Hacker News Reader

Comment by IdiocyInAction | Hacker News Reader

At least the version I hear most often about is a gross disparity between the genders without taking anything into account.

IIRC if you look into it it's mostly a maternity penalty anyway.

View on HN

In the news I mostly see or hear about the non-adjusted gender pay gap (women earn 17-21% less than men). The adjusted pay gap, which takes hours worked into account, is only 1-5% [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

And that's across all ages, but as you go younger the wage gap actually reverses and women make more than men.

I think the argument is that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs regardless of their age.

the issue is that if you are 10% less experienced than someone else because you took a year out of your career (imagining two people who started working 10 years ago), it is hard.

Climbing the ladder has inertia, anyone taking a sabbatical will be hugely adversely affected.

We should however destigmatise men taking parental leave in order to readjust this.

I will point out, however, that our society still prefers that men pay more than their share and many women have reported being uncomfortable out earning their partner. Obviously these conditions cannot coexist.

There's one thing you're missing here, and that is as women make up a larger percentage of an occupations' workforce, the wages start to go down with it, which is what happened or is happening with e.g. doctors and teachers.

Do you really expect employers to use their increased bargaining power in favour of workers? Of course doubling the number of workers in an industry is going to lower wages.

How are you relating this to the thread? Maybe you mean it takes time for capital to lower everyone’s income when market competition increases, the actual details of the excess humans matter less and less each year.

Artificial protection and gatekeeping by ordinance are there to protect those who got there first. Then we can blame others: women or immigrants etc, for wage depression. Unions do this less but still favor those who organized first.

If capital gets to hire for less, say that. Maybe the opportunity was an increase in certain pop segments, but they dont make wages go down. The people who pay wages do.

Which is also why a lot of the latest policies are to provide equal maternity and paternity leave. Which is pretty good anyways, why shouldn’t fathers be able to take as much time off?

I strongly support (m/p)aternity leave equality, but I can think of lots of reasons new mothers should be able to take more time off.

If your goal is gender equality, though, it needs to be equal, and we should encourage fathers to take the full time off as well. Otherwise, from an employer's perspective, women are ultimately lower-value employees, because they have an additional pool of time off they can utilize, while men do not.

Balancing that out gives one less reason to favor one gender over the other when it comes to hiring and assigning a salary.

One thing is the leave shouldn’t be “all at once or lose it” but a bucket that can be drained over time. The mother can use it very early and the father later which provides the best experience for everyone.

What if women are higher-value stay-at-home parents than men? Then maybe the optimal equilibrium is reached by more maternity leave taken on average by women than paternity leave taken by men… which produces an inverse result in the workplace.

This is contrary to the goal of equality.

It all hinges on whether or not sex/gender (and everything that comes with it) makes you more likely to enjoy and/or excel in certain roles. My gut feeling is it does.

If it does, then the goal of that kind of equality is a false goal.

If not, then you’re right.

It would be best if we gave parents the choice to determine what split is best for children themselves.

Right now, there isn’t really choice, because few countries have had equal leave rights, and those that do have had them for such a relatively short amount of time that we have no idea. So we haven’t been able to test any sort of hypothesis at all. All we have is culturally bound gut feelings, but if we just listened to those then we would still think that there are only four elements, that the earth is flat, etc.

And in the US we don’t even have legally mandated paid maternity leave, so even that would be a start.

Tell that to the women who are made to feel uncomfortable in their chosen work environments by men whose gut tells them they shouldn't be there.

No, that is not the kind of equality this discussion is about.

In this case, we are asking whether two hypothetical people who are completely identical in every way except for their genitals will receive the same opportunities, rewards, and treatment from their employers and their peers.

It is not for public policy to speculate on which parent will produce more value for the baby or the household by staying at home. The point you were responding to originally was this: If you mandate more parental leave for women than for men, you end up creating an incentive for employers to hire men instead of women (or choose to let women go when layoffs come around), because their benefits cost less.

That is the type of gender inequality we are talking about, and I hope you will agree that fixing it is not a "false goal".

I read the thread more closely and, you’re right, if men are not allowed to take the same amount of paternity leave as women, then that should be changed so that any person can take the same amount of parental leave. I didn’t realize that was not the case (I don’t live in the States). I was responding more directly to the notion that men should be encouraged to take the full leave / same amount of leave as women.

There is a lot of cultural pressure around men taking leave even if it is available.

Shinjirō Koizumi caused controversy when he took two weeks of his family leave as a minister because Japanese men never take it due to cultural reasons even though they are legally entitled to a full year of paternal leave. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/asia/japan-koizumi-paternity-...

And he was the son of a former prime minister, so even he was not powerful enough to be immune from criticism of this kind

While the details differ, the social benefit are mostly similar for both maternity and paternity leave. It create a better bond between parents and child, resulting in children that grow up more healthy and productive for society. Parental bonding take times.

If you're talking about the difference at the aggregate level, it's mostly a difference in selected job types (eg STEM vs social sciences).

I'm talking about e.g. within STEM where a gap of both pay and position remains.

I'm aware of the pipeline issues for many STEM positions. Do you have any data on the pay gap by industry for the groups within STEM?

Which group would you like to start with? Data science?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gender-pay-difference-field-d...

I'd perfer to see many positions within STEM so neither of us can cherrypick.

Do you have a real article with real data? This is just a post by some person on LinkedIn. It doesn't provide any background or support for the claims given. It even misuses the aggregate wage gap number from the BLS to apply at the job level...

"The term “gender pay gap” describes the disparity between what men and women earn in the workforce. Women earn, on average, 82% less than men do in the same job in the United States."

Perhaps you have some data from an authority like the BLS?

I guess it depends what you're reading, but the point remains that there's likely gender based pay gap within any given field/position.

I'm not sure where the "anyway" comes from in your last statement. The reasons for the disparity don't affect the reality that it's there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com