I've seen the argument that women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings.
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.
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?
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."
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).
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.