As always, the OECD is leaving out other massive gaps. For instance, the working hour gap: even if you limit yourself to the class of full time workers, men work more hours than do women. There's the work satisfaction gap: women work in jobs that offer them more work satisfaction than men. There's the commute gap: men spend more time in their commutes per week than women do. There's the retirement gap: full time women retire years earlier than full time men. There's the workplace risk gap: men are far more likely to work in jobs that cause them injury or death. There's the on-call gap: men tend to work more inconvenient hours and do work outside of normal working hours.
I'd love for all these gaps to be reduced, but the situation is less "patriarchy stealing money out of women's pockets and undermining equal pay for equal work" and more "men face strong gendered pressures to sacrifice well-being in exchange for more income." There is definitely social sexism being surfaced by the wage gap statistic, but it's against men, not women.
It is more complicated than I let on and not as simple as class X is victimized. However, it's frustrating that this pushback happens only when a random internet comment is oversimplifying in the men have it worse direction and never when a massive institution is oversimplifying in the women have it worse direction.
This would make more sense if it wasn't related to children. Women aren't just working fewer hours to relax. They work fewer hours because society demands that they do a whole extra job of raising children.
These also hold for single, childless men and women. But that's almost besides the point: you can just as well say that men work more hours because society demands they sacrifice their well-being to earn more income.
The only reason your formulation gets more play in media is that there's a strong social bias ascribing hypoagency to women (so whatever unfair pressures they face are due to patriarchal oppression) and hyperagency to men (so whatever unfair pressures they face are their own fault).
It's honesty sad that it took like 20 years of bullshit to get to the point where we can freely discuss this stuff without being shouted out of the room for being sexist or some other -ist/-ism. The pursuit of equity is one of the single most toxic things to happen to modern societies.
idk how the hackernews community feels about this stuff but..
this is the usual oecd “gender equality is good for gdp” framing, which is fine as far as it goes, but it still treats care work like some side issue instead of the foundation of the whole labor market. if you actually want equality, stop acting like childcare, eldercare, parental leave, and wage suppression are just personal choices. they’re baked into the system.
and things like pay transparency or getting more women into leadership aren’t enough if the system still rewards overwork, instability, and unpaid labor at home. the real fix would mean socializing care, shortening the workweek, and not tying basic survival to having a job.
As a father, I really can't understand how every article about this topic talks about as if fathers and mothers are just interchangeable. We are not.
Mothers carry their child for ~9 months, they give birth to that child. The bond between a mother and her freshly born child is bigger than that of the father.
Of course fathers are very important too, and yes fathers should spend more Time with their children in general.
But it's Just crazy to ask mothers to get back to work as soon as possible. Many mothers want to Work part Time, because they want to spend more time with their children. The issue is, that care work is not paid or valued nearly the same as work for money.
Also if you're feeding your young child like you are supposed to, the father simply can't feed the child, because we don't give milk.
Nearly all articles about this topic care only for how to get women back to Work instead of what's best for society and for families.
If that would be the Focus, we would talk way more about how to integrate children into the work Life and less on how to grow GDP.
It's not that hard to understand. The Overton window has been successfully manipulated by butt hurt commies at universities (that no longer call themselves commies, they call themselves * studies usually and converted from economic class to a fractured mix of dichotomies based on whatever they think they can exploit at the time). This means truly bonkers nonsense permeates university and society. At the same time we neutered the antitrust law won out of the last billionaire baron build up in the name of the free market (while ignoring that the natural outcome of the free market is monopoly and we need antitrust to break up market power abusers). So in that context we have insane people and billionaires (who also may be insane) pushing their own interests an the average to above average segment of society that just wants to have their 2-3 kids and be comfortable get steamrolled.
On page 43, it shows very clearly, that women who do not have children have almost no earnings gap.
Society can "fix" this in two ways:
- introduce the same penalty for fathers, so that both earn less - which would IMHO lead to even less children
- lift up families/mothers and help women not experience this gap, by having full time high quality child Care, have laws that allow mothers to take their children to Work, etc etc.
Second one is much harder to accomplish, because it costs money and time and effort.
The first one is Just forcing fathers to stay at home while mothers go back to Work.
I don't think that's the right context to put this in. The correct context would be that families that have children face costs associated with having kids and the monetary portion of those costs seems to express themselves disproportionately as a decrease in the woman's earnings. Those costs probably represent a real decrease in the value of labor so "fixing it" might push us further from an optimal outcome, not closer.
Not sure I understand you correctly, but the study I linked shows that mother's earnings drop significantly after the First child. That has nothing to do with the significant monetary cost of children, which are added on top of that.
The alternative context that is probably correct is this is a cost of having kids because the kid makes the parent(s) less reliable/negatively impact a number of performance metrics and therefore make them less valuable. Families choose to make the wife the unreliable one and that is reflected in wages. "solving" that valuation pushes us further from an efficient market outcome making us all worse off. If the above is true, which I think it is, then the correct path is not compensating mothers for this cost, it's figuring out how to get families that can afford to bear said cost to have a lot more children.
To whoever downvoted this, I'd be interested to see your sources showing that women do in fact have the same job preferences as men. Because every study I've seen shows that their career preferences differ. Or do you genuinely not understand that if women on average have a preferences for fields that pay less, they'll earn less on average?
I hate to say it, but there's something more fundamental going on. Take a look at open source for example - Very low barrier to entry, no one is getting paid, and there's no interview. I ran a project that had over 100 contributors, and of the ~20 that I got to know personally, there were 2 women, only one was cis. Either young girls are still be pushed away from the "hustle" culture, or different genders tend to care about different things.
An even more obvious example might be Uber drivers. Anyone can take Uber as a side income, yet there's so few women who do. How can you explain this phenomenon by anything other than "the way girls are raised" and "biological differences"?
Not just employment rates, women are also taxed for a “pink” tax on products they need…all while it now requires a working household to afford to live.
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I'd love for all these gaps to be reduced, but the situation is less "patriarchy stealing money out of women's pockets and undermining equal pay for equal work" and more "men face strong gendered pressures to sacrifice well-being in exchange for more income." There is definitely social sexism being surfaced by the wage gap statistic, but it's against men, not women.
I would say against both genders.
Just because institutions are oversimplifying doesn't mean we have to
The only reason your formulation gets more play in media is that there's a strong social bias ascribing hypoagency to women (so whatever unfair pressures they face are due to patriarchal oppression) and hyperagency to men (so whatever unfair pressures they face are their own fault).
this is the usual oecd “gender equality is good for gdp” framing, which is fine as far as it goes, but it still treats care work like some side issue instead of the foundation of the whole labor market. if you actually want equality, stop acting like childcare, eldercare, parental leave, and wage suppression are just personal choices. they’re baked into the system.
and things like pay transparency or getting more women into leadership aren’t enough if the system still rewards overwork, instability, and unpaid labor at home. the real fix would mean socializing care, shortening the workweek, and not tying basic survival to having a job.
Mothers carry their child for ~9 months, they give birth to that child. The bond between a mother and her freshly born child is bigger than that of the father.
Of course fathers are very important too, and yes fathers should spend more Time with their children in general.
But it's Just crazy to ask mothers to get back to work as soon as possible. Many mothers want to Work part Time, because they want to spend more time with their children. The issue is, that care work is not paid or valued nearly the same as work for money.
Also if you're feeding your young child like you are supposed to, the father simply can't feed the child, because we don't give milk.
Nearly all articles about this topic care only for how to get women back to Work instead of what's best for society and for families.
If that would be the Focus, we would talk way more about how to integrate children into the work Life and less on how to grow GDP.
On page 43, it shows very clearly, that women who do not have children have almost no earnings gap.
Society can "fix" this in two ways: - introduce the same penalty for fathers, so that both earn less - which would IMHO lead to even less children - lift up families/mothers and help women not experience this gap, by having full time high quality child Care, have laws that allow mothers to take their children to Work, etc etc.
Second one is much harder to accomplish, because it costs money and time and effort.
The first one is Just forcing fathers to stay at home while mothers go back to Work.
I don’t share that argument, I just wanted to point it out.
An even more obvious example might be Uber drivers. Anyone can take Uber as a side income, yet there's so few women who do. How can you explain this phenomenon by anything other than "the way girls are raised" and "biological differences"?
Also, Uber driving is not side income, it is main income low pay job for overwhelming majority of the drivers.