My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.

What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?

And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this way. People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.

1) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal opportunity: Bad

2) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal societal expectations: Bad

3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.

4) Gender-biased job preference due solely to genetically determined traits and inherent job qualities. Ok. (I don't think this exists much as most traits that impact job preference have a significant emergent/environmental components).

I think our "hyper-PC" society agrees with me on 1) and 2) and possibly 4).

I think most of the disagreement happens around 3). Is 3) ever OK? How do we tell if society if sufficiently equal for 3) to be Ok?

My personal stance is that it doesn't make sense to argue that 3) is ok until we have done a much better job of eliminating 1) and 2).

edit: layout/typo

Isn't expecting "gender-equal expectations and opportunities" strange if you agree with "Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits"?

Why would culture expect a tall thin person and a short muscular person to be equally good at basketball and weightlifting?

On the other hand - I also find it hard to believe that the only difference between the sexes is the body build. Based on my engineers' mindset it would quite surprise me if two bodies which look and work different were wired totally alike. Though this line of thought is quite out of fashion.

I often see a preference in particular young adults that pick summer jobs or education based on where they can find co-students/workers that has the same gender, age, color, economical status, and life experience as they. Is this Bad, and if so, how do we eliminate that feeling of familiarity and safety that such choice brings?

There is a yearly study in Sweden that polls peoples priority when looking for job. Highest on the list is often the social environment and co-workers, and the pay (ie, the rational argument for picking a job) is often far low on the list.

The validity of that statement is highly location dependent.

Why does everybody swallow the feminist narrative that it is a horrible chore to spend time with children? Note that feminism depends on that evaluation, otherwise a lot of their complaints evaporate.

As I said in another comment, if you don't like spending time with children, you could simply opt not to have one. How do feminists explain that people have kids who they then supposedly hate to take care of? (Of course, it has to be socialization, it never occurs to women that they have a choice because the patriarchy has brainwashed them...Sure thing)

FTFY.

I know just by staying at home you are not free of all worries. But for the time being, your responsibility is not worrying about earning a livelihood.

others perceive racism/sexism everywhere and only read that the 95 percentile and unweighted pays are different.

We can get off the political topic and start with other axioms as well. IE some believe more women need to be involved in tech, while others want less competition in their respective field (lower vs higher salary).

Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.

The answer to "is it society or biology" is both. And it will always be both, because you can't change biology and you can't "balance" society without being able to disentangle biology, and disentangling biology from society would violate both causality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Even measuring how much of each it is has the same problem.

People want to say we just need better evidence. We just need to measure it better or be more diligent or think about it more carefully. But it isn't that. It's that the problem is NP-complete and n is large. It may even be incomputable because some of the necessary information was lost to history and not knowable.

Which is why it's a political football. People choose their team and see how far they can run with the ball, because the score isn't based on science or math.

For your first question, I always think the key is choice and support for people who make choices that are counter to the norm. Sure, it might be that when given a choice free of social pressures, more women might still choose to be the primary caregiver for children than men will.

That is fine, and women and men who make that socially traditional choice should be supported and not judged. The key, however, is to make sure we also support and don't judge the people who choose other arrangements for child caregiving. We should not design laws and social conventions that punish those who choose to go against the norm.

I don't know... maybe this is all moot if we're still working through the "simpler" stuff like balancing laws and getting rid of stereotypes.

Nowadays, I see tens of young girls joining local raspberry jams for fun in the UK. My friend's daughters are playing with electrical circuits and installing switch&lamp circuit between beds to chat in Morse code. And none of this comes from pushing for forced equality-in-numbers. This is just kids getting excited about stuff, because nobody is stopping them.

I think the stereotypes played a big part for a long time and we'll see a slow rebalancing of candidates' genders. I think (and hope) the situation will be very much different in ~15 years when current kids finish universities. But I don't believe much active support can change anything for near-future graduates.

So.. either parent who care gives can get the same leave for that caregiving. Basically, do not write gender specific laws. Write laws based on parenting role, and it can apply to either gender who takes on that role.

I don't think we can try to fix the market demand for the various roles, but we can certainly fix the legal discrepancies.

The emotional support is impossible to legislate, but I think as a society we should not judge negatively men who decide to be the primary child care provider nor judge women who decide to be the breadwinner (although in most families, both parents need to be both... I am a big proponent of day care)

That's this part of your comment: "emotional support", "accepting of other's identity", "taxing some roles and subsidizing others", "undesirable roles". Those all come out of stereotypes.

Either way, the net effect is a diminished supply of labor relative to the varied demand. By contrast, women seek jobs that often are chock full of other women, creating an increased supply of labor and lower relative wages.

Sometimes I think about how little teachers get paid and wonder why I know so many women going in to that knowing the poor pay in advance.

Men and women (on average) have different hormone levels, and those hormones do effect our emotions and our choices.

If not hormonal, how do you explain the emotional changes in post-partum depression, menopause, pregnancy, 'roid rage, sympathetic pregancy...?

If you take a number of people with different aggressiveness (or as most studies do, look at chimps with picking orders), and you find no correlation with hormone. Add 5% more hormone, and you don't get 5% behavior. Pump in larger amount of hormone, and you see exaggeration of existing behavior. Remove all hormone, and you see a decrease behavior, but the behavior doesn't go away. Its regulative.

post-partum depression, menopause, and pregnancy all cause major changes in a person. Hormone levels, since its regulative, also change with those changes. There were for example a study at women with abnormal amount of testosterone (but within the limit of naturally occurring in humans). The first studies from 1970 showed how there was increased crime, increase aggressiveness, changes in sexuality, emotions, and the ability to keep maintain a job. When people tried to reproduce those studies, everything was shown to be false.

To simplify, do you know of any scientific or medical sources that say "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion" as you claimed earlier?

"Normal estrogen levels vary widely. Large differences are typical in a woman on different days, or between two women on the same day of their cycles. The actual measured level of estrogen doesn't predict emotional disturbances.". (webmd article. not a authoritative but useful as a general summery)

"However, estrogen is not simply a natural "physiological protectant". Some have reported that estrogen administration does not improve mood and even causes fear and anxiety. Therefore, the impact of estrogen on emotion varies and may depend on the individual's current state and the situation. The authors believe that hormones do not exert an absolute and singular effect on the body." (Estrogen Impacts on Emotion: Psychological, Neuroscience and Endocrine Studies)

As an example estrogen effect, it regulated how easy memories of arousals are formed, which also adrenaline happens to do. Both do this for rather logical reasons, ie, to increase or decrease the chance of a similar event to happen again. This can then have an effect of the perception of fearful faces, although the study on mice from 2006 (Jasnow et al) doesn't really give a definitive number on how big impact that has on female mice total emotional state. It is also reported that this effect the perception of pain and the memory of having pain.

"The testosterone increment was associated with detectable but minor mood changes ... Future research should investigate the implications of these minor mood changes."(Effects of Testosterone on Mood, Aggression, and Sexual Behavior in Young Men: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Study)

I will stop here. People like to blame hormones and hormone levels to excuse someones behavior. The data I have seen is quite clear the effect is regulative and thus you don't get an cause-and-effect.

And those quotes are not quite "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion".

"the impact of estrogen on emotion varies"

And another quote from the study you quoted (Effects of testosterone on mood, aggression, and sexual behavior in young men: a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study):

"Increased circulating T was associated with significant increases in anger-hostility from baseline (mean score = 7.48) to wk 2 (mean score = 10.71)"

7.48 to 10.71 doesn't seem like a very minimal change.

----

Since you quoted WebMD (perhaps a useful summary) I will as well:

"It's clear that estrogen is closely linked with women's emotional well-being. Depression and anxiety affect women in their estrogen-producing years more often than men or postmenopausal women. Estrogen is also linked to mood disruptions that occur only in women -- premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and postpartum depression."

And from another article:

"Declining estrogen levels associated with menopause can cause more than those pesky hot flashes. They can also make a woman feel like she is in a constant state of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Unfortunately, these emotional changes are a normal part of menopause."

"Some of the emotional changes experienced by women undergoing perimenopause or menopause can include: Irritability, Feelings of sadness, Lack of motivation, Anxiety, Aggressiveness, Difficulty concentrating, Fatigue, Mood changes, and Tension."

----

Perhaps we can agree.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by regulative, but I agree that emotions are complicated and hormones are not the only influence, nor is the relationship a simple cause and effect.

On the other hand, there's significant evidence that hormones do effect emotion, including perhaps the most striking example which I somehow forgot earlier: puberty. And their prenatal effect on the structure of the brain.

Would you agree hormones do effect emotions, but aren't the only factor, and the relationship is complicated, unpredictable, and varies between individuals?

By regulative I mean that in order to see a major effect, you already need to have a major state. A person with no aggression is not going to get aggressive based on testosterone. A person that is already aggressive will have that aggression regulated if one artificially increasing the circulating testosterone, most often by exaggerating the aggression in a context aware way. For example, a person who has a tendency for road rage won't be more likely to shoot someone, but they might honk the horn more or yell more loudly. Regulative effects don't cause things to happen, but rather modulate what already exist.

Puberty and pregnancy has an other thing in common, in that it both cause changes in the persons neurons. Its speculated the reason that a womans body during pregnancy do this is in order to make it easier form memories and bond with the newborn baby. Its been suggested that some typical pregnancy behaviors is thus a result of those changes to the neurons. I would strongly suspect that hormone levels have a regulative role in facilitating the rate of the changes, but I doubt if measuring the hormone level would be a predictor for how much of a change actually happened.

To bring out an analogy, taxes has an regulative effect on wealth, but its a not a predictor for it. If I selected random individuals over the world and only looked at where they live and how much percent that they pay in taxes, it will tell me nothing about who is rich and who is poor. I have a better time looking at living expensive and food prices, but even that is a poor method to predict how much wealth someone has. I would thus not describe taxes as having a significant effect on wealth, and that wealth per adult is the result of a complex system.

I think you may mean (and if this is the case I generally agree) that when hormones trigger behaviors such as road rage, those behaviors have already been learned. Likewise, testosterone is unlikely to cause someone to shoot another driver because significant inhibitions against that behavior have been learned.

But hormones have an effect even in early childhood and before birth, when no behaviors have been learned yet. Prenatal hormones affect brain structure, and studies have found a link between hormones in children as young as 3 months and their choice of toys.[1]

[1] http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks...

Gender, to the degree that gender is not about culture, is quite far down the list of predictors, and even further down on the list would be hormones.

"Steroid hormones are a dominant and pervasive source of sex differences by mediating developmental processes that are enduring and establish adult physiological and behavioural responses relevant to the reproductive constraints of each sex."

From Multifaceted origins of sex differences in the brain, 1 February 2016, an open access article.

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1688/2015...

"Animal models have also allowed us to move beyond hormones and to an appreciation of the important role of sex chromosomes. Study of these mice has revealed important roles for chromosome complement on body weight and feeding, aggression and habit formation, to name a few."

And section 8: "Some argue it is pure folly to study neuroanatomical sex differences with the hope of understanding sex differences in behaviour as the connection between anatomy and behaviour is often weak or even non-existent [50]. Indeed, the most celebrated sex difference in the brain, the SDN, has not been clearly tied to any specific behavioural or physiological endpoint, although see above discussion regarding sexual orientation. While it is true that anatomical or physiological differences in the brain often do not map onto clear differences in behaviour, does this mean they are not important or even, not real? Many studies of sex differences in brain anatomy or neural functioning are perfectly sound, meaning they are fully powered and technically executed using well vetted and accepted approaches, yet a strong correlation between variance in anatomy and variance in behaviour is about the best one can hope for in establishing a causal relationship."

Regarding behavior, and specifically the SDN, consider, for example:

The volume of a sexually dimorphic nucleus in the ovine medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus varies with sexual partner preference. Endocrinology. 2004

"In addition to a sex difference, we found that the volume of the oSDN was two times greater in female-oriented rams than in male-oriented rams."

Wired on steroids: sexual differentiation of the brain and its role in the expression of sexual partner preferences. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2011

"Development of female-directed partner preference in the male is dependent on exposure of the developing brain to gonadal steroids synthesized during critical periods of sexual differentiation of the central nervous system"

The development of male-oriented behavior in rams. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2011

"Although our understanding of the biological determinants and underlying neural substrates of sexual attraction and mate selection are far from complete, compelling evidence is discussed that supports the idea that neural substrates regulating sexual partner preferences are organized during prenatal development"

If so, science has progressed quite far in the last few years that I've been away.

Basically, there's no gene for being a programmer just as there's no gene for being a (good/bad) parent. Why would Nature bother to pre-compute/compile all possible states/outcomes? Better to compute/compile the essentials for a living species then let the rest be handled by history.

Ah so evolution stops at the neck! Genius!

The more you know...

I don't know the answer, but merely asking the question as losteric did is not sexist.

For that, you would need to hire teachers, who would have to re-educate themselves out of being teachers, first. ;)

Although that solution may be roughly on the scale of "ultimately, the great heat death of the universe will make the problem moot."

What if we see basket weaving dominated by women and ham baking dominated by men? Is it free choice? Genetics? Physiological? Cultural?

What about the indirect imbalances resulting from the choice of work, like one role creating a reusable tool and one creating a consumable resource?

It also doesn't account for full time covering a wide number of hours worked. Full time can be 37 hours a week or 45 hours a week, can comparing them as both just being 'full time' misses quite a lot.

>This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids. If anything, I rather be with my kid than stuck an extra 20 hours in the office... one of these pressures is for something most people find more desirable than the other.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.

So are we aiming for more men to take flexible schedules or for pay to not suffer when someone takes flexible schedules? Because if you want the former, it is more about the pressure to earn than the stigma on flexible work schedules. And if it is the latter, how is this fair to the people who don't get the flexible work schedules? I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).

> How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids.

So... you're saying the exact same thing. There is a social pressure for the women to be in careers where they are caring for kids, and for men not to be.

So what did you take issue with in the statement above? Just the word "foist," maybe?

I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.

To be clear, this is not about being 'fair' to the companies, it is about having realistic expectations of the results of our actions.

Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks.

I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers to focus on improving 'output per worker hour' in addition to 'output per worker'.

To be clear, if we want this we have really only have one option: Increase demand (for jobs or products from) companies that do this well. Good work-life balance is a non-salary perk like many others that companies offer.

You can't legislate this focus on the part of employers, all you can do is incentive it.

I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years.

Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers.

My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.

You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?

> "you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less

I am not. I said "if we want this".

However, I think I would have a much easier time backing up the assertion "people want to work less" than you would have backing up " happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year" as a causal relationship.

I never said low stress and low happiness cause low productivity; I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.

>"I said "if we want this"."

You imply that less work and more play is 'better' work-life balance, which assumes that people want to work less.

That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead.

Working fewer hours is correlated with higher productivity, possibly high enough that the increase in efficiency is high enough to overcome the reduction in hours when it comes to total output:

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...

That's just a correlation, and there are tons of confounding factors, but this question is not as straighforward as you seem to think.

That is actually what I said originally, as can be seen from the following quote:

>>>>"I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year."

Worker productivity is usually defined as work per year; I refer to specific or hourly productivity as the amount of work you get done per hour in the office.

Let us accept that I read your claim too literally and move past the semantics.

Do you have any data to back up what you are claiming?

The fact is, huge amounts of "gendered culture" have swapped genders over the centuries.

For example, everything you learned from a book, or from spoken language is not part of your innate biology. Only a part of how you gravitate toward that material may be biologically gendered.

I believe that men are affected by a great number of factors including their biologies, and struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise.

For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for.

Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.

* Even if you don't actually subscribe to this position yourself, it's unfortunately in the nature of debate on a politicised topic like this that the moment you take a position associated with one of the standard camps ("the American Left" or "the Blue Tribe" here, I guess), people will assume that you also hold other opinions typical of that camp. Certainly, "men hold the power in American society" is one of those typical opinions.

Have you considered that most women actually prefer spending more time with their children and therefore prefer men that earn more to finance this? (therefore men focus on their career to attract women that usually at some point prefer to work on flexible schedules)

>How it is more often foisted upon women?

I show that there is an equal pressure put on men to do different things. My issue is with the "more often".

Now, maybe you were only talking about the pressure on women and not the pressure on men... you should be able to see the issue with this as well.

Think about it this way - there are two constant, fixed pressures we are talking about: the pressure to make good money to raise a family, and the pressure to take care of the kids.

We have no way to change the TOTAL pressure - both of those things are fairly fixed (we need to make money and we need to take care of family). The thing we are talking about is HOW those pressures are distributed. Traditionally, the money pressure is more on men and the childrearing pressure is more on women. You can't change any one of those without changing the rest. If you decrease pressure on women to raise children, that in turn raises pressure on men to raise children. This, in turn, would also increase pressure on women to make money, and decrease the pressure on men.

You can choose which angle you come at for the problem, but all of them result in the same thing.

Unfortunately, most comments only mention one side of the problem (that of women being pressured to focus on family), and that leads to reflexive "But what about the pressure on men?" indignant replies. Therefore, it would be good to acknowledge this as a dual issue every time it's brought up, or make it more gender-neutral ("pressure from society to retain outmoded family roles") so friction like the above does not ensure.

Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures. Melinda Gates talks about this at length in their recent letters for 2016[1], and it's a pretty damning picture that whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.

There is nothing about cleaning, or laundry, or sick care, or <other thing women are expected to do because they're women> that makes them not like doing unpaid work anymore than men. Nobody likes doing thankless work, and everybody likes getting paid to do work (and enjoy the freedoms that having money permits). This distribution of work is bullshit, especially in this day and age of increased automation where wages based on dual earners is the norm if you want a middle class existence and are average.

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/2016-Annual-Letter

What? There is a strong systematic bias in favour of single women.

A man who is expected to work 60 hour weeks is much less likely to get custody of his kids.

A man who takes a significant pay cut so he can spend more time with his kids can also get charged by the courts for being a dead-beat dad etc.

We're not comparing custody results, here. We're comparing a full custody woman against a full custody man, across all cultures, not whatever intuition you have about custody battles (in the US, seemingly)?

After doing a bit of reading[1], it's not even clear that any of your statements are true.

"In other words, 91 percent of child custody after divorce is decided with no interference from the family court system. How can there be a bias toward mothers when fewer than 4 percent of custody decisions are made by the Family Court?

What do these statistics tell us?

1. Fathers are less involved in their children's care during the marriage.

2. Fathers are less involved in their children's lives after divorce.

3. Mothers gain custody because the vast majority of fathers choose to give them custody.

4. There is no Family Court bias in favor of mothers because very few fathers seek custody during divorce."

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cathy-meyer/dispelling-the-myt...

I live in the UK, so I can't comment on how things are in the US, but here it's so completely understood that men won't get the kids that it's relatively rare to try. The only person I know who did (who had a partner who was quite plainly unsuitable to be a parent) still lost out. In such an environment, why would it be surprising that men don't pursue custody?

Further, if the argument goes that mothers spend more time with their children, and therefore ought in general to be more likely to get custody, I don't necessarily argue against that. What I don't understand is why it's okay to say 'Mothers typically spend more time/attention on their children, therefore it's natural that they (on average) should get custody', but it's not okay to say 'Fathers typically spend more time/attention on their careers, therefore it's natural that they (on average) earn more money'.

This is true.

> ...whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.

I have no idea how that conclusion is drawn. Men, for example, are significantly more likely to get killed in the course of their work. For example, men accounted for 92% of all workplace fatalities in 2014[1]. To me anyway, getting killed sounds at least as bad as, if not worse than not getting paid for your work.

Overall, my opinion is that men and women face different kind of pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. What addresses one must address the other.

[1] "Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2014" http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm

I never said it wasn't a problem. I said in a different comment:

>But gender roles are still a problem, especially for the people who are forced into the roles they do not like.

Now, as someone who does value work life balance more than making a lot of money working long hours, I do personally judge one social pressure as not as bad as the other. But I also understand that there are man who have different priorities who see other social pressures as worse, and I understand that there is a 'grass is always greener' effect.

> Which gender gets killed most often at work because of a social pressure that your value is determined by having a job, so if the only job options are dangerous, you best take one anyways?

Do you like gender roles or not? You've already posted like 5 times in this thread, and I'm not sure if your perspective is "let's do away with gender roles" or "gender roles are there for a reason, and it benefits women".

>I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).

I would hope that makes my position on the matter clear enough. But in case it doesn't.

Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination. But gender roles are still a problem, especially for the people who are forced into the roles they do not like.

But... even if I made posts that completely contradict everything I said (and I do that sometimes when trying out arguments for sides I don't normally support), that does not invalidate anything in the current posts.

How was Lilly Ledbetter's wage disparity caused by something other than discrimination on the basis of sex? Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter :

"Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236."

However, your response is less than complete. What is "modern day"?

For example, "DU Law School is violating Equal Pay Act"/"The University of Denver is violating federal law by paying female law professors less than their male counterparts, according to the [EEOC]" (2015) - http://legacy.9news.com/story/news/education/2015/08/31/equa...

Why is "trend" relevant? Your clarified statement is that modern wage disparity is not due to discrimination. That means that even a handful of counter-examples would suffice to show that that statement is incorrect. Adding the term "trend" feels very much like you are moving the goalposts.

That does not logically follow. If you're offering an explanation for a large dataset which is depicting a trend, the value of that explanation is not undermined by a handful of statistical outliers. If we say that the explanation for women living longer than men is a mixture of biology and cultural factors, a single story about a woman murdering her husband does not speak to the accuracy of a broader explanation at all.

You would need to demonstrate that the counter-examples and the counter-explanation they suggest are statistically significant.

Edit: I'm not engaging in an ad hominem attack here, but I would like to draw attention to previous comments made by this poster to indicate that this is not the first time they've had difficulty parsing how statistics are generally understood to work: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dalke

It's clear from history, as my example of Lilly Ledbetter, that Wage disparity is also caused by discrimination.

I don't see the need for "counter-examples and the counter-explanation" when documents like http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/4-28-11a.cfm ("Gender-Based Wage Gap Persists, Experts Agree at EEOC Forum" (2011)) say things like:

> Gender-based wage discrimination remains a problem today and a percentage of the wage discrepancy cannot be explained by non-discriminatory factors, said government and private experts ...

Two possible objections are that 2011 isn't modern enough, and that the EEOC cannot be believed. Without knowing what is considered valid evidence, I don't see the need to dig up examples when they can be dismissed with a one line response.

That doesn't make any sense. The OP is taking about averages and overall discrimination in society. I.e. How much of the wage gap is explained by other factors?

I'll point out that the g'parent comment that I objected to classified things into only the categories "gender roles" and "discrimination".

One of the explanations given for the wage gap is that women don't have as much negotiating skills as men. Is that a gender role? Or is it a third category?

I'll quote from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga... (" Wage Gap Myth Exposed -- By Feminists"):

> What the 2009 Labor Department study showed was that when the proper controls are in place, the unexplained (adjusted) wage gap is somewhere between 4.8 and 7 cents. ... The AAUW notes that part of the new 6.6-cent wage-gap may be owed to women's supposedly inferior negotiating skills -- not unscrupulous employers. Furthermore, the AAUW's 6.6 cents includes some large legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories. ... Could the gender wage gap turn out to be zero? Probably not. The AAUW correctly notes that there is still evidence of residual bias against women in the workplace. However, with the gap approaching a few cents, there is not a lot of room for discrimination.

This summary does not seem like a mis-characterization. I therefore see no reason to change my opinion that wage discrimination is due to "gender roles" and discrimination as even 2 cents is still about 10% of even the unadjusted value of 23 cents.

(For purposes of this discussion I limit 'discrimination' to mean 'illegal discrimination on the basis of sex', and not the broader meaning of how cultural discrimination on the basis of sex influences gender roles.)

It is unfair, however, to give no guidelines of what you think might be acceptable.

For example, if "modern" means "occurred within the last six months", then we have to look towards anecdotes and accusations, as court cases and rigorous scientific research take far longer than that.

If "modern" means ten years, then it's easy to find court cases like http://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa-woman-wins-lawsuit-agains... where the wage discrimination happened in 2009, and http://www.startribune.com/norway-asked-to-pay-2-3-million-i... where it happened in 2008.

That said, if you only accept tried court cases as evidence then you've placed a laughably high barrier. Court case 1) have a high burden of proof, 2) are rare, 3) rarely go to completion and are often settled out of court, and 4) make take years to complete. Thus, almost by definition they will not be from discrimination which happened within the last year or two.

> Gender-based wage discrimination remains a problem today and a percentage of the wage discrepancy cannot be explained by non-discriminatory factors, said government and private experts ..

In http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga... , in an essay that argues that illegal wage discrimination is minor, I read:

> What the 2009 Labor Department study showed was that when the proper controls are in place, the unexplained (adjusted) wage gap is somewhere between 4.8 and 7 cents. ... The AAUW notes that part of the new 6.6-cent wage-gap may be owed to women's supposedly inferior negotiating skills -- not unscrupulous employers. Furthermore, the AAUW's 6.6 cents includes some large legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories. ... Could the gender wage gap turn out to be zero? Probably not. The AAUW correctly notes that there is still evidence of residual bias against women in the workplace. However, with the gap approaching a few cents, there is not a lot of room for discrimination.

If it's 2 cents, out of 23 cents, then that's 9%. While minor compared to indirect societal factors, I don't think it's small enough to dismiss outright.

Neither you nor I can explain the unexplained component. It's true that it may have nothing at all to do with discrimination on the basis of sex. However, that is very doubtful as we see successful lawsuits where there is wage discrimination based on sex and we see settlements for that accusation, so we know there it's still ongoing. And we know that mediated settlements are rare, so they are the tip of the iceberg.

Therefore, I see no reason to reject illegal wage discrimination as one of the factors that goes into the wage gap.

Such agnostic logic is unassailable. You don't know; the powers that be don't know; the courts & lawsuits don't know. You're right not to reject the possibility.

However, you'd be wrong the assert the certainty "... disparity is also caused by discrimination" with such flimsy evidence.

We know for an incontrovertible fact that a few decades back women faced wage discrimination, even when doing the same job, with the same experience.

We know this from explicit records, with Lilly Ledbetter being one example. There is a reason why the various civil rights laws were enacted.

Therefore, to argue that wage discrimination does not now exist, the proof must be more rigorous than "we can't explain the remaining gap, but it can't be wage discrimination."

I have pointed to recent (within the last 10 years) court cases where the court determined that there was wage discrimination on the basis of sex. Thus, we know for certain that some wage discrimination exists.

If you want to have an argument that it's small - sure, I'll accept that. If you want to say it's hard to measure its magnitude - sure, I'll accept that too. But there's zero justification to state that it does not exist, when we have evidence that it does exist.

I can be wrong. I could have missed some recent study which resolves this more clearly. There may be a report which shows that the court cases I came across happen to be the only ones that have happened i the last 10 years. Such things would be evidence that my position is weak or untenable.

I have not seen such counter-evidence, hence I see no reason to reject my conclusion that wage discrimination on the basis of sex remains an admittedly minor contribution to the wage gap.

I'm not tremendously familiar with this case, but according to the gods of wikipedia, the evidence for discrimination consisted of nothing but evidence of difference.

Same old same old.

If you do not accept a jury's decision that there was pay discrimination on the basis of sex, then you have ridiculously high bar that precludes effectively all evidence.

That one?

https://www.reddit.com/user/Lawtonfogle/

Yeah, sure, it's the typical story for men, working an extra four hours in the office every day. It's so typical, no-one expects otherwise, and it's notable when the opposite happens.

According to the 2015 Report Caregiving in the US, 60% of caregivers are women, and half of caregivers report having no choice in undertaking caregiving.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...

tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting due.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/biocv

I am SO into being a dad. I want to do as much caregiving as possible. However, breastfeeding kinda throws a monkey wrench into the "split all the work equally" plan. For newborns, eating is what they do most of the time (when they aren't sleeping). If you breastfeed your child, which all pediatricians say is the best for them, I can't do the most time consuming part of the job. Now, we get around this some of the time by pumping and bottle feeding breast milk, but you can't do that all the time, and even then the mom has to pump as much as you feed in order to keep up her milk supply.

This means mom is going to be the primary care giver for an infant. While this could change once the kid starts eating solid food, by then the pattern is going to be established.

I am not saying we shouldn't work to make it more equal, but it isn't as simple as you make it out to be.

What if men and women were to form small teams -- and divide labor between themselves however they saw fit. Such a team would be able to cover for each other -- in sickness and in health and all that jazz.

/s

also /s

After month 6, once the baby starts drinking more formula milk and eating solids, things start becoming potentially more egalitarian, since either parent can handle those.

I have very little time for the breastfeeding brigade, particularly those who think it induces some kind of superhuman immunity in their kids. It's plain wrong in my experience and only serves to perpetuate the exclusion of men and those who didn't give birth to their children.

This study's *1 got the result down to 7 points increase for 90% of babies when breastfed, whereas the figure I hear thrown around most often is 4 points. That's definitely not insignificant! I don't know about the strength of the data around immune systems.

1 http://www.unicef.org.uk/BabyFriendly/News-and-Research/Rese...

--

a) despite controlling for socio-economic status, non-breastfeeding in the 1970s (when this study first got underway), in a period of much stricter gender-roles, could be indicative of mothers who were slightly less concerned with IQ scores than those who breastfed. Mothers' IQ does not control for general educational support and encouragement throughout life. Nor does the IQ measurement taken at 5 years old.

--

b) the milk formula used for comparison with breastmilk was that of the early 1970s. The study does not mention if the formula has improved over the intervening ~40 years. One could reasonably hypothesize that it had. In fact, the study mentions:

> Infants not breastfed received formula feeding (before LC-PUFA supplementation became widely available in the U.K.)

Look it up. The ingredient that caused the effect mentioned is now included in all formula products.

--

c) if you believe that children's IQ is set from the age of 5, when this study measured it, and cannot be increased through tuition or other external factors (lowered or raised), then this must all seem very unequivocal to you. May I remind you that many countries (Scandinavia, Germany) which tend to produce extremely well-educated adults don't even start school until 7+.

--

The unquestioning approach of 'there's a study so it must be right'/'this confirms my bias so it must be right' strikes me as going against everything science stands for, and in an industry that so heavily relies on old wives-tales and 'common knowledge', there's every reason to perpetuate the status quo. It's not only intellectually dishonest, it's morally dishonest. All studies should be made to highlight their weaknesses on the front page, and not leave it up to well respected charities (UNICEF) to unthinkingly promote half-truths.

It's not even the strength of the data that bothers me. It's the fear-mongering (which is very real in the UK, worse in other places, I hear) and guilt laid on to mothers based on these spurious studies which none-to-few of the health advisors have ever read in detail. If all of the data was laid out honestly and people were not pressured into making a choice either way, I'd be fine with that. But the way that women (and men, but mostly women, still) are allowed to essentially bully other women, many of whom have very little choice in the matter, into an activity that often depresses and exhausts them for months on end, when a shared feed from a bottle would have no material effect on the outcomes at adulthood, that makes me frustrated. Don't get me started on when the NHS literature in the UK mentioned increased cancer-rates for non-breastfed children without citing the study, parameters, and knowing full-well that few people understand that correlation != causation should be a consideration in decision-making.

So, in full consideration of the study, if you could raise a nation's IQ by x points by feeding them breastmilk, why aren't governments a) funding studies into which active ingredient causes the effect, whether it be synthesized, how long the optimal exposure period is etc. and b) ensuring every child gets that headstart? Oh, they did. And it's already in formula. And you struggle to produce it naturally if your diet is bad. So you struggle to breastfeed. See how flawed the study and its interpretation can be?

The NZ study is an interesting one because of its huge scope and the fact that NZ at the time (for some reason) didn't have a big link between socio-economic status and breastfeeding, like in Europe. So I do believe it was instrumental in changing medical advice around the world when it was published.

Anyway - why can't the preference to breastfeed at least be accepted? Clearly some parents make that choice, and it shows in the numbers. As a result of a choice, not because of discrimination.

Mind you if you have another child you'd have to do that again.

But good luck getting well paid 3 days a week work for both of you.

TERRIBLE advice. In all things gender and money, Penelope Trunk is a goto: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2013/01/07/how-to-pick-a-husba...

> Don’t tell me that you want your husband to work part-time, because aiming for the impossible 50/50 split leads to divorce. First, because it’s the road to eternal poverty; part-time jobs are low pay, without advancement, and they are the first to go when it’s time to cut jobs. So you create massive financial instability by having two people work part-time.

It's about what you put in, not what you get out.

> You will never be happy.

This is where I think people mess up. They think that relationships somehow magically equate to an immediate jump from miserable to bliss. This couldn't be further from the truth. You need to find your own happiness before someone else can step into your life and make it blissful.

It is just hard because the caregiving pattern is already established.

With very few exceptions, mammalian females are almost entirely responsible for child-rearing across the board. So all signs point that its also hormones too. We as a society need to start equalizing hormones. Women need to start taking testosterone and men need to take estrogen. We will only be equal once there is a single androgynous gender. This is the equality we are fighting for. This is the equality we deserve. #androgyny2016

Seriously though, there are some gender differences worth leaving to freedom of choice. Propensity to child-rear and hormone levels are among them, IMO.

Regardless, you don't know what other people's chore splits are like. It's not something you can observe.

Yes, you definitely can. Easiest solution is to ask them, but you could also do observational studies if you had the funds.

Here's one example where we asked: http://www.gallup.com/poll/106249/wives-still-laundry-men-ya...

These days both parents need to work to have a hope of affording rent/mortgage, and job stability is a thing of the past so to have two bread winners substantially reduces the risk of being completely out of an income or health insurance.

Specialization is indeed a powerful tool, but in this case it is a lower priority than security and shelter.

It's just like the feminist saying... "If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on earth." Women get stuck with this unrewarded and devalued specialized role.

I see no evidence of any force being applied. Women are free to chose their own relationship types same as men. Exceptionally few choose to be breadwinner supporting a stay at home father. Vastly more choose to be stay at home mom married to an income earning dad.

I think there is healthy demand from women to marry a stay at home father, but not enough supply of men who prepared to be a stay at home father from a young age, dreaming about it, excellent at cooking and homemaking, etc. Pipeline needs to be fixed before stay at home fathers can be common.

Also, healthy demand in the abstract doesn't mean that there is actually a way for men who really care about being a father to advertise that fact without creeping out potential dates.

Some might say that the freedom of not having to pursue a job while raising kids is sufficient economic reward.

Some also say that not everything that is valuable can, or should, have a price tag.

Bio-engineer men to produce breastmilk?

Socially, we might like flexibility in terms of it being a choice whether to look after the kids yourselves before they start school; for the beancounters though, they'd really like you both to be paying more income tax please, and the daycare centre to be employing more people too...

This theory conflicts with the fact that the trend over time has been toward more support for parental leave, not less, on the part of government.

If only pay gap were proportional... I'm afraid that employers penalize time off work disproportionally, probably exponentially; part-time work doesn't have half the salary of full-time work, and when employees take a few weeks off, they don't forgo only those weeks' salary, but also slow down their future learning, progress and promotions. Whether that's fair or not is debatable (I'd say it makes sense from employers' point of view, but they're probably unnecessarily harsh with it for game-theoretical reasons), but it probably affects all employees taking time off equally, not just women.

Don Quixote would be proud of those who hoist their flags in battle against evolution, biology and the laws of the universe itself.

Keep up the good fight, dear gender abolitionists, for you truly are against a formidable foe.

1. Attempting to fix the problems of the women in their circle and the resulting echo chamber effect.

These men feel guilty when they hear/see women getting into a victim complex or when they are uncomfortable with market forces.

I keep asking my wife & women I know to demand higher salaries and they are content to take the easy non-confrontational path.

You're assuming that even if society enabled the sexes to take equal time off that the sexes would, in fact, take equal time off. I suppose we could force people to take equal time off, but that hardly seems fair or right.

I did not expect a response, but when I got one, I was ecstatic.

She seems like a awesome person.

I disagree. The primary cause is that women can become pregnant - the possibility alone is in most cases enough - in which case they leave the work force for X amount of time. Depending on country, laws, and personal preferences this time period can range from a few weeks to years. In some countries when this hypothetical becomes a reality it can have a large negative impact on the employer. For instance, in Germany the woman's job position must be held open for her until she decides to return to work (possibly years later), not to mention the full salary compensation months before and after giving-birth, when she is no longer working.

But to simplify it down to flatland, lets assume a woman were to just take 1 day off before giving birth, have a job that required no movement or lifting, and the employer didn't have to compensate her. Still, in this simplest case, a woman is at a disadvantage compared to a man.

Because of this biological disadvantage, I think there will never be the sort of absolute equality we want until people are born in tubes or the capitalistic employer/employee relationship changes.

The company will be reimbursed for the salary by the health insurance upon filling out a form. A company does not pay a single cent more than the cost of hiring another person for the position.

It's paid for by for every employee, with a ~50%/50% split between employer and employee, with the premium depending on gross income only.

You actually want insurance for this because you don't want, for example, small businesses avoiding fertile women because they "already have too many pregnancies right now". If all the employees had kids simultaneously (an irrelevant random event), it shouldn't cause a bankruptcy.

In practice, people aren't typically so fungible, but the insurance at least hedges the salary portion of the risk.

Losing someone with expertise/connections and onboarding someone new is a huge cost, though. Not just in the new person's salary, but in opportunity cost as that person slows down the people they work with in the process of getting up to speed.

I'd argue most of the companies will be able to handle that. Especially since you have plenty of time to prepare.

Above is only the part which is different for men and women for obvious biological reasons. There is also a paternity system leave starting from 2 months after birth but this should ideally not discriminate either gender.

So the employer cannot rely anymore on a man not taking time off.

(The total amount without is about three years instead of 14 months, but only those 14 months are covered financially).

Turnover is so fast in the tech industry, with many employees regardless of gender stay from 1-4 years most of the time AFAICT. Other opportunities and challenges greatly dwarf concerns of pregnancy to the point that I've never once heard one person voice concern over pregnancy but many times heard concern about a candidate likely not sticking around longer than a year (because they have a history of hopping or because we don't think they would be challenged or interested in the work/role).

My opinion is that that norm is old and dying if not already long deceased and any future gains in equality will be found in the market motivator domain, in which biology in tandem with govt policy constitute the major factors at play.

My wife is very smart and capable of making a high salary. She chose a flexible job path and took several years off to be with our children in their younger years. We could certainly afford otherwise; our family would have more money had she decided to go the childcare route. It's just our choice, she has no regrets. It wasn't "foisted" upon her. In fact, it's the happiest she's ever been.

Is there something wrong with a woman prioritizing motherhood? Why does it feel to me that these conversations always frame parenting as some kind of tragedy that disrupts an otherwise successful career?

By the same token, I am very motivated to make enough money so that she can continue to stay home with our kids as long as she likes. I like seeing her and my kids happy. Should I be forced to slow down because this is unfair to women at my office?

This all seems crazy to me. Having kids is a blessing. I totally agree that people shouldn't feel a pressure to do it the "traditional" way or any other way for that matter -- I like when men are given the flexibility to take care of their children in support of their wives' careers. I just don't agree that slowing down one's career in order to prioritize parenthood is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Even if you have a stereotypical breadwinner/housewife relationship, you are legally mandated to take time off, even if you don't want to. That way you avoid the "you're allowed to take paternal leave, but real go-getters don't!" game altogether.

edit: The way I see it, the responses just prove my point. "This would just make people discriminate against x!". That's exactly why it needs to be mandatory, affecting more people, so the issue doesn't become invisible based on it affecting only women.

The whole problem with paternity leave is that there's a financial disincentive for companies to offer it and there's a financial disincentive for male employees to accept it.

How do you know when a woman in the office is actually pregnant?

Going to go feel the bump up yourself?

Well, for one thing, there's the bit where, if the new child will be covered under the father's health plan, he kinda has to tell HR about it. So they can, you know, change the coverage?

Besides, if I did live in the US and the situation came up, I would be more likely to pay for my child's health insurance out of pocket than to take a $40,000 pay cut.

FFS. We've already ceded enough control over our lives to these companies whose only agenda is to suck people dry, and then find new ways to wring even more out of them.

Businesses exist to serve people's needs and interests. People do not exist to serve businesses.

In light of this reality it's good to avoid policies that incentivize even more discrimination.

Oh, believe me, I know. I was dismissed from my last job for having the temerity to take a leave of absence — negotiated in advance with the company, with C-staff level approval — to travel for a few months. When I returned, they presented me with a materially altered performance review (fact-checked with the manager who actually wrote the review), filled with straight-up lies, and said that was why they were firing me.

If you dare to decide the life your job pays for is more important than the job itself, well, there's the door...

Shouldn't they? The career you choose, and the specific firm you choose to work for (or start your own, or whatever) is what I would consider a major life decision which ought to carefully be considered alongside other major life decisions like whether or when to have children.

With the way we've chosen to run our world, such that there are orders of magnitude fewer people offering jobs than there are needing them, one side of that dynamic has tremendous power to dictate terms to the other. That is not remotely an equitable relationship, and to suggest that participating in it is some sort of "exercise" of a "natural right", that is freely entered into, is fatuously specious.

I don't have children, and won't be having any. You seem to be saying that I have to subsidize your childcare leave.

This is the worst case of someone trying to put words in my mouth on HN since the last time I tried explaining something from a feminist perspective...

There have been studies that have shown fathers are far more involved in their kid's lives by taking paternal leave. It also means that the parents will both be far more productive post-leave as they would have developed more balanced responsibilities, and don't have to juggle waking up in the middle of the night with a job for at least the first few months, which is arguably the toughest.

The fact that family leave is not government-mandated and involve both parents taking a reasonable (several-month) leave for caring for a baby is ludicrous.

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

You haven't provided any support for your argument that I, as someone without children, must be made to subsidize the family choices of others.

The resources to cover the extended work absence of the parents has to come from somewhere. In many cases, it'll be one past parent covering a new parent, and then vice-versa. But those of us who can't have children (a) don't get to have children, yet (b) are stuck holding the bag having to pay the costs for others'. Isn't that kind of adding insult to injury for people who can't have babies?

So how is it that you get to make the decision for all of society, such that it must be a one-size-fits-all law, and people aren't allowed to negotiate for the terms that make the most sense for their own personal situation.

I'm sure I won't change your mind, but as a single person with no kids, that's how I see it. I'm quite happy to make a few sacrifices to make life easier for today's children.

Yeah, societal decisions are generally one-size-fits-all laws because it's virtually impossible to make it any other way. In short: tough luck.

If we have to deal with declining birthrates while we figure out a more fair and sane arrangement, that doesn't pit family building against professional success, I'm down.

Do you have any objective reasons why this is suboptimal? Maybe we should go the other way; for example in the Netherlands, many women (with children) choose to work part-time (because they can). So maybe the "status quo" is by choice.

Impossible to tell with our current experimental setup. I lean towards the latter though.

Also, "From January 1st 2016, the number of use-it-or-lose-it 'pappamånad' or 'daddy months' will increase from two to three, in an bid to push couples to share early years childcare more equally." because currently "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

Mandatory parental leave is tricky. Is that a month in a row? As a self-employed person, am I prohibited from filings taxes, sending out invoices, and support questions? Or can I work one day a week?

That's the issue right there. Not surprised "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

I know things are tricky to roll out, there's tons of quirks here and there. User chongli is on like three leaves of the discussion trying to take the idea down based on implementation details. That comes later.

The whole point is that right now it's a "woman's issue". Forcing men to deal with it would make it a "parent issue", and more resources would be devoted to ironing out the details.

It's like that pithy line I heard once- "If men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't be controversial".

edit: Can't reply, but I got your reply just fine dalke. What I'm saying is that making it use-it-or-lose-it is still not good enough. Rather, if you don't get why I suggest it needs to be mandatory, it is you who is not getting me.

edit2: Fanning threads on HN are just no good for discussing stuff. Sorry!

I ... don't think you understood my response. Three months of it can only be taken by the father. The "split between either parent" has limits.

What's wrong with the non-mandatory Swedish system? It's most assuredly called "parental leave here", and isn't a "woman's issue" but a feminist issue. As a male feminist, I agree with that.

Edit regarding "it is you who is not getting me".

You are right. But I fail to understand why I should get you as you haven't made any statement about what "mandatory" means. Do you mean one week of mandatory leave, or one month, or one year? Will it be paid leave, and structured similar to what it is in Sweden (percentage of salary, with cap)? What is the penalty for not complying? If I am an unpaid board member of a Fortune 100, am I prohibited from attending meetings? What about going to shareholder meetings? Going to professional society meetings?

You complain that these questions are "trying to take the idea down based on implementation details", but they are not. They are aspects of trying to understand what you mean by mandatory parental leave, and do a cost/benefit analysis

If Sweden were to require on week of mandatory parental leave, for each parent, how would that improve things?

The fundamental idea I'm advancing is that men get to do calculus with their choice ("hmm do I want to stay? or do I better by my kid by working hard now and sending them to prep school?"). It's cool that Sweden makes it attractive for them to pick parenthood, but it's not enough, it's not really in the same ballpark.

I am suggesting that men shouldn't really have a choice. Women have little/no choice (biologically, because of labor, and socially, because of expectations), so only by forcing an approximation of time lost, do we really make people reconsider whether the situation we put them in and the choices we offer them are fair.

In case this sounds incredibly sinister to people, like capping runners so they're not fast, don't get me wrong. I think the outcome here would be an increased amount of resources put into the "work-life balance" question that everyone pays lip-service to, so that we wouldn't be really forced to choose one over the other.

What you are saying is that you want the government to fine, imprison, or otherwise punish a woman who, as CEO, signs a business deal three days after she gives birth, yes?

Because that's what "mandatory" means. Unless "mandatory" only applies to the father? In which case, why is the father prohibited from signing a business deal three days after the mother gives birth, when the mother would be capable of doing so?

Then there are all the tricky questions, like if the father and mother have broken up and are no longer on speaking terms, or the father is overseas. They are the same issues as for parental leave, only backed by the force of government punishment for not complying.

> What you are saying is that you want the government to fine, imprison, or otherwise punish a woman who, as CEO, signs a business deal three days after she gives birth, yes?

Do you sincerely think this is a good post?

Every mandatory requirement must be backed by penalty, otherwise it's merely optional. Such penalties can include fines, jail, lack of access to social services, and forced removal of one's child.

We know already that 1/4 of Swedish fathers prefer to take no leave, even when there's an 80% salary support. (I don't know how many Swedish mothers take less than a month of leave.)

Any fines must therefore be more than 20% of three months' salary, and even higher for those making over $100K/year.

Any system must also have a way to identify lawbreakers, and allow appeals and special circumstances.

The Swedish experience shows that the father tends to put the extra time into the summer, Christmas, and New Year holidays. If the goal is increased co-parenting - which I believe is your goal - then 1 month spread over a year, especially in a vacation-poor country like the US, is very likely not enough.

An interesting line which seems to ignore evidence as to which gender is more expected to care for their child and treated harsher when they don't.

The underlying ideal is that men would favor men and they would all vote to legalize abortion, but this ignores both how there are many women who are against abortion (while few are against all forms, most are against some forms). It also ignores how men often hold other men accountable for caring for their children, including supporting laws that put dead beat fathers into prison.

I prefer the line "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be illegal."

No matter how you slice it, government mandated leave that doesn't apply to every single person equally will lead to discrimination. If you mandate maternity leave then companies will prefer young men to young women, and if you mandate paternity leave then companies will prefer the old to the young.

Parental leave is detrimental for every person that has it, but doesn't want it. If you're of child bearing age you're a huge risk to your employer if your resume doesn't come with a sterility test stapled to it.

Which is fantastic! There are too many people on this earth for the resources available, and population growth in wealthy countries can be fuelled by immigration.

That's what's happening here in Australia - low birthrate (~1.8) has been aided by immigration, and we've had a 25% increase in population in the last 17 years. Having kiddliwinks is not the only solution to growth in the west.

What possible reason is there for this? To equalize wages? A family had 2 income earners, then they are down to 1. And you want to take away all their ability to have income?

We don't lose the income during parental leave.

You need to get your priorities aligned. This is the land of the free. Not the land of the equal.

Enjoy!

This varies from company to company. It isn't legally required, but the company I work for offers 6 months paid parental leave and it is encouraged you take it to spend time with your newborn/spouse and adjust to the new life. There are a lot of married couples in the office and both parents are allowed to take it together.

Most companies that my friends work for offer paid maternity leave ranging from 3 to 12 months. Generally paternal leave is the one that is never offered, or if it is offered, it's subtly discouraged against actually using it (you want that much-needed promotion now that you have a newborn, don't you? better work harder and not take time off!)

> This is the land of the free. Not the land of the equal.

Is this an attempt to make novelty accounts a thing on HN?

Or more seriously, on a scale of 1-10, how much tongue in cheek is in that assessment?

You lose the experience, and you're not going to be first in line for a promotion when you come back after 6 months. Unless you want to go full Harrison Bergeron and mandate that the employer isn't allowed to reward Alice for the work she did while Bob was on paternity leave.

edit: here's a table with more details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Europe_.28inc._...

"Paternity leave" is an attempt to create a non-capitalist bubble inside of a capitalist world. It's like building a colony on Mars; not something you can do trivially.

How do you enforce it tho? People can not report child birth to their employers.

That should be the hint that your first principles are incorrect.

Who are YOU to believe you can make that decision for me and everyone else?

Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view.

The former (health) is absolutely true, but it's nothing that couldn't also be solved by the mother pumping her breast milk and the father doing the actual feeding by bottle.

"bottle vs breast" is about the actual milk being fed, not the delivery method.

I'm not sold on the validity of it all, but it's something to think about.

Here's the important bit:

"According to Hinde, when a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This "baby spit backwash," as she delightfully describes it, contains information about the baby's immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition. If the mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, they compel the mother's body to produce antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby's body, where they target the infection.

At the same time that it is medicine, breast milk is a private conversation between mother and child. While my daughter lacks words, breast-feeding makes it possible for her to tell me exactly what she needs. The messages we are sending each other are literally made of ourselves, and they tell us about what is going on in our lives at that very moment."

http://www.skepticalob.com/2015/09/mothers-and-babies-commun...

It would certainly be interesting to see how often the mother was producing antibodies for things that the father wasn't (more mundane infection vectors are one of the ideas presented at my link, if baby, mother and father are all sick, you don't have much evidence of the saliva being important).

that's a very descartesian view, and from my experience and study also very unfounded. all you need to do is observe a baby while it's brestfed vs. bottlefed.

would you say that you feel the same after eating off the floor (very clean of course) vs. in a nice setting? after all, it's just about the nutrients, right?

No, it's a summation of the debate behind the phrase "bottle vs breast". From a few links when Googling:

- "Deciding whether to breastfeed or use formula for your newborn?"

- "Breast vs. bottle - breast milk is the perfect food for baby, with numerous advantages over infant formula"

- "Here's help deciding if you should breastfeed your baby or bottle feed with formula."

Pretty much every discussion of "bottle vs breast" is discussing "breastmilk vs formula".

> would you say that you feel the same after eating off the floor (very clean of course) vs. in a nice setting?

Would you say that a newborn baby is capable of comprehending the difference between a 5 star restaurant compared to a 3 star one? I'm not sure applying adult opinions to newborn babies is likely to achieve much.

...for the simple biological reason that fathers can generally run faster and thus chase down the kid... ok, that's just trolling :P

While the father normally is unable to do so without effort like a woman is, they do have all the equipment and their are ways to get it functioning. Somehow I don't think people would be for that option.

Only that paternity leave should be considered normal, something that all companies offer and expect you to take. Whether both parents are at home, or just the dad in cases where the mother can't easily take time off, either is fine.

Currently there is a gender asymmetry in that maternity leave is normal (and required by law), but paternity leave is frequently non-existent, or discouraged.

Normalized paternity leave is the norm in most of Europe.

I took four weeks off for our first child, and will be taking 3-4 weeks off for the second. It's awesome.

In the US, at the federal level, maternity and paternity leave (both unpaid) are covered by the same mandate (FMLA).

In California, paid maternity and paternity leave are covered by the same mandate.

That doesn't negate the social asymmetry, of course.

Not as much as you've been led to believe:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sibbreast.htm

"A new study comparing siblings who were fed differently during infancy suggests that breast-feeding might be no more beneficial than bottle-feeding for 10 of 11 long-term health and well-being outcomes in children age 4 to 14."

A young child will be nursing many times during a day, giving plenty of opportunities for a working mother to nurse their child without giving up time to work on their career. Feedings while the mother is out can be done by bottle using pumped milk, or through formula.

Sexual differences do not need to imply social advantage/disadvantage here ...

Beyond that, if you adopt a policy that considers these outliers and normalize parental leave, there will be parents where breastfeeding is possible but the fathers still take the parental leave.

I wasn't actually making an argument beyond what I posted; if I was to provide an explanation of its relevance it is that it is a fairly common position that real and relevant differences are a necessary, but not necessarily, sufficient condition for policy distinctions, and that insofar as the subthread on the advantages of being with the mother was relevant to the broader subject to start with, it remained relevant (though not, in and of itself, demanding any particular conclusion) as long as there was a real, on-average difference.

Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

>>

I see no evidence to support this "funnel" at all in my life/work experience.

Workers on "flex" schedules in the tech sector underperform by a wide margin. I see little or no reason why I should prop up someone else's life / work choices with my own labor.

Proof, please.

I would point out that most people supporting both those ideas in this thread don't seem to be providing evidence either.

Everybody, I'm pretty sure the down vote is used to bury threads that don't add to the discussion. I think "shawn-butter"'s side deserves to be discussed.

Put another way, we need to upend the idea that hazardous and arduous jobs (often involving hard physical labor) are only the domain of men, and encourage more women to participate in industries like mining, firefighting, welding, truck driving, and construction.

As a man, my out-of-shape physiology precludes me from being one - that doesn't mean that my gender should be excluded from it.

Maybe the tech industry is just immune to this, but this article is basically a press release with no information about data or methodology.

Of course no one should make more money just because they are taller, but that's the reality. No one seems interested to try to correct this, though, because it's not obviously tied to any popular political movements.

It still doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm exhausted today, despite taking a mid-day nap. When I go back next week, I will not be at my best, and there's no way of me being at my best short of sleeping in another room with earplugs while my wife does 100% of the (often literal) heavy lifting of child care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

It included an interview from Claudia Goldin and her research[2] which was quite in-depth.

[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender... [2] [PDF] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/gender_equalit...

Statistics New Zealand calculates the gender wage gap by comparing the hourly earnings, rather than weekly/yearly earnings. This helps to take into account the fact that women tend to work less hours (for various reasons, and is a completely different conversation). [0]

Interestingly, the gap when comparing the entire workforce with this measure is 10% in NZ, and comparing full time employment drops to 5.6% (the lowest in the OECD) [1].

One thing that needs to be considered when comparing the wage gap is that >90% of workplace fatalities are men [2], and that men tend to work much more physical jobs, causing of greater rate in workplace injuries and problems later in life, just think of how many older people you know with hearing loss from work, and how the vast majority of them are men.

[0]: http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/income-and-work/In...

[1]: http://women.govt.nz/our-work/utilising-womens-skills/income...

[2]: https://doe.state.wy.us/lmi/0305/a1.htm

Given that there's more female that graduate now, there's still bias in the process, just not the bias people hope to find.

Now I'll admit I don't have kids, but every partner I've had has had the same view that they'd want me to continue going to work whilst they were stay at home. Any argument to the contrary is often met by the simple fact that said child would have been carried to term by them.

If you accept that as a possbility then we're starting to look at mens rights issue. Is it fair that men have less parental rights? Overall, I'd say no. Are we going to get support for these issues? Probably not.

Obviously in a better world I imagine we'd share a pool of parental leave. People should have the choice but I'd still expect the pool to largely be utilised by females because they want it that way and it's hard to argue otherwise.

"Solely" might be a bit strong, but I don't think this is merely an "idea". It's reality. Women do the majority of child-rearing, pretty much across all species. When it comes to us humans and our bizarre, work-driven lives, their careers suffer for it. I never understood why that is so hard to understand, or why it's controversial.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules

Totally agree. But I'd put much of that blame on "us", not our employers. If we weren't such a consumerist, money-driven society, perhaps more people would be willing to work those flex-hours at less pay, but increased happiness.

Why the passive - couldn't they actively be choosing specific career paths?

"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."

Again, why the "foisted"? Especially for children it doesn't make sense: if it is such an unpleasant task, why not simply choose not to have children? Care for parents might end up in women's hands because they already made the choices for more flexible time (and less income) earlier on.

Instead of "foisted", it seems possible that women simply more often get the option to choose (because they were the ones who were pregnant), and men don't.

Why not have a flexible work schedule for both spouses, so they can raise their children? Better yet, in traditional societies (including Soviet Russia), the grandma often watched the kids instead of some teenage babysitter. The kids grew up with more respect for elders that way. Not only that, but the grandparents weren't shipped off to some nursing home so the adults could work two jobs unimpeded.

Don't certain EU countries already have this in some capacity? Honestly, I think the problem with leave benefits here in the States is the fact we treat them as a privilege rather than as some form of non-monetary compensation. IMO, if I could have an comparable set of leave benefits with a lower salary (assuming leave here would have to be set to market rate for my time I would've otherwise been working to make this an equatable exchange) I probably would take it. I like my free time. I'm sure older workers would love it too if it worked well for them if they were more focused on semi-retirement.

Why do we 'need' to do this? Jobs with very rigid shifts should be at a premium shouldn't they?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/who-are-...

Increasing minimum wage would effectively increase the 77% number also.

To put it into perspective, by your 63% number, it comes out to about 1 million women versus 750,000 men. Shifting the pay of those 250,000 minimum wage workers (that represent the sex gap on minimum wage) by $2 or $3 probably will not even move the 77% number to 77.25%.

Of course there will be the resultant unintended consequences such as the price of housing rising due to more people having a little bit more to spend, seeing as housing and healthcare are both increasing much faster than incomes and inflation it is likely these two will see the windfall and end up resulting in the lower classes having even less disposable income.