It's not that children are career killers, but rather taking significant amounts of time off is.
It's also unclear if harming your career is even a bad thing to begin, considering the options given (e.g. Don't have children, have children but neglect them, have children and take care of them, but have lower income when the caregiver returns to the work force). Perhaps spending proper time with children, even if it is at the cost of potential income, is worth it.
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I wonder if mandating that caregivers be able to work while raising their child somehow (perhaps a combination of remote work, daycare and in laws) would be enough to negate the negative effect while preserving the benefits.
There does seem to be a element of: "people who value their careers more than children end up making more money" here, which seems pretty obvious when you think about it.
From a social and corporate perspective we have a choice though: should be allow incentive systems that reward people who value their careers over their children to continue? Or should we change our incentive systems so that people who value children over career earn equal wages or even more?
Which group of people is actually more valuable to society?
Teachers, full-time mothers and fathers, and generally anyone who's in charge of raising the next generation properly, are all underpaid and arguably undervalued.
However, when you legislate away any reward for risk-takers, innovators, and all those folks you mentioned who simply work harder at the expense of something else in their lives...then you end up in a society where nobody tries, nothing happens, and everyone's pretty well subsumed into an existential crisis -like existence. What's the point of trying if it's guaranteed not to make a difference?
"They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work." - Soviet-era saying
In my experience, it's not the time away from work that is the issue. It's that they ask for less and more flexible hours. They simply put their career on hold until the child becomes a teenager.
Generally speaking, equality of choice between the sexes is unequivocally a good thing...but we're going to spend years untangling the muddy notion in many people's minds that equality of outcome is expected when there is perfect equality of opportunity.
What actually happens in the Scandinavian countries, where both sexes have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is that that gender effects are actually maximized. Men tend to choose STEM careers and competitive paths because they are free to choose, and women tend to choose to become doctors, nurses, and part-time workers of any kind, because they are also free to choose.
Another way to say this is, there will always be Gender Inequality because the (biological) genders are not equal to each other. A woman does not equal a man, and she shouldn't. But try saying that at a dinner party...
I won't disagree with you, except maybe to point out I don't think it's necessarily just biological, but psychological/physiological gender as well that causes the difference. There is some evidence, though last I checked inconclusive, that gender identity has a fairly strong relation with certain brain structures. I don't think it would be surprising that these differences also cause people to gravitate towards certain interests.
Not to say it's always 100% going to make them go towards those interests, before anybody accuses me of making that claim, but it's fairly apparent as far as I'm concerned that even given equal opportunity, people of different genders aren't attracted to the same fields in equal proportion. Gender in multiple senses determines how the brain develops, so it would be surprising if these fields were demographically equal.
I think making an equal opportunity approach is definitely the right thing, but equal outcome I think ends up holding people back and forcing others into fields they won't enjoy. It's working not on the idea of cultivating individual people's passions but forcing them to fit some ideal.
In any case, though, I don't think any of this means that women should be disproportionately affected by having a child. I'm willing to buy the argument that it's societally caused due to expectations and men taking less time off than women for their children.
Societal expectations do play a big role, and it's an open questioned as to whether that's a Natural Rule or whether we just haven't tried other cultural configurations enough yet. And you're right, psychological gender probably does play a large role in the effects. It's helpful to note here that biological gender, psychological gender, and gender expression do not vary independently though.
I'm not convinced that there still is that full sense of "freedom to choose" that you suggest. In your argument that genders naturally tend towards certain careers, how certain are you that you've eliminated systemic bias that may still cause inequalities in occupation and opportunity?
For example, I suspect a similar argument could have been made a few decades ago about why women tend to be nurses not doctors, or why women tend to teach only in elementary but not university settings.
For your argument to have full merit, you'd have to run an experiment in a truly unbiased, gender equal culture. One does not exist. Therefore, your argument rests largely on a hypothesis that, "see, this is the way things are and that says something about the innate nature of gender."
To really challenge yourself, take your comment and swap out gender for race. Would you still feel as comfortable to suggest that, "... where all races have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is that that racial effects are actually maximized. Whites tend to choose professional careers and competitive paths because they are free to choose, and Mexicans tend to choose to become gardeners and low wage workers of any kind, because they are also free to choose."
If that feels uncomfortable, then perhaps your premise needs reevaluated.
What is it about Scandinavia that you believe does not give equal opportunity and choice?
Norway’s current and many of the previous prime ministers were female, there is generous social support for working parents, most women get a college degree, etc Women are still free to choose the kind of job they desire, and they do so.
It is incredibly undesirable to force women and men to choose different jobs because of an ideological desire for equal outcome. There is no way to achieve that without tyranny and without hurting equal opportunity.
With regards to high value jobs that women have chosen due to equal opportunity you have to look no further than doctors. It used to be a mainly male occupation in the western world, and it’s now dominated by women.
For your argument to have full merit, you'd have to run an experiment in a truly unbiased, gender equal culture. One does not exist. Therefore, your argument rests largely on a hypothesis that, "see, this is the way things are and that says something about the innate nature of gender."
But for the opposite position to make sense, the more egalitarian a society becomes, the fewer gender differences would show. Studies show that the opposite is the case.
> I'm not convinced that there still is that full sense of "freedom to choose" that you suggest.
I don't, and I wouldn't! The Scandinavian countries are much further along on this, but probably still don't constitute a perfectly level playing field where being a man or a woman doesn't confer advantages in certain disciplines. I'm just not holding my breath for perfect equality of outcome once the playing fields are fully level; in fact, the science points to it being pretty likely that the only way you'll get men and women to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way in exactly the same proportions is by tyrannical force, which I don't think helps either sex.
> Would you still feel as comfortable to suggest that, "... where all races have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is that that racial effects are actually maximized.
Sure! This one is trickier as I can't point to any society that's very far along the path of actually leveling the playing fields between races. Certainly in the U.S. the stakes are stacked abhorrently high against blacks in particular (the drug war in particular is disgustingly deliberate legislative racism, in my opinion). Many Mexicans in the U.S. are not free to choose. However, we've already run a lot of well-designed experiments that show that race is not at all correlated with intelligence, drive, job choice independent of other factors (family, education, and level of poverty, for example). Gender, on the other hand, has been shown to correlate not at all with things like intelligence, and correlate fairly tightly with things that affect your work and your choice of occupation, such as: disagreeableness (one of the strongest predictors of ending up in a leadership position), empathy, interest in people vs. interest in ideas, etc.
All categories should be open for discussion, and additional good science will gradually wither the fields/distinctions that have no predictive ability or bearing on reality (phrenology, eugenics, antiquated theories of physics, etc.).
This last statement is subjective opinion, but my assessment of the science (plus my real-world experience and fallible human schemas) tell me that we won't find perfect equality between genders once we have perfect equity between genders. That equity is absolutely worth striving for but not at the expense of good science, healthy debate, and dialogue itself, things that are at times threatened in these emotionally-charged discussions.
> Men tend to choose STEM careers and competitive paths because they are free to choose, and women tend to choose to become doctors, nurses, and part-time workers of any kind, because they are also free to choose.
Citation needed. In 1997, only 1 out of 3 doctors were women in Norway. [1] Did it significally change during the past 20 years? Also, since 1990 the ratio of part-time workers lowered among women and went higher among men, so it’s false to claim that women choose more part-time than men now that they have equal "choice". [2]
> Another way to say this is, there will always be Gender Inequality because the (biological) genders are not equal to each other. A woman does not equal a man, and she shouldn't
Women "choosing" to become doctors and nurses while men choose STEM careers has nothing to do with biology. Women are still underrepresented in leadership positions, and healthcare is no exception. [3] [4]
Thanks! Unfortunately that’s not exactly the same because the 1997 study talked about doctors while this link talks about students. It does however show a significant increase because in the 1990s the ratio of women in healthcare students was 50%. [1]
>we're going to spend years untangling the muddy notion in many people's minds that equality of outcome is expected when there is perfect equality of opportunity.
Careful with your wording here. I'm assuming you meant 'is not the same as'; however 'does not equal' could easily be interpreted as 'not the equal of', which has an entirely different meaning than you intended.
A man is not the same as a woman, and a man is not the equal of a woman. My only argument is that the linguistic categories of "Woman" and "Man" are useful (in everyday communication, in science and biology, etc.) and I will be slow to give them up. To pretend that no categories exist is to invite chaos, as categories are useful.
...metaphysically speaking, all categories distort, but good luck navigating the world with your eyes that wide open.
I think this is one of those things that "sounds true" but if we analyzed more deeply and for longer time-spans, we'd find out it's at best half-true, while the other half involves many other factors.
Not disagreeing that gender doesn't play a role in making such choices, but I think society, education, and culture play at least as big of a role. People want to be "seen" a certain way among their peers. A man doesn't want to be "seen" as a nurse, for instance...
This is not because of gender. It's a cultural/societal issue that a nurse job is not an "appropriate" job for a man. So the man "chooses" whatever is "more appropriate" for a man in his society to obtain. But was it really a true choice?
There’s to the best of my knowledge no study that shows that the biological gender matters for the choice of profession. The issue that often muddies things is that girls have been (and still are) brought up with the notion that some professions are not suited to them. This is especially pronounced in IT, where for a long time at the start of the profession, women had the majority of employed people and things started to switch over when home computers were marketed as a boys toy.
There are strong indicators that the biological gender contributes much less than what the society expects in terms of gender roles.
When there's equality of opportunity, then women tend to outscore men on average in Danish high schools (and this trend is true all over the world, given any equal-opportunity situation).
Since women are scoring higher, they have more choice in what fields they want to study since the grade average tend to determine this. In contrast, men have to pick the subjects they can "get" which tend to be the STEM fields. All the typical "female subjects" are the ones which usually requires unethically high grades in Denmark.
Now, to convince a young woman to study STEM not only requires you to convince her that it is an awesome field (which it is, and we should definitely encourage that!). It also requires you to argue why she shouldn't put all her high-grade-work into effect by gravitating to a subject which is women-dominated and the competition is fierce. And that she can live out her dream: she has worked hard and can be anything she wants!
Whereas the young boy who were lazy in school (because he had a hobby of playing a lot of computer games) has to pick one of the "boring fields" where they accept anyone because there are always space for more people.
It is a two-sided situation and as much as you want to focus on the women not picking a given area, you have to focus on why men are so friggin' outright obsessed with the same thing.
There is one type of study which determines part of this: namely that men are interested in things and women in people (on average: The split is something like 33/66 and there is a considerable overlap - but it is one of the strongest gender effects!).
Of course, reality is a mix between biology and environment. And thus also location: the strong welfare state of Denmark could easily play a role.
This is an excellent point. Some time in the past, society drew a line in the sand and said "everything a man does is better than anything a woman does". As a result, women are being pressured into fields that are male dominated _because_ they are are male dominated. Without pausing to think if that truly makes those jobs inherently better.
I think realizing this is a false paradigm will be the next phase in the evolution of this social issue, I just have no idea how it will happen or how it will play out.
And, to prove this point, the gender ratio is much better in STEM fields other than computing and engineering. Biology, for example, has more women graduating nowadays than men, despite the fact that a lot of biology work is actually CS (and more intellectually challenging than most software engineering jobs at tech companies, which to a large extent involve creating CRUD apps).
From working in that field, I can tell you this is not true. There are lots of women in biology but in computational biology its more like one in three (and often much less). In the algorithmic and tool developmental parts even more so. It may be more equal than in pure CS but still the imbalance is huge.
So a hiring rate of 40% would indicate a level playing field in hiring. 33/40 is around 82%. The doubling down policies of "The (metaphoric) beatings will continue until equality is achieved," would seem to be misplaced at the workplace level. If there is systemic bias, it would seem to exist at the educational level.
Regardless, the point of mentioning how much CS is in biology is to dispel the silly idea that biology is somehow less intellectually demanding than CS as practiced in industry.
This is a great argument against the idea that women don't go into those fields because they're somehow incapable of this kind of technical work, but I don't think it's so useful against the claim that they don't because they're just not interested in those fields.
I agree. It seems to be an oversimplification to say that, given the choice, women choose non-STEM jobs. There is centuries of inertia behind the expectations of males and females with regards to career choices. Over time, it is likely that these gender-based expectations will erode and only then will we see if there is true gender-dependent preference when it comes to career choices.
And that still confounds the issue of biological gender and what society constructs to be gender. I doubt that reliable research into this can currently be made since obviously any person that has been brought up in today’s society has been brought up with this societies notion of gender roles. And boy, have we been wrong about what we considered what women could or could not do in the past.
Can you point me to research into how XX is different from social gender? I think I'm not understanding this point. How can society construct the idea of a gender, if not from biology? How else was the social concept of gender created ?
> we're going to spend years untangling the muddy notion in many people's minds that equality of outcome is expected when there is perfect equality of opportunity.
The issue is how you can really measure 'equality of opportunity'. There are so many ways hidden structures can make it seem like there is equality of opportunity without it being there in practice. With 'equality of outcome' it is at least easy to track how we are doing, though it could be leading us away from the goal.
In the James Damore memo, he actually proposed reaching equality of outcome by e.g. changing the jobs until they appealed equally to men and women on average. Perhaps that's one way to cut this knot.
In the James Damore memo, he actually proposed reaching equality of outcome by e.g. changing the jobs until they appealed equally to men and women on average. Perhaps that's one way to cut this knot.
Weirdly enough, a Google and YouTube exec have made basically the same proposal:
Assuming freedom to choose, I would say policies should still try to steer choice to address social needs. For example, let's say there is an imbalance in F:M physician ratio such that one class of people are being underserved. Or the market isn't producing enough physicists, for example, then step in and add artificial incentives to attract a different population.
Note, I'm not insisting on equality of outcomes, because to me that's really not the general objective, given a population can have individuals predisposed for different things. For example, in farming communities we don't expect to see the same interest in urban planning as in cities.
I could accept this argument, but I have not seen compelling evidence that there is equality of opportunity.
Do women with children really have the same opportunity to prioritize their career that men with children do? I doubt it.
Women face much more social ostracism than men do if they choose to spend prioritize time at work over time with their children. Men also face much more social ostracism if they choose take on the traditionally female role of staying home with their children as opposed to engaging in paying work.
Even if women do decide to prioritize work over child-rearing in spite of the social pressure, employers will often assume that their attention will be divided by child-rearing.
I think you will find that the people behind these things are not for equality of choice but for equality of outcome.
In particular they would say that women are not equal to men unless they hold equal power in society. They want women to be in >=50% of corporate executive roles and in >-50% of government positions.
The only problem is that you don't see this outside western countries. Countries with much stricter gender roles have much higher enrolment in STEM for instance. It's obviously not biological, it's cultural.
Equality. If the usual parlance were "Gender Inequity" then we'd be talking about that instead. But that's used so little that googling "Gender Inequity" actually redirects automatically to "Gender Inequality", so the former can't be very much in use.
I can't believe that in 2018, people are still upvoting posts with lines like "A woman does not equal a man, and she shouldn't.". What the fuck.
Do you have any idea how much social/cultural conditioning influences men and women's "biological" decisions to go into whatever field? I am immensely grateful to my parents, who told me that I could do anything I wanted and put me in math and science camps as a kid. I am not surprised that little girls (and boys) who are not given that kind of support don't go into "competitive" "STEM" careers.
I can't believe that in 2018, people are still upvoting posts with lines like "A woman does not equal a man, and she shouldn't.". What the fuck.
A woman should be considered equal to a man. All sentients should be considered equal, in a political and moral framework. However, this should not be conflated with women and men being exactly equal in every conceivable way. If there was ever false equivalence then it is exactly this kind of sloppy thinking.
Do you have any idea how much social/cultural conditioning influences men and women's "biological" decisions to go into whatever field?
Actually, the extent to which biological factors vs. societal factors are at play is something we're still working out.
"Countries with Higher Levels of Gender Equality Show Larger National Sex Differences in Mathematics Anxiety and Relatively Lower Parental Mathematics Valuation for Girls"
Google & YouTube execs claim that Google's hiring rate for women is the same as the Computer Science graduation rate for women, then go on to espouse James Damore's suggestions:
People are angry at your tone, but you’re correct. The evidence shows that disproportionate gender representation in STEM is the product of social conditioning, not anything innate:
Thank you. I'm tired of having these discussions and would love to live in a world where men and women are just assumed equal and we don't have to discuss these things. We no longer discuss if people of different color are equal right? It's amazing what shit women have to deal with.
Most people in the USA don't realize this but women only became full citizens only as recently as the 1970s when they were finally allowed to be on juries. That's less then 50 years ago.
No one can have it all. Some things in life are just mutually exclusive. What about the men who work full time and miss out on spending time at home? Do they have it all? Of course not. Every hour spent at work is an hour not spent with family/friends.
I don't know why we always seem to treat earning less as being this universally terrible, bad thing whenever gender comes up. There is a lot more to life and jobs than just earning money. Work life balance, stress, danger, physical wear.
The general expectation for men seems to be: "Go get a good paying job". Obviously every family is different but where family economics allow I think woman generally have far more choice in terms of whether they stay home, work part time, work less stressful/demanding jobs than men do in today's society.
I've seen a lot of relationships/marriages where the man works a shitty backbreaking/dangerous and/or stressful jobs that pay well while the woman works part time, not at all or a much less stressful job that pays less. I'm sure the inverse does happen as well but from what I've seen it is much rarer.
These types of articles always frame earning less as being a negative for woman. In some cases I'm sure that is true. But what % of the gap is woman choosing to earn less because they have that choice?
Equal, mandatory parental leave would go a long way toward leveling the playing field.
Western cultures are still much more understanding of men being absent from their children's early lives than mothers. These sorts of cultural expectations and allowances are often taken for granted by the people who argue that "inequality of outcome != inequality of opportunity."
If women are to take a career hit for raising their kids, why shouldn't the men who fathered them take that hit as well?
> Equal, mandatory parental leave would go a long way toward leveling the playing field.
I actually thought Sweden already had this, but apparently not. At least not perfectly so, the parents have 480 days in total, with 90 earmarked to each: https://sweden.se/quickfact/parental-leave/
Just trying to put this in the most bare terms, there's obviously plenty of edge cases and caveats around gender, but:
a) Society places a greater burden on women than men for child-rearing.
b) Women who take leave lose out on career opportunities.
c) Men receive greater opportunities to advance their careers relative to women, since they are expected to take less leave.
Even in the presence of equal parental leave, men (or just as often, their employers) can lean on the social expectation to return to work sooner, disadvantaging women.
This becomes a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem since the culture and structure are mutually reinforcing. From a policy perspective, structure is easier to change than culture. In my view, that makes it a logical first step.
Some parents choose to work 75% after having kids its a legal right in Scandinavian countries. From my own experience as a parent its hard to balance being good at home and work.
Simply put your customer will not come and thank you in 20-30 years from now but your children might/will.
It’s hard to have this debate in terms dollars exclusively.
People who are high powered execs and other top tier professionals sacrifice life for profession. I’ve yet to meet a prominent executive, lawyer or physician whose home life isn’t a bit of a shitshow.
If you want to look at equality and making the lives of mothers better, you need to look at everyone. If my wife and I were able to work 25 hours weeks in the same pay envelope, we would have made very different decisions about how to raise our child.
I don't think it's about equality of pay. If I asked for the same terms as my wife, I would earn significantly less, and I doubt I would have much responsibility beyond a "normal" software developer, i.e. I work on what I'm told to.
The point of having to ~"force fathers to take time off" rings true to me, I'd even go as far as forcing both parents to take some minimum time (and maybe of equal length) off: It would relieve all parents of the pressure to justify why they "put family before career".
That's just the time off, though: once both parents are back at work, no law can force them both to devote equal mental & temporal resources to childraising. I suspect very strongly that even with forced equality of parental leave, we would see mothers devoting more attention to their children than do father.
Wow. You know there are sci-fi books written about a world were some people are not allowed to be better than others? If you have some advantage, you have to do extra so it's nullified.
Seriously, who are you to tell me how to run my family life? Your arrogance is astonishing. I suppose if I don't push my kids just the right amount you're going to claim you know enough about how all children will turn out to revoke my parental rights?
I had children when I was in college. I suppose I should have been forced to fail one of my semesters, or do only good and proper people who do things the right way count?
My wife wanted to stay home for many years. I suppose I should tell her she was full of shit for not wanting to make more money?
You think it would relieve pressure to justify putting family before career? Again, wow. These are ADULTS. If they are so fucking wrapped up in peer pressure they can't decide if they should take care of their own babies they don't deserve their own children. Seriously, at what point are people responsible for themselves? Where does the nanny state end? Now we have to force men to not work because some people might get get their feelings hurt? Fuck them.
> Seriously, who are you to tell me how to run my family life? Your arrogance is astonishing.
The point of worker rights is to provide equal footing for everyone. Your boss would certainly like it if there were no mandatory holidays/PTO...
> Now we have to force men to not work because some people might get get their feelings hurt? Fuck them.
No, but in order to provide equal chances for the kids' development in early life. This is valuable for society as early child-parent bonding issues will lead to issues later on in life.
In addition, by forcing employers to provide PTO for fresh parents, they cannot (legally) force those who cannot object to work. Yes, it might be 6 months or whatever time out for a couple managers but an immediate benefit to millions of poor parents.
I assume you're from the US? Well, try to come over to Europe and work here, with such things as workers' rights, minimum PTO per year, proper health insurance systems... sounds socialist as hell but guess what? Our people are happier and more productive.
> The US ranks 14th in happiness ahead of the majority of European countries.
The top 6 in said index is occupied by European countries - and all 8 European countries ranked before the US in said index are routinely bashed in the US as being prime examples of "socialist" hellholes.
> The US ranks 6th in productivity, again ahead of the vast majority of European countries and far ahead of the European average[1]
Well, it's not that hard to beat European countries if you're working 300 hours per year more than them... and the core question is: how much of the US "productivity" originates from the scamming going on at Wall Street, i.e. it has no meaningful human labor associated by which this "profit" was created?
>The top 6 in said index is occupied by European countries - and all 8 European countries ranked before the US in said index are routinely bashed in the US as being prime examples of "socialist" hellholes.
The comment didn't say "these select 8 European countries that are a mere fraction of the overall European population", it said "Europe" which last I checked was a continent encompassing dozens of countries with hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of which are below the US in the ranking. If the comment was meant to be restricted to a very small subset of Europe then it should have reflected that in the wording. To which I can easily select a small subset of US states that would still outrank those countries. Without getting overly specific, do you really think you are happier than the average person living in Hawaii? Really? Really?? As far as your second "point", I didn't say anything about socialist hellholes so you're straw manning me. Also FWIW, none of those countries are actually socialist so if you're asserting that, you're again, flat wrong.
>Well, it's not that hard to beat European countries if you're working 300 hours per year more than them...
So the statement that "Europe" was more productive than the US was wrong. Yes, that is what I said. As an aside to your other point, according to my research, Germans work the least of anybody and rank lower in happiness than the US. Not to mention the western European countries like Portugal and Ireland that actually work more hours than Americans. I don't see you mentioning that but then that would be inconvenient to your narrative..
> and the core question is: how much of the US "productivity" originates from the scamming going on at Wall Street, i.e. it has no meaningful human labor associated by which this "profit" was created?
Those weren't questions I responded to but erroneous statements. But on with the goalpost moving. I love this one. Within a few seconds you say we work 300 hours a year more thus the obviously superior productivity (which is a bit disingenuous since we are more productive per hour and many countries outwork us in total hours) then you follow up with it's all a scam cuz "Wall Street". So which is it and does it hurt talking out of both sides of your mouth like that? Basically you don't want to be enlightened and correct your errors. You want to argue and bully your way into being right no matter what. Of course, just between you and me, what you really want to do is bash the US and feel oh so superior which is just sad and pathetic. Sorry it doesn't work that way. Europe is overall less productive and less happy than the US. Period. The denial of this fact is precisely what I responded to. Choose a small subset of the continent and I can play that game too. Funny how you like to make your assertions as if they are fact when it's just a bunch of received internet wisdom that doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Just for fun, in the CIA world fact book, I looked up Liechtenstein which has the highest productivity per capita in not just Europe but the entire world and the District of Columbia which has the highest per capita productivity in America. Both are about the same size at 60 something square miles. I'll leave it to your imagination which has the higher stats. You guys think you are so much better than everybody else. You're wrong.
I apologize for not including links this time but why bother when you'll just try to move your intellectually dishonest goalposts again necessitating further refutation. Not that I'll bother. You were wrong then and you're wrong now. You base your new assertions on mutually exclusive statements that you wrote within 30 seconds of each other. You are laughable and not worth arguing with so go ahead and entertain other readers with your whining about how much """better""" you wish you were. I'm ignoring you since I have more "productive" things to do. Ha!
edit: I just happened to glance at the tag line in your profile and realized I've been sucked in to wasting 20 minutes debating an angsty teen.
I was talking about making it accepted that people, no matter the gender, take time off after birth of a child.
If one parent decides to stay at home for years, we are not talking about parental leave anymore. And of course everybody should be free to make that decision. But nobody should be forced to decide one or the other way because of gender-specific roles or a lack of affordable daycare.
And finally I believe that, by forcing everyone to think about how to accommodate parents in work life, we, as a society, will find solutions that can benefit all.
I guess this situation will only permanently change if all fathers are completely and truly happy and comfortable with doing exactly the same amount of house work and childcare work as the mothers of their children. As long as the idea of the men as the bigger breadwinner still lingers around for the average parent and boss (consciously or unconsciously, on an individual basis and culturally), it'll impact the decisions being made which then in turn lead to children being bigger career killers for working moms than for fathers.
If that assumption is correct, then the actual question would be: Will this 50/50 (on average) state with truly happy and comfortable fathers ever happen, and will parents (on average) be happier or not? (this sounds like me questioning that they might be, but it's meant as an actual question).
Personally, I am actually quite happy that I don't have specific plans to become a father right now, because truth be told, I wouldn't want to give up so much of my work/passion for taking care of a child (although maybe me saying this is more the consequence of lacking the desire to become a father, meaning that I'd speak differently if that desire would exist).
From experience, primary caretakers of children tend to favor less weekly work hours, flexible schedules, ect. All things that doesn't exactly lend itself to a "high-powered career". So the question I'd like answered is not if women should have the same earning as their male part, they should have the same oppotunity. But if they want it at the cost of the flexibility and hours they ask for?
Women on average have less flexible hours and female dominated occupations have less flex time then male dominated occupations.
Otherwise said, nurse, psychologist or teacher must be there at time. Same with service workers, call center and pretty much anyone who works with people in person. Female dominated professions that could work from home or could be flexible are not. Programmers get to choose when they come to work and see it as their God given right.
> Programmers get to choose when they come to work and see it as their God given right.
Why frame it in this inflammatory way? The fact that programmers can choose their work hours is a privilege and a job-perk. What is the point of guilt-tripping them about it? Surely an ideal world is where more people can work when they please rather than one where everyone is forced to clock fixed hours just because there exist some workers who don't have that freedom?
That is not guilt tripping. I am programmer. The flexible work is seen as a right and company that does not provide it as overly controlling and bad place for work - that is quite universal in both real life and online. And it is not just that, occasional work from home is also seen as basic perk you totally expect. And my colleges are using that right - and that is not blame, just a statement of fact.
The fact is, majority of female dominated jobs are on the opposite of the spectrum. And those jobs are even thrown into every damm discussion about men/women differences while also the very same discussion talk about women having more flexibility. Because women are supposed to be primary care giver and primary care giver is supposed to want flexibility.
It just so happen that wanting something does not necessary gives you that.
My point is not that programmer should feel guilty. My point is that arguing that women=flexible hours is wrong, faulty argument based on some romantic idealized dream. The argument completely ignores the kind of work women do.
Do you have any experience with this? I have a father in law that has been together with a nurse manager for many years now, and she is the reason for the argument. Mothers of young children ask for less hours, less crappy shifts, and ability to take days off work with sick children. And they get it.
But regardless, those kind jobs are unionized here and the pay is not something you negotiate. Not for women, or men. In other words, they don't represent the difference in wages, because they are fixed and they do, by design, not differ just because you become a parent.
I can work full hours and more precisely because flexible hours help a lot to deal with kids needed something. If I had fixed shifts, either I or husband would have to have less hours or someone would have to help us occasionally.
Same with sick kids. When you can work from home or remote (my company does not allow much of it, husbands does a lot of it and people use it) then you do not need free time because kids are sick. You work from home or in evening.
There is no trade off between pay, perks and flexible time. People who get high salaries get perks too. Same with flexible time.
If flexibility was motivation when choosing jobs, women and men would choose completely different jobs to begin with.
HP had some interesting policies which were of great benefit to women. I've been told that HP lets people share a position. Two people can work half time with full benefits, then they are evaluated and promoted as one unit. Many women who were raising families opted to do this.
Tactically, this seems great, but the question that comes to my mind is, if such a practice were widely adopted throughout the industrialized world, would this have the effect of halving the power of women in internal workplace politics? The follow on question that comes to mind: What, exactly, is the effect on the power of women in internal workplace politics, of women taking time off work to raise children?
If you choose to have children then your career is raising children. You have to choose to prioritize one or the other, the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane. There isn't any injustice going on here. Juggling an intense career path with raising children is a bad idea. Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development.
The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.
As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men.
Obviously with unlimited resources this doesn’t have to be the case, but it will always be the average case.
This result isn’t surprising, nor does it seem something that society should be overly concerned with fixing. Choices have all sorts of positive and negative impacts, usually foreseeable ones at that. Work less to raise a family and someone in that household will earn less outside the household.
Economically both parents are still probably producing the same value, arguably the woman is producing significantly more economical value, just the economists aren’t accounting for and valuing properly the work being done inside the household so the graph is scewed.
You create a stacked line chart which tries to account for the net value of the cost-reducing housework performed by men and women in addition to the outside income producing activities, and I would bet the curve shows women driving significantly increased economic value after having children.
It’s the premise that the only metric we should be looking at is outside income which is completely flawed.
This is so intellectually dishonest it borders on insult.
> the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane
Here you talk about the "career of raising children"
> only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed
And then you proceed to justify it with an activity that on average probably lasts for about a year and can in large part be made compatible with a professional life. The average SV hacker brags about taking longer sabbaticals than this.
Should be a fairly easy social experiment to do. Take a good sample size of families (>20000) and provide compulsory paid leave (and counselors that checks that no extra work is being spent at home or the government pay is taken away) so that both parents are away from home at exactly equal amount from inception until the kid moves out.
After 20 years, compare the control with those families that successful follows the trial (and for fun, throw in people who take sabbaticals as a third group) and see the results. Have poll questions about the size of social support networks, social status, income, carer, stress, perception of self worth, and so on. Last make a follow up in 50 years for life span and final carer, pensions and social support networks.
I have some predictions for all of those, backed by the research I have seen so far, but it would make for a very interesting read if such study would be made.
That first quote was someone else's comment, but I don't see anything wrong with the premise. Trajectory and velocity are absolutely properties of career advancement. There's also the question of whether women with children at home are working the same number of hours at the office as men, even after they return to work. Let's throw in the average willingness of a male partner to limit their own career by prioritizing taking care of children over needs of their employer as a factor as well.
Children take an enormous amount of time and money to raise. And the amount of time and money we spend raising our children has increased significantly, as the age of maturity continues to increase (anecdotally this has gone well past 18 years old now, it seems children on average are being taken care of by their parents well into their 20s now). Someone in the family needs to be able to get home to make dinner every night. If you mostly can't travel for your company, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you can't stay past 5 oclock without it being an issue that needs to be planned for, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you get called away from an important meeting because your child is sent home from school with a cold... It's reasonable for employers to pay more to employees which can offer a higher level of service and flexibility and accommodation for work schedule and travel requirements.
One (or more) parental figures in the household need to elect to be on-call, and whoever makes that choice is going to see less outside income because of it. Equality doesn't mean that men and women need to make the same choices, just that a man and woman who do make the same choice should see the same outcome. What the statistics are showing us is merely that men and women, on average, tend to have different preferences and make different choices.
As long as only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed, it turns out that choosing to make babies will (on average) be disproportionately more work for women than men.
Weirdly, there's still a household chore gap between men and women. My position on this is pretty well inline with John Green's: The pay gap is down to a single digit difference, but there is a difference in the unrenumerated work which goes into keeping society going in the context of raising children. (We might disagree on what to do about it.)
Dont know why you're being downvoted. Chore gap is a big issue in hetero-couple households (the majority), and chores and household caring/tending work _is_ a big support for capitalism which capitalism refuses to acknowledge (by refusing to remunerate it). But, capitalism still benefits from it. Guess who usually does this work? Clue: not men.
Most probably downvoted by men who refuse to acknowledge the value provided by unremunerated work to society.
> unrenumerated - you mean unremunerated, right?
(I'm what traditional/conservative society would call a "man")
Is the fact that my comment was so downvoted as to get flagged an example of men -majority of hn readers- refusing to acknowledge unremunerated work, and the fact that men are privileged from having to perform this unremunerated household work in our society?
That's to be expected if most mothers become full-time caregivers to the children, right?
If caregiving were split father-primary or mother-primary 50/50 among families, I'd expect we'd see the pay gap drop.
(Unfortunately, I suspect that because of gains from specialization, doing something more elaborate like both parents juggling career and childcare equally leads to net-worse outcomes in terms of both care given and revenue for household).
The most amazing thing to me was that the male income didn't budge after childbirth. Even ignoring taking time off work, my free time in the evenings and mornings, when I would often do some of my best focused work, has almost entirely vanished since having kids.
This is correlated with a Harvard study of Booth MBA graduates:
>The presence of children is associated with less accumulated job experience, more career interruptions, shorter work hours, and substantial earnings declines for female but not for male MBAs.
The Netherlands is pretty close to that from what I've seen. Most children some of the children here go to day-care from 4 months old on so mothers can get back to work.
Instinctually, I agree with you on the effects of years of daycare on development...could you point me to one or two of your sources? I hate to be that guy on HN, just looking for some confirmation for my bias here :)
You'll also see that it's been cited by 611 papers. It's usually a bit odd to reference a 27 year old paper as a source because additional research since then has likely given more insight into the problem.
Pulling one out at semi-random, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cch.12238/full argues "more hours in non-parental child care were associated with better language abilities. However, more hours in care in the first year of life were associated with less language proficiency at ages 1 to 1.5. At later ages, this effect disappeared and language proficiency increased. Furthermore, children who spent more hours in centre-based care had better language scores than children in home-based care."
> O’Brien Caughy et al. (1994) report that entrance into daycare before the first birthday was associated with higher test scores (Peabody Individual Achievement Tests) for lower income children and lower test scores for higher income children. For the U.K. Gregg et al. (2005) find that children who receive informal care from friends and relatives in the first 18 months of life combined with full time maternal employment have lower cognitive outcomes. ... Finally, Loeb et al. (2007) find that entry into non-parental center based care before the age of one can lead to problem behavior. Magnuson et al. (2007), Baker et al. (2008), Datta Gupta and Simonsen (2010), and the research summarized in Belsky (2006) provide further evidence that non-parental care can have negative behavioral effects in some contexts.
> After adjusting for child care quality, cumulative experience in center-based care was associated with better outcomes than was participation in other types of care. The amount of time children spent in care was not related to outcomes. Children in exclusive maternal care did not differ systematically from children in child care. Tests for lagged relations of earlier child care experiences to later performance (adjusting for current child care) showed that language stimulation predicted subsequent cognitive and language performance 9 to 12 months later. Although children in center care at age 3 performed better than children in other types of care, earlier experience in child care homes was associated with better performance at age 3 than was experience in other types of care.
These would appear to be counter to your statement that "Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has been shown to be highly detrimental to their development." More specifically, once the child is about 18 months old, there appears to be positive effects of daycare and non-parental care.
That "Family Facts" link is from The Heritage Foundation, which has a mission to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense."
I can't help but think there is a bias in which topics to report and which evidence to present.
One way to assuage my doubts would be if the reports had a link to the primary research literature. However, the only citation is to "a FamilyFacts.org Report by Jenet Jacob Erickson, researcher specializing in maternal and child wellbeing and former assistant professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Her report reviewed key findings from 30 years of research on child care and children’s social– emotional development."
This does not appear to be a peer-reviewed report. While peer-review has its problems, I again can't help but wonder about any possible cherry picking.
The last link is to Stefan Molyneux, who is often characterized as "alt-right" or "far-right". As an anti-feminist, I suspect he is biased towards research which keeps middle-class women at home to raise children.
In any case, unlike Erickson, he is (like both you and me) also not an expert on this subject.
This is pretty reassuring, and kind of makes sense to me from a gut level. It makes sense that professionals who love children would raise children who are well-adjusted, etc., vs. dumping your kids at grandma's or the neighbor's.
I don't think I'm a bad parent, but I definitely am not cut out for full-time parenting. My wife doesn't seem to be, either. If either of us were full-time caretakers, we'd honestly be fairly miserable, and I can't believe that wouldn't reflect poorly on our kid.
That's an opinion I can understand, but it completely misses the point of the article. The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's.
> The article is about the fact that children are a far greater risk for women careers that men's.
Might that be because, even in countries devoted to gender equality to an extent previously unknown to mankind, women tend to devote relatively more of their time & concern to mothering than men do to fathering?
Corporations do actually discriminate against married women of child-bearing age, versus single women or women who have older children.
Fact is, having kids means taking time off. And while fathers can take time off if they want in many countries, most take less time than women so as to not interrupt their career.
Well, if the gap tends to 20% it may also indicate a strong tendency to 4-day week among parenting women while men won’t. The fact it approaches it from below suggests a career delay but other than that I don’t see signs of “career killer”. That men’s share of parent leave is so small may be more indicative, but the final datum would be scale promotion rates across genders (although that would restrict to collective bargaining contracts)
I think thats for each individual to decide for themselves.
My career is more important to me than children, because I don't particularly want to raise a child and am not intending to have any. Plus I think there are already too many people on the planet. Doesn't mean I can't love others around me.
Nowhere was that implied, I'm pretty sure most people agree that both are important, no need to create a false dichotomy.
You're argument is reminiscent of some who opposed the suffragettes, who argued that raising children is much more important than voting. Even if that's the case, that is no argument for injustice.
The measure of life is happiness. For many this involves parenting (probably, one imagines, biology drives this, no?).
Some people will choose to be stay-at-home parents. There is nothing wrong with that. That is a career. The household income... is the household income, not the wage earner's, because for a couple with children the family is their life project, and the stay-at-home parent's "service" is "paid for" by the wage earner.
If we really want to compare apples to apples then we have to allocate a fraction (say, half) of the wage earner's income to the stay-at-home parent for the purpose of analysis. Alternatively compare singles' income to singles and childless couples' individuals, and separately analyze married-with-children-and-both-working couples, and then separately analyze married-with-children-and-one-stay-at-home-parent couples.
People take stock of their lives in many different ways: using happiness as the unit of measurement is called hedonism. Pursuing hedonism is a defensible position to take but I'm alarmed by its rise as the default system of value in the educated/cosmopolitan world that most HN readers presumably inhabit.
Things like raising children well, championing unfashionable but important positions, fighting injustice and poverty - the really worthwhile things in life - are often extraordinarily difficult and can cause more despair than pleasure. But I choose to believe that they are nonetheless important, and not only because there is the promise of the glow of contentment in the case of a possible future triumph.
Many in the tech industry achieve extraordinary success in modern society. But when someone rises to that position, the single-minded pursuit of stimulating one's own reward circuits can look quite callous in the eyes of those who haven't been able to rise to wealth and power. In the days of the hereditary aristocracy, there existed the idea of "noblesse oblige", or the obligation of the upper classes to be a positive force for all those who lived in their society. It might do us some good to revive that idea.
Personally, I think that having children is immoral. Yes, it can provide you with little workers to help you on the farm, and provide care and love for you in old age, but what if the child is born with a severe disability and is guaranteed to live a life of suffering? Not only will you experience some pain through their suffering, but you are literally wholly responsible for their life, which they had no consent in giving for their own birth. A happiness that is never experienced by an unborn child is neutral, while the suffering of a born child is negative. What is your opinion for how much a child can suffer before they should not have been born? How much happiness? For most lives there is a tradeoff between the two, so what is the tipping point where they should not have been born? Is it the point of suicide where not only do they not consent to being born, but the no longer consent to being alive?
Let's also consider that most jobs are bullshit jobs anyway. The children are literally the future of humanity and taking care of them is more important than anything else.
It's also unclear if harming your career is even a bad thing to begin, considering the options given (e.g. Don't have children, have children but neglect them, have children and take care of them, but have lower income when the caregiver returns to the work force). Perhaps spending proper time with children, even if it is at the cost of potential income, is worth it.
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I wonder if mandating that caregivers be able to work while raising their child somehow (perhaps a combination of remote work, daycare and in laws) would be enough to negate the negative effect while preserving the benefits.