throwaway92224

The research is warranted, but seems not to support the idea that discrimination is a major driver in the difference in career outcomes or lifetime earnings.

And of course we should continue to discuss all the other reasons women don't end up going into high paying jobs.

Why should we do that?

This is not the smoking gun it appears to be. Men also encounter male coworkers with the same job, who do worse work and make more money than them.

For a lot of women, we assume that there is discrimination because it happens to us directly, so further research into the extent of the problem seems very warranted.

But what do we do when the research suggests that discrimination is not a major driver of macro-trends in men's and women's career outcomes?

(Any research that showed there was no discrimination would of course be suspect, because there are legitimate discrimination cases prosecuted each and every year.)

Assume for a moment that we investigate and find that people do indeed have the same opportunities and the environment is equally welcoming. Would that be it, case closed?

Viewed in this light, the article is confirming a truism well known to anthropologists: men work so women can have children. Our society is little different from others. So much male parental investment is an unusual arrangement among primates, but it’s well documented among humans. Men produce roughly 2/3 of the calories consumed across a broad range of the societies ([Marlowe2001]). This is due to both:

* The difficult, dangerous and demanding nature of human birth and gestation, which is quite different from that of other primates.

* The enormous amount of energy expended in gestation, nursing and early childhood to support growth of the human brain.

The benefit of this arrangement is human brain development: we have larger brains than other primates, and the brains undergo considerably more training before functional adulthood. We are able to have these arguments about women’s careers precisely because of the situation we are complaining about: that women set aside so much to have children, and men set aside so much so they can.

Nothing about the energetics of pregnancy, nursing or early childhood has changed as a result of our transition from working mostly outside to working mostly inside, save that the length of “childhood” is now considerably longer, as long as thirty years in some cases. That women and men do not work equally well when pushed to live the same life course is no surprise, when we consider human history and the lives of the other primates. Should men and women be pushed to live the same life course, it’s not clear how it would be stable: men must bring something to the relationship to balance the large and fixed metabolic cost of gestation and nursing, which they can’t do if they can’t earn more than women. Men who failed to find some way around this would not have offspring and consequently later generations of men would be descended from — and have not just the genes but also the habits of — those men who found a way to obtain superior renumeration. This is no doubt how men got to be what they are in the first place.

[Marlowe2001] Male Contribution to Diet and Female Reproductive Success among Foragers