Why women earn less: Just two factors explain post-PhD pay gap
nature.com
nature.com
Except it'll be: "40 year study concludes: choosing a less lucrative field, and putting more time into family leads to lower salary at work".
We can have all the equality possible. That doesn't change the fact that nobody can have it all. You can't be a primary caregiver and also have an equal career to someone who isn't (statistically, obviously). Traditionally it's been the father who has (for lack of a better word) neglected the children. If you want an equally successful career you need to choose to (again, bad word here) neglect the children.
There are only 24 hours in the day.
Or make the other parent not neglect them
Holy jumping to assumptions, batman.
No, it's a baseless assumption. You're somehow assuming that the only reason someone may even argue that you dont have to "neglect" your children and have a career is "only because they have money to out source their parental duties". That's a blatant baseless assumption. You may feel that, considering your career and the way you've been managing it, the only reason why someone may succeed in not neglecting their kids is if they pay someone else to do their job, but that obviously doesn't mean that your baseless assumption has any truth to it.
Simple math isn't worth anything if you get the facts all wrong.
But even considering your goalpost-moving argument, why do you assume that preserving a high income level is a priority over not neglecting your children?
If you and people like you constantly prioritize maximizing your personal income level over not neglecting your own children, it is rather obvious that you will end up neglecting your children to pursuit a larger paycheck.
But that doesn't mean your job demands it. It's you that is demanding it. You neglect your children because you opt to pursuit a higher paycheck.
But that doesn't mean anyone is forced to neglect their children just to keep a well-paying job. That's only your own personal choice, and you don't justify your personal life choices by throwing blanket accusations and baseless assumptions like you've been doing in this thread.
> why do you assume that preserving a high income level is a priority over not neglecting your children
I didnt assume its a priority, it only becomes a priority if you want to have children and not make less than a man/family without children or full time/part time caring spouse.
At this point I dont even understand what your arguing, I dont even have children, stop projecting.
Also, anyone who has participated, even just as a customer, in the child care / afterschool education / extracurriculars industry, can see some the ways that parenting logistics differ from family to family.
will kids survive neglect? of course they will. but if your idea of a good parent is that your kids just survive, think again. this world has already plenty of human beings ridden with all kinds of inner issues stemming from childhood
This tendency to see the family as a collection of individuals is a rather new way of thinking. So when we say "the father as an individual" is "neglecting" the "child as an individual", we misrepresent reality.
What used to be the way to think about this was that the family is the fundamental unit, and the persons are components of this machine. So the father doesn't take action (in this case work outside the home) of his own accord, but (ideally speaking), plays his role as is in the interests of the family. Similarly, the mother does not stay at home out of some oppression, but plays her role as what is in the best interests of the family.
It is modern feminism that has eroded this idea of the family as a unit, and replaced it with the idea of the family as a collection of individuals.
But the woman becoming an individual instead of a family role seems to have taken a front row seat to that meaning that the man will become an individual instead of role too. And that means admitting that the father role means not being able to have the family part like the mother role does.
I'm in this not saying people should be individuals or roles, just that we as a society (and individuals) should make that choice with our eyes open.
I think "deprioritizing" instead of "neglecting" doesn't sufficiently stress just how much you have to not do, in order to do the other thing.
My opinion is that the tasks of working and home maker should be up to the grownups involved. And if circumstances are such that you spend lots of time on children, then you are probably less useful to the workplace, and therefore should be paid less. It's insane to me that in some jurisdictions you legally have to count years worth of parental leave as if you were at work every day. A CV will not show this gap, even though it should.
Why should traditional systems be deemed inferior to pop media in directing people's lives?
There are, as I see it, two extremes here: 1) Use traditional roles, including the woman doesn't work. 2) Everyone does everything 50/50
Neither, if imposed from the outside, is good.
It's a hard problem in general that people don't know what they want, or what they need to be happy. Women (or men for that matter) who stay home with children are told (implicitly or explicitly) that they "should" go out and work may become unhappy if they do this.
And they can become unhappy not because they don't do what they want, but because they are treated like, or even start believing, that they "want the wrong things". And it's not just that other people say it. It can be the case that they genuinely don't know if they would be happier doing something else.
Try not wanting to have children at all. Parents, family members, and even complete strangers will tell you that you are not happy, that you want the wrong thing, and they'll pity you.
Then there's the "it's selfish of you to not work as a woman, have children, be an breadwinner as a man", etc.. That's worse. That's admitting that the advice you're giving would make that person less happy, so that they will fit in to the advice giver's world view.
In the end I just want people to have control of their lives. I can try enabling their freedom, but I can't make them make good choices.
In other words that there is systematic bias against married women with children, not against all married caregivers with children.
The idea that men can be a primary caregiver still blows minds.
edit: s/leads to/correlates with/ which I agree is an important nuance but doesn't change my point.
Another is that female primary caregivers, more so than their male counterparts, lose interest in focusing on work after they have a child, and thus fall into the rut of a lower performing employee that inevitably gets paid less.
I don't know which it is. Are their studies that try to find out?
This study was looking at pay one year after receipt of PhD. I'd expect that it would usually take longer for people to start being separated by performance in the types of jobs that PhDs typically get.
No, it doesn't.
It says that there is a correlation between being a married woman with offspring and a lower expected salary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
Furthermore, if you even had read the article you would've noticed the bit where it says "Weinberg says that the data cannot identify or tease apart factors that might explain why married women with children earn less — among the possibilities"
Thanks for suggesting the correction, and can I in turn suggest avoiding the phrase "if you had even read the article" in future. I'm sure you intended it to reinforce your remark, but I believe it actually tends to devalue any point it accompanies.
In the first the 'even' appears to mean "even in this very article, you may find this", where as in the second it appears to mean "if you at least put in the effort to read this article".
This suggest that there is no sexism when it comes to compensation for your work, at least among PhDs.
>>That difference, they say, was explained entirely by the finding that married women with children earned less than men. Married men with children, on the other hand, saw no disadvantage in earnings.
Isn't it obvious? Women spend more time away from work raising children. I am ok with the world working that way. Women are better equipped to take care of a child in its first years and taking time to do that will naturally lead to making less money at work (because you spend less time there/learn less/have less experience). It makes sense to split roles in a family: a better equipped partner takes care of children and the other spends more time providing. That's efficient use of combined family human resources.
I see no reasons to fight it. Life is about choices if you want children you will not get as far in your career as people who prioritize career over everything else. It would be unfair to force the latter group to subsidize your lifestyle choices.
At the risk of sounding condescending (I'm not) let's thank our mothers for bringing us into this world. Well done job moms, you really are the best.
I am not sure that's a problem. I've chosen to remain childless because of it and I've never ever met a person who would downplay how hard it is to raise children and not make their (and your) life miserable in the process.
>>But it's so obvious that being a parent is crucial to the society!
Well, my view is that we have way too many people. We have already taken all the land, we are polluting, cutting down forests and there are so many of us we even make the world a worse place to live for ourselves (let alone other species).
>>A civilization that sacrifices reproduction over GDP is bound to disappear.
There is a middle ground between disappearing and having way less people. Machines are coming, we don't need that many to sustain the civilization.
>>Muslim culture, where children are the main source of pride of the mother.
Yeah, and Muslim countries are overcrowded, poor and unstable (at least vast majority of them).
>>At the risk of sounding condescending (I'm not) let's thank our mothers for bringing us into this world. Well done job moms, you really are the best.
At the risk of sounding nihilist: I am not thankful and I will not bring children myself. Too much risk of them being unhappy, breathing polluted air and getting cancer. They would also use a lot of resources, produce a lot of trash and compete over ever decreasing land to build houses on.
I support people who are fit to have children (which includes resources, a good mate, mental health and ability to make them happy) but I don't think we should incentivize it today environment.
true, but only for quantity. quality people, meaning happy, educated, highly moral, caring, contributing to society, etc people we definitely don't have enough. you cannot guarantee to raise such a person no matter how hard you try, but you (anybody) can do your best.
Sons* are the main source of pride
If you're talking about a nurturing personality, I think this entirely depends on the person. I've known men that are very good parents of very young children, and women who are very poor parents of very young children. It really depends on the person.
If you're arguing this position from the perspective of breastfeeding, please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744030
There is more to breast-feeding than milk. There is bonding, warmth, strengthening of immune system (which requires a child actually sucking on a nipple to work). I am sure we will be able to raise a child without any human intervention in not so distant future but it doesn't change the biology. Children wouldn't survive without women in natural settings but can survive without men. While we are able to substitute a lot what women are equipped with using technology it doesn't change the fact that they are better equipped than men.
So are you suggesting my children didn't receive as much bonding, warmth, etc, because I fed them breastmilk instead of my wife? If that's the case, they're growing up to be remarkably well-adjusted, happy, and (quite) intelligent children despite that supposed deficiency.
It sounds like you've been exposed to a very certain, very traditional, kind of family situation. Please let me assure you that this is not the only way people raise successful families.
Even breastmilk, while highly recommend when possible, isn't critical for a babies' well-being since it's not possible at all in many cases (mother's health/can't breastfeed, adoption, etc.).
EDIT: Rate limited, my response to ps4fanboy:
> The fact that you were able to take time off to care for your children suggests that you are most probably middle class or better
Ironically, me taking off work to raise the kids brought us surprisingly close to the poverty line (wife's a school teacher). But we decided it was worth it, my wife wanted to return to work, and that I would be a great caregiver. But we're both highly educated, if that was somehow your suggestion.
> this social standing in society is much more likely to be a contributing factor to childrens long term success than breast feeding
Agreed, in general. So we both can agree that breast-feeding, while recommended, is not a critical factor in raising well-adjusted children.
It's one of the factors. There are others which you are likely to take care of very well.
As to breast-feeding and immune system: http://emph.oxfordjournals.org/content/2015/1/21.short
This requires contact between mother and child when breastfeeding for mother's body to produce compounds in milk in response to infection in a child.
>>It sounds like you've been exposed to a very certain, very traditional, kind of family situation.
Definitely not. I was raised in a very liberal family with mother having dominant personality. I am an atheists and I hold (and still do) very liberal views on most issues. My views on parenthood are shaped by my experiences and what I observe but obviously that is biased because of my environment and people I've met during my life. It's true that the happiest people with families I know are all at least a bit conservative when it comes to the role of mother and a father (even if very liberal otherwise).
And your evidence is?
As a man, I don't want to be punished for having children at home either, so I actually sympathize more with the mothers than with your argument.
The article gives two factor to explain lower salaries among women. The first one is that they chose less lucrative academic fields. The second one happens when the woman is a mother. Despite the speculation in this thread that it's because the woman spends much time raising her child, the article isn't positive about that, and even suggests another possibility (employers assign different responsibilities and salaries to these women).
Anyway, those are just intermediate explanations. The next step is understanding why women make such choices. While I understand that it's tempting to just imagine that it comes from "natural" differences (whatever that would mean) between men and women on which we have no control, another possibility is sexism in the way we raise boys and girls differently. Let's not close the case until we've ruled out this hypothesis, or solved it if it happens to be true.
One key reason might simply be because they can. When a woman priorizes life over work, she sacrifices money, but the general perception of "success in life" will just shift from one well accepted metric to another. When a man does the same, he only has himself to cheer for him.
Cultural expectations like this are much more difficult to change than plain monetary compensation.
Edit: this post may sound a bit more "aww, poor men" than I like, but I really can't see anything wrong with inverting the question from "why do women" to "why don't men"
Making this a binary choice is unnecessary, dangerous and in no way better than the "conservative" notion that women belong to the kitchen. Let's assume everything is solely based on social factors, adult women in this generation still won't have control over the way they were raised. It's unlikely that they will suddenly drop the behaviour they accquired over decades. And even if they could, why should they? If they're happy with their choices let them be. Instead we should work to value caregivers more, regardless of gender.
Midwife is a general high status job for a woman. For a man its low status job, and barely tolerated by society.
A man that work with garbage or sanitary is socially accepted so long he brings in enough money. A woman earning the same amount will still have their social status taking a major hit.
It is generally considered as high status to work as a psychologist or veterinarian for a woman, regardless of pay. A male psychologist status is derived by how much he is earning, and is considered a failure otherwise.
Unsafe and hazardously jobs like mining or working on a oil rig is profitable endeavorers for a man and brings high social status. For a woman its low status job, and barely tolerated by society.
We could try to fix all this by force men and women to prioritize attributes which do not bring them high status in society, or we could try to fix society so people don't derive social status based on sexist attributes like wages and profession.
Another factor that is not addressed in this study is the fact that even apart from societal expectations, the inequality of maternity and paternity leave policies don't fairly give moms and dads the chance to be equally involved in childcare from the very beginning even if they wanted to. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcom...
I don't see why we should be satisfied with the current situation for men, either. Why wouldn't we want a society that gives moms AND dads the option to be involved and present in their kids' lives without branding them as insufficiently dedicated to their work? I think it's totally unfair when I hear about friends who are dads who are met with skepticism when they want leave from work for their kids. There's no shortage of research showing that parental involvement, from both sides, from an early age is good for our kids.
If you are a married woman and you earn more than your husband, you still end up with more childcare responsibilities and less money than your peers.
If you are in a field that is dominated by women, your compensation becomes progressively less than pay in other fields.
If you are great or even best at what you do and chose to not have kids to remain paid well, you remove yourself from the human gene-pool, which is not favorable for humanity in the long run.
Because of norms and cultural understanding you are essentially throttling 50% of humanity's evolutionary and talent potential on the basis of a random assignment at conception.
A different study proves than economically developed countries with more conservative cultural norms regarding gender have substantially lower birth rates (Japan, Bulgaria), well below turnover rates for a healthy society (turnover rate: 2.1 children per family). The more shared parental responsibility an educated society has, the higher its growth.
So are cultural norms mortgaging the future of developed economies? How can this problem be fixed?
Now if you look outside of the US and in different social experiments here is how the problem has been solved before:
1. Families live in the same area reducing economic mobility and slowing down overall econlnomy, but retired grandparents take over care for little ones.
2. Providing universal childcare with high standards of care and education (partial example: Israel, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe etc). After some iteration society ensures that every child gets an equally productive start. Parents male or female are serving society with their best skill set. Population growth in an economically advanced society that leads to economic and scientific development as well.
The family is the cornerstone of civilization! What's wrong with the traditional system where the mother and father work together to provide for a family? It makes a lot of sense to me that the father and mother specialize in different areas (fathers in workplace, women in childrearing) and that way kids both the material wellbeing and the emotional wellbeing to become well-adjusted people.
With all due respect, if the system has worked well for so long, why change it?
Yes children may hold back your career. Why is is wrong to regret that fact? It does not mean that someone considers their career more important than family. In fact it suggests the exact opposite.
> he family is the cornerstone of civilization! What's wrong with the traditional system where the mother and father work together to provide for a family?
Civilisation sometimes exhibits negative behaviour, just like a family. It is so overwhelming common that it becomes an almost meaningless description. It could be loving and nurturing or abusive and hateful. You are really talking about the "traditional nuclear family" which could be just like Finland or a bit like North Korea. Without knowing which it is a meaningless discussion.
When we talk about the traditional nuclear family in the USA we normally refer to as the 1950s family unit.
"The findings support earlier research that suggests that parental and household responsibilities often affect women disproportionately, particularly in environments without adequate work–life and family policies"
I would also question why women "choose" less lucrative fields of study. Perhaps various forms of sexism make the higher paying male dominated fields a harder choice.
It could also be the other way around: Social expectations concerning men as primary income-earners makes it a hard choice for men to pursue less lucrative fields of study.
If a person is expected to only choose a high paying field, but has two options open:
1. High paying field they don't really like.
2. Low paying field they'd love to do.
Then if there are social expectations that someone must make a lot of money, they will generally be forced to choose option 1.
The argument that men are forced by social expectations to choose option 1, and women are more freely able to choose option 2 is not 'absurd'. It may be correct or incorrect and would need some evidence to back it up, but please don't go around labeling positions you don't like as 'absurd'.
[1] see for example Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (MIT Press) http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Pr...
You added the idea of conscious planning. Replace "plan on supporting them" with "higher probability of getting support".
> tons of evidence around sexist cultures in engineering and CS
This has no bearing on the above claim though, does it? That men have a higher risk of being able to find a partner capable and willing on supporting them financially.
Could we once do without it?
invariably makes these discussions fall off a cliff
Alas it's difficult to defend against.
Not at all what I said. Rather, women have the freedom to pursue their interests because they know that their ability to have children will not be determined by whether they can support a spouse.
The "Social expectations" are enshrined into law. Just a quick look at the legal rights involving paternity vs maternity leave make that pretty clear [1]. So do the regulations regarding divorce and alimony in most legislations, see eg. [2] for the case of the US.
The best way of thinking about this issue from the social power angle: Work is unpleasant in most cases (hence mostly only done when incentivised by pay or force) and best to be avoided. Those most able to avoid work are those with most social power. Parental leave is a social mechanism to avoid work, since most people prefer spending time with their children to working.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Variation_in_in...
And there's the sexism: the idea that raising children is not "work".
Anyone who believes caring for a newborn is not hard work is welcome to try it and report back.
If the relationship between you and your children is like that between you and your employer, you are probably not doing it right ...
You can also look at this from a power angle: what do feminist typically campaign for? Do they typically campaign for mandatory patertal leave to match or exceed maternal leave? This would be the case if looking after one's children was such a drag. Nope, they are typically quite happy with women getting the biggest chunk of parental leave, but they want society to view maternal leave as work on par with working in a company.
But the rewards are like no other.
As a parent, I have a disinclination to consider parenting 'work', as in 'I should get paid for this because it sucks', because I don't think that all things that suck should be paid for, in general. Life does suck. Deal with it.
And the suckiness of parenting is in no way at all the same level of suck as, say, having to do a Timesheet every single day and accounting for every 6 minutes of effort in order to get paid a pittance, and so on. Because you can't say: this human being is costing me $__ amount.
To incentivize - or even, associate - parenting work as an under-privileged system of unpaid labor is to allow the conditions of human slavery to slip ever slightly more through the door.
It speaks much of any -ism that claims that child-rearing isn't one of the truly greatest privileges for any living being, sentinent or otherwise, to experience.
Thank you!
An analogy would be beauty. It's quite obvious that it's the women who care more about their appearance (due to male sexual preferences) rather than men caring less.
Also fields change what work they include while keeping the same name, so it's a very sloppy metric at best.
Because of biology its very hard for the father to be the primary carer to children after being born.
Until men and women share equal parts of child rearing on average you wont see equal averages in other parts of society like income by age and career choices.
Women have shown a tendency to favor work life balance over income on average which means if you want to increase female mobility in male dominated jobs you need to increase working conditions for men, like equal entitlements for paternity and maternity leave.
Birth rates in western countries are already falling below 2.0 which is a reduction in population.
While some would argue this is a good thing for the environment, the west does not have the majority of the world population and a reduction in population could lead to geo political instability. The majority of the worlds population does not live under democratic rule, a reduction in population in democratic countries only is a troubling trend.
That's not true. Fortunately, we have in our society the technology (breast pumps) that allow women to save their breast milk for anyone capable of caring for the child to use at a later time: fathers, grandparents, and even the mothers themselves.
They're not the most pleasant contraptions in the world to use (so I'm told), but I wouldn't characterize their use as "very hard".
My wife was the primary caregiver for our children the first 2-3 months, and then she went back to work and I raised them as the primary caregiver. For me to provide them breastmilk after was a bit inconvenient at times, but never "very hard" (they continued to be exclusively breastfeed until ~6 months, and breastfeed in combination with other foods until ~1 year).
That's true. Most jobs in the U.S. allow women to do this, and those that don't are unfortunate and should be shunned if possible.
> Additionally the world health organisation recommends breast feeding for two years.
Yes, but the APA in the US recommends 6 months exclusive/at least 1 year. In our case, it was a bit over 1 year for the first child (she wanted to stop), and almost 2 years for the second (had to be weaned, imagine he would have kept going until adolescence had we permitted /s).
A major reason the WHO recommends breast-feeding for two years is because of water quality issues in developing countries. We are fortunate (for the most part) to have water here in the US free of those pathogens that cause early childhood mortality.
EDIT: I'm rate-limited at the moment, but after carefully reading your reply below, I'd say we probably agree on most parts of the issue posed in TFA. However, unless I'm misreading your position, we appear to disagree on the relative fitness of men and women to raise young children (My position: thanks to technology, both men and women in the West are equally capable of raising infants and young children. In my opinion, their fitness for that task depends on the person).
If only the majority of the US population had that kind of choice.
We are arguing on the same side on this one just quibbling over semantics, "the pay gap" is in my opinion a reflection of the asymmetric nature of raising children between employees and companies, this manifests by women choosing careers on average that are more flexible and have better non monetary benefits, these benefits dont have a positive effect on profitability of the companies/industries that offer them, therefore they have lower average incomes than others. until that burden is equally placed on all companies we wont see any change in the choices females and males make because they will be constrained by their situation (family etc) and that will influence their decisions. To suggest this situation is because of sexism and not capitalism is intellectual fraud the statistics just dont back it up.
This is very true. Though I'm not sure that any country has equal entitlements for paternity leave... men get less mostly because of the physical difficulty of birth and breastfeeding, but more than is entitled there. It helps if the employer isn't forced to pay for the maternity leave, only keep the job open for when she/he returns. (social benefit). Plus laws that protect parents taking time off for sick children, etc.
In countries where child raising is much more equal between the sexes, however, you still see pay differences tied to career choices. Teachers and nurses (which are often female-dominated) often get paid less than male-dominated career choices with equal education requirements. Even when there is a shortage of nurses and teachers... they still pay less.
And I have no clue what the solution to such things are without simply having a different system to pay folks. For example, some sort of equation that combines experience, amount of education required, stress levels and 'untraditional' worktimes, experience, etc. But I also think this would be pushed against greatly.
Sadly this is very hard to be countered even with affirmative action, because a person taking a break (for whatever reason, health issues, a single guy on a two year sabbatical will be hit too, maternity leave) is objectively weaker hire than a person that has built name and contacts in the same period.
Edit: Clarified lower pay