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MortenSN's avatar

Men and women have different access to the base of Maslow’s hierachy of needs: Physiological needs herewithin “The need for reproduction”.

A man needs to convince a woman to have children with him to fulfil this basic need. Thus, men must provide what women wants in competition with other men. If women wants men “who brings something to the table”, men must comply.

Men complies by taking on dangerous or strenuous jobs with high fatality rates or unpleasant working conditions. Not because they are masochists but because that’s how they can get something to show for themselves.

So, with Darwin’s knife at their throat, is it suprising that men always make the choices leading to higher pay?

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Austin Thornton's avatar

Not discussed here are two linked issues.

The first is whether the gender pay gap is coerced or the manifestation of a legitimate preference. The second is the compensating transfers of income from men to women and children.

Its an obvious implication that figures showing men work more having had children, point to them operating in the income provider role. So that extra income is being earned to meet additional demands for the benefit of the mother and child. This transfer at least partly compensates the mother for her income loss.

Do mothers want to work more, or are they coerced by their partners, their employers or the labour market into the role of primary carer and so moving, to some extent, to part time work? Do fathers want more a more significant caring role but are coerced by economic necessities? It might well be said that the optimal parenting arrangement is both parents working to some extent part time and thereby both having sufficient time to have meaningful work AND full engagement with their children. Why is that not the predominant arrangement?

Income demands constrain that choice. Very few families can meet their living standard expectations on the equivalent of a single income. The labour market is such that many parents must work as much as they can within the constraints of providing care.

Parents role play. Its a biological effect that new mothers tend to assert themselves as primary carers. The fathers role is commonly consequential, as earner and secondary carer. Difficult as those roles often are, they are positions which quickly become entrenched and resistant to change.

Clearly some mothers would want to work more if there were more affordable day care. But which choice here is coerced, to work or to care for your child? The decision to work full time and place a child in long hours of day care may be coerced by insufficient family income. It is easy to see that part time work will often be an optimal choice for those families whose overall family income is enough and it will be the established primary carer who will have the benefit of that optimisation.

The contemporary gender pay gap is mainly a consequence of parenting arrangements that are easily recognisable. But the effect of time constraints in single parenthood (families that are overwhelmingly mother led) forcing the parent into part time work at best, will also be significant.

Families with mother and father together are typically better off than single parent families due to the sharing of the fathers surplus earnings. This transfer is strangely omitted from the narrative, except when non payment is the problem.

What then is behind this focus on equality of paid work in preference to spending time caring for your child?

Is there as RR hints, a misunderstanding that the pay gap indicates pay discrimination? Is it as Mary Harrington has written, the erasure of motherhood by some feminist ideologies. Is it an objection to the perceived economic dependency of a mother on her partner (dependency could also be called support - do mothers in fact reject or welcome that support? ) Or is it yet another manifestation of the long held suspicion voiced in many quarters that modern free market capitalist countries are not very child friendly?

It is far from clear that within the innumerable constraints on life that parenting imposes, and there are of course more the more children you have, couples are doing anything other than optimising their preferences. In democratic societies there should be an open discussion about what change we want rather than a tendentious and misleading use of statistics that generate a false narrative of pay discrimination.

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