To think that 16% pay inequality between the sexes isn't necessarily a problem....

[Bananabread123]

.... so long as:

1. men and women are paid equivalent amounts where there is parity of responsibility, experience and competence

2. affordable childcare is available

3. men and women are equally able to take career breaks for the purpose of child rearing, and that cultural barriers inhibiting this are removed

4. there is equality of access to money and spending decisions for women in households where the man is the main breadwinner (and vice versa)

5. Barriers that prevent or dissuade women from working in high paid professions are removed.

Why do I say this?... because in my experience women, on average, tend to want to lead on child rearing, and that this is a biological tendency that exists over and above any cultural norms. Clearly it will be different for every couple, but I'm talking about norms here. Not all, but many women want to take time off after their babies. And many (not all) women embrace the flexibility of part time work when children are young. And if that being the case, they will have less experience than their male counterparts, and it follows they should expect to be paid less on average.

There were studies done in nursing, looking at progression to management.

Women with children took longer than men to get into management.

What is more unexplainable, is that women without children took longer than men. Not as long as those with children, but still longer. In a female dominated profession that says something.

i totally agree there is a culture that needs to change

No you don't.

You have called PPs who mrntioned cultural expectations and their effects on people's behaviour evil feminists who think women are SLAVES.

Cultural explanations are not consistent with your (weak and shallow) argument.

You have repeatedly asserted that if people belueve they are making a free choice we need look no further but just assume there are no constraints at all on that freedom.

If you are going to make a tired old point, at least try to be more consistent than my 8 year old.

The problem with wage inequality runs a lot deeper than people think.

There have been studies done showing that when men move into a traditionally female industry, wages and prestige of that industry rises. When women move into a traditionally male industry, wages and prestige drops.

If a million woman all decided to be plumbers tomorrow, and if in ten years time 80% of all plumbers were women, plumbing would be a low-paid job and would be considered a cushy non job.

Head that's shocking

I have always wondered about nursing, hoping it would be different. Except the number of times I hear my friends and family who are nurses (quite a lot of them are) talking about the male nurses they work with who all seem to be on a higher band or management. And it really bothers me.

Such a huge pool of women to pick from, and yet the one man gets the job.

I don't have kids. Given I'm 50 and have had a hysterectomy, it would take a minor miracle for me to have them now.

I've been working non stop for over 30 years.

Why should I get 16% less pay because I might have had kids?

Someone needs to tell the men in Sweden that the women have 'biological urges' to be the lead parent.
www.stylist.co.uk/life/the-rise-of-the-latte-dads-paternity-equality-feminism-gender-women-men-children-family

I work for a large public sector organsiation ( very male orientated). A large number of departments refuse to allow part-time working which tends to limit the options for women who are returning from maternity leave. ( it does appear to still be women who work part-time.....I don't know any part-time men) They could make an effort to help with job sharing etc but they don't. As a result the jobs which are available which offer flexible hours are a little uninspiring and monotonous. Working in those kinds of roles doesn't motivate you to take promotion and earn more. The women who do well in my industry often don't have children and the men all have wives who pick up the slack at home.

Ps when I worked in recruitment it was a sackable offence to discuss your salary with anyone else.....I have no idea what anyone else earned. Presumably this was the case because some people were earning significantly more.....so there is plenty of opportunity for people with the same experience to be paid differently.

To follow up on some of the comments, i may well be wrong about the average mum having more desire to take a leading role in child rearing than the average dad - perhaps I am blinded by the pervading culture.... and I'm certainly not suggesting that dads shouldn't take an active role or that there is anything wrong with a couple deciding that it would be more appropriate for a dad to 'stay at home'.

However, it's clear that those advocating 'equal pay' as opposed to 'fair pay' (as in along the lines of my op) can only succeed if mums and dads (on average nationally) split the child rearing equally. I don't have a problem with that equal split happening as a result having fair pay structure and culture, but I do have a problem with the assumption that there should necessarily be an equal split, as that assumes there is no biological impulse that mums have more than dads to be the lead child carer, and that undermines women's choices in the interests of promoting a particular feminist agenda.

That's partly why they maintain this ridiculous secrecy...it is my salary, why shouldn't I discuss it? There would be less scope for discrepancies, that's why.

Fair pay is the same pay for the same job.

Regardless of home situation. If you do the same work, you get the same pay.

Why is this so hard?

Your assumption is that people who take time off are lesser than people who dont.
Whereas the actual arguement is 'if we are both grade 6 then we should both get the same salary'.

I'm in a very female dominated professional area. In the geographic area I live in there after 4 top level " consultant " type titles. 3 of the 4 are men... In my previous very male dominated area men in exactly the same roles got paid more, got promoted more and got better projects..... It's boring and depressing and fucking outrageous...
Fwiw in our house dh was the instigator on having children (I wouldn't have if he hadn't pushed it). I had no biological 'urge' to stay at home, but I very much believed that one of us should. Since (at the time) maternity pay was only for women it (financially speaking) had to be me. So there it was... social and political decisions forced me into stepping easy from my career....I now earn less than dh, but when we had our first I was earning more.. Inequality benefits no one. Men who want to be more involved in their kids lives are dissuaded from doing so, because long full time hours are seen as the norm. Going home to pick up the kids would be seen as lack of commitment (dh's old boss once asked why I couldn't do it, then suggested we get a nanny ).

Nobody is arguing that women who have worked full time in the workplace shouldn't have equal pay for the work they do. Nobody is arguing that those women or women in general aren't facing multiple sexist barriers to receiving such pay.

But when we talk about the hourly pay gap between all men and all women which is one of the ways the pay gap is being discussed, we are then including women who have taken large amounts of time off due to caring responsibilities.

I do not mean that people doing the same job at the same level should get different pay.

Women taking years out causes part of the pay gap. Part of that can be removed by no longer discriminating against such women when they return to the workplace and part of that cannot be removed without stopping women being more likely to take time out.

I don't think I'm saying anything there particularly different than the Fawcett society. We need to look at both the sexism faced by women whose careers are stalled by sexist assumptions, and the sexism faced by the many women in low paid, part time jobs with poor conditions and limited career progression due to caring responsibilities. Both of these situations are well evidenced.

Given that we don't live in a society that forces women to have men in their lives, many women now set up family arrangements that don't involve men. They raise children without participation of a father. They do it solely themselves, or frequently with their own mothers helping them. You cannot equalise men and women's contribution to childcare without forcing women to heavily engage on a private level with men over childrearing.

But whether or not someone has taken time off, if they are doing the same job as someone being paid 35k then they should get paid 35k. They won't have been paid while they were off, but when they are at work they should be paid for it.

I have been fortunate to get promoted following mat leave. However I had to do things like never leave early to pick up a sick child, never complain about child etc.
Those who do leave early or refuse to travel are not doing the exact equivalent work and tend to get paid less.
Men tend not to bare the brunt of this. Once they do then there will be real equality of pay.

Yes, but that isn't the only way the pay gap is reported.

It is the law that people doing the same job should have equal pay (although the law gets broken).

When the pay gap gets reported or discussed it compares how much all women get paid compared to how much all men get paid.

So some of the pay gap is down to certain professions (nursing) being generally underpaid, which can be resolved. Some of it is down to some women having much more time away from the workplace, and so not going back into the same role as people who have since had 5, 10, 15 years progression. And the actions required to give such women economic security are different (and some the same for all women).

And Bananabread, I do see how it can be a feminist agenda to get women as a group to do only half of all child rearing. How could that be accomplished for all women?

1. Forced surrogacy to provide children to single men.

1. Forced contraceptive implants or abortion for women who didn't have a man around interested in participating in raising a child.

1. Forced adoption at birth of the children of mothers without a participating father.

1. Sterilisation of all men who don't want to do fifty percent of childcare.

1. Massive social shaming of any woman pregnant without father (either living with her or elsewhere) who isn't committed to the child.

The ends may have changed, but the means of forcing women into private dependency on men if they want liberation would remain the same as the fifties.

But whether or not someone has taken time off, if they are doing the same job as someone being paid 35k then they should get paid 35k.

Of course, men and women doing the same job should be paid the same... I'm not arguing that they shouldn't be! But if I choose to take, say, a 5 year career break, firstly, the currency of my knowledge will have reduced, so I wouldn't be able immediately to operate at the same level as when i left for my career break. Secondly, had I not taken a career break, i would have developed my skills and potentially been promoted.

So had my hypothetical twin not had a career break it is reasonanle to expect that her pay would be higher at the point I return to work.

When society is structured so that men's work is not valued more highly than women's work, then we can talk about it "being OK" that working women receive 16% less of the wealth generated in and by our economy than men do.

Until then, no.

I don't believe men are 16% more valuable, even in terms of economic outputs, than women are.

So it is necessarily a problem for me that we have a 16% pay gap and it will continue to be a problem.

And people who suggest it is not a problem because biology makes women less ambitious and more lazy and obsessed with children can basically fuck off.

Women are culturally expected to do the majority of child rearing.
It's not a free choice when society is so coercive.

I have admitted I was wrong about 16%... I should never have included it. there is pay inequality, and the 16% is too high. I just don't necessarily think it needs to be zero, so long as the conditions are in place for it to be zero should women choose.

Why can't the conditions be in place for it to be 16% in women's favour?

Why are you so happy to accept that being the "lead childcarer" means you should earn less money?

The very idea that the "lead childcarer" should be paid zero despite doing work that contributes enormously to the economy is the real insult to SAHMs.

And you just accept it as normal that women should continue to cojtribute for free and rely on men's patronage for their financial survival.

The model of work and remuneration we are operating under is massively flawed and dysfunctional.

The work that women do is just as important as the work that men do.

So there is no reason for ANY gender gap in pay.

We just might need to start thinking a bit more creatively about how to distribute money and reward work that has traditionally been done for free through the exploitation of women's labour.

I haven't RTFT so this might have been said but I think part of the inequality equation is that caring responsibilities (both for child rearing and other caring responsibilities) are not valued much by our western culture. More often than not, it falls to women but I'm not sure if it's valued less and that's why women tend to be the ones doing it or if it's because women are doing it iyswim.

One way I think of getting around the disadvantage maternity leave has on a woman's career is to legislate for equivalent paternity leave for men - so both men and women were given, say a year off after child birth and both were entitled to statutory maternity/paternity pay for the full period. This would free the couple to have more choice over who or if either should return to work. It would also raise the profile of child caring responsibilities and shift the culture of it being 'women's work' hopefully leading to more equality in the home. It does men and fathers a disservice to suggest that women are biologically more driven than men to be nurturers.

Actually, I think a move to universal income would free up choices for all people in society but I know it's controversial.

If a man or woman spends 25 years dedicated to a career, they will likely be earning more at th me if the 25 years than the man or woman who has a 10 year career break.