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Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this is a case of metrics getting ahead of reality. Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. Perhaps there are some reasons for that, for example the tradeoff between forcing mothers back into the workforce vs. giving them ample time (order of 12 months) to recover and take care of the new born. For the not parents out there, a new born requires feeding every 2-3 hours. Expecting a mother to feed on that schedule and perform as an employee is inhuman.

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> Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal.

All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering?

* (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).

Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?" A passing familiarity with mammal biology is required. FYI, babies do not subsist on hamburgers and fries.

Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive realm, before and after birth, we won't get very far.

PS. There is nothing "penalizing" in taking care of an infant. It is a fundamental part of life. Some even see it as rewarding.

> Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?"

Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked.

> Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable.

Speak for yourself if you want to introduce straw men in the discourse; no one else did. Here we adults are talking about participation in society in equal conditions for all humans, irrespective of debilitating conditions that may temporarily affect them, whether due to illness or strenuous exertion.

Excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere because some of them have a higher biological burden in reproduction is anything but a libertarian ideal. Having men participating in equal terms in the responsibility and joy of raising their children should be seen as a right as well as an obligation. A society that is unable to guarantee that right and claim that duty is a society that has lost its way.

Let's recap:

1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children.

2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question.

"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm

3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers.

Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable.

I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere".

Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force.

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

> don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from

You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.)

> Men and women are not fully interchangeable.

And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.

We seem to disagree with a very specific point about breastfeeding. One perspective is supported by reasonable authoritative sources (AAP). What is your recommendation for the care and feeding for an infant in their first year of life?

Pumping exists. Formula exists. And it isn't like we see balanced childcare responsibilities once children are weaned. The disparity in expectations for men and women in childcare roles extend far beyond the biological realities of childrearing.

Pumping is challenging, if not downright degrading. Ask a working mother. It also doesn't work as well as you might think, both the baby and the mother need breastfeeding 2-3 hours apart, or else the lactation may stop. Formula is suboptimal, according to AAP and common sense.

This is exactly how the singleminded focus on one metric (equal wages or bust) goes awry. Both mothers and infants suffer the pressure on mothers to compete on equal footing with males at all times. Is it really that hard to give mothers the space (and financial support) to chose the well being of their infants and of themselves, and accept that course of action will inevitably lead to a small decrease in lifetime wages?

Even the ancients were well aware of the dangers of attempting to equalize everyone to the exact same standard. See the story of the Procrustes bed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

If I were trying to argue that my ideas were not sexist I probably would not appeal to "the ancients," who also had ideas about, for instance, the unwisdom of letting your wife leave the house on her own.

Preferences are not identical between men and women. 72% of fathers say they would ideally work full time, only 20% of mothers do [1]. 50% of mothers say they would ideally want to work part time, 29% not work at all. Furthermore, mothers that work full time are less satisfied with their parenting than part-time and non-working mothers. Crucially, 70% of mothers that currently work full time would rather work part time or not at all. Most mothers with full-time careers don't want to be working full time, and this disparity is more than a 2:1 margin.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m...

I think it is instructive to compare this case to disability. There are perfectly rational reasons, from a cold economic perspective, that an employer would not want to hire any disabled employees, or that a business would not want to build amenities to accommodate them as customers. But we've decided that it is not to society's benefit to have a system wherein the disabled are routinely discriminated against, so we don't allow you to do those things. Why is this case different?

This is an orthogonal point. I don't see any provision mandating wages or promotions for periods when people are on leave, abled or disabled.

The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers.

BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...

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