By choice.



First of all, parental leave is not "rare in America." It is in fact extremely common.

Secondly, women are not offered lower pay owing to a preemptive assumption that they are going to abandon their jobs for a year and raise a child. They are compensated fairly according to their skillset. If they take a year off and spend it raising a child rather than building their skillset (as their childless coworkers are doing), then or course, they are going to fall behind their work-dedicated co-workers. What's the alternative? Hold the childless go-getters back, to keep them on par with their child-bearing cohorts? Let's be fair here.

They're going to miss out on some raises that their co-workers - who didn't take a year off and were instead working hard and building their skillset and advancing their careers - will get. That is simply something they willingly forfeit in choosing children over their career. It is a choice.



This is pretty absurd, in my opinion, and is not worth further consideration.



Surely you're joking.

Say you've got a couple where the man works 60 hours a week, bringing home $100k/year. The woman stays home, tending the household, buying groceries, and keeping the family running. A few years later, she realizes the marriage isn't working out, and she files for divorce.

She gets half his money, and he gets ... the other half.

Tell me how that is more devastating to the woman than the man?

Family courts are extremely heavily biased in favour of the woman, not the man. Not only will the man lose half (or more) of everything he's earned while married to her, he will no doubt have to continue providing support to the poor, helpless woman for several years, even after the divorce. Because, of course, the assumption is that a woman is utterly incapable of providing for herself on her own, so it's only fair that a former spouse continue providing for her for several years after their union is terminated, right?



This is nonsense. Again, not worth any further attention. I'd invite you to spend a week living with my wife and I.



Wow.

This situation is completely irrelevant to the vast, vast majority of GRS readers. Thus, why would J.D. devote time to an issue that is completely irrelevant to 99% of his readers?

You seem to have read this completely differently to the way that I read it. I assumed that Theatrechick was pointing out the need for blogs like Queercents precisely because minority groups may have different financial issues and pressures to *99%* of GRS readers.

Similarly, there is an audience for personal finance information that takes into account the different choices and lives that women often lead (compared to men). Approximately half the population are women, you would expect that there would be both a significant audience and material to fulfil this need. I think that one of the issues is that the majority of bloggers are younger, and many of the typical gender-specific financial issues that women face don't arise until later in their lives. This is of course conjecture.

My own personal finance blog, is naturally informed by my status as a single woman in my twenties. I could easily (and would be happy to) be described as feminist. I'm not sure that it's quite what the OP is looking for, because I don't have many financial issues that are distinct from single men in their twenties.

The rest of kombat's post is interesting. I could have sworn I'd read research that said that on average in couples women spend more hours per week on housework than men. Perhaps, I was mistaken.

I hope that he is right, that childless women are no longer penalised in the workforce, because that's how I plan to remain. I do think that it certainly used to be an issue some years ago. If that's changed so much for the better.

The financial implications of childbearing are significant - women who have children are likely to spend more time out of the workforce than man who have children (even if it's only for a couple of months at a time). I'm imagining that a good feminist personal finance blog would seek to provide suggestions on how these financial implications could be mitigated.

I addressed the whole child-bearing thing here in this post via my economist perspective.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/forum/view ... ght=#18564

Theoretically, there is likely to always be a difference in men's and women's salaries (at least in the current cultural paradigm). This explainable difference arises because only women bear the burden of birthing a child (in the physical sense). This has meant, historically, that women were more likely to be absent from the workplace / workforce at some time. When absent, they are not gaining new skills, or keeping their old skills sharp (this is called a hysterisis effect). That depresses their wages upon re-entry.

Over the last say, 50 years, the wage gap between men and women has declining. Part of this decline is due to women entering fields previously populated by men only, or (perhaps similiarly) into higher paying roles. However, another part of the gap convergence is because of better natal medical care, returning a mother to the work force faster. Telecommuting (as it becomes more normal) will likely continue to decrease this gap. Further convergence is due to cultural (or legal) changes, such as the families and medical leave act.

Yes, a good amount of the gap was due to discrimination (thats the gap we don't like). My point is to explain the non-discriminatory factors and how they are also partly responsible for a wage gap.

As an aside, one of my many jobs in Civil Rights is on this very issue (wage discrimination). What I've presented here is an early in the morning summary of the historical literature before I had coffee

----

As for parental leave, such is now exceptionally common because its been legislated by Congress. Its the Families and Medical Leave Act

For employers, it may make sense to penalize employees for spending time out of the workforce and having children. But at a large scale, over a long time period, you'll see one of two things:
1) Lots of women who decide not to have children because they can't afford them, or don't want to get held back in their careers;
2) A growing number of women in high-paying jobs who take just enough time off to deliver the baby, and then hire a nanny. (Which raises its own issues about the exploitation of poor immigrant labor)

The U.S. still has a fairly high birth rate, but - well, honestly, if employers can't offer more family-friendly policies, it could go down the path of Italy and Japan. And even if it doesn't - I am really, really frustrated by how many men will say, "Well, just don't have kids," as if they were a fun indulgence like a latte or a motorcycle. I mean, we're talking about the next generation of our society. We're talking about going against millions of years of evolution that come down to "survive until you can reproduce" (which doesn't mean that everyone, or every woman, wants to have children - but that biological drive is there. It's real.)

The difference in wages from being out of the work force is NOT a penalty. It's a result of job skills being lost. I recommend wiki-ing "hysterisis". I want to move this discussion to neutral language. The same thing occurs for men who leave the workforce for similar periods.

Anyways, the gap is in a well-defined long-term trend decline. That's a good thing. Good change never occurs quickly, especially in economics

My data is Canadian, but it is likely not that much different from what is happening in the US. The two countries are often similar with respect to economics.

The Canadian Census came out this week and showed that women are earning 85 cents for every dollar men earn. BUT they actually checked to see if childbearing has an effect. They discovered that, even among men and women in their 20s, the gap stands. (Women in Canada generally have children in their late 20s through to their late 30s.) And, even though women's education levels have been rising (often outpacing that of men), they saw no wage gains in the past five years. The study found that women with graduate and professional degrees earned 96 cents for every dollar earned by a man. But bachelors graduates earned 89c and apprenticeship and trades grads earned 65c. The study was looking at young men and women, so childbearing should not have had much of an effect. Moreover, in Canada, our combined maternity and parental leave covers a full year and employers must keep the parent at the same position and wage level when they return -- and they must also provide any salary increases that the rest of their team got.

So, here, in a country where women now outnumber men at university and where women typically have children in their 30s, women are still earning less than men.

This is not an attack on men. But it does suggest that feminist personal finance blogs could seek to help women overcome some of these obstacles. Unfortunately, men and women are socialized in ways that affect their earning power and choices. It appears that education really helps with that, since you note that people with graduate degrees earn roughly the same.

I understand that as an economist, you want to move the conversation into neutral language. But neutral langauge is a screen to the on-the-ground reality because the fact is that women are differently affected by this stuff than men. I would love it if that were not the case, because that would mean we've made real progress to dismantling restrictive and dated gender norms. But those gender norms exist, and so does the disparate impact. And as for whether it's a penalty or not, potayto potahto, for the most part. Besides, some women do come back from maternity leave to find their pay scale reduced. Congress considered that to be enough of an unwarranted penalty that they cassed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act. And guess what, pregnancy discrimination claims alleging violations of that Act are filed every year with the Equal Opportunity Commission at an ever-increasing rate.

This isn't specifically in response to you, JerichoHill, but this touches on comments that a couple of other people have made about time out for parental leave being a choice that is independent from sexism or pay discrimination. I think there are simplistic ways in which that is true, and deeper ways in which that is untrue. Yes, any person who leaves the workforce for six months or six years to provide childcare is going to miss out on skills development that *may* make them less sought after as an employee (I say "may" because there are other considerations like client contacts that are critical in business, but that don't necessarily correllate to length or recency of work history). That will likley be the case whether that person is a man or a woman.

But there's also the fact that most of the people leaving the workforce to provide childcare are women, and not men. Why is that? I don't think it's as simple as "choice." True, no one points a gun at these women and says, "quit your job." But I don't think it's a free choice in the way that, say, picking what color socks to wear in the morning is a free choice, because there are underlying pressures and assumptions in the prevailing culture that influence that choice. Those gender norms have very specific ideas about who ought to be doing childcare, which parents of a heterosexual pair is a bad parent when the kid goes into day care, which parent is more likely to be less committed to their job after having a kid and should thus have fewer responsibilities at work, etc.

Neutral terms make sense when we are talking about a gender-neutral society. When we get to a gender-neutral society, please wake me up; I definitely don't want to miss it.

Plonkee I have seen several such studies as well. This week this study was released by the National Science Foundation in the US finding that after marriage, men create seven more hours of housework for their wives, while wives reduce the time their husbands spend on housework by one hour.

kombat, if you would like to talk facts rather than talking trash, we might have an interesting conversation, but right now I would only be responding to "nuh uh" with my own "yes huh," and that's not very interesting for anyone, including myself.

PS, is there some way to spell check in the post frame? I am a slacker typist and I would prefer not to subject y'all to it.

Edited to clarify I hope I didn't insult you with the Civil Rights Act reference, JerichoHill, since I missed the first time round that it's part of your job to work with that law. I'll leave it for the benefit of anyone who's not familiar with it. I don't think we're going to agree on what proportion of a wage gap is due to underlying sexism versus neutral factors since many of what you seem to consider "neutral" factors may not be actionable under non-discrimination law but it are still nonetheless based on sexist gender norms.

I was thinking of an example using myself. I used to program in COBOL on IBM mainframes for many years. Believe it or not, I still see jobs open for COBOL programmers. If say instead of working in other areas like I have been, I was a COBOL programmer who quit working when I quit programming in COBOL (about 13 years ago), and now I wanted to go back to work. I believe I could find a COBOL job, and within weeks, be up to speed again and at my old level of productivity and knowledge. However, say the only jobs were in JAVA programming and in tools like Websphere (not to mention the change from structured programming to object-oriented programming). I would have a very difficult time breaking into the job market, because of perceived "job skill loss" by employers over that time. Granted, nothing replaces several years experience programming in a language and the knowledge and tricks of the trade one learns, but the reality would be, I would probably, within several months, and certainly within a year or two, come up to speed, since I do have the base talent of logical thinking and algorithm/process-oriented design and development. But, of course, it would be easier to hire someone who already knew JAVA, was recently trained, and probably cheaper, and in more early stages of their career.

So, I think part of it is the perception of employers that being out-of-the-workforce translates into lost-skills. If one is able to translate talents and God-given gifts into a more generic language, they can then apply them into a current-day job using a specific skill-set. That may require training on the applicant before the job, or on the job, but at least it would zero in on the specifics more closely and quickly.

It may be more difficult to resolve this in a career not as specific as programming in a language say, where a person as a large gap in a naturally occurring accumulation of skills and knowledge over the years for that field, and breaking back in would be harder to define and overcome (Not to mention having moved higher into management, and the constant practice of dealing with people that may have been affected by a gap). But, if the person had a passion for the field, they may have kept up on it to a certain extent (and practiced those skills on other venues), and have an easier time getting back in. But, it's still harder to convince an employer after an extended absence.

A couple more factors to consider in the difference in pay.

Men are more likely to take "High risk jobs".
The pay also tends to increase with the amount of risk one is willing to take on (or put up with!) in their job.

By "High Risk", I mean jobs that can either negatively effect their health (construction workers, swat team, fire fighters) or their "emotional well being" [ie. stress levels] (stock broker, CEOs, doctors, etc).

Another factor is that Males tend to work more hours per week then Females:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/x ... asp?More=Y

If you had a salaried employee that worked an average of 45 hours and another that worked 40 hours; whom would you be more likely to give a raise to, everything else being equal?

Also in the past it used to be that males where more educated and had more tradeskills and certifications. Right now (in the USA), more women are enrolled in college then men; so that trend should be reversing it's self if it hasn't already. But that has, and education will continue; to effect stats on salaries.

Another thing to consider:

If I could hire a Woman for $5 and a Man for $10 with them both being equal skill and equal output; then as a employer it would be in my best interest to hire 2 woman for $5 and discriminate against males because they have "inflated" wages.

The reason being, is for the same amount of wages ($10), then I could get DOUBLE the output by hiring two women.

This obviously isn't the case. If there was a Real difference in wages between genders (based solely on discrimination) then the market would realize this and correct it self. The smart companies would hire up woman till their wages rose to that of a mans and in the mean time reap profit from the under valued wages of woman.

In fact, if this was the case it would be in employers best interest to discriminate against males since they have "over priced" wages for the same amount of skill/production. Thus the only logical conclusion here is that statistical males must be some how increasing their value in the workforce to justify their higher wages (or that woman are some how statistically decreasing their value; or a combination of both).

What browser are you using? FireFox and Safari both have spellcheckers in input boxes.

you can also copy/paste into word or such.

on windows:

Hold down Control key and hit A then C; that selects all then Copies.
Open Winword, hold control and type V and that pastes it into word.
Run Spell check, use same Ctrl A,C,V to put back in forum.

More women are coming out of Canadian medical schools than men. More university graduates are women.

People do price discriminate. That's why you have pink collar jobs.

The misspelled word will be underlined in red, right click on the word and suggestions will be presented to pick from.


.. or like a new e-mail.

I suspect, (although I'm not sure) that the women are paid slightly less, because they are perceived as being less useful with the same qualifications. If you are looking at two individuals, it might not be discrimination, but when you are looking at averages it is, I guess, more likely to be discrimination.

I think the point would be in the example that you've described that the woman is perceived as only being worth half the man, and so you need 2 women to get the output of 1 man. So thats why it doesn't equalise itself. Of course, in the real world the differences are slight, and whilst I know that genuinely used to happen, I'm not sure the extent to which it still does.

One of the issues that you have to control for in pay studies is the bias towards gender-specific jobs and how those are rewarded in pay. So, there are two separate things, balancing out the gender bias in jobs (more female engineers, more male nurses) and then ensuring that men and women are paid the same in the same jobs.

Child-bearing is a difficult thing - I'm guessing that if you only took 6 months maternity leave (standard British amount) then within 1 year of returning, it shouldn't make that much difference. You'd have to be very unlucky to seriously lose you skillset in that time, although I have known it to happen to someone taking a 4 month gap between jobs.