To be really annoyed and disappointed with Dh views on this

[fleec]

Dh just said to me that the gender pay gap doesn't really exist. He said that women choose lower paid jobs because it suits them . Also that women choose to slow down their careers because of children and that women have less assertive personalities meaning that they are generally suited to less senior roles.

I am fuming with him. I cannot believe that he thinks this . AIBU to think that we are all different and that you can't generalise in this way! I am not one who generally holds very strong feminist views but this has really got to me.

I do think he's partly right, lots of women do choose low paid jobs. They don't want to work many hours, want certain hours or just need the magic sixteen hours to claim numerous top up benefits.

Lots will have careers just as good as men because they want to and can cope with being a parent and having a career. For others, they get pregnant early before establishing themselves and then either don't bother returning to work or go back for a few hours limiting their options.

It's a choice, nobody is forced into it so in that point he is right.

TIRFandProud - differences in the brain? Like the differences between the brains of people of different races? Like the theories about being able to work out criminal temdencies from the shape of the skull? Funnily enough, there is a fear there because of the history of men drawing conclusions and then trying to fit the facts around them, rather than doing the science properly... I'm sure differences in hormone levels, etc, do have an effect on people's brains - just not in the pathetically crude way implied by suggesting women are less suited to leadership because they are less assertive...

Some of what he has said is factually correct - a big contributing factor to the pay gap is that it is mostly women who take part time, flexible jobs and those tend to be at lower pay grades

That in itself is institutional discrimination imo. The people who NEED part-time, flexible jobs are more likely to be women (90% of single parents are women, and the huge majority of carers are women). The lack of decent jobs that are compatible with those roles disadvantages women.

The organisation I work for won an award last year for being a family friendly employer. Nearly all the other award winners were big city firms. Someone from a corporate law firm told our director and it someone senior has a sick child who has to stay home, they get an agency nanny in to take care of them, so the employee can go to work!

Working practices need to change, it's not just about the money.

It's all very well saying it's a choice. But a) it's the choice of both parents to have children and b) gender-related caresr choices are not made in a vacuum. Many girls are still being brought up with stereotyped expectations of what they are supposed to do in life.

Good lord, what a dinosaur!

He sounds quite a catch.

Obviously for longer than 100 years women have been conditioned to be wives and mothers.

Absolutely this.

I get sick of the biological determinism that is so often used to defend discrimination.

Wonderful that you've found this out now.

It's the perfect opportunity to have a conversation about how, if you have children, you fully intend to continue working and he can choose between the child going to nursery or him going P/T or becoming a SAHD.

You'll share the maternity leave with him - you do the first 6 months mat leave, then he can take additional parental leave for the last 6 months.

You're willing to do either a drop-off or pick-up on the nursery/school run and he can do the other. Obviously he'll need to be responsible for kiddie sickness absence since you're going to be concentrating on your career.

...since apparently the pay gap is a choice, and you're choosing to opt out of it. So he can take the traditionally female role of being responsible for the children, and see how he likes his 'choice' of having his career suffer.

Ask him if he thinks that’s why black people are paid less also. They are less assertive and don’t want it as much

The gender pay gap is different to the 'equal pay for equal work' issue!!!

The former at least has a little more justification (as PPs have said): women may choose to work less hours to help support family and if that is their choice then great. But the hours that they do should be remunerated fairly - I think it's hard to argue with that? We can all argue till we're blue in the face about whether women genuinely prefer to care for family or whether we're conditioned into it. It's difficult to construct a good enough experiment to prove it.

But often it is not really a choice in the true sense of the word is it? If a man wishes to have a family a woman somewhere has to bear a child. It's not just about women choosing to have family. If she wants to be a SAHP great. But when the child of two working parents needs care/ unscheduled pick-up, usually it's the man's meetings/ deadlines/ diary/priorities that can't be moved somehow. Often because his workplace won't accept it the way they do for a female employee. Usually the woman blinks first.

The 'equal pay' issue is a massive one. How can anyone justify that two people doing the same job should not be paid the same? The only modifiers to your pay should be unbiased and objective performance measures e.g. how much business do you bring in/ how many rooms do you clean/ exam papers do you mark? Not how popular you are with the team; the fact you have other skills that are irrelevant to the job at hand; the number of hours you are simply 'present' in the office etc.

The gender pay gap exists because women are socialised to believe they 'must have' children and that being assertive is 'complying with male centric norms' (or being unfeminine, in old-speak).

If we stopped socialising women to suppress their innate aggression and be eternally reliant on group approval things would be significantly more equal.

Your DH needs to be aware that there is still a lot of policing of women's gender roles that he won't be aware of as it isn't coming from men.

There's some truth in what he said. Reams of threads on here, 'Want to go PT as 'DP' and I cannot afford childcare and 'DP' earns more', 'I have to go back to work from mat leave but I'm already pregnant again and work's not happy', 'I have to go back to work and baby is only 1!' 'How can I work from home and earn £40k/annum?'

There is some truth of in what he says, for me and my friends/acquaintances at least.

However, the assertiveness thing is bollocks! Lots of women are plenty assertive (though may be labelled "bossy")

The thing is, in families someone has to look after the house and kids. In many relationships this is shared more or less equally. But in other relationships, one partner does most of it and works PT (or not at all) whilst the other partner works full time.

Personally, I think me working PT and being a "housewife"/"sahp" besides works best for our family. I also LIKE not working FT, if I am honest, and it means,we can have a dog.

But yeah, I chose not to earn/work as much as I could. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed about my lack of career....

"The gender pay gap is down to choice as evidenced by it only appearing around the age when women choose to get pregnant."

For young women NOW it may only appear at the age when women have children (which the men also choose by the way), but for any of us older than that we've had unequal pay all our lives.

All if these are examples of childcare being the woman’s job. It’s unpaid. Versus having to stay at work to do paid work. That’s socialisation x 10000.

@roundaboutthetown

Well, chemicals / hormones as well as the physical differences in the brain.

We know there are chemical difference.

We know there are physical differences.

We know they work in different ways (observable in the form of electrical activity).

Seems logical to me that this will have some sex-based manifestation in behaviour and personality. Why do you think it's logical that there wouldn't be?

He's absolutely right.

All you can hold your husband to account for is what goes on inside your marriage.

Yes, he's right.

I worked part time to be at home more for children = no comment from family.
Dp then went part time to be at home with children more = comments about what he would do with his time, was he doing further study etc.
Conditioning sucks.

women have less assertive personalities meaning that they are generally suited to less senior roles.

He is an arse. I'm so sorry, OP.

To be fair what he has said is somewhat true.

TIRFandProud - point me to where I have said there are no manifestations of difference, please.... I have profoundly disagreed with the ludicrous notion that women are less suited to leadership because they are "less assertive" (and pointed out that if you wish to argue this, then you could just as well argue that men are less suited to leadership because of their excessive and inappropriate aggression...). I have not at any point said I think there are no differences between men and women. There is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that women cannot assert themselves because their brain structure will not allow it!!!

There is a bit of truth in what he says but a gender pay gap does exist as well. There is no one simple answer but he isn’t 100% wrong

There's some truth in what he said. Reams of threads on here, 'Want to go PT as 'DP' and I cannot afford childcare and 'DP' earns more', 'I have to go back to work from mat leave but I'm already pregnant again and work's not happy', 'I have to go back to work and baby is only 1!' 'How can I work from home and earn £40k/annum?'

This with bells on. For every woman who posts on MN about how childbearing has interfered with their career, I know 10 in real life who have purposefully set about long-term SAHM, far beyond where their children are settled in full-time school and have robust immune systems etc.

For those who have gone back to work, they tend to work part-time in fields that are complementary to their husband's more all-encompassing careers.

Naturally, there are exceptions.

I slot into the second category above - my husband is the high earner. I'm pretty highly educated (I have a post-graduate degree) and I was earning a lot more money than my husband was when we met. I just lost interest after my children were born, and particularly after my husband started earning more money. I just don't care, I'd rather be around for my kids.

I'd no doubt be described as a cock-lodger if I were man.

My husband is wildly appreciative of the things that I do at home; it all works for us.

I also don’t think the gender pay gap is particularly a construct of the workplace. I think a lot of the issue goes back to education - the best paid fields are in STEM, which girls are still not highly represented in at a university level.

I do all the childcare and sick days in our marriage. Not because I have a vagina, but because my DH earns 3x what’s I do so it’s folly for us to lose a day of his wages rather than mine. He earns 3x my salary not because he has a penis but because he is highly qualified and very experienced in a very well paid field. Incidentally, it is one in which there are fewer women. Again, this disparity is not the fault of the institution he works at, it is because the education system is still failing girls in encouraging them to pursue certain fields.