There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny.
This is a common misconception. The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this. It does affect the glass ceiling though, even if the women don't choose to have kids. I really do mean there's no smoking gun. You can even account for worse negotiations, prioritization of work life balance, work flexibility, family, and you don't fully explain a gap (albeit it does get smaller, but remember that even a 1% difference is significant here).
I really suggest listening to Rebecca Greenfield's The Paycheck. The first season goes into all this. I think it's a lot more convoluted and surprising to many. It's also not focused on median earnings and so I think is really good if you want to understand fairness (glass ceiling is also discussed). And I don't think anyone disagrees with your second paragraphs. Women should have choice. But there's still gaps that aren't explained and we shouldn't just easily dismiss them. I should also mention that this gap is in no way a phenomena strictly in America. It's global.
A lot of economists have put in a lot of work trying to understand this and there really is no agreement on what does cause it. So don't dismiss things so easily. Most problems in our modern and complex world have many casual factors and large casual graphs.
> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career.
>The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this
Articles like this are where I get my understanding. https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
And I want to quote something from this article that you may also find from my above comment
> As Goldin put it recently to Freakonomics, "It's hard to find smoking guns."
It's standard to consider the null hypothesis as the answer if it lies within the margin of error of what you're measuring. Last I knew comparing exact jobs (not merely professions), actual hours worked (no "full time" category) and years of experience (not age) explained more than 90% of the gap. Are all these other causes you mention measured accurately enough to ensure the null isn't within the error range?
However, people take “explained” to mean “it’s fine, we don’t have to do anything” when instead it’s actually the stuff we know we should be targeting.
* Men on average work higher paying jobs, male dominated fields are on average higher paying.
* Men on average hold higher titled positions in a given field, the glass ceiling is a thing, and women have a harder time becoming managers and directors.
* Women have fewer years of of experience on average because of childcare.
This is all stuff we need to work on because “controlling” for all this stuff and then forgetting about it makes it seem like it’s totally fine that 99 men and 1 woman are senior SWEs as long as the 1 woman makes the same pay.
Sometimes you can find the explanation and it is "totally fine", if your goal is to eliminate gender discrimination. This is only a problem if your goal is equality of outcome, independent of preference.
>Women have fewer years of of experience on average because of childcare.
It has been long shown that women desire to raise children more than men. Fixing this difference would require making both men and women do something other than what they want. For what purpose, so that the numbers are symmetrical?
>Men on average work higher paying jobs, male dominated fields are on average higher paying.
As long as these fields are open and non-discriminatory to women, there is no problem! Some fields do have discrimination issues, and we should focus on that, not try to fight the market demand for occupations.
>all this stuff and then forgetting about it makes it seem like it’s totally fine that 99 men and 1 woman are senior SWEs as long as the 1 woman makes the same pay.
If women don't want to be SWEs, this isn't a problem. Last I checked, there was a massive imbalance in computer science application and graduation rates. Last I checked, SW firms were tripping over themselves to hire and promote women.
At some point, you have to question the premise that numbers would be equal if you removed unequal barriers and discrimination. At some point, if your sole metric is equal numbers, you have to force men and women to do jobs that they don't want to.
> At some point, you have to question the premise that numbers would be equal if you removed unequal barriers and discrimination. At some point, if your sole metric is equal numbers, you have to force men and women to do jobs that they don't want to.
I feel like we're 99% in agreement, the difference is that I see a 20-30% difference among groups that have more variance within them than between them as evidence of those barriers and discrimination and a system that continuously reinforces the same outcomes. And it goes both ways, the barriers that push men out nursing, child care, and art are just as important, the difference is what data you use to demonstrate it.
#First, the simple numeric argument: Small innate differences in mean preference can have large effects at the margin for normal distributions. If you take two identical distributions, and move the mean of one 20-30%, the number that falls above or below a threshold changes a lot more than 20-30%.
For example, decrease the mean of one curve a single standard deviation (~35%), and the tail drops a lot more. A value that is in the top 2% of the first curve is now the top 0.1% of the second curve. That is a 2000% difference in samples above the value.
#The second is the feedback-loop argument: People have preferences, and lets assume the innate preferences between genders is small. Over time, positive feedback loops can amplify these differences. This doesn't have to be sinister, but can be as simple as becoming interested in what are exposed to via same gendered friends and what your social network does.
You see it often in certain communities or families that specialize in a given trade (eg, my uncle was a carpenter, or my aunt was a nurse). The only way to stop these influences is to raise people in a bubble or gender randomize their friends and role models. What we DO want to avoid negative feedback loops where people are actively pushed away from a trade. (e.g. inhospitable workplaces for male nurses or female carpenters)
This is a false, when you actually ask people of their desires rather than repeat sexist tropes more men want children than women. This actually makes sense when you think about it since the expectation is the woman will be doing the majority of the childrearing and they're the ones expected to make sacrifices.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/actually-men-have-al...
>The Statistics Canada General Social Survey of the family has been asking Canadian men and women about their fertility intentions for decades with this question, "How many children do you plan to have, including the ones that have already been born or you are expecting at this time?"
>When this question was first asked in 1990, more women than men expressed a disinterest in having children. Among childless men and women between the ages of 15 and 44, 15 per cent of women said they had no desire to have children in the future compared to only 10 per cent of men. Additionally, more men than women expressed a desire to have children in every age group and regardless of whether they were married, single, cohabitating, or divorced.
Just to be clear, the above discussion is not about median wages between genders, it is about median wages between genders for similar job experience and job titles. The former is a 17% difference in wages and is related to men and women choosing different types of jobs that have differences in pays while the latter is a discussion about differences in pay for similar work. There are different decisions that women make in a job, but that doesn't explain everything. Hence the "no smoking gun" argument that keeps being said.
Which is why it is unexplained. i.e. We don't have strong confidence in the causal structure. No one is really disagreeing with this. But to create causal graphs you have to have... causes. If you can't measure something well then you can't form that graph well.
I would strongly recommend this podcast to anyone that enjoys leftwing propaganda, strong rebuttals of strawman arguments, and misinterpreted statistics.
In particular interesting was their implicit praise of slave-labour-supported childcare in Singapore and their analysis of the problem of falling birth rate by studying China.
I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go out on the field and score a goal, and when they start doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then your team loses.
Sigh. No.
IMO the reason men are drafted is men are disposable. Much less valuable than women.
Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women to war then your population dies. This just reinforces what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying they can't change or evolve.
I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily just biological, but they are requirements of some kind) that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs. "disposable".
Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.).
The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries.
Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?
We all are, after all, governed by our evolutionary journey; we're just simple animals at our core.
I agree, and there's an easy test: I know from experience that there's a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on men who make this choice.
Individuals of whatever gender exist within incentive landscapes, and they act within those landscapes to result in the best life for them. Many men and women wish they had different incentive landscapes to navigate through. My argument would be that creating a world where men and women can choose their paths according to their individual dispositions without penalty would result in one where more men and women are happy, which is why I'd like to nudge our existing world in that direction.
Adding incentives, nudging, and valorizing specific actions puts equality of outcome over equality of choice.
We shouldn't push a trend to respect and valorize men who stay home more than those who work. We should push a trend to respect them equally
We are in violent agreement.
Where I thought we differed is providing preferential incentives to men who stay home over those who work.
I'll buy the part about adding incentives.
Nudging and valorizing, however, are inevitable aspects of human life. Abolishing heroism is not realistic (and, honestly, it's a pretty mild incentive anyway).
About half the men I know with kids would prefer to be primary care taker.
If we somehow convince more men to want to be the primary caretaker, and feel more strongly about does that necessarily make the world a better place? It means both more men and more women don't get what they want.
Couples with compatible desires in line with the status quo would be unaffected. Couples with compatible desires opposite the status quo would purely benefit. Couples with discordant desires would negotiate the allocation of responsibilities more freely without social expectations biasing the outcome, which would lead to one partner benefiting and the other losing, but in a way that's either neutral or leads to a net benefit across the two individuals.
There is also the hypothetical idea that stay at home dads get a called pussies, but I've never seen it come up.
Hell, until recently it was only women who had access to maternity leave, paternity leave in most countries seems to be quite a new concept.
is different from
> affects both equally
Perhaps the first should have been "women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater than those experienced by men".
Greater than men in general, or men who make the the same choices as the impacted women?
It’s possible this doesn’t create a 100% balance, but it’s also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to spend far more time with the children (and usually both parents want to despite what some debate participants will say), and other non financial costs and benefits.
One way to solve this would be to require all marriages to have a pre negotiated divorce agreement with experienced advisors on both sides to discuss what would be fair compensation in case of divorce.
That can easily be balanced via legislation. What cannot be balanced is one partner having to take on all the health risks and lifelong consequences of childbirth and breastfeeding, etc.
The net result of this is that men are more likely to die any given year during their careers and have a life span shorter by several years than women do.
Sure, but let’s be careful not to cherry pick the statistics. It’s still true that the average life expectancy for men is about 5 years shorter than women.
I notice that there are attempts in our society to balance some areas of risk but not others. Breast cancer funding is much greater than prostate cancer funding despite the latter killing more people, etc.
Good thing it's opt-in. Why would you want to legislate opt-in behaviour?
If you are talking about overall career impact post birth, you would only expect equal outcomes if men and women are making the same choices and have the same preferences.
If the "problem" is simply different numeric outcomes between men and women, it ignores any differences between the wants of men and women.
There are a lot of career obligations that aren't fundamental to productivity. For example, people are largely expected to go to an office and be physically present for eight consecutive hours. This makes certain kinds of childcare activities impossible. But if instead flexible hours or work-from-home were the norm, this choice would no longer be necessary and it no longer becomes a "one or the other" situation.
Consider something like the idea that pumping at work is unprofessional. This is a 100% cultural thing. Pumping does not make somebody less productive. But if we don't consider this cultural influence we might just say "well women just choose to stay at home when they have infants and there is nothing we can do about that."
This honestly sounds pretty fishy-- like they wanted to goose their diversity stats for free while not actually changing any part of their org chart.
I do know someone who was promoted while on maternity leave (@FANG). She absolutely deserved the promotion and has done a great job leading her (analytics, engineering adjacent) team. She subsequently went on leave for a second child (no second promotion that I’m aware of).
In my country during maternity leave the work contract is legally frozen, no change is allowed of any kind (due to a history of frauds with salaries, the government pays a big part of it so there were cases where they increased the salary 10 times for the duration of the leave). Still, nobody said anything because that target beats the law. The only thing they did not touch was the salary because this is the only thing the government is checking.
People may have different commitments to work after having kids, and compensation can and should be adjusted based on that.
I definitely work much less than I did pre-kids, but my compensation has gone up significantly. I think this is typical for men. My wife also works less for more money post kids (but she had kids while doing postdoctoral work, and then moved to private industry).
In my opinion general "years of experience" is not a large contributing factor in regards to pay anyways. Relevant experience on specific projects using certain technologies and expertise in specific domains matters a lot more. It's supply and demand.
Someone else is the same age, graduated the same year, from the same school, but took two years off of work and therefore has 8 years of experience. They make $80k, which is less than their colleague.
See the difference?
Except that 1 year off has put them 1 year behind their peers who now have 11 years experience. Their skills have also decayed by a year, and they missed 1 year of developments in the industry.
People shouldn’t be penalised for having kids, but likewise it should be recognised that having children does impact career trajectory in a non-discriminatory way.
Sorry, the market pays based on experience, not on age! You're asking for a subsidy.
* raising children would require zero time and overhead
* or people who don’t have children should be barred from working more hours than a working mother can reasonably work.
Of course this entire discussion is mostly classist to such a degree many people literally don’t see it. For a mother to work full time with young children requires a lower paid (usually a woman) person to take on the child rearing role. So it’s sexist for a woman to take a few years prioritizing her children, but it’s equality for another woman to raise those children?
This phrasing is bizarre and reflects a cramped notion of gender equality. Child rearing is something that has to happen. We will already face economic challenges due to our increasing ratio of retirees to workers, and bad things will happen economically if our population begins to contract.
Now, Americans can allow the fertility rate to drop below 2, and bring in immigrants, but that’s not a sustainable equilibrium. You’re just outsourcing the burden to immigrant families from cultures that don’t have the same notions of gender equality.
At the end of the day, women (as a group, not necessarily individually) have an indispensable role as mothers. They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. We should approach discussions of how to keep women in the workforce long term recognizing those facts.
Do I think American society needs to incentivize having children through government intervention because of our falling birth rate? Yes
Do I think those women are making the right choice for both themselves and society by choosing to at the margin spend more time with their kids than working? Yes
>They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do.
From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
> From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
This isn’t a “choice” like deciding what car to buy. Fully 56% of women with kids under 18 would prefer to not work at all and stay home instead: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-wome.... Only 39% would prefer to work outside the home. Meanwhile only 26% of men would prefer to stay home.
When society has two groups, and one group is biologically capable of reproducing the species, and expresses strong preferences for caregiver roles, and the other isn’t and doesn’t, it’s not just about individual choices. It’s about accommodating reality—just like we design airplane seats around real humans and require buildings to have bathrooms for men and women.
There’s concrete things we could do. For example, right now, it’s extremely difficult for women who take time off to raise young kids to return to the workforce. We could, for example, make it illegal for employers to consider childcare-related resume gaps in hiring decisions. There’s a whole universe of system-level things we could retool if we went in with the assumption that women would want to take a few years off work at some point to attend to child rearing without permanently downshifting their careers.
There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(
And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for.
Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide.
Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced.
I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age.
TL;DR - hope for the best, plan for the worst.
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