To ask how on earth there could be a 'pocket money gender gap'?

[LittleLionMansMummy]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36440161

I mean, how?! Am I being naive? Why are parents apparently treating their children so differently in this respect? What's going on? Poor girls have no hope of smashing the glass ceiling when their own parents are short changing them practically from birth. Interested in hearing your views!

[IceBeing]

yeah I was gobsmacked at that one too.

I guess gender bias is as deeply embedded as all research says it is :(

[BrieAndChilli]

I wonder if it's the fact that parents of only girls will say give £5 a week pocket money but then will also buy makeup, magazines, clothes, hair products etc whereas parents of only boys will give say £8 a week pocket money but expect the boy to buy everything out of that???
My kids are all younger than 10 and they all get the same regardless of gender BUT I know I spend more on DD than the boys in terms of clothes, hair bands/brushes/detangler, stationary etc

[IceBeing]

I don't think this is the worse end of the parental bias either. I think telling boys that they shouldn't cry is probably a more troubling issue.

[araiba]

i reckon it means fuck all

statistical anomaly?

more girls in east anglia? more boys in london?

insufficient data for any conclusions- just needed to generate a headline to justify themselves doing the research

[steff13]

How odd. We give our kids a base of $1 per week per year of their age, then they can get extra by doing extra chores.

[steff13]

more girls in east anglia? more boys in london?

That's a good point; I guess it's really only significant if they're talking about kids in the same families.

[RandyMagnum]

There's not enough data collected for it to be of any actual value, unless they ask exclusively different sexed twins, what the each get for pocket money and find an unfair difference; then the results they have collected don't mean anything. If I have two boys, and give them £10 a week each, but the family down the street have two girls at the same age and give them only £5 a week, the results are skewed automatically. It's all relative.

[ElsaAintAsColdAsMe]

I haven't read the article but I can see how this happens, it happened to me.

I have 2 brothers who were rewarded for every household chore they did, anything I did was expected due to (I assume) me being female. It's ridiculous this still happens in this day and age.

[IceBeing]

Its a big enough survey that numbers of girls in boys in the different geographical areas are unlikely to be adding much noise.

I think it might be parents spending more money on girls clothes because they are more expensive then compensating in pocket money. This is a bollocks strategy in my opinion because it isn't the girls fault that female clothing is more expensive....

[IceBeing]

randy variations like the one you mention would get averaged out of the >1000 children.

[araiba]

if they checked the average against tall/ short kids, there would be a difference but noone says short kids get more pocket money or anything

same for eye,skin, hair colour, favourite type of music etc

meaningless drivel

[IceBeing]

My parents tried to give me 3K at one point because they had spent that on my brother and sisters uni education which they didn't have to spend on mine because I was older and got a grant. I told them to give us 1K each or keep it because my siblings hadn't seen the money and it wasn't their fault they were born too late for grants....

[IceBeing]

good grief some people are statistically illiterate.

They would find a height dependence because height is correlated to age. There wouldn't be a hair colour dependence because of the numbers they are averaging over.

10% is a lot of difference between two populations sampled more than 500 times. The difference is very likely real and significant - though you need to know the standard deviations of the two samples to be sure...

[araiba]

thats what im saying

none of them have a dependence including the sex of the child or its eye colour but if you had the information about eye colour you could generate a headline about it because there will be different results from overall average

[LittleLionMansMummy]

I just don't understand it on any justifiable level. I kind of get where it comes from in employment terms (I mean, I understand the history, the reasons for pay inequality etc) but what possible reasoning can apply here? I'm not saying I agree with pay inequality among employees but I can at least see where it stems from and form a view as to how it can be tackled. But this is just bizarre.

[Nataleejah]

I remember something like this from my teenage years. There was this notion, that parents should give more pocket money to their sons, because a boy is expected to pay if he asks a girl out but then there was another "front", saying that "why on earth boys' parents should be financially supporting girls who go out with their son?"

[IceBeing]

Okay so lets say the standard deviation is 3 quid - so two thirds of people give their kids between £3.55 and £9.55 which seems reasonable.

That means the boys average is 6.93 with an error of 0.12 and the girls is 6.16 with an error of 0.12.

The girls average is 6 sigma away from the boys, so the hypothesis that the girls have a different average pocket money to boys can be made well in excess of the 99% confidence level.

Which means it is more likely to be true than the Higgs boson existing (which you may recall was announced when it hit 5 sigma...)

There may well be a difference between brown hair and blond, but you would expect it to be in the pennies...so less that the 12 pence error on the average...and hence not statistically significant.

[LittleLionMansMummy]

Oh and Iceberg I agree with you entirely about boys crying. Currently mum to one son and pregnant but don't wish to know the gender. The whole genderisation of children intrigues and exhausts me in equal measure. Ds comes home quite frequently with casual sexism he most definitely doesn't get from us and I'm at a loss to know how to deal with it.

[LittleLionMansMummy]

IceBeing, not Iceberg.

[BombadierFritz]

Deeply ingrained sexism that starts from birth (or even prebirth). Noone does it deliberately (or almost noone) and we wouldnt even think it was true if someone told us we were doing it

[KayTee87]

This is horrible. I'm 33 weeks with our first, we found out the sex at 20 weeks as I thought it would help with names (hasn't haha) we're having a boy. My husband goes to watch football and plays various sports. I said to my DH before finding out the sex that whether we were having a girl or a boy he would be including either sex in these activities and not just a boy. I'm very grateful that my dad taught me the same diy etc that he taught my brother as its defo helped me in life, and he used to train me to win the sports at sports days I can't stand people that treat their children differently for any reason. My mum babies my brother still and it doesn't do him any favours.

[KP86]

When I've seen articles like this in the past (confessing to not reading this one), they say that for some families it's because the "boy's" chores are valued more highly in terms of pay rates. Mowing lawns, walking pets, washing cars vs "girl" chores like dishes, cooking, sweeping the floor. So families who pay per job done end up paying the boys more.

What it's really saying is that we already value the behind the scenes caring jobs less than the physical tasks, even within our own homes.

Scary how ingrained it is.

[LittleLionMansMummy]

See, when I was little my dad gave us a flat rate - none of this extra for different chores rubbish, we all had to pitch in and pull our weight with all chores. As the youngest, muggins here always got lumbered with drying up/ putting away but yearned for promotion to washer upper. It was dog eat dog, survival of the fittest in our house!

[IceBeing]

I remember the who was washing drying and putting away rows....we didn't get money for it either - just expected to do it.

[Ihavenopigs]

Icebeing
Can you explain your statistics as I don't follow?
You say standard deviation = 3
But this means sigma =3 since sigma is just another name for standard deviation so 6 sigma would be 18
So don't get the 0.12?
Thanks