Maybe women should just mate select for men who are more into taking care of kids and less into working more hours than they do to share a higher income so they can devote more time to having kids. (Straight) men respond to female incentives and I just know my mate selection will be better if I advertise resource provenance over “I want to balance my life to take care of kids”. Super easy to test this. Put two profiles on a dating site and have everything the same except for cues to preferences for intensive parenting (at the expense of renumerative work) vs cues for workplace success (at the expense of parenting) and see which gets more interest and more interest from more attractive women. Never explain with male intransigence what is better explained by female mate selection. Women can’t have everything so they optimize for some things at the expense of other things and a higher proportion of women generally would rather have a husband make more than them and share it than have men wasting the time they could be earning money to share with them doing intensive parenting. As do men, but there is much less handwringing over living with tradeoffs and blaming the downstream effects on “culture” or whatever.
I appreciate your write-up - you get to the point and emphasize that this isn't a story of discrimination.
However, the fact that women's wages fall when they have children shouldn't be framed as something bad happening to women. In some cases it might be, but I suspect the majority of the time this is just women making choices about what is important to them.
I could make a graph demonstrating what happens to your earnings at retirement - you'd see a cliff as income falls off to $0. However it would be silly to frame that as something bad - having your income fall to $0 is the point of retirement!
Making trade-offs in life is inevitable and we shouldn't think of women's wages falling after having children as something bad. We could flip this story around - we might look at the choices of men after having children, and lament how awful it is that they have to continue working, rather than getting to spend more time with their families. Why don't we ever read that story?
We shouldn't presuppose one is better, but I'm afraid these types of stories do exactly that.
One of the best explanations of the gender-wage gap. Thank you.
You note that for "most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite. For most men, it barely makes a dent." You also say that men's income often goes up but don't say why. It suspect that men, as they become fathers, they take on more responsibility for making ends meet in the family by working overtime and seeking new more demanding jobs. Men are providers. Rather than denigrating men for making more, we should honor their commitment to their families and making an effort to earn more income.
It is fascinating how we measure each other’s societal worth based on income.
Men get sent to fight wars.
Men are dispatched into all the high-risk fields with the greatest mortality rates.
Men who perform working class jobs are increasingly viewed with disgust by the elite classes, and the elite class now identifies self-consciously as Democrats.
Women earn BAs at a higher degree than men, yet continue to yearn to be mothers.
Women are the only humans who can bring forth human life.
And women are unhappy: with their opportunity to work more, their pursuit of sexual freedom, and their increased desirability among employers.
I think I have just laid out the justification for most of Mr. Reeves’ research in an impolitic voice.
We are making a mash of our culture. Why? Because, as Rob Henderson so eloquently argues, the elite class pushes beliefs that do no scale well across a host of strata.
I found the results to an online survey regarding Americans' views on the gender pay gap from Survey Monkey (Mar. 2019). It seems to fit the article you were describing almost perfectly (couldn't find any grouping of the data by edu. level).
There’s no job I want other than to raise my little kids. You could offer me or my husband a million dollars a year to swap roles, and my husband and I would still keep our lives the way we have it. Just wanted to say that, because this obsession over the closing the wage gap is so messed up to me.
Years ago, I met a very successful female CEO with young children. Her husband also had a high-level job. She said they had a "household manager" who did (nearly) all things a corporate wife would do, in addition to employing a nanny. It was very expensive, she said, and worth every dollar.
What we’re really missing are stats for the living standard of various demographic groups.
It’s always asserted that women has it worse because they earn less. That may not be the case. If women have sources of income that are unavailable for men, it may well hint at the core reason for women earning less; they get their funding elswhere.
Yes, but. Women know this but just as some believe a woman can have a penis, they think all differences between the sexes should be erased through social engineering, technology and behavioural change. Other women (us TERFS, conservatives and materialists) think it’s a flawed question and a society that requires two incomes to meet the living standard previously covered by one is a con, and a Ponzi scheme underpinned by female labour in the developing world. It’s a problem of philosophy, not data.
How much of the gap among mothers is due to personal choice? How often do mothers choose to spend less time advancing their career goals after giving birth? And how much supplemental income do family courts award mothers? I have been going through a divorce for the last three years and I have had to spend over $300K in attorney fees just to be a part of my son's life. The bias against fathers in family courts is astounding and as a society we simply ignore the inequities despite the abundance of crime associated with fatherlessness. Let's give fathers equal footing in Family Court and then revisit the gender pay gap.
Economist Claudia Godin's recent book "Career and Family" has a good explainer of this also. When you look at college graduates after they have just left school, men and women earn pretty much the same (sometimes women even outearning men). This changes about a decade after college when people start having children and women overwhelmingly are the ones who put their careers on hold to be the primary care taker. The husband's usually pick up more hours at work and by the time the woman is ready to go back to work, it's hard to catch up.
Again your post is wrong it is not a wage Gap, it is an earnings Gap
Maybe women should just mate select for men who are more into taking care of kids and less into working more hours than they do to share a higher income so they can devote more time to having kids. (Straight) men respond to female incentives and I just know my mate selection will be better if I advertise resource provenance over “I want to balance my life to take care of kids”. Super easy to test this. Put two profiles on a dating site and have everything the same except for cues to preferences for intensive parenting (at the expense of renumerative work) vs cues for workplace success (at the expense of parenting) and see which gets more interest and more interest from more attractive women. Never explain with male intransigence what is better explained by female mate selection. Women can’t have everything so they optimize for some things at the expense of other things and a higher proportion of women generally would rather have a husband make more than them and share it than have men wasting the time they could be earning money to share with them doing intensive parenting. As do men, but there is much less handwringing over living with tradeoffs and blaming the downstream effects on “culture” or whatever.
Please edit this article. There are several mistakes:
“I provide what I think it a pretty good”
“gender gap gap”
“…higher someone’s level of education…”
I appreciate your write-up - you get to the point and emphasize that this isn't a story of discrimination.
However, the fact that women's wages fall when they have children shouldn't be framed as something bad happening to women. In some cases it might be, but I suspect the majority of the time this is just women making choices about what is important to them.
I could make a graph demonstrating what happens to your earnings at retirement - you'd see a cliff as income falls off to $0. However it would be silly to frame that as something bad - having your income fall to $0 is the point of retirement!
Making trade-offs in life is inevitable and we shouldn't think of women's wages falling after having children as something bad. We could flip this story around - we might look at the choices of men after having children, and lament how awful it is that they have to continue working, rather than getting to spend more time with their families. Why don't we ever read that story?
We shouldn't presuppose one is better, but I'm afraid these types of stories do exactly that.
There is no pay gap. Is just your struggle understanding 2nd grade math.
Could the men work more because as more children are born into the family more money is needed?Just a crazy thought.
One of the best explanations of the gender-wage gap. Thank you.
You note that for "most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite. For most men, it barely makes a dent." You also say that men's income often goes up but don't say why. It suspect that men, as they become fathers, they take on more responsibility for making ends meet in the family by working overtime and seeking new more demanding jobs. Men are providers. Rather than denigrating men for making more, we should honor their commitment to their families and making an effort to earn more income.
It is fascinating how we measure each other’s societal worth based on income.
Men get sent to fight wars.
Men are dispatched into all the high-risk fields with the greatest mortality rates.
Men who perform working class jobs are increasingly viewed with disgust by the elite classes, and the elite class now identifies self-consciously as Democrats.
Women earn BAs at a higher degree than men, yet continue to yearn to be mothers.
Women are the only humans who can bring forth human life.
And women are unhappy: with their opportunity to work more, their pursuit of sexual freedom, and their increased desirability among employers.
I think I have just laid out the justification for most of Mr. Reeves’ research in an impolitic voice.
We are making a mash of our culture. Why? Because, as Rob Henderson so eloquently argues, the elite class pushes beliefs that do no scale well across a host of strata.
I found the results to an online survey regarding Americans' views on the gender pay gap from Survey Monkey (Mar. 2019). It seems to fit the article you were describing almost perfectly (couldn't find any grouping of the data by edu. level).
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/equal-pay-day-2019/
There’s no job I want other than to raise my little kids. You could offer me or my husband a million dollars a year to swap roles, and my husband and I would still keep our lives the way we have it. Just wanted to say that, because this obsession over the closing the wage gap is so messed up to me.
But Leftists claim that "Gender" is just a "Social Construct"!
Years ago, I met a very successful female CEO with young children. Her husband also had a high-level job. She said they had a "household manager" who did (nearly) all things a corporate wife would do, in addition to employing a nanny. It was very expensive, she said, and worth every dollar.
What we’re really missing are stats for the living standard of various demographic groups.
It’s always asserted that women has it worse because they earn less. That may not be the case. If women have sources of income that are unavailable for men, it may well hint at the core reason for women earning less; they get their funding elswhere.
Yes, but. Women know this but just as some believe a woman can have a penis, they think all differences between the sexes should be erased through social engineering, technology and behavioural change. Other women (us TERFS, conservatives and materialists) think it’s a flawed question and a society that requires two incomes to meet the living standard previously covered by one is a con, and a Ponzi scheme underpinned by female labour in the developing world. It’s a problem of philosophy, not data.
How much of the gap among mothers is due to personal choice? How often do mothers choose to spend less time advancing their career goals after giving birth? And how much supplemental income do family courts award mothers? I have been going through a divorce for the last three years and I have had to spend over $300K in attorney fees just to be a part of my son's life. The bias against fathers in family courts is astounding and as a society we simply ignore the inequities despite the abundance of crime associated with fatherlessness. Let's give fathers equal footing in Family Court and then revisit the gender pay gap.
Economist Claudia Godin's recent book "Career and Family" has a good explainer of this also. When you look at college graduates after they have just left school, men and women earn pretty much the same (sometimes women even outearning men). This changes about a decade after college when people start having children and women overwhelmingly are the ones who put their careers on hold to be the primary care taker. The husband's usually pick up more hours at work and by the time the woman is ready to go back to work, it's hard to catch up.