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]

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.

We currently encourage mothers to take 6-12 weeks off or to completely stop their career for months or years (with the inherent consquences) and encourage fathers to take very little time at all (generally less than two weeks at the birth of each child) away from their career for childcare. We're not starting from a value-neutral point here where everyone is encouraged to make their own choices with no real societal bias -- status quo says that mothers have to choose between prioritizing children or career and it's basically not socially acceptable for men to prioritize their children over their career, not even for a few months or a year. These are descriptions of the larger picture, there are certainly men who stay home to care for their children and lots of individual women find other ways to negotiate the kid-work conflict that include things like part time work, working from home, starting businesses, etc. but they are the exceptions and this is more about societal attitudes than any individuals' choices.

So the point is not to enforce that each parent stay home a year (the logistics of enforcing such a draconian law are beyond me anyway), the point is to change the societal view, so that it's considered normal and reasonable for each parent to stay home a year with their child. Not every family would do this, but on average over the whole of society fathers would stay home and care for children more often than they do now, hopefully close to equally with women (again, on average, not necessarily in any given household) but I'll take improvement. :) Hopefully that would mean that later on they'd also be more likely to handle the sick leave days that occur when a child is ill or needs to go to doctor's appointments. This would solve for Dan4th's issue (that I still think is a redherring) without simply making it easier to avoid hiring (or making it easier to fire) women with children over women without children or men with or without children. Or at least shift it out of the gender realm and stick it solidly in the breeder-vs-anti-breeder realm.

[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.)