Obviously with unlimited resources this doesn’t have to be the case, but it will always be the average case.
This result isn’t surprising, nor does it seem something that society should be overly concerned with fixing. Choices have all sorts of positive and negative impacts, usually foreseeable ones at that. Work less to raise a family and someone in that household will earn less outside the household.
Economically both parents are still probably producing the same value, arguably the woman is producing significantly more economical value, just the economists aren’t accounting for and valuing properly the work being done inside the household so the graph is scewed.
You create a stacked line chart which tries to account for the net value of the cost-reducing housework performed by men and women in addition to the outside income producing activities, and I would bet the curve shows women driving significantly increased economic value after having children.
It’s the premise that the only metric we should be looking at is outside income which is completely flawed.
> the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane
Here you talk about the "career of raising children"
> only women can get pregnant, give birth, and breast feed
And then you proceed to justify it with an activity that on average probably lasts for about a year and can in large part be made compatible with a professional life. The average SV hacker brags about taking longer sabbaticals than this.
After 20 years, compare the control with those families that successful follows the trial (and for fun, throw in people who take sabbaticals as a third group) and see the results. Have poll questions about the size of social support networks, social status, income, carer, stress, perception of self worth, and so on. Last make a follow up in 50 years for life span and final carer, pensions and social support networks.
I have some predictions for all of those, backed by the research I have seen so far, but it would make for a very interesting read if such study would be made.
Children take an enormous amount of time and money to raise. And the amount of time and money we spend raising our children has increased significantly, as the age of maturity continues to increase (anecdotally this has gone well past 18 years old now, it seems children on average are being taken care of by their parents well into their 20s now). Someone in the family needs to be able to get home to make dinner every night. If you mostly can't travel for your company, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you can't stay past 5 oclock without it being an issue that needs to be planned for, that's a big limiting factor for high paying jobs. If you get called away from an important meeting because your child is sent home from school with a cold... It's reasonable for employers to pay more to employees which can offer a higher level of service and flexibility and accommodation for work schedule and travel requirements.
One (or more) parental figures in the household need to elect to be on-call, and whoever makes that choice is going to see less outside income because of it. Equality doesn't mean that men and women need to make the same choices, just that a man and woman who do make the same choice should see the same outcome. What the statistics are showing us is merely that men and women, on average, tend to have different preferences and make different choices.
Weirdly, there's still a household chore gap between men and women. My position on this is pretty well inline with John Green's: The pay gap is down to a single digit difference, but there is a difference in the unrenumerated work which goes into keeping society going in the context of raising children. (We might disagree on what to do about it.)
Most probably downvoted by men who refuse to acknowledge the value provided by unremunerated work to society.
> unrenumerated - you mean unremunerated, right?
(I'm what traditional/conservative society would call a "man")
If caregiving were split father-primary or mother-primary 50/50 among families, I'd expect we'd see the pay gap drop.
(Unfortunately, I suspect that because of gains from specialization, doing something more elaborate like both parents juggling career and childcare equally leads to net-worse outcomes in terms of both care given and revenue for household).
Is the best plan, to make money, then to pay other people to raise your children?
>The presence of children is associated with less accumulated job experience, more career interruptions, shorter work hours, and substantial earnings declines for female but not for male MBAs.
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_th...