Interesting Links for 27-09-2016

[andrewducker]

Why the gender wage gap explodes when women hit their 30s (tags: gender money women pay business society children ) An open letter to Jeremy Corbyn on Europe. (tags: europe labour politics uk ) The tThings we aren't allowed to talk about (tags: freespeech society morality ) How to Know if You Are a Good Person (tags: morality psychology

Comments

[bart_calendar]

A factor in the wage gap that that article doesn't address is that one way people get into management positions is by applying for jobs at other companies and in that way moving from worker to manager.

But women in their 30s with a wedding ring on their finger aren't going to get hired by other companies, because hiring managers assume they'll have babies very soon and then be off on maternity leave.

A recruitment expert I used to work for tells women in that age range to use words like "partner" in their interviews to strongly imply they are lesbian even if they are not, because the interviewer can't ask if they are lesbian but if the assume they are they suddenly become less worried about them becoming pregnant.

Meanwhile married men in their 30s get hired by other companies very easily because managers assume that when they get their wives pregnant in a year or two they'll work very, very hard to keep their jobs so they can support their families. This is why the same recruiter (this was before gay marriage was legal) advised their gay male clients in their 30 to wear a wedding ring to interviews.

[naath]

Also, women intending to have babies want to qualify for maternity benefits, which you often get (to the fullest extent) only after working in a place for a number of years.

Personally I think the solution here is to get more men to do more of the work of child-rearing, including taking paternity leave, so that the expectation of "will have baby and be away for 6 months and then part time" falls equally on men and women.

[bart_calendar]

Yes. But good luck with that.

[andrewducker]

It's changing slowly. The UK brought in shared parental leave, and I know people (at my work) who have used it

(Plus Norway and Sweden have it mandated, of course.)

[bart_calendar]

Yeah but it will never fly in America and in the UK my feeling is May and Brexit and all that will force benefit cuts all around and paternity leave will be the first on the chopping block.

[naath]

There's a slow chipping away at it, it'll take ages. But I hope we'll get there. Me I'm childfree, and I don't want people assuming I'll be wanting years of maternity leave when I apply for a job...

Shared Parental Leave does not create more leave per baby, it only allows couples to assign the leave differently. I'm not convinced it costs much.

[bart_calendar]

The thing is you have like 2,000 plus years of the cultural assumption that women will take care of the children. Getting past a cultural assumption that is that ingrained takes a lot of time.

There was an article a year or so (I forget where) that studied why people are still freaked out about their teenage daughters having sex in an era where safe abortions and and contraceptives are often widely available.

The bottom line is that for so long young women were at such an extreme risk of dying during childbirth that keeping girls away from sex for as long as possible was a survival strategy and unconsciously that fear still exists and will take a long, long time to move out of the collective reptile brain. (This is also why "waiting for marriage" was so ingrained so that if the woman did die during childbirth there would be a young able bodied person left to take care of the kid.

[bart_calendar]

Interestingly that same study theorized that the cultural hostility to male homosexuality may have come from an AIDS like epidemic a couple thousand years ago and that while people didn't make the connection between anal sex and the epidemic they did notice that men who had sex with men were more likely to die and that entered the cultural unconsciousness. (And made me wonder if that's what that one bible story is really about.)

[brixtonbrood]

Exactly. Two years while you wait to qualify for full maternity benefits, one year trying to get and stay pregnant, nine months being pregnant, one year on maternity leave, one year after your return in order not to have to pay back enhanced maternity benefits. An ambitious man in his early thirties would have done at least two pay-motivated moves in that time, and that's only one child, and without the "golden" handcuffs of an unleavable part time job.