Women vs Capitalism - The biology argument

[Blindspot82]

Was reading a book over Christmas called "Women vs. Capitalism" by Vicky Pryce which was very insightful. In her book, she quotes one leading economist as saying that the reason the gender pay-gap is so large is because of biology - the woman's natural choice to give birth and then, raise children which ultimately takes them out of the workplace for significant periods of time. They lose vital workplace skills, don't make the important connections that their male counterparts are making and thus miss out on promotion opportunities/chances to work on big projects that showcase their ability.

I agree with the economist's statement - that the gender pay-gap is related to a question of biology ultimately. But this argument doesn't solve the intrinsic problem, which is that women are generally penalised in the workplace for having children whilst men tend to scoop up the top jobs. The other obvious counter-argument is that yes, women could "choose" not to have children at all. But then the human race would die out. So it doesn't really hold up as a valid reason for such inequality.

In reflection, most workplaces now promote women into high senior roles. But...……..if you go right to the very top, 99% of the time it's a man, or a group of men who hold the leadership accountability.

I can't help feeling that women also feel forced to choose low-paid, less senior jobs after having children because they are in the main, the principal care-giver for their child/children, and the responsibility of motherhood comes first, before all others. Why can't we introduce a basic income to reward the vast quantities of work a woman does in the home, which is currently undervalued? What is it about that full-time job of raising very small children and managing a house that goes unrecognised in financial terms?

The "biology" argument is simply not an excuse to pay women less than men, or to defer finding ways to promote women and utilise their skills and talents in line with men after maternity leave. It just astounds me that we consider ourselves a modern society and yet women are some of the most financially discriminated people within it.

Capitalism relies on new entrants. So, quite, why aren’t those who provide them rewarded?

Place marking, as it's a very interesting question

In a true capitalist society the creators of new (human) capital would be the ones to reap all the rewards. That’s why women were enslaved in the first place - they literally had the essential productive capacity and therefore were kept captive and allowed no rights so that others could appropriate the product of their labour. It’s why historically a woman’s children belonged to her husband. Those are priceless resources and you can’t have women owning them.

Oppressed precisely because of our biology/reproductive ability.

As long as women are doing the work for free, that’s an “efficiency” in Capitalist terms. A capitalist society will never “reward” for the sake of work. It will pay what “the market will bear”.

In capitalism, women must make their unpaid work costly to society. They must be willing to NOT do the valuable work unless properly paid for it.

The biology argument doesn't quite work for me. Women who don't have children get penalised. Some women only take a few months off, in a working life of 50+ years.

It's coupled with a society expectation that they will be prioritising those children in terms of their attention and effort, whereas a man is expected to prioritise his earning capability to support wife and child, so we believe ( subconscious) that the women will work less well and the man better.

I think there is a biological history to it all. War and Out of home work seen as adding value beyond pure survival. But I don't think it justifies where we are today.

Blindspot82, I feel that while people born with ovaries are not exactly the same as people born with testicles, the variations have been greatly exaggerated, especially when used to justify different treatments, so I’m very skeptical about claims that different treatments are largely because of biology. Women have been clearly and overtly discriminated in prior to the 1960s when in some countries, laws were passed to forbid that, although there are counties where that sill happens. In many cases this discrimination was based on supposedly differences in biology. But the biggest argument against this biology justification is that things change. If this discrimination was biological there would be no change. In regard to the wage gap, women made 60.7% of what men made in 1960. This actually decreased to 57.6% in 1966, but then shortly after the Equal Pay Act of 1963 it started to increase until it reached 81.6% in 2018, see here: www.pay-equity.org/info-time.html. Then the Women’s Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate increased from 32.0% in January of 1948 to 57.6% in September of 2019. This figure reached 60.2% in March of 2001 At the same time the Men’s Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate decreased from 86.7% in January of 1948 to 69.3% in November of 2019. The Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate is the percentage of adults in the civilian population who are employed or actively seeking employment. See here fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002, and here fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001. These figures are for the US, but most likely are similar for the UK. If the difference in women’s experiences were solely or primarily due to biological factors there would not be the large changes we see. See the topic “Women in history and an examination of gender norms” here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/feminist_theory/3736953-Women-in-history-and-an-examination-of-gender-norms for more information on this and kindly comment there.

Tom,

I've been trying to read up on Universal Basic Income vs Job Guarantee and I can see the arguments of both sides. I think a combination of both types as part of economic policies will help lots of people currently marginalised in a capitalist society, including women.

Capitalism is useful to a certain extent but is wholly inadequate and inappropriate in terms of addressing bigger socio-economic issues.

The paradigm of 'work' needs to change. There are a lot of socially useful tasks and roles that go unrecognised by capitalism because they aren't directly correlated with profit - such as childrearing or even regularly visiting elderly relatives. But these things contribute to a healthier, stable society in the long-term, that's why you can't put a price tag on them as they are invaluable.

Good health and social care, decent housing, affordable utilities, access to education and training and so on will go a long way to a happy, healthy populace. This should be the priority of any government in any country - to invest in its citizens, its most valuable resource.
Capitalism will then be forced to raise its game because it cannot easily exploit a desperate workforce. Better salaries, better work-life balance, better employment rights - people can demand for improvements when they aren't scrabbling around for the basics.

Society needs to stop being led by the nose by capitalism. It's a tool / structure like any other human invention and needs to be used for our benefit, including recognising when it is inadequate and choosing other tools and structures that are better alternatives.

I do wonder whether earnings are the absolute best/exclusive standard to evaluate the success of one's life. For example, I work with several people who could earn significantly more but have instead chosen to work less hours (which also reduces their ability to advance their career). They're perfectly happy with that and I don't consider them to have been less successful.

I don't really have any doubts that a significant element of women's issues around work have their origins in reproductive status. This has mitigated mainly because we have more control over reproduction, if we didn't, we'd see a much more significant pay and work gap.

I suppose the real question to me is what does this mean? One feminist approach has been to try and "free" women from their biology. In several ways, through access to biological control of reproduction; artificial feeding of infants; through encouraging women to put children in childcare and turn more childcare over to fathers; through policies around discriminating against women in work and also maternity leaves and such.

I'm personally not comfortable with all of these. As far as control of reproduction, it's fine as far as it goes but it seems very contingent to me, dependent upon a certain state of and access to technology. I would prefer a social model that will work and vale women and their bodies even if there is no access to that kind of technology - I can't see a system that values women most when they technologically suppress their biology as ultimately pro-woman.

While I think it's great to have fathers more involved and I would also say stable communities and extended families that can mitigate childcare burdens, I am not so keen on the idea that of course women will (and perhaps should) want to go back to work for pay rather than care for their infants and young children. I don't really think it's for society to tell women they should not want to do that because it's not very valued work, it's not somehow letting down society if a lot of mothers choose to do that. On the contrary I think society is letting down mothers when that isn't possible.
I also have concerns that what is good for children gets swept aside for what is good for capitalists.
I have some interest in the idea of somehow paying mothers, in fact I think that we need to consider that those who are working in the economy without pay now provide considerable social work that is important. I am on the other hand not sure how much I want to extend the cold hand of capitalism to infect more and more elements of human life.

The fact that things have improved somewhat over the years is because of positive steps being taken to make things more equal, Tom; it doesn’t mean that the original reasons for the gender pay gap have nothing to do with women’s biological ability to bear children, and the assumptions that society makes because of this biological ‘role’. One of the big problems is that the modern workplace is still designed to suit the single earner who has a partner at home taking care of all things domestic, even though this isn’t the reality for most couples nowadays.

Surveys carried out in my profession a couple of years ago indicated there was still simple bias. The same CVs with different names M v F were shown to employers. The difference in wages offered was between £1000 and £3000 in favour of men. Additionally, those employers rated the men as more likely candidates for promotion. So it’s not just the direct effect of women’s choices and the impact of childbearing/care. It kicks in before that with the assumptions about those things.

And everything Goosefoot said, also! The essential work of caring that has traditionally been done by women for millennia has been totally undervalued, and it needs to be recognised as the huge contribution to society that it is.

I think what we have to realise with questions like the CV one above, is that patterns we perceive in the group overall will always have an impact on our judgements about what is going to happen in the future. And we have powerful pattern-seeking brains that pick up on even weaker patterns.
If someone has over the years seen that more women will tend to fit their careers around kids compared to men, that will affect how you assess the general chances of a general male candidate vs a female one. Obviously with a specific man or woman they know other factors come into it.
Individuals can recognise that bias and choose not to act on it for reasons of fairness or legal requirements, but I think it's futile to try and stop people from recognising those patterns as long as they exist. If women are more likely to take a career break, telling people that it's not true will just make them think you have an agenda, or are stupid. It might even make them more likely to ignore laws as they believe they were made on a false basis.

the woman's natural choice to give birth and then, raise children which ultimately takes them out of the workplace for significant periods of time.

You can bet your bottom dollar that if enough women suddenly decided that childbirth wasn't a 'natural choice', they would be forcefully persuaded otherwise.

They lose vital workplace skills, don't make the important connections that their male counterparts are making and thus miss out on promotion opportunities/chances to work on big projects that showcase their ability.

I don't think many women lose vital skills by taking a few months off, but it's enough to change their role from equal earner to secondary earner. As others have said on his thread, most well paid jobs still assume that somebody is at home taking care of domestic duties.

I've been trying to read up on Universal Basic Income vs Job Guarantee and I can see the arguments of both sides. I think a combination of both types as part of economic policies will help lots of people currently marginalised in a capitalist society, including women.

Elizabeth Warren is making some interesting noises about this.

There's an interesting US-based UBI account on Twitter.

One of the most privileged things I hear is "who will clean the toilets?" in response to the prospect of UBI giving us the power to refuse to do work we don't want to do. People don't exist to save you from shit. It's your shit. You clean it. Or pay more. Or automate that shit."

50 years after slavery became illegal in the US, some white people decided they didn't like how black women with monthly stipends weren't cooking & cleaning for white people, so they decided refusing employment should be illegal. 100 years later not much has changed. Here's a bit of history for you. Black soldiers' wives in 1918 received monthly stipends. They had the freedom to decide for themselves what work they'd do. White people didn't like that, so they wanted a law that would jail refusers to clean their shit.

twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1077244162083381249

The newspaper item about the proposed enforcement of employment for black women in 1918 is here:

twitter.com/BaelockHolmes/status/1077006002392834053

Great posts, Nonny and Goosefoot. The value of unpaid work doesn't get factored into that be-all and end-all, GDP, with depressing consequences. Not least because GDP is a rubbish metric.

Arran - that's shocking - I hadn't heard that before - but somehow not totally surprising. People don't let go of their privilege lightly, and that doesn't just apply to men.

I'd like to know why Vicky Pryce - a very bright and well connected woman ended up taking the points for her Husband's speeding.

I seem to remember that she argued coercion in court - though not necessarily in those words and I'm not looking to blame her. I am just stuck that she yielded to her Husband on that occasion, and didn't appear to have power. I suspect it's all part of the same syndrome.

Contrast the attitude to women taking time out to produce the next generation, which definitely benefits society, to the attitude to men taking time out to fight in wars or just do training for it, which benefits society if you live in a world of gangster-nations without planetary rule of law.

Men: heroes, get paid, get points in employment, etc etc etc.

Women: all they want to do is have kids and "not work."

Pregnancy and childbirth: physically very demanding, significant frequency of long term injury or consequences, fatalities happen.

Training for war: physically somewhat demanding. Minute chances of injury or fatality. Actual war: physically very demanding, significant frequency of long term injury or consequences, fatalities happen.

So here's my suggestion to even out the situation: UBI could help. But pay it out only to women for the first two or three generations, until people get it through their thick skulls that what women do is extraordinarily valuable.

Ultimately I think that the solution has to be to begin a sort of withdrawal of capitalism, and a control and limiting of it, from more areas of life. Not just for this but for all kinds of reasons - the capitalisation of information (people's personal data, or genetic information) would be another area I think this needs to happen.

UBI seems to me more like a capitulation, and that worries me a little.

UBI could help. But pay it out only to women for the first two or three generations

While I'd find it challenging to refuse free money with no strings attached, I'd also find it hard to honestly claim I deserved it simply because of my chromosomes (I've never had children). If it were made contingent on having children, we already have that in the form of tax credits and, for those who need it, welfare and, better still, these are based upon who actually provides support for a child at the time (encouraging men to take part in the raising of their child).

withdrawal of capitalism, and a control and limiting of it, from more areas of life

What form would this withdrawal take and what would replace it? I'm particularly interested in how its replacement would govern private property and the production/distribution of products.

I think I have traded pay and a promotion for flexibility. I know I could have earnt more, increased my skills, and be promoted in the next couple of years if I hadn't had a baby so in a way I have been penalised BUT in my current role I can have time off at short notice and work the hours I want so for me there has been give and take with my employer.
So I guess my point is sometimes there is a quid pro quo in the workplace and not everything can be inferred from statistics

So biology is real after all? Who knew?!

I don't think this economist is saying anything new.

It's not so much biology itself that stops women progressing as the socio-economic patriarchal setup that's grown up around it. It's quite easy to conceive of a system whereby this inequality is levelled out in various ways. Achieving it is another matter entirely.

I can't see a system that values women most when they technologically suppress their biology as ultimately pro-woman

Totally agree.....and aligned to that is the pressing need for humanity to re-prioritise for the sake of the planet, humanity and the other living creatures with which we share the earth. We need to be closer to nature; more aligned with natural rhythms...not further away or far removed via technology.

More localism, more self sufficiency where possible.....Globalisation has come at a great cost and that certainly includes the globalisation of capital too.

I'm not so sure I agree with Pryce's economist's assertion that the problem is women taking time out of the workplace.

I've known a number of men who spent their 20s and 30s messing about, doing bugger all, only to then jump into jobs and find themselves earning six figures in their late 40s. The key for them seems to have been an ability to be geographically mobile.

So I suspect the issue is far more nuanced than just "these women opted out of the workplace". I reckon it probably has more to do with time and location flexibility once they try to re-enter the world of work.

But, of course, I maybe wrong.