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 have to say it, I think Honeylulu made perfect sense. If us women choose to have children and want to have time off for birth and caring for them, then we may have to accept our careers will be hold during this time (and therefore will earn less overall than men). I think it's a positive choice sacrifice and ideally, there will always be the opportunity to pick up the career again once the children are older.

Choices are never made in a vacuum. Everyone operates within the society within which they love, with all the history and expectations behind this.

My company refuses to give pay rises to anyone -guess what they are all female - who works part-time. Part time means no less than 4 days a week (ie no one is on 3 days a week in my firm ). Which means during the time the women is working great hours , usually whilst children are small the rest are enjoying salary increases.

This automatically creates a gender pay gap if you look at pay per hour per role. My boss is a white male in his seventies who makes it quite clear he doesn't like pregnant women in the work place.

Less not great! I want to add that women will quite often 'choose'to work less hours as after maternity leave she is the one who is expected to carry on the 'caring ' organising things for the child role.
My DH whilst great never even considered reducing his hours at work.
The choice is made to facilitate everyone's, including the woman's lives BUT the downside is less pay and a gender pay gap.

Live not love ahh typos. I'm on my phone

Your DH is actually correct (assuming that I had read it correctly). The ‘gender pay gap’ is largely attributable to factors other than gender on a level of primary causation. In other words, women don’t get paid less because they are women but rather because of the choice they make. However they do seem to make a lot of these choices (like taking maternity leave, moving into part time work, not asking for a pay rise etc) because they are women. Contrary to the intuitive response that this is down to gender inequality this phenomenon is prevalent even if the most gender equal countries, Sweden provides an interesting illustration. It would seem that the reasons behind women being paid less on average are more nuanced than gender inequality or the oppression of women. It actually seems to be the opposite and largely a result of women choosing roles that are less well paid. This seems to a combination of women placing more value of positions that have better work life balance (hence not as well paid) and women choose not professions that pay well. Part of this seems to be down busibessses placing more value of personality traits found more commonly in men than in woman. This gives rise to the conclusion that you husband has drawn that women are better suited to being maincaregivrs/less lucrative work. What you husband hasn’t done is gone to the next step to ask why? Is it because they are women and that’s just what women are like? Or is it because women, by and large are conditioned into certain behaviours and preferences from infancy? What you husband had said is true. There is no pay gap- men and women get paid the same for the same work, women just work less/take less well paid jobs. Women (today) are better suited to this less hours/less lucrative style of working (as exemplified by the choices that women make themselves when they are free to do so). The real question is whether women are inherently better suited to such work. If this is the case, then is business making the most out of personality traits that make women generally less successful in business? If not, if it’s not the fact that they are women that has made them better suited to these roles, then what has made a whole generation of women develope personality traits and preferences that prevent them from succeeding in business by and large?

TIRFandProud

Actually studies show that male and female brains start off pretty much the same but if a child is given toys like building blocks, lego etc. they will develop better spatial awareness and if they are given dolls they will develop better emotional intelligence. So you can see how society actually influences the development of girls' & boys' brains from a young age.

@TuftedLadyGrotto

Doesn't your Uber example show it's not some patriarchal conspiracy to keep women out?

Either they were less good at the job or chose to earn less? It seems to absolutely favour the argument that society is treating women unfairly.

'I have to say it, I think Honeylulu made perfect sense. If us women choose to have children and want to have time off for birth and caring for them, then we may have to accept our careers will be hold during this time (and therefore will earn less overall than men). I think it's a positive choice sacrifice and ideally, there will always be the opportunity to pick up the career again once the children are older.'

It boggles me that women actually still think this way. 'If us women choose to have children' - do men never have children then? What if all women suddenly stopped 'choosing' to have children, would we all shrug and say 'oh well the human race is going to die out, such a pity?'

Ideally there is a chance to pick up a career again, but in practice for many women it's extremely difficult or impossible, because time at home with children is seen by patriarchal society as time the woman spent 'doing nothing' - it counts for nothing, despite being the thing that is forming the next generation of humans.

Why do women accept being treated in this way?

@Damnthatonestaken it really, really isn’t. It is the MEDIAN pay by gender. You could just google it....

@HeavyLoad x-post

No they don't. There are differences in prenatel male and female brains.

Citation

It's believed to be due to a surge of testosterone in the womb which has an effect on neurochemical composition, cell life and death and neural connectivity

citation

In the first 3 months after birth, male brains grow more quickly. In particular the cerebellum which increases about 9% more quickly.

By 3 weeks old there are numerous studies showing girls have more developed senses including recognition of sights and sounds. Far too soon for socialistation to have any effect (according to most).

Of course society, education etc have their effects but the brains do not start off the same. They exhibit big differences prenatal - from around 24 weeks.

citation

What is it that worries you so much about accepting there may be innate behavioural and intellectual differences* in the sexes or genders?

This is a genuine question and I'd love an answer.

*I'm not for a second talking about men being more intelligent than women.

After having a child I realised the few female senior staff at my company were those without children and after leaving said company after a battle for flexible working, I basically feel like my career is now doomed.

Oh yeah, I am also 100 times more assertive than my male partner. I have to write assertive emails for him. My mum and sister are very assertive and all my female friends are very assertive.

Ideally there is a chance to pick up a career again, but in practice for many women it's extremely difficult or impossible, because time at home with children is seen by patriarchal society as time the woman spent 'doing nothing' - it counts for nothing, despite being the thing that is forming the next generation of humans.

Why do women accept being treated in this way?

This sort of emotive commentary does no one any service. No one is going to value you raising your children, other than the person who shares them with you.

If you're in any field other than childcare, your years at home with your children represent not only years of not gaining experience, but an atrophy of skills.

The question is not 'why do women accept being treated this way' but rather:

Why are they choosing the fields they do

Why are they choosing men who have no intention of taking paternity leave or helping around the house, much less relocating to accommodate their careers for example

Why are they not back at work after having a baby much sooner - why are they at home with school-aged children

Whey are they so nice and accommodating

And so on. But as you can see, all these questions are provocative and unsociable and strike at the very heart of what we perceive as a woman's choice to sort her life out as she sees fit.

One factor was that male drivers drove faster, so they were able to complete more jobs. Women were more likely to quit after a shorter period of time, so it may be experience. And the social issue of caring responsibilities.

It was really interesting.

freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about-the-gender-pay-gap/

TIRFandProud Sorry previous post wasn't in reply to you btw just a general rambling!

There isn't anything that worries me about there being innate differences, I actually always assumed there were biological differences and was surprised recently when I saw a programme that said there were very few differences and the differences that existed in adult brains were a result of external factors but it seems studies vary a lot.

The programme was really interesting about a primary school class being re-taught gender roles. Can't remember what it was called now, it was on C4.

I loved the Uber article, thanks for posting.

So is it your opinion, RoadToRivendell, that having children is of no value to anyone other than the children's parents?

TIRF - when girls and boys/men and women are treated as large groups lumped in with each other, it is likely that differences will emerge. And that may be interesting to some extent, but it should have no influence whatsoever on how individual men and women are treated by those around them, or on the general treatment that they receive by society. The circumstances in which your gender may have a strong influence on how you're treated, in a positive way, would be in a medical situation - there is a lot of evidence that shows that women display different symptoms to men and require different treatments. Strangely enough though, in that circumstance, where sex does play a key role, it's often totally overlooked and ignored.

Sex differences are too often used as a sort of justification for treating women less well than men. Yes, women in general might be more sociable than men, for example, but if I'm not a sociable person, what other women do is entirely irrelevant and if people expect me to be sociable because of my genitalia they can fuck off.

So is it your opinion, RoadToRivendell, that having children is of no value to anyone other than the children's parents

Since we have no way of verifying which parents will do a good job (or not), and since we have no shortage of humans, and since we're biologically programmed to have children in any case - probably not.

Sorry that should say 'the circumstances in which your sex may be have a strong influence' - given that we're talking biology here, it's sex that makes the difference, not gender.

'Since we have no way of verifying which parents will do a good job (or not), and since we have no shortage of humans, and since we're biologically programmed to have children in any case - probably not.'

That explains a lot actually. I didn't realise people felt that way.

So if continuing the species has no value to society, what does?

I could no longer respect someone who said that. Ugh.

I'm also curious - there is a lot of evidence, say, that people of black African origin have biological differences to people of white caucasian origin - people of African origin tend to be taller, have greater muscle mass, be more prone to certain illnesses etc. In what way should we take those biological differences into account when talking about disparities in how black and white people are hired/progress through companies? Should we look a black person in the face and tell them they didn't get a promotion because black people tend to do/feel X and in that case they should expect their career not to go as well as they'd like?

So if continuing the species has no value to society, what does?

It's not that continuing the species has no value to society, it's more that it falls away because 1. almost everyone does it 2. there's little risk of people not doing it to the point where we'd actually have problems (I don't lump pensions into this, incidentally, and work in job automation so this will certainly colour my perspective).

I'd value something like reducing plastic a lot more, because people actually have to be induced to do it, and relatively few people do it.

What I'm curious about is why it's considered acceptable to point to biological differences to explain why women don't get what they want, when it wouldn't be acceptable to say, for example, that a person with cerebral palsy can't have a desk job that they're fully capable of because generally people with CP don't progress well and therefore they should just suck that up.

@Inseoir we are all of black African origin. All humans descend from a small group of homo sapiens in East Africa.

There is actually only one race, biologically - human race.