partner preference. Endocrinology. 2004

"In addition to a sex difference, we found that the volume of the oSDN was two times greater in female-oriented rams than in male-oriented rams."

Wired on steroids: sexual differentiation of the brain and its role in the expression of sexual partner preferences. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2011

"Development of female-directed partner preference in the male is dependent on exposure of the developing brain to gonadal steroids synthesized during critical periods of sexual differentiation of the central nervous system"

The development of male-oriented behavior in rams. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2011

"Although our understanding of the biological determinants and underlying neural substrates of sexual attraction and mate selection are far from complete, compelling evidence is discussed that supports the idea that neural substrates regulating sexual partner preferences are organized during prenatal development"

I've been reading up on an embryologist that has been digging into the question of what defines sex in humans. She's concluding sex can be as varied as eye color and the like. So, sex isn't much a static category but rather a clustering of characteristics. It's something that may seem counter intuitive, but Nature doesn't have to obey our intentions.

In addition to what leereves mentions, preferences could be different because of biology also in a different way. Knowing that their child-bearing period is quite limited, women rationally overweight "having children" and underweight "having a great career" in their youth, compared to men, who can work their ass off for 20 years, and still easily have kids afterwards. On other words, it's easier for men to "have it all" than for women (I don't agree with the values expressed by this saying, but I'm guessing many people do).

>It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad.

It also doesn't account for full time covering a wide number of hours worked. Full time can be 37 hours a week or 45 hours a week, can comparing them as both just being 'full time' misses quite a lot.

>This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids. If anything, I rather be with my kid than stuck an extra 20 hours in the office... one of these pressures is for something most people find more desirable than the other.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.

So are we aiming for more men to take flexible schedules or for pay to not suffer when someone takes flexible schedules? Because if you want the former, it is more about the pressure to earn than the stigma on flexible work schedules. And if it is the latter, how is this fair to the people who don't get the flexible work schedules? I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).

Elsewhere, on a different topic, you posted something along the same lines:

> Which gender gets killed most often at work because of a social pressure that your value is determined by having a job, so if the only job options are dangerous, you best take one anyways?

Do you like gender roles or not? You've already posted like 5 times in this thread, and I'm not sure if your perspective is "let's do away with gender roles" or "gender roles are there for a reason, and it benefits women".

The very last line of the post you just responded to.

>I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).

I would hope that makes my position on the matter clear enough. But in case it doesn't.

Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination. But gender roles are still a problem, especially for the people who are forced into the roles they do not like.

But... even if I made posts that completely contradict everything I said (and I do that sometimes when trying out arguments for sides I don't normally support), that does not invalidate anything in the current posts.

> Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination

How was Lilly Ledbetter's wage disparity caused by something other than discrimination on the basis of sex? Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter :

"Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236."

Single past data point does not make a modern day trend.

I'm glad you've clarified that statement "Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination" is incomplete, and that you accept that historical wage disparity included discrimination on the basis of sex.

However, your response is less than complete. What is "modern day"?

For example, "DU Law School is violating Equal Pay Act"/"The University of Denver is violating federal law by paying female law professors less than their male counterparts, according to the [EEOC]" (2015) - http://legacy.9news.com/story/news/education/2015/08/31/equa...

Why is "trend" relevant? Your clarified statement is that modern wage disparity is not due to discrimination. That means that even a handful of counter-examples would suffice to show that that statement is incorrect. Adding the term "trend" feels very much like you are moving the goalposts.

The EEOC only indicated _disparity_, and because it's a governmental political bully, it got to turn that into an accusation of discrimination. Logic not necessary.

You are of course free to reject any data points you disagree with.

It is unfair, however, to give no guidelines of what you think might be acceptable.

For example, if "modern" means "occurred within the last six months", then we have to look towards anecdotes and accusations, as court cases and rigorous scientific research take far longer than that.

If "modern" means ten years, then it's easy to find court cases like http://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa-woman-wins-lawsuit-agains... where the wage discrimination happened in 2009, and http://www.startribune.com/norway-asked-to-pay-2-3-million-i... where it happened in 2008.

That said, if you only accept tried court cases as evidence then you've placed a laughably high barrier. Court case 1) have a high burden of proof, 2) are rare, 3) rarely go to completion and are often settled out of court, and 4) make take years to complete. Thus, almost by definition they will not be from discrimination which happened within the last year or two.

If those data points were on topic ("discrimination"), instead of off topic ("difference"), I wouldn't reject them.

Since you don't accept the EEOC as a valid source of information, you are likely to reject statements like http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/4-28-11a.cfm :

> Gender-based wage discrimination remains a problem today and a percentage of the wage discrepancy cannot be explained by non-discriminatory factors, said government and private experts ..

In http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga... , in an essay that argues that illegal wage discrimination is minor, I read:

> What the 2009 Labor Department study showed was that when the proper controls are in place, the unexplained (adjusted) wage gap is somewhere between 4.8 and 7 cents. ... The AAUW notes that part of the new 6.6-cent wage-gap may be owed to women's supposedly inferior negotiating skills -- not unscrupulous employers. Furthermore, the AAUW's 6.6 cents includes some large legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories. ... Could the gender wage gap turn out to be zero? Probably not. The AAUW correctly notes that there is still evidence of residual bias against women in the workplace. However, with the gap approaching a few cents, there is not a lot of room for discrimination.

If it's 2 cents, out of 23 cents, then that's 9%. While minor compared to indirect societal factors, I don't think it's small enough to dismiss outright.

Neither you nor I can explain the unexplained component. It's true that it may have nothing at all to do with discrimination on the basis of sex. However, that is very doubtful as we see successful lawsuits where there is wage discrimination based on sex and we see settlements for that accusation, so we know there it's still ongoing. And we know that mediated settlements are rare, so they are the tip of the iceberg.

Therefore, I see no reason to reject illegal wage discrimination as one of the factors that goes into the wage gap.

"I see no reason to reject ... as one of the factors"

Such agnostic logic is unassailable. You don't know; the powers that be don't know; the courts & lawsuits don't know. You're right not to reject the possibility.

However, you'd be wrong the assert the certainty "... disparity is also caused by discrimination" with such flimsy evidence.

I am making a different argument.

We know for an incontrovertible fact that a few decades back women faced wage discrimination, even when doing the same job, with the same experience.

We know this from explicit records, with Lilly Ledbetter being one example. There is a reason why the various civil rights laws were enacted.

Therefore, to argue that wage discrimination does not now exist, the proof must be more rigorous than "we can't explain the remaining gap, but it can't be wage discrimination."

I have pointed to recent (within the last 10 years) court cases where the court determined that there was wage discrimination on the basis of sex. Thus, we know for certain that some wage discrimination exists.

If you want to have an argument that it's small - sure, I'll accept that. If you want to say it's hard to measure its magnitude - sure, I'll accept that too. But there's zero justification to state that it does not exist, when we have evidence that it does exist.

I can be wrong. I could have missed some recent study which resolves this more clearly. There may be a report which shows that the court cases I came across happen to be the only ones that have happened i the last 10 years. Such things would be evidence that my position is weak or untenable.

I have not seen such counter-evidence, hence I see no reason to reject my conclusion that wage discrimination on the basis of sex remains an admittedly minor contribution to the wage gap.

"We know this from explicit records, with Lilly Ledbetter being one example."

I'm not tremendously familiar with this case, but according to the gods of wikipedia, the evidence for discrimination consisted of nothing but evidence of difference.

Same old same old.

"It is unfair, however, to give no guidelines of what you think might be acceptable."

If you do not accept a jury's decision that there was pay discrimination on the basis of sex, then you have ridiculously high bar that precludes effectively all evidence.

The same court decision that was thrown out by the SCOTUS? The same jury that used the 51% "more likely than not" standard to assume that the difference in pay was due to discrimination, there being no actual clear evidence?

That one?

> Why is "trend" relevant? Your clarified statement is that modern wage disparity is not due to discrimination. That means that even a handful of counter-examples would suffice to show that that statement is incorrect. Adding the term "trend" feels very much like you are moving the goalposts.

That doesn't make any sense. The OP is taking about averages and overall discrimination in society. I.e. How much of the wage gap is explained by other factors?

> How much of the wage gap is explained by other factors?

I'll point out that the g'parent comment that I objected to classified things into only the categories "gender roles" and "discrimination".

One of the explanations given for the wage gap is that women don't have as much negotiating skills as men. Is that a gender role? Or is it a third category?

I'll quote from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga... (" Wage Gap Myth Exposed -- By Feminists"):

This summary does not seem like a mis-characterization. I therefore see no reason to change my opinion that wage discrimination is due to "gender roles" and discrimination as even 2 cents is still about 10% of even the unadjusted value of 23 cents.

(For purposes of this discussion I limit 'discrimination' to mean 'illegal discrimination on the basis of sex', and not the broader meaning of how cultural discrimination on the basis of sex influences gender roles.)

>"Why is "trend" relevant? Your clarified statement is that modern wage disparity is not due to discrimination. That means that even a handful of counter-examples would suffice to show that that statement is incorrect."

That does not logically follow. If you're offering an explanation for a large dataset which is depicting a trend, the value of that explanation is not undermined by a handful of statistical outliers. If we say that the explanation for women living longer than men is a mixture of biology and cultural factors, a single story about a woman murdering her husband does not speak to the accuracy of a broader explanation at all.

You would need to demonstrate that the counter-examples and the counter-explanation they suggest are statistically significant.

Edit: I'm not engaging in an ad hominem attack here, but I would like to draw attention to previous comments made by this poster to indicate that this is not the first time they've had difficulty parsing how statistics are generally understood to work: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dalke

I disagreed with the statement 'Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination'.

It's clear from history, as my example of Lilly Ledbetter, that Wage disparity is also caused by discrimination.

I don't see the need for "counter-examples and the counter-explanation" when documents like http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/4-28-11a.cfm ("Gender-Based Wage Gap Persists, Experts Agree at EEOC Forum" (2011)) say things like:

> Gender-based wage discrimination remains a problem today and a percentage of the wage discrepancy cannot be explained by non-discriminatory factors, said government and private experts ...

Two possible objections are that 2011 isn't modern enough, and that the EEOC cannot be believed. Without knowing what is considered valid evidence, I don't see the need to dig up examples when they can be dismissed with a one line response.

I find it weird that you don't think that contradicting yourself invalidates anything.

He's a frequent poster on r/mensrights, so that may be a clue.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Lawtonfogle/

> > This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

> How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids.

So... you're saying the exact same thing. There is a social pressure for the women to be in careers where they are caring for kids, and for men not to be.

So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe?

The framing does make a difference, as it sets the perception of which gender is being "wronged".

I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.

Both are true and both need to be fixed. Yes, men are often pressured to be the breadwinner of the family. That is a problem too, and it should be less stigmatized for the women to be an equal breadwinner.

You are implicitly assuming that there are no differences between male and female preferences (on average). It seems plausible that biologically-originated gender differences may extend beyond genitalia. Is there any reason to believe men and women have the same priorities, abilities, and preferences, and that we should expect them to attain the same outcomes?

You'd need to show that our incredibly complex artificially created environments are built with biological gender differences at their core, or acknowledge that a huge part of human existence is learned behaviors.

The fact is, huge amounts of "gendered culture" have swapped genders over the centuries.

For example, everything you learned from a book, or from spoken language is not part of your innate biology. Only a part of how you gravitate toward that material may be biologically gendered.

If you believe that gender-correlated differences in life outcomes are largely due to societal norms, there are some issues which should be much higher priorities than (relatively) small differences in earnings due to choices of professions. For instance, almost all inmates on death row are male, and 90-95 percent of the prison population are male; this is a terribly disparate outcome with a much greater impact on the lives affected (and likely due mostly to mens' life choices, not a biased legal system). Perhaps you might argue that we should encourage men to stop committing crimes, but alas, we already do that, and it does not seem to work. Should we then use affirmative action to start encouraging women to take risky decisions to be more like men and be imprisoned at similar rates (or perhaps just imprison women at random if we are only after equality of outcome)? I don't know that this would work, but it would be 'fairer', would it not?

I believe that men are affected by a great number of factors including their biologies, and struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise.

I chose my language specifically. Single women are more often family caregivers than are single men.

Does that support the narrative that caregiving is shunted onto women against their will/without their say?

For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for.

Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.

Well put. Likewise, you can reframe the difference as 'women are paid less overall than men' or as 'men get less leisure time and less time with their families overall'. It would be interesting to see a campaign for shorter hours for men without changing pay.

I understand that people want a different work-life balance, but I do not understand why they expect higher compensation per unit of output while working less. Increasing the number of workers a company will need to achieve the same product will add overhead and a great deal of ancillary costs; if your goal is to get people to spend less time at work, you should be willing to accept a pay cut (at least proportional to the decrease in output). Labor is the largest cost for most companies, and expecting them to remain in business while dramatically increasing their costs is unrealistic.

To be clear, this is not about being 'fair' to the companies, it is about having realistic expectations of the results of our actions.

People who work less and have a better work-life balance can get more done in less time.

Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks.

I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers to focus on improving 'output per worker hour' in addition to 'output per worker'.

To be clear, if we want this we have really only have one option: Increase demand (for jobs or products from) companies that do this well. Good work-life balance is a non-salary perk like many others that companies offer.

You can't legislate this focus on the part of employers, all you can do is incentive it.

I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year.

I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years.

Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers.

My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.

> they are usually less productive per week/month/year.

You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?

> "you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less

I am not. I said "if we want this".

However, I think I would have a much easier time backing up the assertion "people want to work less" than you would have backing up " happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year" as a causal relationship.

>"You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?"

I never said low stress and low happiness cause low productivity; I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.

>"I said "if we want this"."

You imply that less work and more play is 'better' work-life balance, which assumes that people want to work less.

> I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.

That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead.

Working fewer hours is correlated with higher productivity, possibly high enough that the increase in efficiency is high enough to overcome the reduction in hours when it comes to total output:

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...

That's just a correlation, and there are tons of confounding factors, but this question is not as straighforward as you seem to think.

>"> I am only saying that less hours means less total work output. That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead."

That is actually what I said originally, as can be seen from the following quote:

>>>>"I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year."

Worker productivity is usually defined as work per year; I refer to specific or hourly productivity as the amount of work you get done per hour in the office.

> That is actually what I said originally, as can be seen from the following quote:

Let us accept that I read your claim too literally and move past the semantics.

Do you have any data to back up what you are claiming?

I explain my issue with this question.

>How it is more often foisted upon women?

I show that there is an equal pressure put on men to do different things. My issue is with the "more often".

Now, maybe you were only talking about the pressure on women and not the pressure on men... you should be able to see the issue with this as well.

Except that we are talking about why women on average don't make as much during their careers. You are punting and saying, well men have pressure to work more. You are absolutely right, and it should be part of the conversation, but you've not somehow proved that the women being encouraged to prioritize family isn't a problem.

>you've not somehow proved that the women being encouraged to prioritize family isn't a problem.

I never said it wasn't a problem. I said in a different comment:

>But gender roles are still a problem, especially for the people who are forced into the roles they do not like.

Now, as someone who does value work life balance more than making a lot of money working long hours, I do personally judge one social pressure as not as bad as the other. But I also understand that there are man who have different priorities who see other social pressures as worse, and I understand that there is a 'grass is always greener' effect.

It's two sides of the same coin – women are pressured to pay more attention to family with the exact same mechanisms (society, older relatives, media etc.) that men are pressured into working long hours and being primary breadwinners.

Unfortunately, most comments only mention one side of the problem (that of women being pressured to focus on family), and that leads to reflexive "But what about the pressure on men?" indignant replies. Therefore, it would be good to acknowledge this as a dual issue every time it's brought up, or make it more gender-neutral ("pressure from society to retain outmoded family roles") so friction like the above does not ensure.

Great point—the context of both roles in a partnership is important to the discussion. Having said that, what about single parents who now must do "both" jobs? Women are at a systematic disadvantage in this scenario.

Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures. Melinda Gates talks about this at length in their recent letters for 2016[1], and it's a pretty damning picture that whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.

There is nothing about cleaning, or laundry, or sick care, or <other thing women are expected to do because they're women> that makes them not like doing unpaid work anymore than men. Nobody likes doing thankless work, and everybody likes getting paid to do work (and enjoy the freedoms that having money permits). This distribution of work is bullshit, especially in this day and age of increased automation where wages based on dual earners is the norm if you want a middle class existence and are average.

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/2016-Annual-Letter

> Women are at a systematic disadvantage in this scenario.

What? There is a strong systematic bias in favour of single women.

A man who is expected to work 60 hour weeks is much less likely to get custody of his kids.

A man who takes a significant pay cut so he can spend more time with his kids can also get charged by the courts for being a dead-beat dad etc.

> A man who is expected to work 60 hour weeks is much less likely to get custody of his kids.

We're not comparing custody results, here. We're comparing a full custody woman against a full custody man, across all cultures, not whatever intuition you have about custody battles (in the US, seemingly)?

After doing a bit of reading[1], it's not even clear that any of your statements are true.

"In other words, 91 percent of child custody after divorce is decided with no interference from the family court system. How can there be a bias toward mothers when fewer than 4 percent of custody decisions are made by the Family Court?

What do these statistics tell us?

1. Fathers are less involved in their children's care during the marriage.

2. Fathers are less involved in their children's lives after divorce.

3. Mothers gain custody because the vast majority of fathers choose to give them custody.

4. There is no Family Court bias in favor of mothers because very few fathers seek custody during divorce."

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cathy-meyer/dispelling-the-myt...

> "In other words, 91 percent of child custody after divorce is decided with no interference from the family court system. How can there be a bias toward mothers when fewer than 4 percent of custody decisions are made by the Family Court?

I live in the UK, so I can't comment on how things are in the US, but here it's so completely understood that men won't get the kids that it's relatively rare to try. The only person I know who did (who had a partner who was quite plainly unsuitable to be a parent) still lost out. In such an environment, why would it be surprising that men don't pursue custody?

Further, if the argument goes that mothers spend more time with their children, and therefore ought in general to be more likely to get custody, I don't necessarily argue against that. What I don't understand is why it's okay to say 'Mothers typically spend more time/attention on their children, therefore it's natural that they (on average) should get custody', but it's not okay to say 'Fathers typically spend more time/attention on their careers, therefore it's natural that they (on average) earn more money'.

> Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures.

This is true.

> ...whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.

I have no idea how that conclusion is drawn. Men, for example, are significantly more likely to get killed in the course of their work. For example, men accounted for 92% of all workplace fatalities in 2014[1]. To me anyway, getting killed sounds at least as bad as, if not worse than not getting paid for your work.

Overall, my opinion is that men and women face different kind of pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. What addresses one must address the other.

[1] "Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2014" http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm

It isn't a problem. Women generally should prioritize family. Women are generally more nurturing than men. Why are you making this out to be a problem?

Those pressures are not independent. Any time you say "women are pressured" to do something, there is an implicit "relative to men" added at the end. The same goes for the reverse.

Think about it this way - there are two constant, fixed pressures we are talking about: the pressure to make good money to raise a family, and the pressure to take care of the kids.

We have no way to change the TOTAL pressure - both of those things are fairly fixed (we need to make money and we need to take care of family). The thing we are talking about is HOW those pressures are distributed. Traditionally, the money pressure is more on men and the childrearing pressure is more on women. You can't change any one of those without changing the rest. If you decrease pressure on women to raise children, that in turn raises pressure on men to raise children. This, in turn, would also increase pressure on women to make money, and decrease the pressure on men.

You can choose which angle you come at for the problem, but all of them result in the same thing.

I don't understand the argument here: the previous poster said women are pushed to take care of kids and elderly parents (for no pay, often prompting a reduction in work hours or a desire to stay at a more flexible but lower-paying job, or for me staying in a particular geographic region with lower pay on average) while men are pushed to be primary breadwinners (so they're pushed to make more money, perhaps doing shitty jobs or trading in time with family and community that they would value). It's pretty clear that the people pushed to do work for no money make less money then the people pushed to do work for money, and in fact pushed to make more money when possible. What's the disagreement?

I think you misread the parent. They were saying that specifically family care is foisted on women (more often). In just the previous sentence they assert that men face an equal but opposite pressure.

> So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe?

Have you considered that most women actually prefer spending more time with their children and therefore prefer men that earn more to finance this? (therefore men focus on their career to attract women that usually at some point prefer to work on flexible schedules)

The word "foist" does imply coercion to do something that is against the target's will or interest. Would you be equally okay with the statement being replaced with "self-sacrificial status climbing is more often foisted upon men in our society"? Add to that the common narrative* that men are in charge in our society and therefore social pressure is essentially equivalent to pressure exerted by men, and you quickly get a statement that amounts to "[the problems we observe] are caused by men forcing women to care for family members".

* Even if you don't actually subscribe to this position yourself, it's unfortunately in the nature of debate on a politicised topic like this that the moment you take a position associated with one of the standard camps ("the American Left" or "the Blue Tribe" here, I guess), people will assume that you also hold other opinions typical of that camp. Certainly, "men hold the power in American society" is one of those typical opinions.

Or 80 hours per week. In the tech industry in particular, I would be interested in what this looks like.

> I rather be with my kid than stuck an extra 20 hours in the office

Yeah, sure, it's the typical story for men, working an extra four hours in the office every day. It's so typical, no-one expects otherwise, and it's notable when the opposite happens.

> How it is more often foisted upon women?

According to the 2015 Report Caregiving in the US, 60% of caregivers are women, and half of caregivers report having no choice in undertaking caregiving.

Here's a really interesting freakonomics radio episode that goes into some good detail here if anyone's curious where these differences really originate:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...

Beat me to it. The episode is basically an interview with Claudia Goldin who is about as qualified a person as you could hope for to speak on this matter. [1]

tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting due.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/biocv

It's not just society, it's also biology. Even if "parenting" roles were completely equal, "childbirth" role would fall only on women, so they would still take more time off for children (and hence get lower pay).

Indeed, the crusade against biology is one I watch with great amusement.

Don Quixote would be proud of those who hoist their flags in battle against evolution, biology and the laws of the universe itself.

Keep up the good fight, dear gender abolitionists, for you truly are against a formidable foe.

Your perspective is quite similar to mine. The hubris of our current society is baffling sometimes.

all this is caused by one weakness exhibited by many men.

1. Attempting to fix the problems of the women in their circle and the resulting echo chamber effect.

These men feel guilty when they hear/see women getting into a victim complex or when they are uncomfortable with market forces.

I keep asking my wife & women I know to demand higher salaries and they are content to take the easy non-confrontational path.

Artificial Uterus, or in the Vorkosigan saga, 'Uterine Replicator'

Technically correct but irrelevant. Childbirth itself takes a couple weeks. A proportional pay gap from that would be well under one percent, and it could be offset by the fact that women live five years longer.

> A proportional pay gap from that would be well under one percent

If only pay gap were proportional... I'm afraid that employers penalize time off work disproportionally, probably exponentially; part-time work doesn't have half the salary of full-time work, and when employees take a few weeks off, they don't forgo only those weeks' salary, but also slow down their future learning, progress and promotions. Whether that's fair or not is debatable (I'd say it makes sense from employers' point of view, but they're probably unnecessarily harsh with it for game-theoretical reasons), but it probably affects all employees taking time off equally, not just women.

This is a hypothetical scenario where parenting roles are equal, meaning lots of men are taking off months, and lots of women are taking off months plus a couple weeks. People take off a couple weeks all the time; it's called vacation. I can't see any meaningful pay difference making sense.

Oppressor! youtube.com/watch?v=vAc5JqcBPK8

I emailed Dr. Goldin to ask her a question about her research when writing a paper on the wage gap for undergrad english.

I did not expect a response, but when I got one, I was ecstatic.

She seems like a awesome person.

I don't understand why we want a society where everyone is trying to both parent and work full time. Specialization is a powerful tool. Speaking personally it makes a lot more sense for my wife to stay home and have primary responsibility for raising our kids and managing our household while I focus on my career. Implicit in this discussion is that the woman who choose flexibility and child-rearing options are oppressed or less than and it's not the case in reality.

The problem is that we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing, which is not economically valued or rewarded, and men to specialize in earning income, which wields huge social and economic power. And the reason this happens is that men withhold their parenting labour, and women are forced to pick up the slack.

It's just like the feminist saying... "If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on earth." Women get stuck with this unrewarded and devalued specialized role.

One way to deal with this, is to make it equally viable for men or women to be stay-at-home patents. Viable socially (no stigma) and viable economically, so that the family simply chooses for the higher earner (if income is their determined) to have the job responsibility and the other to say home. So the problem is in the family dynamics. Society has to allow for the family dynamics to fall on either side without side effects.

>equally viable for men or women to be stay-at-home pa[r]ents //

Bio-engineer men to produce breastmilk?

> we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing

I see no evidence of any force being applied. Women are free to chose their own relationship types same as men. Exceptionally few choose to be breadwinner supporting a stay at home father. Vastly more choose to be stay at home mom married to an income earning dad.

Being a victim of society is en vogue.

I actually think this is a mirror image of "companies don't hire women / because there aren't enough qualified women!" discussion.

I think there is healthy demand from women to marry a stay at home father, but not enough supply of men who prepared to be a stay at home father from a young age, dreaming about it, excellent at cooking and homemaking, etc. Pipeline needs to be fixed before stay at home fathers can be common.

And there is a bit of a game-theoretic problem here. As a guy, I've dreamed about being a father and raising kids since I was young, but for me the path to that always seemed to require getting a well-paying job.

Also, healthy demand in the abstract doesn't mean that there is actually a way for men who really care about being a father to advertise that fact without creeping out potential dates.

My observations are the opposite. Most high-earners I know are men, so if I wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, I would have a hard time finding a high-earning partner (so the choice shifts from "who stays ar home" to "do we live a poor or middle-class lifestyle").

> ...which is not economically valued or rewarded...

Some might say that the freedom of not having to pursue a job while raising kids is sufficient economic reward.

Some also say that not everything that is valuable can, or should, have a price tag.

That's not what people want though. What people want is for it to be socially acceptable for men to be the ones that take on the more flexible, lower paying, schedules to care for their kids as well as for it to be socially acceptable for women to /not/ take on that role and instead be the breadwinner.

I don't think people want it, but it has become a bit of a necessity due to the widening income gap and stagnant wages. Used to be middle America could afford to have one parent stay home and job stability was much better.

These days both parents need to work to have a hope of affording rent/mortgage, and job stability is a thing of the past so to have two bread winners substantially reduces the risk of being completely out of an income or health insurance.

Specialization is indeed a powerful tool, but in this case it is a lower priority than security and shelter.

I don't see anyone on this thread saying that a family must have two breadwinners. I think the argument is that the opportunity should be there, so anyone can follow the career path that best supports their chosen family roles.

This is totally fine, as long as society supports any specialization choice (men or women taking either role). As long as we support both choices equally, it doesn't matter if one gender ends up doing one of the roles more than the other.

Essentially, it happens from a tax perspective. Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that. From their perspective, a childcare centre with a staff:child ratio of 1:4 is more efficient than a stay-at-home mum with a nine month old baby at 1:1 (and the older siblings already in school).

Socially, we might like flexibility in terms of it being a choice whether to look after the kids yourselves before they start school; for the beancounters though, they'd really like you both to be paying more income tax please, and the daycare centre to be employing more people too...

> Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that.

This theory conflicts with the fact that the trend over time has been toward more support for parental leave, not less, on the part of government.

Parental leave only after women entered the workforce in such large numbers, and we've seen (and felt) the negative consequences from trying to outsource child-rearing so completely. Parental leave was not as necessary because there were more stay-at-home parents; and before early 1900s it was more common for both parents to work from home (i.e. on a farm).

> … because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting.

You're assuming that even if society enabled the sexes to take equal time off that the sexes would, in fact, take equal time off. I suppose we could force people to take equal time off, but that hardly seems fair or right.

> society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute

With very few exceptions, mammalian females are almost entirely responsible for child-rearing across the board. So all signs point that its also hormones too. We as a society need to start equalizing hormones. Women need to start taking testosterone and men need to take estrogen. We will only be equal once there is a single androgynous gender. This is the equality we are fighting for. This is the equality we deserve. #androgyny2016

Seriously though, there are some gender differences worth leaving to freedom of choice. Propensity to child-rear and hormone levels are among them, IMO.

I suppsoe there is a hormone for washing dishes and doing laundry also.

Laundry is the most overrated chore. Clothes in, detergent in, shut the lid, push the button. You can do it in 45 seconds.

Regardless, you don't know what other people's chore splits are like. It's not something you can observe.

> Regardless, you don't know what other people's chore splits are like. It's not something you can observe.

Yes, you definitely can. Easiest solution is to ask them, but you could also do observational studies if you had the funds.

Here's one example where we asked: http://www.gallup.com/poll/106249/wives-still-laundry-men-ya...

As the father of a 10 week old baby girl, it isn't as simple as just society enabling parents to contribute equally.

I am SO into being a dad. I want to do as much caregiving as possible. However, breastfeeding kinda throws a monkey wrench into the "split all the work equally" plan. For newborns, eating is what they do most of the time (when they aren't sleeping). If you breastfeed your child, which all pediatricians say is the best for them, I can't do the most time consuming part of the job. Now, we get around this some of the time by pumping and bottle feeding breast milk, but you can't do that all the time, and even then the mom has to pump as much as you feed in order to keep up her milk supply.

This means mom is going to be the primary care giver for an infant. While this could change once the kid starts eating solid food, by then the pattern is going to be established.

I am not saying we shouldn't work to make it more equal, but it isn't as simple as you make it out to be.

True. But from about 9 months you could both work say 3 days a week if you wanted.

Mind you if you have another child you'd have to do that again.

But good luck getting well paid 3 days a week work for both of you.

Yeah, we are going to do some of those work schedule things as we go forward (we are also going to do daycare).

It is just hard because the caregiving pattern is already established.

> But from about 9 months you could both work say 3 days a week if you wanted.

TERRIBLE advice. In all things gender and money, Penelope Trunk is a goto: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2013/01/07/how-to-pick-a-husba...

> Don’t tell me that you want your husband to work part-time, because aiming for the impossible 50/50 split leads to divorce. First, because it’s the road to eternal poverty; part-time jobs are low pay, without advancement, and they are the first to go when it’s time to cut jobs. So you create massive financial instability by having two people work part-time.

You are correct! People are so stupid when it comes to these gender discussions. I'm glad my wife and I have a traditional household. It works great and both of us are happy. Good luck to those with the "eye for an eye" mentality. You will never be happy.

> Good luck to those with the "eye for an eye" mentality.

It's about what you put in, not what you get out.

> You will never be happy.

This is where I think people mess up. They think that relationships somehow magically equate to an immediate jump from miserable to bliss. This couldn't be further from the truth. You need to find your own happiness before someone else can step into your life and make it blissful.

It seems that you and this "mom" person you mentioned, may have stumbled upon a truly workable form of equality.

What if men and women were to form small teams -- and divide labor between themselves however they saw fit. Such a team would be able to cover for each other -- in sickness and in health and all that jazz.

Marriage is about love, not economics (division of labor, risk mitigation, specialization even), and anyone with other opinions on this subject is a bigot.

also /s

One of the things that I did to compensate for that was to take on a significantly greater share of "common duties" such as dishwashing, laundry, paying bills, taking out the trash etc. Before our baby, these used to be generally done around 50-50. I took over all of them.

After month 6, once the baby starts drinking more formula milk and eating solids, things start becoming potentially more egalitarian, since either parent can handle those.

The funny thing about breastfeeding is that advice varies between countries, despite WHO advice. Which is very short on data, IMO. China, France say bottle up, UK has a strange and emotional culture around bonding with your baby, as if men and adopted parents are unable to do so without mammary glands.

I have very little time for the breastfeeding brigade, particularly those who think it induces some kind of superhuman immunity in their kids. It's plain wrong in my experience and only serves to perpetuate the exclusion of men and those who didn't give birth to their children.

I think the data's pretty unequivocal about it affecting the IQ of the baby.

This study's *1 got the result down to 7 points increase for 90% of babies when breastfed, whereas the figure I hear thrown around most often is 4 points. That's definitely not insignificant! I don't know about the strength of the data around immune systems.

1 http://www.unicef.org.uk/BabyFriendly/News-and-Research/Rese...

If one study is enough to convince you, without being skeptical of its methods, fair enough, but consider this:

a) despite controlling for socio-economic status, non-breastfeeding in the 1970s (when this study first got underway), in a period of much stricter gender-roles, could be indicative of mothers who were slightly less concerned with IQ scores than those who breastfed. Mothers' IQ does not control for general educational support and encouragement throughout life. Nor does the IQ measurement taken at 5 years old.

b) the milk formula used for comparison with breastmilk was that of the early 1970s. The study does not mention if the formula has improved over the intervening ~40 years. One could reasonably hypothesize that it had. In fact, the study mentions:

> Infants not breastfed received formula feeding (before LC-PUFA supplementation became widely available in the U.K.)

Look it up. The ingredient that caused the effect mentioned is now included in all formula products.

c) if you believe that children's IQ is set from the age of 5, when this study measured it, and cannot be increased through tuition or other external factors (lowered or raised), then this must all seem very unequivocal to you. May I remind you that many countries (Scandinavia, Germany) which tend to produce extremely well-educated adults don't even start school until 7+.

The unquestioning approach of 'there's a study so it must be right'/'this confirms my bias so it must be right' strikes me as going against everything science stands for, and in an industry that so heavily relies on old wives-tales and 'common knowledge', there's every reason to perpetuate the status quo. It's not only intellectually dishonest, it's morally dishonest. All studies should be made to highlight their weaknesses on the front page, and not leave it up to well respected charities (UNICEF) to unthinkingly promote half-truths.

It's not even the strength of the data that bothers me. It's the fear-mongering (which is very real in the UK, worse in other places, I hear) and guilt laid on to mothers based on these spurious studies which none-to-few of the health advisors have ever read in detail. If all of the data was laid out honestly and people were not pressured into making a choice either way, I'd be fine with that. But the way that women (and men, but mostly women, still) are allowed to essentially bully other women, many of whom have very little choice in the matter, into an activity that often depresses and exhausts them for months on end, when a shared feed from a bottle would have no material effect on the outcomes at adulthood, that makes me frustrated. Don't get me started on when the NHS literature in the UK mentioned increased cancer-rates for non-breastfed children without citing the study, parameters, and knowing full-well that few people understand that correlation != causation should be a consideration in decision-making.

So, in full consideration of the study, if you could raise a nation's IQ by x points by feeding them breastmilk, why aren't governments a) funding studies into which active ingredient causes the effect, whether it be synthesized, how long the optimal exposure period is etc. and b) ensuring every child gets that headstart? Oh, they did. And it's already in formula. And you struggle to produce it naturally if your diet is bad. So you struggle to breastfeed. See how flawed the study and its interpretation can be?

One study isn't what convinces me, it's the existing body of evidence that does so. Organisations like WHO don't recommend a minimum of 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding because of a single study, and I don't claim to be able to interpret any of the studies better than them. Your complaints about the 'breastfeeding brigade' don't seem to square up with existing medical advice.

The NZ study is an interesting one because of its huge scope and the fact that NZ at the time (for some reason) didn't have a big link between socio-economic status and breastfeeding, like in Europe. So I do believe it was instrumental in changing medical advice around the world when it was published.

So you think it is plain stupid to pause your career so that you can breastfeed your kids? Obviously kids grow up without breastfeeding, although that alone doesn't tell us much - kids tend to grow up no matter what you do, and in some cases we probably simply don't know how to measure the impact of their experiences as toddlers.

Anyway - why can't the preference to breastfeed at least be accepted? Clearly some parents make that choice, and it shows in the numbers. As a result of a choice, not because of discrimination.

No, not stupid, just often the result of manipulative half-truths. See above comment thread for a more comprehensive reply.

I would expect no less for the majority of companies. If you put in X hours for Y salary/wage I don't doubt they'd give the same amount as compensation regardless of sex, age, race, etc. Money is money and work is work. Social norms are the real culprit in terms of inequalities in society. Sometimes businesses do push back against these norms since more often than not it hurts their bottom line (ex. racial segregation laws hurt the private bus companies). So, if a social norm can be toppled to boost revenues or productivity I always expect a business to wave their progressive banner.

"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."

I disagree. The primary cause is that women can become pregnant - the possibility alone is in most cases enough - in which case they leave the work force for X amount of time. Depending on country, laws, and personal preferences this time period can range from a few weeks to years. In some countries when this hypothetical becomes a reality it can have a large negative impact on the employer. For instance, in Germany the woman's job position must be held open for her until she decides to return to work (possibly years later), not to mention the full salary compensation months before and after giving-birth, when she is no longer working.

But to simplify it down to flatland, lets assume a woman were to just take 1 day off before giving birth, have a job that required no movement or lifting, and the employer didn't have to compensate her. Still, in this simplest case, a woman is at a disadvantage compared to a man.

Because of this biological disadvantage, I think there will never be the sort of absolute equality we want until people are born in tubes or the capitalistic employer/employee relationship changes.

Seems like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good.

No. My observations would just suggest adressing the issue at the employer/employee relationship or market motivator level, whereas yours suggest handling it at a propoganda/media/educational level to remove the social norm of women staying at home.

My opinion is that that norm is old and dying if not already long deceased and any future gains in equality will be found in the market motivator domain, in which biology in tandem with govt policy constitute the major factors at play.

> For instance, in Germany the woman's job position must be held open for her until she decides to return to work (possibly years later), not to mention the full salary compensation months before and after giving-birth, when she is no longer working.

The company will be reimbursed for the salary by the health insurance upon filling out a form. A company does not pay a single cent more than the cost of hiring another person for the position.

> A company does not pay a single cent more than the cost of hiring another person for the position.

Losing someone with expertise/connections and onboarding someone new is a huge cost, though. Not just in the new person's salary, but in opportunity cost as that person slows down the people they work with in the process of getting up to speed.

Sure, but we are talking about 3.5 months (1.5 before birth, 2 after). In addition in the months before birth you are allowed to continue working if you wish so.

I'd argue most of the companies will be able to handle that. Especially since you have plenty of time to prepare.

Above is only the part which is different for men and women for obvious biological reasons. There is also a paternity system leave starting from 2 months after birth but this should ideally not discriminate either gender.

And what happens if that person is the CEO?

Couple of questions: 1. Who pays for the insurance? 2. Why is it called insurance?

It's the public health insurance system.

It's paid for by for every employee, with a ~50%/50% split between employer and employee, with the premium depending on gross income only.

> Why is it called insurance?

You actually want insurance for this because you don't want, for example, small businesses avoiding fertile women because they "already have too many pregnancies right now". If all the employees had kids simultaneously (an irrelevant random event), it shouldn't cause a bankruptcy.

In practice, people aren't typically so fungible, but the insurance at least hedges the salary portion of the risk.

In other industries I can see this being a concern, but in tech?

Turnover is so fast in the tech industry, with many employees regardless of gender stay from 1-4 years most of the time AFAICT. Other opportunities and challenges greatly dwarf concerns of pregnancy to the point that I've never once heard one person voice concern over pregnancy but many times heard concern about a candidate likely not sticking around longer than a year (because they have a history of hopping or because we don't think they would be challenged or interested in the work/role).

Note, that fathers now have similar rights. There are some exceptions right around the birth, because that clearly affects women an men differently. I might also miss some differences. But the current legislation allows both my partner and me to take out equal amounts of time (about 7 month) in the coming year (we can split 14 months, as long as they each takes at least 2 and they can overlap) with 66% compensation replacement from the state.

So the employer cannot rely anymore on a man not taking time off.

(The total amount without is about three years instead of 14 months, but only those 14 months are covered financially).

The difference is that a woman has to take time off (for health reasons), whereas the man can take time off. Economically, there is a penalty for taking time off (lower salary, lower skills, lower future earnings), its economically rational to not take time off. But only a man can make that choice.

What if it's the case that preferences are different among men and women? Why do we assume that the women surveyed would prefer to have the higher paying but more demanding career paths?

My wife is very smart and capable of making a high salary. She chose a flexible job path and took several years off to be with our children in their younger years. We could certainly afford otherwise; our family would have more money had she decided to go the childcare route. It's just our choice, she has no regrets. It wasn't "foisted" upon her. In fact, it's the happiest she's ever been.

Is there something wrong with a woman prioritizing motherhood? Why does it feel to me that these conversations always frame parenting as some kind of tragedy that disrupts an otherwise successful career?

By the same token, I am very motivated to make enough money so that she can continue to stay home with our kids as long as she likes. I like seeing her and my kids happy. Should I be forced to slow down because this is unfair to women at my office?

This all seems crazy to me. Having kids is a blessing. I totally agree that people shouldn't feel a pressure to do it the "traditional" way or any other way for that matter -- I like when men are given the flexibility to take care of their children in support of their wives' careers. I just don't agree that slowing down one's career in order to prioritize parenthood is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Because we are not operating in a vacuum of information with only this single article to go on?

Constantly declaring victory doesn't mean you've won an intellectual debate. The left have convinced themselves that gender roles are bad, and the left happen to dominate some academic fields. That doesn't make them the sole arbiters of true and false.

Absolutely! I reject the base assumption of this whole discussion that your salary is a measure of your worth as a person.

I like the idea of "mandatory paternity leave", to make up for the biological asymmetry.

Even if you have a stereotypical breadwinner/housewife relationship, you are legally mandated to take time off, even if you don't want to. That way you avoid the "you're allowed to take paternal leave, but real go-getters don't!" game altogether.

edit: The way I see it, the responses just prove my point. "This would just make people discriminate against x!". That's exactly why it needs to be mandatory, affecting more people, so the issue doesn't become invisible based on it affecting only women.

That would go a long way to correct for differences resulting from maternal leave, but there would still be issues such as single people, and especially single men, being favored (since it is rare for them to have a child who they must then take mandatory leave to care for).

It would definitely favour gay men, though they could still adopt and take paternity leave.

I remember reading that gay men suffer a penalty to straight men while gay women have a boost compared to straight women. I wonder if that is related child care expectations when they do adopt children.

No doubt you're correct. It's not a simple issue to fully resolve, but there is some seemingly low-hanging fruit to grab for.

We already suffer from declining birthrates in the west. Your solution would make not having a child the best choice for "go-getters."

Isn't that already the case?

My solution may not be optimal, but the status quo is "male go-getter with supportive female companion" as standard model of coupling.

If we have to deal with declining birthrates while we figure out a more fair and sane arrangement, that doesn't pit family building against professional success, I'm down.

The Swedish way is to have 480 days of parental leave per child, which can be split between either parent. "For 390 of the days, parents are entitled to nearly 80 per cent of their normal pay up to a maximum monthly income of 37,000 kroner ($4,500)." - http://www.thelocal.se/20151229/one-in-four-swedish-fathers-... .

Also, "From January 1st 2016, the number of use-it-or-lose-it 'pappamånad' or 'daddy months' will increase from two to three, in an bid to push couples to share early years childcare more equally." because currently "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

Mandatory parental leave is tricky. Is that a month in a row? As a self-employed person, am I prohibited from filings taxes, sending out invoices, and support questions? Or can I work one day a week?

> which can be split between either parent

That's the issue right there. Not surprised "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

I know things are tricky to roll out, there's tons of quirks here and there. User chongli is on like three leaves of the discussion trying to take the idea down based on implementation details. That comes later.

The whole point is that right now it's a "woman's issue". Forcing men to deal with it would make it a "parent issue", and more resources would be devoted to ironing out the details.

It's like that pithy line I heard once- "If men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't be controversial".

edit: Can't reply, but I got your reply just fine dalke. What I'm saying is that making it use-it-or-lose-it is still not good enough. Rather, if you don't get why I suggest it needs to be mandatory, it is you who is not getting me.

edit2: Fanning threads on HN are just no good for discussing stuff. Sorry!

"That's the issue right there"

I ... don't think you understood my response. Three months of it can only be taken by the father. The "split between either parent" has limits.

What's wrong with the non-mandatory Swedish system? It's most assuredly called "parental leave here", and isn't a "woman's issue" but a feminist issue. As a male feminist, I agree with that.

Edit regarding "it is you who is not getting me".

You are right. But I fail to understand why I should get you as you haven't made any statement about what "mandatory" means. Do you mean one week of mandatory leave, or one month, or one year? Will it be paid leave, and structured similar to what it is in Sweden (percentage of salary, with cap)? What is the penalty for not complying? If I am an unpaid board member of a Fortune 100, am I prohibited from attending meetings? What about going to shareholder meetings? Going to professional society meetings?

You complain that these questions are "trying to take the idea down based on implementation details", but they are not. They are aspects of trying to understand what you mean by mandatory parental leave, and do a cost/benefit analysis

If Sweden were to require on week of mandatory parental leave, for each parent, how would that improve things?

I don't know whether a week a month or a year is suitable, or percentages, or damages. This is not my field.

The fundamental idea I'm advancing is that men get to do calculus with their choice ("hmm do I want to stay? or do I better by my kid by working hard now and sending them to prep school?"). It's cool that Sweden makes it attractive for them to pick parenthood, but it's not enough, it's not really in the same ballpark.

I am suggesting that men shouldn't really have a choice. Women have little/no choice (biologically, because of labor, and socially, because of expectations), so only by forcing an approximation of time lost, do we really make people reconsider whether the situation we put them in and the choices we offer them are fair.

In case this sounds incredibly sinister to people, like capping runners so they're not fast, don't get me wrong. I think the outcome here would be an increased amount of resources put into the "work-life balance" question that everyone pays lip-service to, so that we wouldn't be really forced to choose one over the other.

Okay, I see your point. I don't believe it's a useful one.

What you are saying is that you want the government to fine, imprison, or otherwise punish a woman who, as CEO, signs a business deal three days after she gives birth, yes?

Because that's what "mandatory" means. Unless "mandatory" only applies to the father? In which case, why is the father prohibited from signing a business deal three days after the mother gives birth, when the mother would be capable of doing so?

Then there are all the tricky questions, like if the father and mother have broken up and are no longer on speaking terms, or the father is overseas. They are the same issues as for parental leave, only backed by the force of government punishment for not complying.

This is ridiculous. The policy could be something like "take a month off within a year of your kid being born".

> What you are saying is that you want the government to fine, imprison, or otherwise punish a woman who, as CEO, signs a business deal three days after she gives birth, yes?

Do you sincerely think this is a good post?

I sincerely think that the benefits are not worthwhile.

Every mandatory requirement must be backed by penalty, otherwise it's merely optional. Such penalties can include fines, jail, lack of access to social services, and forced removal of one's child.

We know already that 1/4 of Swedish fathers prefer to take no leave, even when there's an 80% salary support. (I don't know how many Swedish mothers take less than a month of leave.)

Any fines must therefore be more than 20% of three months' salary, and even higher for those making over $100K/year.

Any system must also have a way to identify lawbreakers, and allow appeals and special circumstances.

The Swedish experience shows that the father tends to put the extra time into the summer, Christmas, and New Year holidays. If the goal is increased co-parenting - which I believe is your goal - then 1 month spread over a year, especially in a vacation-poor country like the US, is very likely not enough.

>It's like that pithy line I heard once- "If men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't be controversial".

An interesting line which seems to ignore evidence as to which gender is more expected to care for their child and treated harsher when they don't.

The underlying ideal is that men would favor men and they would all vote to legalize abortion, but this ignores both how there are many women who are against abortion (while few are against all forms, most are against some forms). It also ignores how men often hold other men accountable for caring for their children, including supporting laws that put dead beat fathers into prison.

I prefer the line "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be illegal."

> male go-getter with supportive female companion

Do you have any objective reasons why this is suboptimal? Maybe we should go the other way; for example in the Netherlands, many women (with children) choose to work part-time (because they can). So maybe the "status quo" is by choice.

Maybe it's a biological choice, maybe it's cultural and social momentum from hundreds of years of forcing gender roles legally and violently.

Impossible to tell with our current experimental setup. I lean towards the latter though.

The precautionary principle would say not to do your experiment until you can be assured it won't damage your research subjects.

I lean towards the former. There are multiple reasons for this being a biological choice. One, women's childbearing period is more limited than men's, so it's rational for them to prioritize "taking care for the children" over "having a great career". Another is that because they give birth, they pretty much have to be absent from work (for a few days at least), whereas men don't, so again it's rational for a woman to take additional leave for childcare, so that only one parent gets penalized (by lower pay and less experience and future promotions) by taking time off. Of course, the latter only applies given everything else is equal; if the mother earns significantly more than the (step-)father, then it would be rational for her to take off only as many days an necessary for health reasons, with her partner providing the rest of childcare.

It already is for female go-getters.

Which is why the person you replied to would most likely advocate for eliminating parental leave entirely, and I agree.

No matter how you slice it, government mandated leave that doesn't apply to every single person equally will lead to discrimination. If you mandate maternity leave then companies will prefer young men to young women, and if you mandate paternity leave then companies will prefer the old to the young.

Parental leave is detrimental for every person that has it, but doesn't want it. If you're of child bearing age you're a huge risk to your employer if your resume doesn't come with a sterility test stapled to it.

Similarly it would lead to discrimination against large families (large these days being anything more than 2 kids). Employers likely won't tolerate someone having 5 kids over a 5-10 year period and taking all that disruptive and expensive leave.

Because people should totally be making major life decisions on the basis of what employers will "tolerate".

FFS. We've already ceded enough control over our lives to these companies whose only agenda is to suck people dry, and then find new ways to wring even more out of them.

Businesses exist to serve people's needs and interests. People do not exist to serve businesses.

There's not a whole lot you can do about discrimination. Unless the employers are dumb enough talk openly about what they're doing. They can find any subjective reason they like and claim that's the reason for letting you go. You can try to sue, and sometimes you'll even win, but there's no Job Police SWAT Team that will beat down the door and force them to give you your job back in time for your next mortgage payment.

In light of this reality it's good to avoid policies that incentivize even more discrimination.

They can find any subjective reason they like and claim that's the reason for letting you go.

Oh, believe me, I know. I was dismissed from my last job for having the temerity to take a leave of absence — negotiated in advance with the company, with C-staff level approval — to travel for a few months. When I returned, they presented me with a materially altered performance review (fact-checked with the manager who actually wrote the review), filled with straight-up lies, and said that was why they were firing me.

If you dare to decide the life your job pays for is more important than the job itself, well, there's the door...

There are many businesses out there. Make your employment decisions based on your values.

I don't have children, and won't be having any. You seem to be saying that I have to subsidize your childcare leave.

Yes, because, shockingly, both parents caring for babies helps society as a whole. Maybe you should stop being selfish instead of making it hard for others to have families.

There have been studies that have shown fathers are far more involved in their kid's lives by taking paternal leave. It also means that the parents will both be far more productive post-leave as they would have developed more balanced responsibilities, and don't have to juggle waking up in the middle of the night with a job for at least the first few months, which is arguably the toughest.

The fact that family leave is not government-mandated and involve both parents taking a reasonable (several-month) leave for caring for a baby is ludicrous.

Society is helped by having healthy babies, yes.

You haven't provided any support for your argument that I, as someone without children, must be made to subsidize the family choices of others.

The resources to cover the extended work absence of the parents has to come from somewhere. In many cases, it'll be one past parent covering a new parent, and then vice-versa. But those of us who can't have children (a) don't get to have children, yet (b) are stuck holding the bag having to pay the costs for others'. Isn't that kind of adding insult to injury for people who can't have babies?

So how is it that you get to make the decision for all of society, such that it must be a one-size-fits-all law, and people aren't allowed to negotiate for the terms that make the most sense for their own personal situation.

I'd say that you came up in the public school system, were raised by a mother who dropped out of the workforce and stopped her other contributions to society in order to raise you, received all the cheap or free healthcare that is available to minors, and took advantage of all the opportunities that society provides to young people in order to help them be successful and functional parts of their community. So you've kind of already had your share and owe it back to us.

I'm sure I won't change your mind, but as a single person with no kids, that's how I see it. I'm quite happy to make a few sacrifices to make life easier for today's children.

I doubt any legal scholar would argue that a pre-schooler is able to sign a contract obliging them to pay back a student loan, so how can you say any given person owes society for their public school education?

I said that's my point of view. I had no intention of making a legal argument of it.

Doesn't that argument boil down to "we've done it that way in the past, so it must be continued in the future"?

It's in my interest as a member of society that there's a well-stocked pipeline of healthy well-adjusted well-educated kids coming up so that my old age is not some kind of hellscape.

> So how is it that you get to make the decision for all of society, such that it must be a one-size-fits-all law, and people aren't allowed to negotiate for the terms that make the most sense for their own personal situation.

Yeah, societal decisions are generally one-size-fits-all laws because it's virtually impossible to make it any other way. In short: tough luck.

> Maybe you should stop being selfish

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

That is not remotely what I'm saying, and I gave absolutely no reason to suggest it.

This is the worst case of someone trying to put words in my mouth on HN since the last time I tried explaining something from a feminist perspective...

> Because people should totally be making major life decisions on the basis of what employers will "tolerate".

Shouldn't they? The career you choose, and the specific firm you choose to work for (or start your own, or whatever) is what I would consider a major life decision which ought to carefully be considered alongside other major life decisions like whether or when to have children.

Another interesting way of considering it is that people who exercise their natural right of association make trade offs in doing so that you find repelling. This viewpoint has the benefit of not dehumanizing people who run and work for businesses.

I flatly reject the notion that, with as massive a power differential as the employer-employee relationship structurally entails, it qualifies as an "exercise" of some "natural right of association".

With the way we've chosen to run our world, such that there are orders of magnitude fewer people offering jobs than there are needing them, one side of that dynamic has tremendous power to dictate terms to the other. That is not remotely an equitable relationship, and to suggest that participating in it is some sort of "exercise" of a "natural right", that is freely entered into, is fatuously specious.

It's already mandatory in multiple european countries and it leads to nothing of the sort.

Because Europe already has an average of <2 kids pr couple?

Thus indicating that us getting over a year of parental leave for each kid doesn't lead to mass breeding.

Or hiding it.

> We already suffer from declining birthrates in the west.

Which is fantastic! There are too many people on this earth for the resources available, and population growth in wealthy countries can be fuelled by immigration.

That's what's happening here in Australia - low birthrate (~1.8) has been aided by immigration, and we've had a 25% increase in population in the last 17 years. Having kiddliwinks is not the only solution to growth in the west.

That's a terrible idea. It may seem nice to a person with a lot of disposable income, who can afford for both people in the family to take have a break from their careers, but forcing that on people who are in poor financial condition is just terrible.

Parental leave is paid.

It should be, but in America there is no requirement for it to be. Presumably that would come in with any change to make it mandatory.

But how much is it paid? If somebody is making six figures, is it going to cover the whole amount? That seems unlikely. If it's a low percentage of the total amount, then it's forcing a big pay cut that families may not be able to afford.

Details vary by country, but in the three countries I've lived in 100% of your salary. It's paid by social security, even if your salary is in the seven figures, then you also paid a high amount to social security to cover for it.

edit: here's a table with more details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Europe_.28inc._...

I think the US would have a long way to go before the public would ever accept having 7+ figure salaries paid out of the taxpayer pocket. That's pretty cool that some countries do though I see some of them only offer the 100% to women and not men.

We don't lose the income during parental leave.

You lose the experience, and you're not going to be first in line for a promotion when you come back after 6 months. Unless you want to go full Harrison Bergeron and mandate that the employer isn't allowed to reward Alice for the work she did while Bob was on paternity leave.

I think parent means mandatory paid leave.

First, you'd be creating a penalty for hiring people who are likely to have children. As a father of young and yet unborn children, I wouldn't appreciate it.

Currently there's a penalty for hiring women based on that exact same reasoning.

Right, but that penalty is deeply ingrained into our capitalist society. You can't solve it with just a quick bandaid fix.

Can it be fixed? In the end, pay is linked to productivity. The only fix I see is increased use of paternity leave.

Productivity on paternity leave is zero, since you're not working, so why expect pay to be anything but zero?

"Paternity leave" is an attempt to create a non-capitalist bubble inside of a capitalist world. It's like building a colony on Mars; not something you can do trivially.

If we're talking about Silicon Valley and the tech field in general, there already is a penalty for being a father to young children and/or expecting them. A good deal of tech jobs are well over 40 hours a week, sometimes work is all there is time for. That is not an environment conducive to being an active and involved father.

How do you know when a man in the office becomes a father? If you institute "mandatory paternity leave" then he just won't tell you. It's already illegal to ask about marital status during a job interview. Are you suggesting we change that, too? Then you risk further reducing the number of marriages in society.

The whole problem with paternity leave is that there's a financial disincentive for companies to offer it and there's a financial disincentive for male employees to accept it.

How do you know when a man in the office becomes a father?

Well, for one thing, there's the bit where, if the new child will be covered under the father's health plan, he kinda has to tell HR about it. So they can, you know, change the coverage?

I live in Canada. We don't need to tell our employers about our families in order to receive health care. We still have a similar gender wage gap though.

Besides, if I did live in the US and the situation came up, I would be more likely to pay for my child's health insurance out of pocket than to take a $40,000 pay cut.

You only have to do that when the child of born. Even then, you have quite a bit of leeway as to when you have to notify the insurance company.

> How do you know when a man in the office becomes a father?

How do you know when a woman in the office is actually pregnant?

Going to go feel the bump up yourself?

How about letting people make their own choice on how they want to spend their life?

Who are YOU to believe you can make that decision for me and everyone else?

I agree. I also agree with your comment if you replace "life" with "money."

>I like the idea of "mandatory paternity leave", to make up for the biological asymmetry.

How do you enforce it tho? People can not report child birth to their employers.

You want to make it illegal for someone to work when they want to work and can work..., and maybe even need to work for the income? That is a horrible idea.

What possible reason is there for this? To equalize wages? A family had 2 income earners, then they are down to 1. And you want to take away all their ability to have income?

> and maybe even need to work for the income?

We don't lose the income during parental leave.

How far are you willing to sacrifice freedom in the name of a few percentage points increase in your so called "equality."

You need to get your priorities aligned. This is the land of the free. Not the land of the equal.

I'm actually Canadian, and I was astonished to find, in this very thread, that in the USA you don't even offer paid maternity leave .

Enjoy!

>I'm actually Canadian, and I was astonished to find, in this very thread, that in the USA you don't even offer paid maternity leave

This varies from company to company. It isn't legally required, but the company I work for offers 6 months paid parental leave and it is encouraged you take it to spend time with your newborn/spouse and adjust to the new life. There are a lot of married couples in the office and both parents are allowed to take it together.

Most companies that my friends work for offer paid maternity leave ranging from 3 to 12 months. Generally paternal leave is the one that is never offered, or if it is offered, it's subtly discouraged against actually using it (you want that much-needed promotion now that you have a newborn, don't you? better work harder and not take time off!)

> randyrand

> This is the land of the free. Not the land of the equal.

Is this an attempt to make novelty accounts a thing on HN?

Or more seriously, on a scale of 1-10, how much tongue in cheek is in that assessment?

Huh? Its a play on my name... Randy =)

That would only work if you would pay parents for the money they lose while they are not allowed to work. Otherwise you would mainly make families poorer.

Just to clarify, your ideology requires legally enforced social engineering to deny an aspect of biology?

That should be the hint that your first principles are incorrect.

> We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good

Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view.

There is a lot more to parenting than just breastfeeding (which can be pumped and stored ahead of time - it's not always practical).

>for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't.

While the father normally is unable to do so without effort like a woman is, they do have all the equipment and their are ways to get it functioning. Somehow I don't think people would be for that option.

For a reference to that strange fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation

From what I remember reading kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view.

The former (health) is absolutely true, but it's nothing that couldn't also be solved by the mother pumping her breast milk and the father doing the actual feeding by bottle.

"bottle vs breast" is about the actual milk being fed, not the delivery method.

I'm not so sure this is true. Here's a good article you can read: http://www.thestranger.com/features/feature/2015/08/26/22755...

I'm not sold on the validity of it all, but it's something to think about.

Here's the important bit:

"According to Hinde, when a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This "baby spit backwash," as she delightfully describes it, contains information about the baby's immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition. If the mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, they compel the mother's body to produce antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby's body, where they target the infection.

At the same time that it is medicine, breast milk is a private conversation between mother and child. While my daughter lacks words, breast-feeding makes it possible for her to tell me exactly what she needs. The messages we are sending each other are literally made of ourselves, and they tell us about what is going on in our lives at that very moment."

An interesting reply (from someone who interacted with Hinde before writing it):

http://www.skepticalob.com/2015/09/mothers-and-babies-commun...

It would certainly be interesting to see how often the mother was producing antibodies for things that the father wasn't (more mundane infection vectors are one of the ideas presented at my link, if baby, mother and father are all sick, you don't have much evidence of the saliva being important).

Great response, thanks! I'm glad to see the other side of this argument and would love to see how the scientific evidence comes out.

> "bottle vs breast" is about the actual milk being fed, not the delivery method.

that's a very descartesian view, and from my experience and study also very unfounded. all you need to do is observe a baby while it's brestfed vs. bottlefed.

would you say that you feel the same after eating off the floor (very clean of course) vs. in a nice setting? after all, it's just about the nutrients, right?

>that's a very descartesian view

No, it's a summation of the debate behind the phrase "bottle vs breast". From a few links when Googling:

- "Deciding whether to breastfeed or use formula for your newborn?"

- "Breast vs. bottle - breast milk is the perfect food for baby, with numerous advantages over infant formula"

- "Here's help deciding if you should breastfeed your baby or bottle feed with formula."

Pretty much every discussion of "bottle vs breast" is discussing "breastmilk vs formula".

> would you say that you feel the same after eating off the floor (very clean of course) vs. in a nice setting?

Would you say that a newborn baby is capable of comprehending the difference between a 5 star restaurant compared to a 3 star one? I'm not sure applying adult opinions to newborn babies is likely to achieve much.

Newborns like their mothers.

Wow, you are trying to hard!

I don't think they were suggesting that it becomes the norm that only fathers stay home.

Only that paternity leave should be considered normal, something that all companies offer and expect you to take. Whether both parents are at home, or just the dad in cases where the mother can't easily take time off, either is fine.

Currently there is a gender asymmetry in that maternity leave is normal (and required by law), but paternity leave is frequently non-existent, or discouraged.

Normalized paternity leave is the norm in most of Europe.

I took four weeks off for our first child, and will be taking 3-4 weeks off for the second. It's awesome.

> Currently there is a gender asymmetry in that maternity leave is normal (and required by law), but paternity leave is frequently non-existent, or discouraged.

In the US, at the federal level, maternity and paternity leave (both unpaid) are covered by the same mandate (FMLA).

In California, paid maternity and paternity leave are covered by the same mandate.

That doesn't negate the social asymmetry, of course.

> kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view

Not as much as you've been led to believe:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sibbreast.htm

"A new study comparing siblings who were fed differently during infancy suggests that breast-feeding might be no more beneficial than bottle-feeding for 10 of 11 long-term health and well-being outcomes in children age 4 to 14."

I'm not advocating for fathers to take time off instead of mothers, I want them both to have leave.

My wife couldn't produce milk. My wife's niece wouldn't latch. There are a lot of people in these situations where, even if true, your reasoning does not apply.

So? As long as there are substantial number to whom it does apply, it will remain a real on-average sex difference.

This sub-topic was about normalizing parental leave. Is your argument then that societal policy should only be based upon real on-average differences?

> Is your argument then that societal policy should only be based upon real on-average differences?

I wasn't actually making an argument beyond what I posted; if I was to provide an explanation of its relevance it is that it is a fairly common position that real and relevant differences are a necessary, but not necessarily, sufficient condition for policy distinctions, and that insofar as the subthread on the advantages of being with the mother was relevant to the broader subject to start with, it remained relevant (though not, in and of itself, demanding any particular conclusion) as long as there was a real, on-average difference.

It may not be perfect, but policy real average data are probably better than policies based on ideology without average data?

Real average data is necessary but not sufficient. Policy should also consider the real outliers it may affect. So while you could argue that normalizing parental leave is unnecessary because children are better off with their mothers, we should do that while recognizing that it is not true for all family units. E.g. if there is no mother, or as in the examples I provided for the person I was replying to, there is a mother but breastfeeding is not possible.

Beyond that, if you adopt a policy that considers these outliers and normalize parental leave, there will be parents where breastfeeding is possible but the fathers still take the parental leave.

I won't argue the differences, but there's no reason a child can't be breast-fed and also bottle-fed.

A young child will be nursing many times during a day, giving plenty of opportunities for a working mother to nurse their child without giving up time to work on their career. Feedings while the mother is out can be done by bottle using pumped milk, or through formula.

Sexual differences do not need to imply social advantage/disadvantage here ...

Actually, a lot of kids can't switch between bottle and breast (even with the new 'nipple imitation' designs) and they end up 'losing' the ability to drink from one of them

In some Nordic countries it's becoming the norm that mom takes breast-feeding time and dad takes toddler-time...

...for the simple biological reason that fathers can generally run faster and thus chase down the kid... ok, that's just trolling :P

The second I walk in the door when I come home work, my toddler expects - as if it were some inviolable law of the universe - that we take turns chasing each other through the house. This made me chuckle :)

Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

I see no evidence to support this "funnel" at all in my life/work experience.

Workers on "flex" schedules in the tech sector underperform by a wide margin. I see little or no reason why I should prop up someone else's life / work choices with my own labor.

I believe you were down voted because you disagreed with the generally believed idea of "the funnel for women" and the generally believed idea of "flex schedules increase productivity" without providing any evidence.

I would point out that most people supporting both those ideas in this thread don't seem to be providing evidence either.

Everybody, I'm pretty sure the down vote is used to bury threads that don't add to the discussion. I think "shawn-butter"'s side deserves to be discussed.

> Workers on "flex" schedules in the tech sector underperform by a wide margin.

Proof, please.

> We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).

Put another way, we need to upend the idea that hazardous and arduous jobs (often involving hard physical labor) are only the domain of men, and encourage more women to participate in industries like mining, firefighting, welding, truck driving, and construction.

If you make note of the differences in physiology between the male and female body, you might discover that there is a non-arbitrary reason why industries requiring hard physical labor have traditionally been the domain of men.

If you make note of the differences in physiology between the male and female body, you might discover that there is a non-arbitrary reason why industries requiring childcare have traditionally been the domain of women.

If a particular woman, regardless of her physiology, can pass the physical bar necessary to be a firefighter, why in the world should she not work in this domain?

As a man, my out-of-shape physiology precludes me from being one - that doesn't mean that my gender should be excluded from it.

This is correct and I agree with it, but my statement goes a step further. I am saying that women should be strongly encouraged to be part of these occupations, in the same way that men are strongly encouraged to take paternity leave and help with child rearing.

And before the invention of power tools you'd have had a valid point.

You might discover that we no longer heavily relying on human labor or do you sugest that women are incapable of operating machines?

Alternatively, it's because of benevolent sexism. Women aren't slobs if they want to kick back and watch day-time TV while watching kids, they're doing the hardest job in the world!

It's not actually the hardest job in the world, by a long stretch. For starters, look at jobs that actively put your life at risk. Giving birth is very risky, too, but once the baby is out I think the risks go way down - however, the riskiness of giving birth is part of why women are given the privilege to get the less strenuous stay at home work and not having to go out as lumberjacks to earn a living. On the downside I suspect the riskiness of birth is also a reason why less women get access to education: if you can only afford to send some of your kids to school, it makes more economic sense to send the kids with the higher survival rate. In some countries one in ten women die from pregnancy.

Most studies about the gender gap in pay find that most of the 77% figure is attibutable to differences in career choices/training/&c., but there remains a rough 5% difference in pay that is not attributable to those things. Ask most men if they would take a roughly 5% pay cut, and they would not say that it insignificant or something that can be ignored.

Maybe the tech industry is just immune to this, but this article is basically a press release with no information about data or methodology.

And that approximately 5% difference can be solely attributed to the fact that men are more likely to negotiate for their salaries than women. I don't remember the study off the top of my head but there was a YouTube video that was investigating the pay gap and referenced the study looking at men's and women's willingness to ask for more pay.

That might be part, but there are even simpler explanations. Taller people make significantly more money per inch. Why that is, who knows, but just by itself it can explain around half the wage gap - before correction. In other words, after correction, if you also correct for height, then women make more than men.

Of course no one should make more money just because they are taller, but that's the reality. No one seems interested to try to correct this, though, because it's not obviously tied to any popular political movements.

That this ~5% difference is hard to explain doesn't mean it is caused by gender discrimination.

New father here. My current employer provides two weeks of paternal leave. I ended up taking a third week of vacation time to extend this, which I'm in now.

It still doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm exhausted today, despite taking a mid-day nap. When I go back next week, I will not be at my best, and there's no way of me being at my best short of sleeping in another room with earplugs while my wife does 100% of the (often literal) heavy lifting of child care.

Not sure where you live but there's FMLA in the USA for up to 12 weeks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

I think that covers unpaid leave; three months without pay would put us in a crappy situation.

For anyone interested, Freakonomics explored[1] this in detail and their conclusions were pretty similar.

It included an interview from Claudia Goldin and her research[2] which was quite in-depth.

[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender... [2] [PDF] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/gender_equalit...

It is all about how you calculate it as to what number you arrive at.

Statistics New Zealand calculates the gender wage gap by comparing the hourly earnings, rather than weekly/yearly earnings. This helps to take into account the fact that women tend to work less hours (for various reasons, and is a completely different conversation). [0]

Interestingly, the gap when comparing the entire workforce with this measure is 10% in NZ, and comparing full time employment drops to 5.6% (the lowest in the OECD) [1].

One thing that needs to be considered when comparing the wage gap is that >90% of workplace fatalities are men [2], and that men tend to work much more physical jobs, causing of greater rate in workplace injuries and problems later in life, just think of how many older people you know with hearing loss from work, and how the vast majority of them are men.

[0]: http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/income-and-work/In...

[1]: http://women.govt.nz/our-work/utilising-womens-skills/income...

[2]: https://doe.state.wy.us/lmi/0305/a1.htm

"Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields."

Given that there's more female that graduate now, there's still bias in the process, just not the bias people hope to find.

In STEM? Far fewer women graduate with CS degrees than men. I think that percentage is actually declining.

Have a source? My understanding is that there's been an overall decline in stem degrees; meaning that, if there's a gap, it's not due to gender bias or a lack of opportunities for a given gender. Basically, I don't buy it, but happy to be proven wrong too.

I'm on mobile, but I think this is the report I was thinking of https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...

So while we are militarizing against the idea that woman are forced into staying at home, you do need to consider whether family care being the domain of woman is something men have foisted upon them or if it's something they themselves desire.

Now I'll admit I don't have kids, but every partner I've had has had the same view that they'd want me to continue going to work whilst they were stay at home. Any argument to the contrary is often met by the simple fact that said child would have been carried to term by them.

If you accept that as a possbility then we're starting to look at mens rights issue. Is it fair that men have less parental rights? Overall, I'd say no. Are we going to get support for these issues? Probably not.

Obviously in a better world I imagine we'd share a pool of parental leave. People should have the choice but I'd still expect the pool to largely be utilised by females because they want it that way and it's hard to argue otherwise.

>We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women

"Solely" might be a bit strong, but I don't think this is merely an "idea". It's reality. Women do the majority of child-rearing, pretty much across all species. When it comes to us humans and our bizarre, work-driven lives, their careers suffer for it. I never understood why that is so hard to understand, or why it's controversial.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules

Totally agree. But I'd put much of that blame on "us", not our employers. If we weren't such a consumerist, money-driven society, perhaps more people would be willing to work those flex-hours at less pay, but increased happiness.

"Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths"

Why the passive - couldn't they actively be choosing specific career paths?

"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."

Again, why the "foisted"? Especially for children it doesn't make sense: if it is such an unpleasant task, why not simply choose not to have children? Care for parents might end up in women's hands because they already made the choices for more flexible time (and less income) earlier on.

Instead of "foisted", it seems possible that women simply more often get the option to choose (because they were the ones who were pregnant), and men don't.

I think both men and women should stop automatically buying into the idea that your career goals should involve having inflexible hours working some high status position for some corporation. Most pay inequality in our society comes from the assumption that women are better primary caregivers for children than men, so they get custody of the children. Many men complain about this, as well, but as long as it's going to be the norm in most states, women's pay will be lower.

Why not have a flexible work schedule for both spouses, so they can raise their children? Better yet, in traditional societies (including Soviet Russia), the grandma often watched the kids instead of some teenage babysitter. The kids grew up with more respect for elders that way. Not only that, but the grandparents weren't shipped off to some nursing home so the adults could work two jobs unimpeded.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).

Don't certain EU countries already have this in some capacity? Honestly, I think the problem with leave benefits here in the States is the fact we treat them as a privilege rather than as some form of non-monetary compensation. IMO, if I could have an comparable set of leave benefits with a lower salary (assuming leave here would have to be set to market rate for my time I would've otherwise been working to make this an equatable exchange) I probably would take it. I like my free time. I'm sure older workers would love it too if it worked well for them if they were more focused on semi-retirement.

But work that has flexible hours is not equal to work that has inflexible hours. So theoretically equal pay for equal work stands. I guess it's a matter of whether or not you can truly evaluate work equality.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.

Why do we 'need' to do this? Jobs with very rigid shifts should be at a premium shouldn't they?

Not in one big tech company I worked in for the same role there was a marked difference in male and female mainly due to the problems with PRP

I am sorry, foisted? Most women have a much higher nurturing instinct and most men have a much higher competitive instinct. Just observe little kids at play for a while. Biology is what it is regardless of the zeitgeist.

63% of minimum wage workers are women:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/who-are-...

Increasing minimum wage would effectively increase the 77% number also.

It would increase it for the wrong reason, and only in the short-term, you pre-suppose that increasing the minimum wage won't lead to other wage increases. Why would someone who is getting paid more than minimum wage to perform a job which requires a skill be ok with being paid less than they were before, in relative means?

The increase in minimum wage does cause increases in near-minimum wages as well, but as you go up the salary scale (which is stretched quite longly, thank you very much), the impact of minimum wage increases is reduced, leading to an overall reduction in inequality.

I'm sorry but there will be no reduction in the overall income gap with a raise in minimum wage. You admit the minimum wage increase will cause the jobs near that rate to increase as well as the medium income levels. The high end of the income scale is so far "stretched" as you say and held by so few people that the effect of the minimum wage increase is insignificant. Infinity -1 is still infinity.

Of course there will be the resultant unintended consequences such as the price of housing rising due to more people having a little bit more to spend, seeing as housing and healthcare are both increasing much faster than incomes and inflation it is likely these two will see the windfall and end up resulting in the lower classes having even less disposable income.

Only 1% of the US civilian labor force earns the minimum wage. So you're talking about a small fraction of the total US pay base. It wouldn't even remotely dent the 77% number, first because the minimum wage affects so relatively few, and second because the wages in the group are so small it won't meaningfully impact the median income that primarily drives the 77%.

To put it into perspective, by your 63% number, it comes out to about 1 million women versus 750,000 men. Shifting the pay of those 250,000 minimum wage workers (that represent the sex gap on minimum wage) by $2 or $3 probably will not even move the 77% number to 77.25%.

Close, but I don't think that quite accounts for the whole story. For instance, if minimum wage is raised, it depends on how much it's raised by to determine what % of workers will have increased wages. If we took it up to (purely as an example) $15/hr, then everybody earning less than that would also see a pay raise, but would not be included in the 1%. I don't know where you got your previously cited statistics, so I can't exactly run the numbers to see the impact, but I imagine it could be a sizable effect.

And unemployment is higher among men.

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