So where does it go wrong for women?

[Falalalafishfingers]

I'm sure this has been asked a 1009 times!
Read so many times in threads that it makes more sense for woman to give up work/ cut hours as dh/dp earns so much more. This suggests that men are already earning more pre-children?
So where does it go wrong? My guess is university.

For me it's just good old sexism. DH and I have exactly same qualifications and experience entering the job market. Achieved the same things in similar companies. Then we were both offered the same role at the same organisation (more than one role going). He was offered £10k more. No explanation given. Hr didn't want to hear about it. So off he flew, now he's a senior manager and that means it would never make sense for him to take any parental leave, because why drop the higher salary? And so slowly the work at home falls to me, which makes it harder for me to perform well at work.

There are thousands of women who actually want to stop working for several years to raise their children. It’s their choice. Two of the younger women I work with long for the day they have a baby with their partners and give up work.

@bestguesstimate
But that would have been your fathers shit behaviour. Not his job. That's your mother accepting shit behaviour.
What a sad reason not to have children.
You're not your parents. Cycles can be broken

The “norm” is for women to take a year’s maternity leave. Multiply that by two kids and she’s two years behind the men. Then it’s also normal to go part time which again delays progression.
I am the higher earner and we decided that I would only take 2 months’ mat leave for first baby and 3 for the second and to go back full time afterwards. I received a TON of judgement for making this decision, mostly from other women. (There was even a thread today asking what people silently judged about others and one poster said patents of babies in full time childcare at 3 months... yep that would be me.)

I think for many women they realise after having children that they now really do 'have it all' - namely 2 jobs - work and children. My observation, and I know NAMALT, many men just do not step up after children, in fact they step down. Once a woman has time at home on maternity leave they think they should 'do it all' and then when they go back they expect them to continue doing it all. An easy excuse is that the women by that are earning less. Society is too fixated on someones worth being calculated by how much they earn, until this changes we're going nowhere.

@Lifeisabeach09

And not figuring out what I wanted to do career-wise before I went to university.

But you can change your career. What you decide at 18 does not have to be the rest of your life.

Most women I know start on the same footing as their male partners. But even if they don't have children the gender pay gap exists (see e.g. law)

Do you have some data that shows the pay gap for childless women?

The following article say "The gender wage gap is really a child care penalty." Women who have children take a hit, women who don't, do not. Men are OK either way.

www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-childcare-penalty

I really like that viewpoint millieEpple

I earn more than DH, before having DC the plan was that I would return to work full time and he would be a SAHD. However once DC1 arrived I realised I didn’t want to miss out on so much of their early years. So we both went part time, 5 years on and neither DH nor I have had a promotion.

So our income is less than if I had returned full time and climbed the career ladder, however I remind myself that wages are compensation for the time you sacrifice, and at that point in our lives the time spent together with our infant children was worth more than the compensation of our wages.

Maybe (ok, definitely!) we will never make it into the high earner bracket now, and maybe we will regret it, but all I know is when DC1 arrived my priorities shifted. Luckily so did DHs.

The gender pay gap is a bit of a red herring. It's equal pay that's the issue. Performing just as well as men in the same role and still getting paid significantly less.

OH and I have similar education & work in same sector (2:1 degrees in maths/law, qualified as accountants at similar age). He’s in practice doing audit/tax. I’ve always worked in industry and currently do a mix of accounting and IT. I’m 2 1/2 years older and currently earn more than him. We have crossed back and forth but generally earned similar amounts and I’ve been on a bit more most of the time.
In my personal experience what has made a difference for me not losing out overly
I went back to work after 6 months after first child and 8 after second and used keeping in touch days to stay up to date with what was going on at work
OH & I both went part time briefly when we had 2 pre school kids to help our work/life balance (4 days a week each) and only for about a year. During that year if one of us needed to work our usual day off the other took holiday.
OH covered most of the kids sick days between maternity leaves and first 6 months after I went back. In his words I haven’t just been off for months so no ones busy thinking I’m not invested at work and besides everyone thinks it’s so awesome I want to look after the kids where for you there are definitely people who are more likely to think it’s a negative.
On the flip side neither of us earn as much individually as we could (& likely would) have had we not taken any time out/adjusted for a good work/life balance. We’ve both deliberately chosen employers with family friendly policies. In my case I stayed somewhere I knew I wasn’t earning as much as I would elsewhere due to excellent paid maternity, flexible working policies & the fact I’d worked there 10 years and built up a good reputation with lots of management so felt I’d do better there long term than somewhere I had less equity. In OHs case he left somewhere he got huge bonuses to go somewhere without one but with lots of flexible working options.
Overall as a family we are probably better off with what we’ve done than one of us having got a higher paid job and the other one taking time out. I feel like it’s more secure as one of us could lose our job and we’d still be able to pay the mortgage and it’s definitely more tax efficient. I’m always surprised more people don’t take a similar approach.

@wonderup

I thought young women out earned men now

Oh if only...

@Phineyj

The stats show clearly that the gender gap only emerges when children come along. There have been a lot of threads speculating about the causes.

It depends on your age. For those not so young now, there would have been a gender pay gap when they were younger and meeting men.

@2021vision

I think for many women they realise after having children that they now really do 'have it all' - namely 2 jobs - work and children. My observation, and I know NAMALT, many men just do not step up after children, in fact they step down. Once a woman has time at home on maternity leave they think they should 'do it all' and then when they go back they expect them to continue doing it all. An easy excuse is that the women by that are earning less. Society is too fixated on someones worth being calculated by how much they earn, until this changes we're going nowhere.

I would say three jobs - work, children and managing the household

There are still weird ideas about status.

Plenty of women wouldn’t dream of dating someone younger, shorter, less established or who earned less.

There are also plenty of women still raised with the expectation that they won’t need to be responsible for themselves financially for their entire lives.

"This would all be solved if women wanted to date low-earning men and were willing to work full-time after maternity leave."

In my social group I've only known one man who earned less than me! He worked in a call centre. All the other men worked more.
The type of work men are oriented towards tends to pay better.

I think some women just want to stay at home. I’m a lone parent so don’t really have a choice, but honestly I wanted to go back to work and couldn’t imagine not going back full time. That being said I am a teacher so so get a lot of holidays which I think balances it out. I love my job though and I love the independence and financial security it gives me. My boyfriend earns less than me but will probably out-earn me in the long run given his field. I still wouldn’t give up my job as I love it, enjoy not having baby brain, it will provide us with a much more comfortable income if we’re both working well-paid jobs and because I know that being an independent woman with a mind (and not just a housewife) is partly what my boyfriend finds attractive about me. I don’t mean by this that I do everything for his desire, but I’m happier working and thus I can see why he finds me more attractive as a result.

"I think it starts during careers advice in secondary school. Yes, there was a lot of "women can do STEM too" stuff, but one (1990s) the girls were told to "be anything you want to be" and "follow your passions" and "if you do a job you love you never work a day in your life", "consider your future work-life balance" whereas the boys were just told/absorbed "get the highest pay you can"."

We were told (girls AND boys) that 60% of graduate jobs go to graduates in any subject. I kind of suspected at the time that it didn't make sense...

Girls therefore grow up with a desire to please, not to be bold. And you've got to be bold to get on in a career.

Socialisation may not be the route cause of male boldness. I've read that males of many species are greater risk-takers than females, and that this makes evolutionary sense, because males are much more expendable. A male can produce far more offspring than a female, therefore a population will recover far more easily from the loss of a large proportion of the males, than a large proportion of the females. Men are the warriors and explorers because they are stronger than women, they are stronger than women because they are expendable as warriors and explorers. They have evolved to do the dangerous jobs because they are more expendable.

Correction: "Men are not the warriors and explorers because they are stronger than women"

RandomLondoner - is exploring warrior part of the average office role?

Dh and i earned nearly the same when we left college

He left a year earlier than me

He joined an accountancy firm and did exams and got promotions

I went to work in banks, then insurance companies i didnt do the exams, my final job pre children was in a company where i had already taken a pay cut to go to a department i preferred and when i got pregnant i didnt get the promotion i was due

By the time i got pregnant dh was on about 10k more than me and by the time ds1 was born he was on double my wages

Must be the part time working I think.

I had a really nice antenatal group with a mix of women from different professions: bank manager assistant at our local branch, assistant manager at a nursery, nurse, architect, solicitor. All but one went back part time

Imposter syndrome tends to be more common in women and I think it really hinders career progression. I work in an all-women team and they're a talented bunch but we (and I include myself) all really struggle with self-doubt! I'm sure with some confidence and belief in our abilities we'd be miles ahead in our careers.

Sex (not gender) and children. Either because you have children, or society expects you to have them.

I love my kids. Wouldn't be without them. But I am fully aware that having them, the maternity leave, the part time, has massively limited my career.

I didn't appreciate quite how sexist society is until I was pregnant with our eldest.

There's a manifesto called insuring women's futures, a group of people involved in insurance and financial services completed research with the aim to improve women's financial resilience and some of the root causes of the pension deficit. They've highlighted 12 perils and pitfalls in women's lives that can affect their financial resilience, starting with a the apprenticeship pay gap, where young women are paid less than young men for apprenticeships. It's well worth a read