> 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.