A flagrant lie.

A flagrant lie.

What evidence do you have that the 5-8% gap is not due to discrimination? Because the 5-8% gap accounts for all, and yes, I mean all, reasonable explanations for the gap, and 5-8% is what's left over unexplained by those things. So, even if it's not strictly discrimination, it's something unreasonable, and women should not be subjected to that unreasonable disparity, no matter if you think that alien mind waves are a better explanation than discrimination.

And to reiterate, the 5-8% gap is not the entirety of the injustice. It is not just that women are conditioned or pushed into career paths that pay less and that they bear the bulk of the burden of child rearing well beyond biological necessity as well as non-child domestic chores, even if it is reasonable to think that the reason why women make about 75% as much as men has a lot to do with career choice and needing to take time out of the workforce for kids.

5% difference per annum is not significant? Try telling that to Wall Street. They'd kill for that kind of return.

Well named's wording wasn't very precise there. The study found that the total gap is 20% and that just over 60% of that gap can be explained by the various factors you have mentioned frequently (motherhood, choice of profession etc) and not directly due to discrimination but the rest of the gap can't be explained by those factors. Well named took a reasonable estimate of around half of that unexplainable gap being directly due to discrimination - meaning around 20% of the gap would be directly caused by discrimination, which works out to be a gap of 4-5% due to discrimination, not 4-5% of the total gap.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Do you think the study is not applicable to first world countries or that a 5% gap in pay is not significant in first world countries? If the former, why would you think that when basically every study on the subject is done in first world countries? If the latter then were you assuming that you don't work in a first world country when you answered that "of course" taking a 5% pay cut would be significant?

Correct. Thanks for clarifying for me.

Also, to itsinhot: those numbers aren't assumptions exactly, they are based on the tables from the study I linked, which analyzes data from PSID. I'm not sure why you're saying no one has linked any studies. One reason I linked the NBER article is also that it has a very detailed literature review, which means it provides citations for many articles. For someone who wants to learn more about what research exists on this topic the literature review is probably more useful than the study itself.

Also, I focused narrowly on discrimination in some legal sense because it's at least very concrete and conceptually simple, even if it's not trivial to try to get a statistical measure of. And also because of my (mis)understanding of itshotinvegas' views about gender-related "obstacles" (not to rehash all of that). But if we're just thinking about "obstacles" related to gender in a broad sense then discrimination is certainly not the beginning and end of that conversation.

Another area of interest (IMO) is the motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus. I'm not worried here about measuring exact extents of these, and to be clear again I'm not proposing any sort of public policy change either. But I think the co-existence of these two phenomena illustrate how cultural scripts and beliefs about gender shape outcomes, which is interesting to think about at least. In this case, it's our gendered assumptions about how parenthood relates to productivity.

I'm not going to look for citations right now, but as an anecdote I recall having an interesting conversation with a sociologist who specializes in gender at a conference, and she connected to the motherhood penalty/fatherhood bonus back to the post-WWII cultural shift in the 50s, with the reassertion of traditional gender roles following women's expansion in the labor force during the war. In a nutshell, the assumption that mothers will be less productive because they must be focused on childcare is part of that cultural script. But so is the fatherhood bonus, it involves the cultural expectation that the married man will be the primary breadwinner and so of course a man with children "needs" to earn more to care for his family. Beyond any of the politics, I think it's interesting at least to think about how culture shapes the economics, with residual effects long after the norms themselves seem antiquated.

WN,

I love you, but this is a giant blind spot that ignores biology and pretty much all of natural history IMO. You do understand, that mothers have literally been the only food source for young children for all of mammalian history? You dont think that is a clue that the "childhood focus" might have roots that go a lot further back than our culture.

Also, I find the whole "motherhood penalty" narrative extremely disturbing. If capitalism was a monster that had a consciousness, that sounds like exactly what it would say, to culturally pressure women to make the pursuit of capital gains their primary modus in life, and to sacrifice their children for the machine.

Why aren't we talking about fatherhood penalty of missing most of their children's lives because they are out working? I think we should all think real closely at what values we are prioritizing by this loaded language, and what master we are serving. I think any conscientious leftist should be a little disturbed that the "left" of today (which is a false left IMO) is inducing plebes becoming slaves to the capitalist machine.

right on que

well when we were cave dwellers...

careful of destroying society by letting women participate in capitalism...

whatabout the father penalty...

Seems like an appropriate place to point out that Gloria Steinem is admitted CIA and this is basically exactly what "capitalism" did.

Interesting, but it didn't pressure men to sacrifice their children?

Hahahahhahaha, oh boy, here we go again. Let's see which from the giant cache of prejudices gets pseudo-scientific justification this time.
Do you even know without googling it what is the current recommended age for when children can be given solid food, and how much time the average woman spends out of the work force for each child?

LOL, I don't believe you for one second.

Ah yes, why doesn't someone think of the poor fathers who have monetarily, socially, and intellectually rewarding careers while shirking any semblance of a fair split of domestic responsibilities (even the non-milk-producing ones) on average, even when their wives work?

Liberals actually have a ton of ideas about increasing paternal involvement. If you spent a moment or two not arguing against them, you might be distinguishable from an MRA.

I'd say the same children of the women are also the children of the men.

Kelhus:

a) I'm not ignoring biology. You shouldn't expect every single post to be comprehensive. I'm verbose enough as it is.

b) One of the interesting things about the motherhood penalty is that it's larger than it would be if it were only a penalty for having less work experience as a result of leaving the workforce for a period of time (i.e. maternity leave). It doesn't reduce to a human capital difference. Women nursing infants does not explain this phenomenon (nor of course is there anything wrong with maternity leave.)

c) I think you're committing the naturalistic fallacy in an interesting way, particularly in relation to pairing the motherhood penalty with the fatherhood bonus. There's no biological explanation for why we pay men more for being parents: again it is not explainable by human capital differences. We could also choose to economically reward women for contributing to the reproduction of the labor force (as a Marxist might describe it :P) in exactly the same way that we reward men for their part in doing so. Given your prior concerns about birthrates, it might even be something you'd like to support.

In general, it seems short-sighted to me for people to rely on narrowly constructed economic productivity arguments in this context, or to focus on biology leading to natural differences while ignoring all of the social context related to those real differences. Presumably, it makes some social sense to incentivize child-rearing and involved parenting. Not economically penalizing people who take parental leave makes sense as part of that, and biology is not preventing anyone from doing so.

In prehistoric times all indications are that children weren't fully weaned until 2.5-7 years of age. Even though 99% of historic times, including much of the developing world today, children weren't weaned until much later. The whole idea that women's bodies shouldn't be a vital source of nutrition for the first several years of their children's life is an extremely recent cultural adaptation.

All indications are through the vast majority of our natural history, women were not only the primary food source, but also the primary caregiver of their own children. That isn't to say they didn't "work," but the work they did for the most part they did while they were watching their children.

The whole concept that you should pay non-kin to take care of your children so you can go produce capital is a very recent, cultural, bizarre notion. I know inside the narrative it makes sense, but looking at how every other mammalian species, including our own for the vast majority of our natural history works, it is extremely bizarre.

Like, the disconnect I'm having with the latter half of your post is that you seem to be interpreting talk about the "motherhood penalty" as implying support for women not having children.

That seems entirely backwards. People who bring up the motherhood penalty generally think it's a bad thing, and that it would be preferable for women (and men too) not to face a penalty for having children. It's the existence of the penalty which disincentivizes parenthood. That's rather the point. The same is true for more general feminist complaints that our culture and economic system insufficiently recognize the economic value of domestic labor.

The notion of monetarily compensated care for children is new, sure, but collective care for children is very, very old, much older than the invention of the nuclear family. Also, if you think we should look at arbitrary mammalian societies for how to organize our own, you're going to find some very uncomfortable examples in short order.

Sure there is. It is because 5 billion years of biology dictates that a small % of males are always going to have an "advantage" if you are playing the "capitalism" game (where the winners are decided to be the people who have generated the most capital for themselves). I actually think even if children were not involved a small % of males would still be the overwhelming majority of "winners" in a free society for mainly biological reasons.

And it would take a tremendous amount of societally imposed tyranny to achieve any sort of equity along these grounds. And the juice will definitely not be worth the squeeze IMO.

Can you spell out the "advantage" you're mentioning? Maybe describe the tremendous amount of societally imposed tyranny as well?

Why look at arbitrary mammalian societies. You are the geneticist. Why don't we do it based on genetic kinship to us. How many millions of years do you have to go back to find a common ancestor to a single mammal that doesn't follow the basic natural human history outline I just gave, where the mother wasn't the primary food source and caregiver for their children during early childhood?

And if you are trying to refute my argument by pointing out that in human (among other primates) natural history there has often been kinship groups where women briefly had other related females watch their children (while they still did the vast majority of childcare themselves) all you have done is reinforce my argument IMO.

every other mammalian species

I actually dont think it is even possible for our species. I think society would collapse and there would be a rebellion if you tried to order a society where men and women had equitable contribution to the labor force and equitable compensation.

It is too unnatural to how our species and capitalism functions.

I think the best we can hope for is to have a relative modicum of equality of opportunity, and realize that this is going to lead to a society that doesn't look much different than the one we have today as far as gender norms go.

What even are the positions that people hold here? Everyone agrees that some amount of discrimination exists while it's an argument about degrees and the liberals thinking it's mostly artificial and Kehlus/conservatives thinking it's mostly natural? Somebody should explain this whole debate to me like I've never heard it before which is mostly true.

The "costs" of having the large non-motile egg versus the small, mobile sperm are as old as sexual reproduction itself. I don't think anyone here seems to have a very good appreciation for how far back this all goes.

Ironically, from a natural perspective it would probably be easier to argue that males get the short stick, as on average in every species of animals a much larger % of females than males get to reproduce and carry on their genes to the next generation (in humans the ratio seems to be 2:1 naturally, which is actually fairly equitable as far as these things tend to go).

The whole concept that being biologically designed to be the sex that is guaranteed higher reproductive success is a "cost" is very bizarre and backwards from a natural perspective. I dont think there is very much appreciation for how much the neoliberal capitalist machine has twisted our value system towards its own ends.

Can your opinion on all this be changed Kelhus?

Seems like you're pretty set and everything proves your viewpoint, one way or the other. (Don't bring up other people please.)

The way I see it is we are trying to blame modern human culture to explain phenomenon that have been around for ~1 billion years or so and are pretty ubiquitous for the vast majority of lifeforms (that is how long sexual reproduction has been around according to wikipedia).

For all our human exceptionalism that we take for granted, we are actually an extremely predictable, boring species when it comes to our life histories and gender norms. Given the theoretical potential for culture to really mix things up, I think it is actually amazing how narrow and predictable human societies really are; and this underscores how constrained we are by our biology.

Can you refute my arguments at all? Can you argue against the theory why in a sexual reproducing species the sex that produces a small number of large, relatively valuable eggs is going to bear more "costs" of childcare compared to the sex that has a very large number of cheap, motile sperm?

Workplace discrimination is just the way things have always been, folks.