The 10-Year Baby Window That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
OP's point was specifically that the wage gap may be caused by women's focus on child care instead of career advancement.
Yet, as I was trying to say: that idea is hard to square with the study's findings. Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25. But in that age group, the study did not find a sustained reduction in income.
What I was suggesting is that they are choosing to have children earlier so that they have older children when it is time to start focusing on a career.
Who presumes that? I would presume people who are looking to start a family would want a solid foundation to start from. That means holding off on having kids until you've gotten some sort of stability. Most people in their early 20s don't have any sort of stability.
Sure, some women would continue to downshift their career to focus on raising children. But many women who just want a couple of kids but aren't otherwise gunning for mother of the year (all of the women in my family) can have them at a convenient time and return focus to their career without loosing ground permanently.
I'd argue that that is best time we're better at everything. As living beings, our lives are optimized to produce offspring. Therefore our body and mind will be at its peak at the same time we're more fertile. (This is for both men and women)
Do we know that? I see a study suggesting that women who earn more relative to their male partners will be more likely to divorce (so called "independence effect"). I see a study that suggests that lower income families are more likely to divorce. These two bullet points alone make me think there is not a clear cut story about how the income of one partner effects marriage and divorce rates.
>Results showed a woman’s employment status has no impact on whether she chooses to divorce, but an unemployed man faces a greater increase his wife will file.
(https://www.themarkslawfirm.com/marital-problems-linked-to-u...)
> A Harvard University study declared “job loss” the biggest factor in divorce.
> she learned that divorce is more likely when husbands are not employed full-time. In fact, those without full-time jobs increase their odds of divorce by roughly 30%.
(https://thebigsmoke.com/2016/12/29/harvard-study-finds-job-l...)
> Others looked at the how income affects the marriage and divorce decisions of young Americans; they found that high earnings capacity increases the probability of marriage and decreases the probability of divorce for young men.
(https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...)
It feels pretty well established.
The last one, that actually might have said something about earnings vs divorce is a study done from 1957–1964. A fairly different time for women in the workplace, and male-female relationships in general.
One do not have to believe that the breadwinner model exist as a gender role, or that the pay gap exist, but then discussing them together becomes moot. There is no study to show that spouses which have the same education, same experience, same job, put in the same number of hours with the same responsibilities have different pay. No such apple to apple comparison exist.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
One of the articles below says:
>He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do.
So yeah, if you are sampling 3:2 women:men with college education, then what you say is true if and only if that is the distribution in reality. I don't think that baseline assumption is supported by the evidence [1]. In actuality, they've just identified that college educated women tend to move to cities for work in greater numbers than men. However, if you compared only women with college degrees to only men with college degrees, then the difference would reappear.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
I think the stats I've read about were true for major cities (even smaller ones); in some the difference was up to 30%. So having a median 8% compound interest in ~7 years (1.7x multiplier) should give some nice cushion for having kids if women wisely plan for that and don't expect to get handouts from government once they are pregnant. For countryside that seems to be a different story, but there more traditional roles still work and men are more often responsible for keeping family alive and well financially.
If we want to govern wisely, we should stop squeezing every single area where women can get some benefit and look at it holistically; men are starting to get fed up with more and more demands and society can't really function well when one half of population is always treated with more priority than the other (easier admissions/exams at universities, easier hiring process, higher income during best years, less demanding work etc.).
There first sentence you wrote disagrees with everything else you said. The point is there study above oversampled college educated women 3:2. If you want to weigh the sample by which degree as well, then that would help get more comparable numbers too. But this study which claims 8% better for single women, clearly doesn't support your delusional follow up.
It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect. I would have probably guessed that any hiatus in your professional career (including education) would result in a proportionally-delayed career advance throughout your career. I. e.: spend 2 years with children from 23-25 and your income at 60 is what you'd have made at 58 without children.
Not really. My hunch is that it's due to two reasons: (1) education is often much less intensive than a competitive career, so it's much earier to study while having a child (in many cases, you don't even need to attend the lectures, just pass the exams!); (2) probably the much bigger reason is that the "have children before 25" sample includes mostly people in non-professional careers where there isn't a lot of room for advancement anyways... someone with 2 years of experience as a store clerk or receptionist is worth about the same as someone with 4 years of experience, whereas the worth is significantly different in something like medicine, investment banking, programming, ...
if household management was a good to be bought and sold, we could discover its price curve through market mechanisms. since women do more house work, we would be able to appropriately account for that gap.
but do we want a society where household care is simply another market good?
but the real question is, would we want to?
Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be.
the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is.
that's my take on it, at least. =)
It's not because they aren't valuable; they're just not more valuable than our leisure time (for the majority of people). Of course, even this varies--for example, outsourced child care is very popular.
> patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power.
I don't think the patriarchy/power theory is a particularly good one. Men have never behaved as a social class nor monopolized social power. While it's true that men are overrepresented at the very top of almost every society, it's also true that men are overrepresented at the very bottom of almost every society. Theories of patriarchy don't predict this anywhere at any time, much less in almost every human society that has ever existed on the planet.
I don't know what the right answer is, but it's very likely that for hundreds of thousands of years, a society's survival has depended on reproductive success where men are expendable and women are crucial. As such, men are left to do the risky work while women added social value in low risk (but important!) areas of life like tending home and family. These dynamics incentivize risk taking and competition among men, which explains men disproportionately occupying the tops and bottoms of every society. Working outside the home has only been the less risky occupation in the last hundred years or so, and our society is still adapting to the change. This is probably wrong on some of the particulars but right in general.
that's gonna need some backup as you're going up against the likes of foucault and nietzsche on this one. besides, what happens at the bottom of the hierarchy is a non sequitur here. you can't just claim that power theory is wrong because not all men are at the top. that's an odd stipulation to impose.
> ...men are expendable and women are crucial...
this is also an odd statement. both men and women are crucial to species survival.
that's actually the crux of my argument: both men and women do valuable work, but the power dynamic has disporportionately placed value on "manly" work and less so on "womanly" work. what do you think incentivized women to enter the workforce in the first place?
Sorry, I don't follow. What needs backing up? That men are disproportionally represented at the bottom or that this observation is incompatible with patriarchy theory? Regarding Nietzsche and Foucault, I'm afraid I don't put much stock in philosophy as a discipline.
> besides, what happens at the bottom of the hierarchy is a non sequitur here. you can't just claim that power theory is wrong because not all men are at the top. that's an odd stipulation to impose.
Agreed, but that's not what I claimed! :) I claimed _patriarchy_ is wrong because _men are disproportionally represented at the bottom_. This is different than "not all men are at the top". Patriarchy predicts a distribution in which men are skewed toward the top and women toward the bottom (as you pointed out, this is compatible with overlap in the distributions); instead we see that the distribution of men is relatively flat compared to that of women (more men at the extremes and fewer in the middle compared to the distribution of women), but no measurable skew.
> this is also an odd statement. both men and women are crucial to species survival.
They're not _equally_ crucial to _reproduction_. The society with 49 women and 1 man is much more likely to survive than the society with 49 men and 1 woman. The society that prioritizes the safety of its female constituents is the society that survives. This predicts the universally gendered nature of work and distribution of power without needing to invoke collusion.
> the power dynamic has disporportionately placed value on "manly" work and less so on "womanly" work
Society is a complex beast, but here's my best attempt at explaining the most relevant bits of the system (this mostly applies to any time between the Paleolithic and ~1900, inclusive): A household needs to bring in resources and it needs general maintenance/overhead. The best way to bring in resources tended to be to render services to the community (market). The highest value services were often the riskiest. Because men are less reproductively critical, men specialized in the high-risk, high-value work while women tended to take care of the maintenance/overhead (like caring for the family). The men who were very successful at their risky enterprises rose to the top of society, and the men who were not very successful sank to the bottom. Even though men brought in the resources, they didn't keep them for themselves, but shared them with the family, thereby compensating their wives equally for their work.
> what do you think incentivized women to enter the workforce in the first place?
There were 2 major catalysts: out-of-home, high-value work began to get significantly safer in the wake of the industrial revolution and two world wars killed off tens of million of men, creating huge economic opportunities for survivors who were disproportionately women.
> since women do more house work
What if it is valued appropriately? E.g. (1) I don't value the housework you do at all, nor does pretty much anyone else in the society... sure, you can put a $ value on e.g. cleaning (hiring a cleaning service) or cooking (hiring a chef), but it won't be clean to your standard and it won't be your favourite food; (2) it's possible, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience quite likely, than women value household care more than men - so they want to do more of it. Of course, not everybody, but even on average that could have a significant effect.
Why?
In my opinion, only if you can replace it with something better... E.g. speaking English is culturally formed, but so what?
I don't have kids yet, but I've thought a lot about how to raise any future children I might (well, want to) have. My current thinking is that I will raise them differently, boys and girls, according to what I see the most probably outcome (e.g. for each to be heterosexual). Sure, I might turn out to be wrong, but (1) you can't avoid putting some preconceptions in a child's mind (after all, that's what "raising children" means), and (2) as long as they can consciously choose a different path (e.g. "I'm actually gay, I'll optimize my life for that") I think that's mean-variance optimized choice.
It's like, well your kid could be Mozart but you screwed them completely because you taught them guitar, stupid you... but then, there's no way you could have known, and a guitar is probably still better than complete lack of music, so it's a good choice overall.
Viewed in this light, the article is confirming a truism well known to anthropologists: men work so women can have children. Our society is little different from others. So much male parental investment is an unusual arrangement among primates, but it’s well documented among humans. Men produce roughly 2/3 of the calories consumed across a broad range of the societies ([Marlowe2001]). This is due to both:
* The difficult, dangerous and demanding nature of human birth and gestation, which is quite different from that of other primates.
* The enormous amount of energy expended in gestation, nursing and early childhood to support growth of the human brain.
The benefit of this arrangement is human brain development: we have larger brains than other primates, and the brains undergo considerably more training before functional adulthood. We are able to have these arguments about women’s careers precisely because of the situation we are complaining about: that women set aside so much to have children, and men set aside so much so they can.
Nothing about the energetics of pregnancy, nursing or early childhood has changed as a result of our transition from working mostly outside to working mostly inside, save that the length of “childhood” is now considerably longer, as long as thirty years in some cases. That women and men do not work equally well when pushed to live the same life course is no surprise, when we consider human history and the lives of the other primates. Should men and women be pushed to live the same life course, it’s not clear how it would be stable: men must bring something to the relationship to balance the large and fixed metabolic cost of gestation and nursing, which they can’t do if they can’t earn more than women. Men who failed to find some way around this would not have offspring and consequently later generations of men would be descended from — and have not just the genes but also the habits of — those men who found a way to obtain superior renumeration. This is no doubt how men got to be what they are in the first place.
[Marlowe2001] Male Contribution to Diet and Female Reproductive Success among Foragers
There sure is a lot of assumptions here too. More and more men are becoming stay at home dad's...myself included. Guess what, it impacts our career too. Possibly more so...I can't tell you the number of people that seem shocked to hear I stay home. Some literally are speechless.
If you're a woman and you have non-standardized interests, you are "problematic" for society. If you're a woman and want to raise your own children, you're "problematic". If you're a woman and the number on your paycheck is not priority #1 in your life, you're "problematic".
> This seems to be particularly problematic for women building their careers, when they might have to work hardest and prove themselves most, and less so for women who have already established some seniority or who have not yet started careers.
There is no mention of women being problematic for society.
Do they emerge with the same level of training & experience? Difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
There's some perverse incentives to take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs.
If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/w... (picked mostly arbitrarily from a DDG search for 'well-rounded education') states the usual reasons for that approach.
For example, is the goal only 'to produce medical professionals in an efficient way'? Or does education also include 'acquiring general knowledge' and 'training in citizenship' (quoting that link).
There's also a complaint about 'what Duke University professor and interdisciplinary-studies expert Cathy Davidson describes as "the duck, duck, goose model."'
I had an odd exchange once, over lunch at a UK research site with mostly European graduate students. I found out that I knew more about European history than the others. My education in the US included a European history course, while most of the Europeans had specialized in science since they were teenagers.
Not that that knowledge has really proved useful ... but then again, neither has my training in quantum mechanics.
The advice you give - "it is the gateway to a career" - has rather large built-in flaw.
The student loan industry, and the increasingly profit-oriented universities, have basically looked at the overall earnings difference of getting a degree and exclaimed "I want me some of that!"
Young adults who start life $30,000 in debt, for that is the current average outstanding student loan balance per borrower, make for a more compliant wage slave.
Your complaint does not seem to be about universities, but rather concerns the lack of a respected vocational training path. Since you appear to understand the historical context of what 'well-rounded' is supposed to mean, I think your use of 'bizarre' was facetious.
Moreover, you have changed what you are talking about. In your previous comment you were focused on students who "take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs." Most people who attend a 4-year college as 'a gateway to a career' do not plan on additional post-college education. As such, they do not have the perverse inventive you described.
That is quite true. In the early 1900s the US medical system was revamped specifically to make it harder for people to become doctors. This included making a college education a prerequisite. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
Only recently have new medical schools been built, after a hiatus of decades. Most of these are still going through accreditation.
Even with more schools, the residency requirement results in the 'jaws of death'. https://physiciansnews.com/2013/02/14/this-chart-is-scaring-...
It's a bit unfair to center the blame on (liberal arts) universities for the degree programs they offer to pre-med students when it's the medical school accreditation program which makes the requirement, and does so to make an inefficient system.
If you want an efficient system, look to Cuba. ELAM has 20,000 students.
Why do we prefer to send troops to other countries instead of medical doctors?
Not that everyone would become a doctor even if it were easier to attain, but to take it to the logical extreme, if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity.
This is only true if every doctor coming out of med school is exactly the same or if you can't tell the difference in skill among doctors.
But there is an expectation that med school produces doctors who are sufficiently equal in their ability (in that you should not need to worry about which doctor you end up with). That you are suggesting this is not the case is quite interesting.
If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
Having friends and family who work in the medical industry, I get to hear them talk about how every new patient they take on thinks their previous doctor was the worst doctor ever. And then when you talk to the people working at the practice of the previous doctor, they tell the exact same story, except about the doctor at the other practice.
You soon realize opinions don't measure much of anything.
I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books.
Also, a huge chunk of tech's HR issues are mostly created by startups having very young founders and young managers that don't have real life experience. (to me, young is anybody younger than 30). Half of the firing/issues I have seen in real life could have been easily avoided if the people in the room had more experience.
Consider the ages of some key figures in the American Revolution in 1776 (https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding...)
Marquis de Lafayette, 18 James Monroe, 18 Gilbert Stuart, 20 Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 Betsy Ross, 24 James Madison, 25
I wouldn't trust a 26 year old or 40 year old newly graduated doctor either, for the same reasons.
There are different stages of brain development that don't finish until around 25 in women and 28 in men, but these aren't necessary to be mature. Even people who are 40 will make decisions that their 50 year old selves will view as immature. And given that much of what we consider maturity is driven by experience, delaying acquisition of experience until after maturation will result in further delaying maturation for the next generation.
You have to be 35 to run for president in many countries....
etc...
There is obviously a sliding scale, but the 25-ish age range is more physical where your prefrontal cortex is still developing, while later stages are more experience based maturity.
"Neuroscience has shown that a young person's cognitive development continues into this later stage and that their emotional maturity, self-image and judgement will be affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed.
Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties says Antrobus.
"A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception," says Antrobus."
You don't need to.
After finishing their education, doctors and lawyers start working, but that work is largely training (i.e. further education) except that they're also earning money because they're already somewhat useful (not as useful as full-blown doctors and lawyers, but more useful than someone without equivalent education). In many countries in Europe, doctors need aditional 4-6 years of training before they can work without supervision and carry actual responsibilities... similar for lawyers, they need at least 2-3 years of work before they can pass the bar exam.
I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem...
Just because something may have an impact that differs based on sex doesn't make it sexist. Would we call pregnancy sexist because it works differently for each sex?
Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance?
If I require my developers to have a degree, it doesn't violate this concept even though a degree isn't required to be a good programmer.
Yes. E.g. in the U.K., you can start practicing law around age 21. In the U.S., typically it's 25 if you go straight through. Somehow the U.K. still manages to be a center of commerce and finance.
Also, which actor is the one creating the disparate impact in your view? The one requiring the degree? The one setting requirements for getting into law school? The college that requires a high school diploma? The one lowering the standard in grade school so that kids are not ready for college sooner than they could be?
[1] Say you had to be 5'7" to vote. That would be facially gender neutral, but not gender neutral in fact, since the average women is shorter than that while the average man is taller.
Unless we start comparing apples to oranges (e.g. women who want to reproduce and abandon the child vs. men who want to reproduce, have custody over, and raise... - or vice versa) the career/family planning difficulties bear substantially equally on both men and women.
If career/family planning poses a greater burden on a sex, it's more likely men who lack the capacity to (apologies for the crudeness) "just go get knocked up." A man who wishes to have and raise a kid requires substantially more investment. He has to get a partner and keep them around for at least 9 months or indefinately. Indeed, it's that historical necessity of being able to "provide for a family" which imposed the burden of excessive career development.
So, in summary, it's not like women can't have kids in college, or at least, it's not harder for them to do so than it is for men.
In this case, women aren't actually shorter than men.
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
for med school, you could still have 5 years of academic training (as with the Indian model) and then do 4 years of apprenticeship (internship /residency) and be a fully qualifed doctor by 25.
for law school, 4 years of academic training and 3 years of apprenticeship and be a fully qualified lawyer by 23.
these are professional trades, so the apprenticeship piece is a crucial transition period to learn from those who came before you.
I'm not certain what a 'programme to help women re-enter the labor force' would look like, so I won't comment on that.
Flexibility is awesome, and in many jobs (particularly our own) it's possible. But in many other jobs (the majority, perhaps?) it's impossible, or has extreme costs.
I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by strangers will have various physical & psychological issues compared to those raised by their own families; while it's necessary in some cases I don't think that we want to encourage it as a society.
All three are useful for parents of young children. And, interestingly enough, the first tends to be anti-correlate to the latter two among professions.
Consider jobs where it's hard to reschedule work at the last minute: pilot, surgeon, lawyer, cop, cashier (at smaller stores), etc: all these jobs tend to allow people to choose schedules other than 9-5 rather easily.
In any case: I think these are all solvable problems, and the old saying that if men where responsible for childcare, we'd have more day cares than Starbucks and mandated home office policies for every company comes to mind.
Your last point of parent's being the only ones capable of raising a child is idle conjecture not supported by any research. And in any case, it would still allow to distribute child care more equally among both parents. Flexible schedules
This has been studied. There is very little evidence for your hypothesis.
If that could work, then the children would love their paid caregivers, and the family ceases to exist.
Human relationships require time, and this time can not be scheduled. One must be there for the bruises and scratches.
If two working people have a child, and one is going to partially leave the work force to care for the child, who's salary would you pick?
The uneven salary, on top of the cultural biases we all absorb, mean it's practically a given the man will stay in the workforce and the woman will become the caregiver.
Equal pay for women means more men will get to take on childcare roles. Feminism is humanism.
Yet you ignore that the article goes on to state that the biggest gaps were the ones that started with the women making more. It seems on average the couple is picking the wife to absorb the hit regardless of the paychecks.
In nature vs. nurture, with humans, comparative anthroplogy is pretty conclusive - there are VERY few things all humans do regaurdless of culture.
“what do men do” or “what do women do” is so much more a function of history and how we’ve organized our society (aggricultural / industrial) than a product of in-built characteristics. I’m not saying there are no inherent differences, i’m just saying nobody knows what they are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...
The ability to give birth is another obvious difference that has nothing to do with nurture but is directly relevant to the topic at hand.
Yes, there are differences between the average man and the average women physically. Height, muscle mass, etc. but that does not say much about what is a natural role and what is one that is a product of culture. Because we don’t spend, and probably never spent that much of our lives doing very heavy lifting or giving birth.
Why do you think we evolved sexually dimorphic features if not to help us in specialized roles?
* patriliny,
* the incest taboo,
* relative prevalence of monogamy, even in societies that allow polygyny,
* the universality of religion.
Much of the "nuts and bolts" of human society are found to be shared cross culturally.
What's the importance of that? If we see the same behavior show up in many different, unrelated cultures, all across the globe, it would seem to suggest that there is something fairly deep and structural about it. Maybe some cultures can function with something different, but it's not necessarily up for debate, or something that is likely for any one culture, like our own.
With regards to anatomy, you can see a similar situation. Some people are born with six digits on their hands, some without certain organs, some with organs of greatly changed size or shape. These exceptions are a part of nature; but great regularity of structure is a part of nature, too. Variation doesn't necessarily indicate "choice" or "arbitrariness".