IIRC if you look into it it's mostly a maternity penalty anyway.
Climbing the ladder has inertia, anyone taking a sabbatical will be hugely adversely affected.
We should however destigmatise men taking parental leave in order to readjust this.
I will point out, however, that our society still prefers that men pay more than their share and many women have reported being uncomfortable out earning their partner. Obviously these conditions cannot coexist.
Artificial protection and gatekeeping by ordinance are there to protect those who got there first. Then we can blame others: women or immigrants etc, for wage depression. Unions do this less but still favor those who organized first.
If capital gets to hire for less, say that. Maybe the opportunity was an increase in certain pop segments, but they dont make wages go down. The people who pay wages do.
Balancing that out gives one less reason to favor one gender over the other when it comes to hiring and assigning a salary.
If it does, then the goal of that kind of equality is a false goal.
If not, then you’re right.
Right now, there isn’t really choice, because few countries have had equal leave rights, and those that do have had them for such a relatively short amount of time that we have no idea. So we haven’t been able to test any sort of hypothesis at all. All we have is culturally bound gut feelings, but if we just listened to those then we would still think that there are only four elements, that the earth is flat, etc.
And in the US we don’t even have legally mandated paid maternity leave, so even that would be a start.
In this case, we are asking whether two hypothetical people who are completely identical in every way except for their genitals will receive the same opportunities, rewards, and treatment from their employers and their peers.
It is not for public policy to speculate on which parent will produce more value for the baby or the household by staying at home. The point you were responding to originally was this: If you mandate more parental leave for women than for men, you end up creating an incentive for employers to hire men instead of women (or choose to let women go when layoffs come around), because their benefits cost less.
That is the type of gender inequality we are talking about, and I hope you will agree that fixing it is not a "false goal".
Shinjirō Koizumi caused controversy when he took two weeks of his family leave as a minister because Japanese men never take it due to cultural reasons even though they are legally entitled to a full year of paternal leave. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/asia/japan-koizumi-paternity-...
And he was the son of a former prime minister, so even he was not powerful enough to be immune from criticism of this kind
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gender-pay-difference-field-d...
Do you have a real article with real data? This is just a post by some person on LinkedIn. It doesn't provide any background or support for the claims given. It even misuses the aggregate wage gap number from the BLS to apply at the job level...
"The term “gender pay gap” describes the disparity between what men and women earn in the workforce. Women earn, on average, 82% less than men do in the same job in the United States."
Perhaps you have some data from an authority like the BLS?
I'm not sure where the "anyway" comes from in your last statement. The reasons for the disparity don't affect the reality that it's there.
I'm my experience, people usually confuse the two. There's rarely anyone pulling up BLS data for a specific job. We've even had presidents use the aggregate numbers misapplied to the specific level.
And they have to remember to avoid comparing the per hour earning at all cost.
On the contrary, I find that most data shared about this gap are just a lazy average of all men and all women earnings without controlling for stay-at-home parents, experience, diplomas, fields, etc.
When people talk about the gender wage gap they're not usually talking about the overall average, but rather doing like for like comparisons.
It feels like you're suggesting your sister chose to give up sales for fiction because there were other factors at play such as quality of life, that that is a decision men would be less likely to make, save therefore her actions have tipped the scale towards "women earn less."
But when people are talking about the gender pay gap they usually mean within a specific field or job title. So the comparison would be made between your sister and other men in sales, or between her and other men who left that career to go into fiction writing. In most cases the woman still earns less despite doing the same work and having the same work life balance (in theory; in effect she'll almost certainly be doing more additional domestic and other unpaid labour).