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...
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did not expect a response, but when I got one, I was ecstatic.
She seems like a awesome person.
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.
Bio-engineer men to produce breastmilk?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It is just hard because the caregiving pattern is already established.
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.
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.
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.
/s
also /s
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.
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.
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...
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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.
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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.
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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+.
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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?
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.
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.