Today I want to talk about the wage gap. No matter which way you look at it, or how debunked you consider it, part of the reason for its existence is that women have kids, and this affects their income pretty negatively. Id like to look at this a bit closer. (Note, the scope of this discussion is JUST the part of the wage gap due to having kids. There are a bunch of other contributions, including a fair chunk which researchers cant find any reason for, but systematic bias against women is a reasonable hypothesis) The issue isnt simple and monolithic. There are at least two sub-factors, and depending on how you look at it, possibly quite a few more. What Im interested in is your ideas on how these factors can be mitigated. The basic concept is womens career earnings are reduced because they lose work time and seniority as a result of scaling back work activities to have children Contributing factors to the actual reduction in work time: First, and irreducible, the medical necessity for taking leave in late pregnancy and post-partum. I actually consider this a minor factor, because its very much fixed in time and limited in scope (complications aside). Maternity/parental leave, being six months or a year of paid leave awarded to the parent of a newborn. You still get paid, but the time counts against you in the seniority game. Reduction in hours after returning to work as a result of taking care of the child, affecting both your direct income and your chances of promotion. These three factors all affect women disproportionately because women usually end up being the ones holding the bag for factors two and three. In addition, and a separate issue is the PERCEPTION that women will be the ones holding the bag, making businesses less likely to promote, independent of the quality and hours of work they actually put in. I submit there are two parts that a solution must address: 1) Making these factors land on women a smaller proportion of the time, ie getting men off their asses and contributing more to the raising of children. 2) The second bit is trickier. How do you make that burden land less lightly on whoever it lands on? From the business point of view, the cold reality is that it makes no sense for them to give pay rises and promotions to someone whose work output is reduced. Especially since they can argue they the reduction is in response to a personal choice (ie, the choice to have a child). However, children are, yknow, kinda necessary to the whole perpetuation of the species thing, so penalising having them is kind of a jerk move. The first bit involves increasing the POSSIBILITY of doing so (Allowing fathers to take part of the parental leave, extending flexible hours programs to men, etc). Also increasing the ACCEPTABILITY of it, by reducing the social forces against it - ie, the shaming of career-women as bad mothers, and of stay-at-home dads as less than masculine, and of making dads who take their kids out to playgrounds feel less like everyone is looking at them as potential freaks and paedophiles. The other bit is increasing the ATTRACTIVENESS of it. If, in this unbalanced world, the man is already earning more than the woman (see Other factors contributing to wage gap, including probable bias against women), how do you get more men to do it? I suspect the social factors are actually the big one here. For the second bit... I got nothing. You cant just expect business to pay someone the same for less work. On the flip side, personal choice or not, having children is a significant part of the human experience, and penalising people for doing it seems wrong. Government-managed salary-matching just seems like the wrong way to go about it, but ... Im interested in your thoughts on possible solutions.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 03:00:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015