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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Jesus christ thank you, folks on the internet are so quick to dismiss pay gaps just because we know what causes them as if that magically makes it not a problem.

Take one factor, women earn less because of mid-career halts due to having children, like the father didn't also have a child. Women bear the brunt because we're expected to be the primary caregivers, and this hurts men too due to the "father babysitting his kids" problem of considering the father's involvement as secondary.

You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.

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What if Women, on average, prefer to take more time away from work due to having a child than their male partners? And what if "Black" people are, on average, younger than other groups and so are more likely to be in early-career roles?

More broadly, once we start dividing "People" up into groups like "Black" "White" "Man" "Woman"; isn't a bit silly to think the groups won't expect and want and do different things? Like even if we assign people literally at random (and 'Race' isn't much different than this); wouldn't differences emerge?

Now, imagine you enslave one of those groups for ~400 years, prevent them from voting or getting an equal education for another ~100+. Might differences emerge in how society treats that population?

Yes. Do you agree that my point is also correct? Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas.

If we defined the "groups" in a less historically informed way, we'd still have differences.

> Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas.

I think it's very easy to overstate how much those things are genuine differences in preference/ability. Allowing no-fault divorce dropped female suicide rates by 20%; were they happy in those marriages, or enduring them? Would they choose differently if offered the same opportunity?

Wasn't there also research showing that when women's financial independence improved, divorce rates went up? I wish I could find that source again.

Do you think people with Green eyes are more or less compensated than people with blue eyes?

Eye color, unlike Race or Gender, is pretty evenly distributed over the obvious confounding variables like "Age" or "Preference of staying home with children". I'd expect it to be +/- 10%, though probably not "equal" enough to keep "disparate impact" folks from calling it out.

Any individual woman has far more control over how she and her husband split childcare responsibilities than her employer who was not involved in who she decided to marry or how they decided to split up childcare and financially providing for the family.

And I don't think it's crazy for individuals who dedicate more of their life to work to make more money those who don't.

each family makes their own decision how to split responsibilities at home. Its possible that men take care of children, while women work more.

my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap, and on balance it all comes down to individual choices, division of labor at household level.

Using motherhood as a wedge issue between genders is an artificial issue that ignores incomes and choices at the household level.

> my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap

Time to turn off the “Leave it to Beaver” reruns, I think.

It seems logical that if either partner has to stop working for childcare, whichever partner earns the most keeps their job, unfortunately that just creates a feedback loop where gender gap means women are more likely to tale on child care, which in turn is used to justify the gender gap.

I don't think there is any real agency there. That said I also don't think parenthood is the root of the issue.

Just from my casual observation, it seems like these days, lots of women complain about having to do a lot more household work than their husbands, while also holding a full-time job just like the husbands. But no one ever seems to ask these women: "why did you marry this guy then?"

Of course, I've been in a bad marriage myself, so I understand how someone can make a really poor decision about their marriage partner (esp. when young!), but it seems to me that a lot of people are in lousy marriages, and are only still in them because it's easier to put up with a crappy partner, especially when you have kids, than to divorce and try to deal with the huge challenges that life as a divorced parent presents. I suspect many, many people (primarily women) are just waiting until the kids are out of the house until they finally end their marriages.

All in all, this makes me wonder how viable traditional marriage as an institution really is any more.

This is patently false. The USA does not have any regulations around equal parental leave for example. Very few companies allow employees to split their leave however they want, like some other countries do.

this is not an issue between union and corporation, but more like societal issue. Other countries provide prolonged maternity leave (Sweden has 16 months leave) and free/cheap childcare.

Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.

This is not a gender issue, this is the issue of American elites refusing to provide incentives to working American families.

Remember, most of the American societal "struggles" across artificial wedge lines (straight vs gay, male vs female, democrat vs republican, pro-choice vs pro-life, coastal vs rural, etc etc) => are artificially created by the mainstream media and Uniparty in the DC to leech taxes from working families and selectively prop up one side of the struggle, so that another side is outraged and fought the other.

There is only one struggle in America: rich rentiers on Investment income/Trust funds vs Working class on W2 income.

everything else is distraction

I broadly agree, but would draw this out a little:

> Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.

I'd be surprised if any federal elected official was on record with a position as ghoulish as this. I think the diversity of opinion on "what do we do about childbearing" is broader than "American lawmakers... would rather women have an abortion". At least the right is pushing a lot of incentives to make women staying home to raise children economically feasible again, and the left is really trying to figure out the care economy. There's a lot of hot button cultural stuff entwined with all of this, but also a rich policy discussion happening underneath.

> You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.

Yes it should — if they’re making choices at a different rate.

That is, if men who take similar time off experience similar hardship and it simply happens to be that women prefer to stay home with the kids more often, there is literally no problem.

We don’t need to “fix” biology to fit our ideology: that’s backwards.

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