Gender pay gap

[FlyTipper]

The world divides into two: those who believe a gender pay gap exists, and those who don't.

Those who don't say women are doing different jobs. They are working part-time, prioritising home/family, do not want the high level responsibility and work load associated with high profile jobs. Thus women choose lower paid jobs because they prefer the conditions.

Those who believe it exists say two people presenting the same show or headlining the same film should be paid the same but clearly are not.

My position: women do different work and this largely explains the observed pay gap. But where the world is set up for men to succeed, women have to pick up the 'crumbs' they can. SO the pay gap doesn't truly exist, but that isn't because of women's choice.

As befits my character, I like to have my views tested. DO you agree?

"If the pay gap is the difference on average between lifetime earnings of men/women. Then clearly all other things being equal then taking 1-2 years out of your career is going to reduce your lifetime earnings vs someone who doesn't."

Your lifetime earnings, but not your salary and not your career progression. If you have worked 20 or 22 years, you should really be in the same position and not so far behind just because you had 1-2 years out because of children. Even if theoretically there was a measurable detriment let's say, then imo it would still be a 'morally' right decision to not penalize women for it. We would be nowhere as a species without offspring.

Sorry but I think you are trying to equate "gender pay gap" with lifetime earnings and that's a different issue.

Here:

(5 min video where he talks about agreeableness).

"Large organizations run on the unheralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness and they are disproportionately women..... If you wanna hire someone to exploit...productively, you hire middle-aged women who are hyper conscientious and who are agreeable, because they'll do everything, they won't take credit for and they won't complain. And that's nasty. And I think that happens all the time".

Take from that what you want.

Here he talks more about what agreeableness actually is:

@mrghardy "Sorry but I think you are trying to equate "gender pay gap" with lifetime earnings and that's a different issue."

"The gender pay gap is the difference in the average hourly wage of all men and women across a workforce." gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/public/assets/pdf/gender-pay-gap-explained.pdf

You also said: "Women earn more in their 20s than men. By the mid 30s it's the other way round."

So if women earn more in 20s, then less in 30s and for rest of their career, then clearly on average over the course of their careers they earn less, so no, it is not a different issue.

Women earn less than men on average over their entire career - it is an earnings gap

"Your lifetime earnings, but not your salary and not your career progression."

Please read my example again. I never said anything about Brother B getting pay rises or promotions whilst Brother A was travelling.

So I'll ask again, clarifying this time, their salary and job remains equal throughout their career, even though Brother A took 2 years off to go travelling

Brother B has +2 years of salary and pension contributions. He's earned more than Brother A, is that fair? Of course it is

"If you have worked 20 or 22 years, you should really be in the same position and not so far behind just because you had 1-2 years out because of children"

Most women have children in their twenties and thirties, which does not = 20 or 22 years of work experience.

How do you control random events that might occur in those 1-2 years whilst a female colleague is on maternity leave - like her manager leaving for another job and thus his/her position becoming vacant, and the job going to a man who wasn't on maternity leave?

It's fairly infuriating that women discussing the gender pay gap end up with a thread dominated by men, policing who says what. But crack on.

who is policing what? I'm just reminding PP that despite her reporting my posts yesterday she's the only one that had posts removed.

What does that tell you?

That the post broke talk guidelines. I remember why.

ok so MNHQ felt the need to police her posts, not me, nor mine.

Yes, they did, they're good like that if you report posts that break talk guidelines.

I am learning to love fmsfms, she has talked in another thread (not stalking, I was invited by fmsfms) about her personal history in a way that is very open and honest and this openness is usually given a lot of respect here on feminist chat. fmsfms has shared something that is triggering my empathy, despite my male socialisation. If that's confusing anyone I am female, but have spent my entire life immersed in male socialisation, it rubs on.

anyway:
If you wanna hire someone to exploit...productively, you hire middle-aged women who are hyper conscientious and who are agreeable, because they'll do everything, they won't take credit for and they won't complain. And that's nasty. And I think that happens all the time".

I think the age cohort regression analysis will show a change in this dimension.

I'm late middle age and do not fit this profile, the opposite in fact, I mean 70's punk women are now late middle age.

I have no reason to please any fucker and I have every reason to shout my mouth off as intelligently as my years have educated me to do. Beware.

@Picassospaintbrush I think you're right! That quote about middle-aged women was possibly more accurate in the past...or for mothers in their 30s or 40s who feel unable to leave their (perhaps flexible and/or part-time) job that works well for the family, but less well for them personally, so they don't want to rock the boat.

Someone at my work has been part-time since her daughter was born (5+ years ago), and despite official policy encouraging managers to put everyone forward for promotion once they've been in a role for a certain amount of time, those working part-time seem to have to fight for it, and still are denied year after year...she has now given up trying.

Also, I'm sure it's been said before, but it seems like especially from what I've read of that facilitated man thread helpfully linked earlier the child-related issue for women often starts with the firstborn (after taking up to 12 months off for maternity leave, during which time their partner is still working, may be on track for promotion, etc.) and then if a second child arrives, it becomes much harder financially (or even impossible logistically) for the family to make it work...and by then, the mother's career may be stagnating or she's earning less than the father, so the logical choice for the family is for her to give up work to avoid those childcare costs altogether, or at least go part-time for a few years, and the father's salary and career becomes more important to the family, with the pressures that brings.

If people only had one child, maybe it would match up better with the saving up to take 1-2 years off travelling scenario (assuming that the parents can afford high quality childcare for 10+ hours per day with their combined salaries once they both go back to work full-time...), but it's not really the same situation.

And even if it were, this mother penalty apparently only accounts for around 20% of the pay gap (not sure how they determined that though -- I still need to read that paper I linked to earlier)...

But I suspect young women and men do, to some extent, make early career-related decisions with these 'traditional' roles subconsciously in mind -- well before they think about having kids or getting married.

P.S. I'm still interested in the approaches companies are taking to combat this, if you can share.

I cant help noticing that the men posting on this thread

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3249615-to-think-he-should-pay-on-first-date

havent posted on this one Funny that!

It’s none of my buisness how other people’s dating goes! If she can get men to buy her dinners then more power to her. Personally I find it’s a great way from separating those women who view men in a certain way as walking atm machines and those who have a genuine interest to build something substantive. Best to read the signs and get out early!

This is only going to get resolved when couples naturally choose to fully share parental leave 50:50. The whole system needs to be reformed to make this feasible and attractive. I would suggest that the total should be 16 months so long as each partner uses at least 4 months of the leave whilst the other partner is working at least 0.75fte. Additional clauses would be needed to make sure that self-employed and people in more unusual employment scenarios are also covered.

If men are just as likely to have a childcare career gap then that will obviously help the gender pay gap. Women will be back at work quicker and will have less skills-rust to deal with.

I think fathers having a significant chunk of solo SAH parenting is incredibly good for the kids and for the dad-kid bond. All the threads about women taking all the emotional load for the household and men not thinking about either the nitty gritty details or the big picture but just carrying out specific named tasks - that doesn't happen in our house and I attribute it in part to the fact that dh did take some of "my" leave (only 3 months) and was fully in charge for that. I wasn't his "boss" giving him detailed instructions of how and what and where and when.

I think the only hope is to bring up the next generation with an expectation that obviously people of both sexes should do their fair share of all kinds of jobs - involve our sons in domestic tasks as soon as they can wield a hoover hose; involve our daughters in diy and car maintenance too - and on both cases whether or not they are interested or any good at it because adults step up and do what needs doing, sharing both the fun and the unattractive tasks fairly between everyone.

Achieving this is directly required for evolving a work culture where there are no sex-based differences for how parenthood affects careers. There probably would be a 'parental pay gap' but it would be evenly distributed between men and women.

"I cant help noticing that the men posting on this thread

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3249615-to-think-he-should-pay-on-first-date

havent posted on this one Funny that!"

What? That thread is in AIBU not FWR, and you are wondering why we didn't post in it? Come on...

fms

I still disagree. Lifetime earnings is simply a consequence of your yearly salaries. There might be overlaps with lifetime earnings in the sense that the same event (child) can drive both, but it is not the same thing and the solutions for it are not the same.

In fact, what you are talking about is just as important a topic, but still different. Yes, if you lost work years because of children, you will earn less in your life - that translates into less savings and a lower pension. Again I believe the government has an obligation to mitigate this and help women who have had children. But it's not the same issue, because you could address one but not the other. You could have it so that the mother goes back to work and her career and salary continue as she had never left (data shows the top 5%, or some other number, I don't remember exactly, of female earners benefit from being a mother, everyone else loses out, while men generally benefit or at least don't lose out). Still doesn't mean that she will ever catch up on the lost 2 years say.

@mrghardy "I still disagree."

Go do some more reading on the subject then, if women are paid less than men then they earn less than men.

This is so blindingly obvious

Imchilbob very well written post, but how do you correct for the choice that us men have to forestall having kids until we are at the top of the career ladder? If as a man I have ambition and don’t want to suffer a career gap I am at liberty to do so and have kids much later? That fact alone will still stack the top ends of any organisation in favour of males. We don’t have the same biological pressures.

Otherwise I agree 100% with you on the importance of the dad-child bond, but how exactly do you incentivise those who don’t prioritise parenthood?

"This is only going to get resolved when couples naturally choose to fully share parental leave 50:50."

This is the fallacy of striving for equity of outcome, the idea that we can get to a point where parental leave is taken in equal measure by the sexes is absurd

As Peterson has said you can only accomplish equal outcomes through pressure and tyranny, e.g. Mandating that the leave MUST be taken even if people don't want to

Aren't there statistics that show that the number of men that don't reproduce has been lower than the number of women throughout history?

There will always be greater number of single men that are prepared to pursue their careers ahead of everything else.

It's a shame that the interesting voices on this thread about the causes, potential solutions, and conflicts thereof, the pay gaps between the sexes have been drowned out on this thread by aggressive, arrogant sealioning. Would have been a great thread, otherwise.

fmsfms gun to my head and force me to choose liberty or equality I’d choose liberty, but that does NOT mean equality where possible is anyway a bad thing. The contraceptive pill and reproductive rights have allowed women a hitherto unequalled access to all aspects of society. Maybe a future biological innovation to reverse aging or push back the menopause might close some of these gaps further.

To just throw your hands up and say “‘twas ever thus.” Doesn’t take into account the human ability to innovate the crap out of things. I refuse to accept things cannot be improved.

Broadly speaking you’re right in that 80% of women through human history have passed on their genes relative to 20% of men, but I’ve done a casual pass across the data and in modern economies the disparity is only a few percent. It’s disingenuous to extrapolate from a historical trend that hasn’t be translated into a modern context. If you have data that contradicts it I’m all ears, but I couldn’t find it.

www.aviva.com/newsroom/news-releases/2017/11/Aviva-announces-equal-paid-parental-leave/

This is a new trend in the City , its increasingly the case in the USA too.

The world divides into two: those who believe a gender pay gap exists, and those who don't.

I don't think this is true. My experience is people are disputing what the figure is showing. In the UK we are at the early stages of actually examining the meaning of this statistic. It took about two years to determining what the calculation should be, I was involved in the consultation and have done a number of projects on this.

It was understood that it is an imperfect measurement. Any single figure measure always will be.

Typically the pay research business does is paid for consulting and is kept confidential. I will think of ways we can be more open, plus I am very interested in business/education partnerships on this, I am going to talk to some people over the next few weeks on some ideas.

@SonicVersusGynaephobia

Who is doing that?

fms

You completely fail to see the point.