Wage gap revisited

[differenceblog]

Rep. Carolyn Mahoney (2007) urges her readers to participate in "Equal Pay Day" on April 24th. Equal Pay Day is theoretically the day when what a woman earned since January 1st, 2006 equals what a man in a comparable job earned in calendar year 2006. The National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) website says that Equal Pay Day will be featured in

Comments

[rarkrarkrark]

It always fascinates me that when the gender gap comes up, people always start talking about whether it's fair because women take more leave etc...except that the gender pay gap is still significant even when all of those variables (choice of job, amount of leave taken, etc) are taken into account.

[differenceblog]

The problem, as I see it, is that employers are in a really bad position in terms of reducing pay for underperforming employees under current conditions. That goes for either men or women.

[rarkrarkrark]

I thought that's what firing/layoffs are for. Admittedly, I've primarily worked in an industry known for regular layoffs. I'm not sure how that might work out in industries that don't tend to have regular layoffs.

But the only way I can see this being an issue is if we're penalizing individual women for the behavior of some other women (i.e. paying women less across the board because some of them will drop out of the workforce to have children, or some of them have children and thus will take more leave) which is still a problem.

[differenceblog]

My concern is that you can't penalize women who actually do take leave, under the current system. If you can't penalize the individual, you penalize the group.

[rarkrarkrark]

Why do we penalize the group when it's women or people of color or young people or other minorities, but not when it's men or white people or adults? Why is this okay?

Personally, I think it would benefit society more if we encouraged men to also take paternity leave. I've been thinking we should encourage mom to stay home and primarily rear a child the first year of it's life, so as to encourage breastfeeding, and encourage dad to stay home the second year, so that mom can go back to her career and dad can get his year to bond and care for the kid, and then we've got near-verbal-near-potty trained kids going into daycare rather than infants going in at six weeks.

[ukelele]

There are many ways to provide extended parental care for infants without having each parent take a year off. I have a 3-month-old, and we will be able to cover care for her through at least 19 months via a combination of maternity leave, telecommuting, part-time work, and a teacher's schedule.

Which is to say, I think the goal of having more parents able to provide extended care is a fine one, but I don't think going about it by encouraging one particular set of logistics is a good strategy, because that is neither the only workable set, nor necessarily the best choice for a given family. (I could have quit my job and had a good chance of reentering the work force on reasonable terms, but the down sides outweighed the ups. And the husband would go batty if he didn't go to work for a year.)

(Yes, we're very lucky that we have so many options.)

[rarkrarkrark]

On the other hand, just saying "child rearing responsiblities (and the work absences caused thereof) should be more equally shared" isn't enough. There needs to be *some* sort of concrete plan to bring that to fruition. Admittedly, just dealing with infant and toddler care isn't enough but it's a place to start, both in an individual child's life and as a society. It might be more accurate to say that there needs to be many concrete plans brought to fruition, and this is just one. In any case, humans just don't handle abstract goals well

[ukelele]

I agree that the disparity in leave, and the culture promoting that, are annoying. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if some disparity was unavoidable; I was mostly unable to leave the couch for the first 1-2 weeks postpartum in a way that my husband was not, and I have ongoing breastfeeding logistics he doesn't.)