The U.S. educational system is needlessly slow and expensive. In other countries you don't need to pay for four years of college before starting medical school or law school. For example, I think in India a woman can finish medical school at age 23, whereas in the U.S. it would be age 26, assuming she graduates high school at 18. If women and men complete their education earlier, it is easier to have both a high-powered career and a family.
In India, medical school is 5 years. In the US it is 4 years. Beyond that, I do not know. I will note, however, that when Indian doctors move to the US, do their USMLE and try to get into a residency program, they do not do any special training to "catch up".
The first four years in the US is actually not in medical school. Basically you'll need the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in biological sciences to go to medical school. Most students do 4-yr college and then med. A total of 8 years. Then residency and on and on. If the biological sciences requirement is simply folded into a five year course that's the Indian model. MBBS - Bachelor of science and Bachelor of medicine.
It's really bizarre the way that pre-professional undergraduate programs in the US work. Pre-med is basically a smorgasbord of random stuff, with a slight inclination towards biology and chemistry, although from my remembrances with premed classmates, they didn't take a whole lot more sciences than the general requirements mandated. Pre-law is even worse, with people taking the most generic possible collection of liberal arts classes, usually ending up with Econ or History almost by default.
There's some perverse incentives to take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs.
If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US.
For example, is the goal only 'to produce medical professionals in an efficient way'? Or does education also include 'acquiring general knowledge' and 'training in citizenship' (quoting that link).
There's also a complaint about 'what Duke University professor and interdisciplinary-studies expert Cathy Davidson describes as "the duck, duck, goose model."'
I had an odd exchange once, over lunch at a UK research site with mostly European graduate students. I found out that I knew more about European history than the others. My education in the US included a European history course, while most of the Europeans had specialized in science since they were teenagers.
Not that that knowledge has really proved useful ... but then again, neither has my training in quantum mechanics.
It's a luxury, and a remnant of outdated conceptions of what the purpose of university education is. As much as some hate reality, and wish for some never-existent golden age of well-rounded liberal arts education, people engage in higher education because it is the gateway to a career, and as such, what they really want is relevant vocational training, which, outside of a few rare disciplines (engineering, namely) they rarely get, and instead faff around with trivialities for most of four years, at a toll of 35-60k per year.
Outdated, out-shmated. The concept of a university has changed enough times that whatever "new" view is in vogue now is a repeat of what came before. Once upon a time universities were a place to get relevant vocational training as a cleric, doctor, administrator, and a handful of other fields.
The advice you give - "it is the gateway to a career" - has rather large built-in flaw.
The student loan industry, and the increasingly profit-oriented universities, have basically looked at the overall earnings difference of getting a degree and exclaimed "I want me some of that!"
Young adults who start life $30,000 in debt, for that is the current average outstanding student loan balance per borrower, make for a more compliant wage slave.
Your complaint does not seem to be about universities, but rather concerns the lack of a respected vocational training path. Since you appear to understand the historical context of what 'well-rounded' is supposed to mean, I think your use of 'bizarre' was facetious.
Moreover, you have changed what you are talking about. In your previous comment you were focused on students who "take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs." Most people who attend a 4-year college as 'a gateway to a career' do not plan on additional post-college education. As such, they do not have the perverse inventive you described.
On a different tack, you finished with "If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US."
That is quite true. In the early 1900s the US medical system was revamped specifically to make it harder for people to become doctors. This included making a college education a prerequisite. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
Only recently have new medical schools been built, after a hiatus of decades. Most of these are still going through accreditation.
It's a bit unfair to center the blame on (liberal arts) universities for the degree programs they offer to pre-med students when it's the medical school accreditation program which makes the requirement, and does so to make an inefficient system.
If you want an efficient system, look to Cuba. ELAM has 20,000 students.
Why do we prefer to send troops to other countries instead of medical doctors?
The long process to becoming a medical doctor (or lawyer) plays a large part in why they tend to be high-powered careers. Not being able to start a career until later in life is a disincentive to follow in that path, and the fewer people willing to still go through with it, the more power those careers will possess. There are other ways to limit the numbers, like a lottery, but not all of those are given the same social acceptance in North America. We are socially okay with extending time in academia.
Not that everyone would become a doctor even if it were easier to attain, but to take it to the logical extreme, if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity.
It still holds true. If this were the case, the scarcity of those who have observably more skill will hold the power.
But there is an expectation that med school produces doctors who are sufficiently equal in their ability (in that you should not need to worry about which doctor you end up with). That you are suggesting this is not the case is quite interesting.
I think there are large differences in ability between doctors even within specialties, but most doctors meet a minimum level of competence because the requirements for med school effectively filter out people who are not intelligent and conscientious enough to become doctors.
If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
> If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
Having friends and family who work in the medical industry, I get to hear them talk about how every new patient they take on thinks their previous doctor was the worst doctor ever. And then when you talk to the people working at the practice of the previous doctor, they tell the exact same story, except about the doctor at the other practice.
You soon realize opinions don't measure much of anything.
I think you missed what I said. I said ask a doctor about other doctors. Most doctors have a good sense of which other doctors are competent and which are not. These aren't the opinions of random people. This is particularly true of specialists.
I did. But is that like how programmers often think everyone else is incompetent? Professionals can be just as biased as everyone else. If there are real grievances, why are they not being brought up to the board? Doctors more than anyone are ethically expected to bring incompetence to public attention. It is why we as a society consider it a good to give them an artificial market advantage that we would not consider for a cashier at Walmart.
The problem is that people don't fully mature until 25-ish.
I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books.
Also, a huge chunk of tech's HR issues are mostly created by startups having very young founders and young managers that don't have real life experience. (to me, young is anybody younger than 30). Half of the firing/issues I have seen in real life could have been easily avoided if the people in the room had more experience.
Way back when, there was some limited experimentation in the US with 6-year combined college/MD programs. They still exist but very few are 6 year--and they're schools you've probably never heard of. My understanding is that part of the issue was that there was a general feeling that students benefited from the additional time even if it wasn't strictly necessary with respect to coursework.
This is a good point, but I don't think that means we should stick young people in schools while we wait for them to mature. It seems more useful to have them doing some sort of productive work, where they can start learning by experience.
There are different stages of brain development that don't finish until around 25 in women and 28 in men, but these aren't necessary to be mature. Even people who are 40 will make decisions that their 50 year old selves will view as immature. And given that much of what we consider maturity is driven by experience, delaying acquisition of experience until after maturation will result in further delaying maturation for the next generation.
Car companies have decided to be 25, as in many states you can't rent a car if you are under 25.
Turo, has the age limit at 30 for high-value cars.
You have to be 35 to run for president in many countries....
etc...
There is obviously a sliding scale, but the 25-ish age range is more physical where your prefrontal cortex is still developing, while later stages are more experience based maturity.
"Neuroscience has shown that a young person's cognitive development continues into this later stage and that their emotional maturity, self-image and judgement will be affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed.
Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties says Antrobus.
"A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception," says Antrobus."
I don't really trust a 23yo software engineer either... Heaven knows my 23-year-old self wasn't worth a damn. And yet the Thiel's of the world fetishize them...
After finishing their education, doctors and lawyers start working, but that work is largely training (i.e. further education) except that they're also earning money because they're already somewhat useful (not as useful as full-blown doctors and lawyers, but more useful than someone without equivalent education). In many countries in Europe, doctors need aditional 4-6 years of training before they can work without supervision and carry actual responsibilities... similar for lawyers, they need at least 2-3 years of work before they can pass the bar exam.
See I'm totally ok seeing a 23 yr old doctor. And if there were more 23yr old doctors then you'd be able to spend more time with your 35 yr old doctor because he wouldn't be busy with me.
Freeman Dyson has commented on how long and wasteful it is for most people to get a doctorate
I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.
I took one, and although it gives me a great advantage to be trained in research when exploring complex problems it feels like it took too many years that I could have spend on my passion for creating things.
It's not just India. A law degree is a 3-year undergraduate degree in the U.K. as well. It works fine. In the U.S., in contrast, there has been a push towards extending the process that has a disparate impact on women. Now, it is typical for a lawyer to get a 4-year college degree, spend a year or two working, spend three years in law school, and graduate around 27 or 28, putting them into their mid to late 30s by the time they are established enough for many women to feel comfortable having kids. It's an enormously sexist feature of the profession, caused by the fetishization of schooling and academia.
>It's an enormously sexist feature of the profession
Just because something may have an impact that differs based on sex doesn't make it sexist. Would we call pregnancy sexist because it works differently for each sex?
>This form of discrimination occurs where an employer does not intend to discriminate; to the contrary, it occurs when identical standards or procedures are applied to everyone, despite the fact that they lead to a substantial difference in employment outcomes for the members of a particular group and they are unrelated to successful job performance.
Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance?
If I require my developers to have a degree, it doesn't violate this concept even though a degree isn't required to be a good programmer.
> Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance?
Yes. E.g. in the U.K., you can start practicing law around age 21. In the U.S., typically it's 25 if you go straight through. Somehow the U.K. still manages to be a center of commerce and finance.
And what evidence do you have that it has no impact? Like I mentioned bringing up developers having degrees, there are many successful developers without degrees, but having a degree still has enough of an impact that requiring a degree isn't considered a disparate impact.
Also, which actor is the one creating the disparate impact in your view? The one requiring the degree? The one setting requirements for getting into law school? The college that requires a high school diploma? The one lowering the standard in grade school so that kids are not ready for college sooner than they could be?
It's pretty sexist to suggest that women can't handle the same gender-neutral barriers as men. Sure, the extent of undergraduate education is excessive, but that's because it's excessive for everyone, not because women are intellectually/professionally weak and need extra time to "feel comfortable."
It's not a gender neutral barrier.[1] It's facially gender neutral, but not gender neutral in fact. Forcing people to spend 7 years in unnecessary schooling before even starting on the 7-8 year grind of establishing one's career has a disparate impact on women, because it overlaps their biological childbearing window. Getting rid of that unnecessary school would be better for everyone, but especially women because it would get rid of unnecessary constraints on their career/family planning.
[1] Say you had to be 5'7" to vote. That would be facially gender neutral, but not gender neutral in fact, since the average women is shorter than that while the average man is taller.
That's a distinction without a difference, because in fact men experience the same biological childbearing window: it takes two.
Unless we start comparing apples to oranges (e.g. women who want to reproduce and abandon the child vs. men who want to reproduce, have custody over, and raise... - or vice versa) the career/family planning difficulties bear substantially equally on both men and women.
If career/family planning poses a greater burden on a sex, it's more likely men who lack the capacity to (apologies for the crudeness) "just go get knocked up." A man who wishes to have and raise a kid requires substantially more investment. He has to get a partner and keep them around for at least 9 months or indefinately. Indeed, it's that historical necessity of being able to "provide for a family" which imposed the burden of excessive career development.
So, in summary, it's not like women can't have kids in college, or at least, it's not harder for them to do so than it is for men.
In this case, women aren't actually shorter than men.
Four year college tends to be a great equalizer for other social injustices, however. While Northwestern may be a complete waste of time for the demographic you're advocating for (the well-educated and likely affluent), it does act as a way to retard the development of those people and allow the children from under served communities to catch up. For as much as your plan would allow the top 0.1% female to close the gap with the 0.1% male, it would also severely deepen the divide between wealthy/poor and probably further suppress African American achievement. You'd have to fix our problems with equal educational opportunity in much earlier stages of development to take the burden off of colleges.
Given the enormous expense in both time and money it's pretty hard to see college as an equalizer for those who start off with fewer resources in life.
i'd be ok with medical/law training to start as early as 16 (for those who can finish high school early).
for med school, you could still have 5 years of academic training (as with the Indian model) and then do 4 years of apprenticeship (internship /residency) and be a fully qualifed doctor by 25.
for law school, 4 years of academic training and 3 years of apprenticeship and be a fully qualified lawyer by 23.
these are professional trades, so the apprenticeship piece is a crucial transition period to learn from those who came before you.
How is this a surprise to anyone? Children require time and effort, and this usually means one of the parents works less or not at all. Considering 25 to 35 are prime child-rearing ages, the reason for this gap seems quite obvious.
The result indicates that 25 to 35 is prime career age, not prime child-rearing age (the latter may well be true, but this study doesn't answer that question).
It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect. I would have probably guessed that any hiatus in your professional career (including education) would result in a proportionally-delayed career advance throughout your career. I. e.: spend 2 years with children from 23-25 and your income at 60 is what you'd have made at 58 without children.
The article is comparing pay gap between married partners. Those who have children when they are younger are much less likely to be highly educated or be in high paying careers to begin with, and they're not likely to be in a relationship with someone who is either. Lower pay in general implies lower variance since they're not likely to be moving up the ranks into $100k, $150k, $200k+ careers.
> It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect
Not really. My hunch is that it's due to two reasons: (1) education is often much less intensive than a competitive career, so it's much earier to study while having a child (in many cases, you don't even need to attend the lectures, just pass the exams!); (2) probably the much bigger reason is that the "have children before 25" sample includes mostly people in non-professional careers where there isn't a lot of room for advancement anyways... someone with 2 years of experience as a store clerk or receptionist is worth about the same as someone with 4 years of experience, whereas the worth is significantly different in something like medicine, investment banking, programming, ...
My guess is that it doesn't account for job title.
One of the articles below says:
>He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do.
So yeah, if you are sampling 3:2 women:men with college education, then what you say is true if and only if that is the distribution in reality. I don't think that baseline assumption is supported by the evidence [1]. In actuality, they've just identified that college educated women tend to move to cities for work in greater numbers than men. However, if you compared only women with college degrees to only men with college degrees, then the difference would reappear.
University degree is not a good metrics - who cares about English literature majors or many other degrees that are next to useless in a marketplace and only indebt their students?
I think the stats I've read about were true for major cities (even smaller ones); in some the difference was up to 30%. So having a median 8% compound interest in ~7 years (1.7x multiplier) should give some nice cushion for having kids if women wisely plan for that and don't expect to get handouts from government once they are pregnant. For countryside that seems to be a different story, but there more traditional roles still work and men are more often responsible for keeping family alive and well financially.
If we want to govern wisely, we should stop squeezing every single area where women can get some benefit and look at it holistically; men are starting to get fed up with more and more demands and society can't really function well when one half of population is always treated with more priority than the other (easier admissions/exams at universities, easier hiring process, higher income during best years, less demanding work etc.).
This response reads like nonsense. I think you are so impassioned that you forgot to link your unrelated ideas together.
There first sentence you wrote disagrees with everything else you said. The point is there study above oversampled college educated women 3:2. If you want to weigh the sample by which degree as well, then that would help get more comparable numbers too. But this study which claims 8% better for single women, clearly doesn't support your delusional follow up.
If you're a woman and you have non-standardized interests, you are "problematic" for society. If you're a woman and want to raise your own children, you're "problematic". If you're a woman and the number on your paycheck is not priority #1 in your life, you're "problematic".
Article subtitle mentioned 'problematic', searching the rest of the article found one other usage:
> This seems to be particularly problematic for women building their careers, when they might have to work hardest and prove themselves most, and less so for women who have already established some seniority or who have not yet started careers.
There is no mention of women being problematic for society.
> Research has shown other policies that would help: programs to help women re-enter the labor force; flexibility in when and where work gets done; subsidized child care.
I'm not certain what a 'programme to help women re-enter the labor force' would look like, so I won't comment on that.
Flexibility is awesome, and in many jobs (particularly our own) it's possible. But in many other jobs (the majority, perhaps?) it's impossible, or has extreme costs.
I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by strangers will have various physical & psychological issues compared to those raised by their own families; while it's necessary in some cases I don't think that we want to encourage it as a society.
There are multiple definitions of flexibility: the ability to quickly change one's schedule, the ability to to continuously work a non-standard schedule, and the possibility to easily work part-time (and return to full time).
All three are useful for parents of young children. And, interestingly enough, the first tends to be anti-correlate to the latter two among professions.
Consider jobs where it's hard to reschedule work at the last minute: pilot, surgeon, lawyer, cop, cashier (at smaller stores), etc: all these jobs tend to allow people to choose schedules other than 9-5 rather easily.
In any case: I think these are all solvable problems, and the old saying that if men where responsible for childcare, we'd have more day cares than Starbucks and mandated home office policies for every company comes to mind.
Your last point of parent's being the only ones capable of raising a child is idle conjecture not supported by any research. And in any case, it would still allow to distribute child care more equally among both parents. Flexible schedules
It is been studied: communes in Israel, child care in Russia, orphanages in Romania... it turns out that you can't usefully pay people to love children. Mothers will do things for children that paid workers will not do.
If that could work, then the children would love their paid caregivers, and the family ceases to exist.
Human relationships require time, and this time can not be scheduled. One must be there for the bruises and scratches.
I mean, it should be pretty obvious that isn't the case, as the person you form the strongest bond with in your life is an unrelated "stranger." That would be your spouse, of course.
Like so many others, the article fails to acknowledge that some women (and some men!) don't mind earning less if that allows them to take are of their children. I could certainly earn more than I do today. But that would mean spending even less time with my children, so I don't. Does it hurt my career? Probably. But it's worth it.
Given the choice of either focusing on your career or your children, yes. If you'd want to focus on your career and maximize your income, would you take off a few years to take care of your children? Certainly not.
Further study is warranted, I'm sure, but it seems reasonable on the surface. Those who have their children earlier have children that are older during their prime working years. Those who have children later already have established careers. 25-35 does seem to be a critical period in setting the course for one's career, so those who opt to focus on children during that time are giving up the gains they could be making in the workplace.
That's not the point. You're just providing an intuitive explanation for the study's empirical findings, which I agree with.
OP's point was specifically that the wage gap may be caused by women's focus on child care instead of career advancement.
Yet, as I was trying to say: that idea is hard to square with the study's findings. Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25. But in that age group, the study did not find a sustained reduction in income.
> Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25.
What I was suggesting is that they are choosing to have children earlier so that they have older children when it is time to start focusing on a career.
> Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25.
Who presumes that? I would presume people who are looking to start a family would want a solid foundation to start from. That means holding off on having kids until you've gotten some sort of stability. Most people in their early 20s don't have any sort of stability.
The point of the article is that various social factors force women to make a choice they really shouldn't have to. We have set up the economy such that the key career-building period occurs at the same time as when most women need to have kids (if they plan to have them). There is no particularly good reason for it, and we could alleviate the situation by e.g. rolling back the unnecessary focus on post-secondary and post-graduate education.
Sure, some women would continue to downshift their career to focus on raising children. But many women who just want a couple of kids but aren't otherwise gunning for mother of the year (all of the women in my family) can have them at a convenient time and return focus to their career without loosing ground permanently.
I'd argue that that is best time we're better at everything. As living beings, our lives are optimized to produce offspring. Therefore our body and mind will be at its peak at the same time we're more fertile.
(This is for both men and women)
I would be very interested to know if there is a correlation to how often men file for divorce and the amount of time the wife spends on child care and related responsibilities. We already know that the rate in which women will file for divorce is directly related to the income of the husband, which would then make this a directly symmetric incentive model and possible a form of nash equilibrium which the solution that the article suggest are not addressing.
> We already know that the rate in which women will file for divorce is directly related to the income of the husband
Do we know that? I see a study suggesting that women who earn more relative to their male partners will be more likely to divorce (so called "independence effect"). I see a study that suggests that lower income families are more likely to divorce. These two bullet points alone make me think there is not a clear cut story about how the income of one partner effects marriage and divorce rates.
There is a study that shows rates for different industries too. I think entertainment industry has the highest divorce rates where as engineering is among the lowest? If someone kind find a link I'll be grateful
> A study at Ohio State University found 75 percent of women don’t want to marry an unemployed man. It also found that a man’s unemployment has a negative effect on whether a couple goes through divorce.
>Results showed a woman’s employment status has no impact on whether she chooses to divorce, but an unemployed man faces a greater increase his wife will file.
> A Harvard University study declared “job loss” the biggest factor in divorce.
> she learned that divorce is more likely when husbands are not employed full-time. In fact, those without full-time jobs increase their odds of divorce by roughly 30%.
> Others looked at the how income affects the marriage and divorce decisions of young Americans; they found that high earnings capacity increases the probability of marriage and decreases the probability of divorce for young men.
Three of those are about employed vs unemployed, not how much you earn. Compairing nil to n rather than n1 to n2.
The last one, that actually might have said something about earnings vs divorce is a study done from 1957–1964. A fairly different time for women in the workplace, and male-female relationships in general.
The quote above describe part time vs full, which incidentally is also what the pay gap compare in the article. If we exclude unemployment, part time and overtime then we don't get a pay gap between spouses and the 10-year baby window is irrelevant for discussion. It all falls on comparing the total income of one individual to that of an other, from the range of nil to n, and attribute the pattern to a social concept.
One do not have to believe that the breadwinner model exist as a gender role, or that the pay gap exist, but then discussing them together becomes moot. There is no study to show that spouses which have the same education, same experience, same job, put in the same number of hours with the same responsibilities have different pay. No such apple to apple comparison exist.
> The study found that over all, women earn $12,600 less than men before children are born and $25,100 less afterward.
If two working people have a child, and one is going to partially leave the work force to care for the child, who's salary would you pick?
The uneven salary, on top of the cultural biases we all absorb, mean it's practically a given the man will stay in the workforce and the woman will become the caregiver.
Equal pay for women means more men will get to take on childcare roles. Feminism is humanism.
> The group of women who had the biggest post-baby pay gap compared with their husbands was, paradoxically, women who earned more than their husbands before having children.
Yet you ignore that the article goes on to state that the biggest gaps were the ones that started with the women making more. It seems on average the couple is picking the wife to absorb the hit regardless of the paychecks.
I did mention something about cultural biases, yes? Culture has its hooks deep. Given complete freedom economically, we still choose things based on what is "normal" or "expected".
And equal pay won't fix things like each gender having difference qualities they prefer in partners, on average. Nor will it fix things like career choice (studies have found that places with less economic freedom have better gender parity in picking careers). It may be possible some of this isn't cultural at all. Every other species on the planet has sexually dimorphic characteristics, so to we shouldn't assume that humans either don't, or even that the ones we do have would have no impact on any factors related to pay (including things like impacting what careers a person finds desirable).
You’d be surprised how much is cultural. Core beliefs, emotions, etc.
In nature vs. nurture, with humans, comparative anthroplogy is pretty conclusive - there are VERY few things all humans do regaurdless of culture.
“what do men do” or “what do women do” is so much more a function of history and how we’ve organized our society (aggricultural / industrial) than a product of in-built characteristics. I’m not saying there are no inherent differences, i’m just saying nobody knows what they are.
There is a difference between who we are, and what we do. Most people work in jobs that do not require the kind of heavy lifting that depends on a sexual dimorphic advantage. Even in pre-industrial settings... tilling fields, harvesting crops, general farm work can almost entirely be done by men, women, and even children.
Yes, there are differences between the average man and the average women physically. Height, muscle mass, etc. but that does not say much about what is a natural role and what is one that is a product of culture. Because we don’t spend, and probably never spent that much of our lives doing very heavy lifting or giving birth.
Those were just a few examples off the top of my head, there are many more (I’m unaware of any female hunting societies for example, breast feeding is another obvious one...).
Why do you think we evolved sexually dimorphic features if not to help us in specialized roles?
You’re describing things that are found in many cultures, not things that are found in all cultures. None of those are universals, except maybe religion, but only because it can be defined so loosely.
You’re describing things that are found in many cultures, not things that are found in all cultures.
What's the importance of that? If we see the same behavior show up in many different, unrelated cultures, all across the globe, it would seem to suggest that there is something fairly deep and structural about it. Maybe some cultures can function with something different, but it's not necessarily up for debate, or something that is likely for any one culture, like our own.
With regards to anatomy, you can see a similar situation. Some people are born with six digits on their hands, some without certain organs, some with organs of greatly changed size or shape. These exceptions are a part of nature; but great regularity of structure is a part of nature, too. Variation doesn't necessarily indicate "choice" or "arbitrariness".
Wouldn't lengthening the human life span solve a lot of this? Or even lengthening our span of peak performance? What if we lived to an average of 90-110 and had peak performance until 70-80 instead of living to 70-80 with peak performance until 40-50? That 10 year gap would mean a lot less.
Well, you can't move a biological clock. Women that get pregnant after age 35 are deemed high risk, advanced maternal age. The risk of downs syndrome and other defects goes way up. Men having children after age 35 also have some poor outcomes, but not quite as bad or likely.
There sure is a lot of assumptions here too. More and more men are becoming stay at home dad's...myself included. Guess what, it impacts our career too. Possibly more so...I can't tell you the number of people that seem shocked to hear I stay home. Some literally are speechless.
Sure. My point was that with an extra 20 years of peak time taking time off from mid 20s until mid 30s would not be so devastating. You'd have a lot more time to make up for it later.
from a pure economic perspective (which is the slant imposed by "pay gap"), a core piece of the problem is that household care (as a broader category that includes child care) is not adequately specified and appropriately valued monetarily.
if household management was a good to be bought and sold, we could discover its price curve through market mechanisms. since women do more house work, we would be able to appropriately account for that gap.
but do we want a society where household care is simply another market good?
What is meant by "is not adequately specified and not appropriately valued monetarily"? My question isn't meant to sound skeptical, I'm genuinely curious.
i meant that we don't buy and sell it in the ways we would buy and sell plumbing services, for example. we don't have a professional organization that sets standards and issues credentials. we can't compare the quality of one provider against another. there isn't a market to buy and sell household care, with the concomitant prices that implies.
Presumably we don't do these things because the market indicates that they aren't valuable, right? In other words, we don't do them because we don't want to do them, or at least we lack the ability to do them at a price that is better than doing it ourselves? Also, we do pay some people for some of these tasks--childcare, for example. And increasingly I think we're seeing more penetration by the market--grocery shopping and other direct-to-home services.
Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
i think we don't do those things, not because they're not valuable--in fact, we've shown they're immensely valuable by dedicaitng whole groups of people for decades of their lives to the task--but because patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power.
we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be.
the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is.
It's not because they aren't valuable; they're just not more valuable than our leisure time (for the majority of people). Of course, even this varies--for example, outsourced child care is very popular.
> patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power.
I don't think the patriarchy/power theory is a particularly good one. Men have never behaved as a social class nor monopolized social power. While it's true that men are overrepresented at the very top of almost every society, it's also true that men are overrepresented at the very bottom of almost every society. Theories of patriarchy don't predict this anywhere at any time, much less in almost every human society that has ever existed on the planet.
I don't know what the right answer is, but it's very likely that for hundreds of thousands of years, a society's survival has depended on reproductive success where men are expendable and women are crucial. As such, men are left to do the risky work while women added social value in low risk (but important!) areas of life like tending home and family. These dynamics incentivize risk taking and competition among men, which explains men disproportionately occupying the tops and bottoms of every society. Working outside the home has only been the less risky occupation in the last hundred years or so, and our society is still adapting to the change. This is probably wrong on some of the particulars but right in general.
> I don't think the patriarchy/power theory is a particularly good one. [....] Theories of patriarchy don't predict this anywhere at any time, much less in almost every human society that has ever existed on the planet.
that's gonna need some backup as you're going up against the likes of foucault and nietzsche on this one. besides, what happens at the bottom of the hierarchy is a non sequitur here. you can't just claim that power theory is wrong because not all men are at the top. that's an odd stipulation to impose.
> ...men are expendable and women are crucial...
this is also an odd statement. both men and women are crucial to species survival.
that's actually the crux of my argument: both men and women do valuable work, but the power dynamic has disporportionately placed value on "manly" work and less so on "womanly" work. what do you think incentivized women to enter the workforce in the first place?
> that's gonna need some backup as you're going up against the likes of foucault and nietzsche on this one.
Sorry, I don't follow. What needs backing up? That men are disproportionally represented at the bottom or that this observation is incompatible with patriarchy theory? Regarding Nietzsche and Foucault, I'm afraid I don't put much stock in philosophy as a discipline.
> besides, what happens at the bottom of the hierarchy is a non sequitur here. you can't just claim that power theory is wrong because not all men are at the top. that's an odd stipulation to impose.
Agreed, but that's not what I claimed! :) I claimed _patriarchy_ is wrong because _men are disproportionally represented at the bottom_. This is different than "not all men are at the top". Patriarchy predicts a distribution in which men are skewed toward the top and women toward the bottom (as you pointed out, this is compatible with overlap in the distributions); instead we see that the distribution of men is relatively flat compared to that of women (more men at the extremes and fewer in the middle compared to the distribution of women), but no measurable skew.
> this is also an odd statement. both men and women are crucial to species survival.
They're not _equally_ crucial to _reproduction_. The society with 49 women and 1 man is much more likely to survive than the society with 49 men and 1 woman. The society that prioritizes the safety of its female constituents is the society that survives. This predicts the universally gendered nature of work and distribution of power without needing to invoke collusion.
> the power dynamic has disporportionately placed value on "manly" work and less so on "womanly" work
Society is a complex beast, but here's my best attempt at explaining the most relevant bits of the system (this mostly applies to any time between the Paleolithic and ~1900, inclusive): A household needs to bring in resources and it needs general maintenance/overhead. The best way to bring in resources tended to be to render services to the community (market). The highest value services were often the riskiest. Because men are less reproductively critical, men specialized in the high-risk, high-value work while women tended to take care of the maintenance/overhead (like caring for the family). The men who were very successful at their risky enterprises rose to the top of society, and the men who were not very successful sank to the bottom. Even though men brought in the resources, they didn't keep them for themselves, but shared them with the family, thereby compensating their wives equally for their work.
> what do you think incentivized women to enter the workforce in the first place?
There were 2 major catalysts: out-of-home, high-value work began to get significantly safer in the wake of the industrial revolution and two world wars killed off tens of million of men, creating huge economic opportunities for survivors who were disproportionately women.
color me skeptical on these disjunct arguments, but a lack of time means i will have to bow out of this one. if you have more coherent and considered reasoning written elsewhere, i'd be happy to consider those.
Sure it is: the cost of day care. There is a very clear economic indicator for whether you should have a one- or two-income household: after subtracting childcare costs, do you still come out ahead?
yes, that's true but also part of what i meant by underspecified. childcare is part of the equation and is one way we're monetizing household management. but there's more to it.
> household care [...] is not [...] appropriately valued monetarily
> since women do more house work
What if it is valued appropriately? E.g. (1) I don't value the housework you do at all, nor does pretty much anyone else in the society... sure, you can put a $ value on e.g. cleaning (hiring a cleaning service) or cooking (hiring a chef), but it won't be clean to your standard and it won't be your favourite food; (2) it's possible, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience quite likely, than women value household care more than men - so they want to do more of it. Of course, not everybody, but even on average that could have a significant effect.
In my opinion, only if you can replace it with something better... E.g. speaking English is culturally formed, but so what?
I don't have kids yet, but I've thought a lot about how to raise any future children I might (well, want to) have. My current thinking is that I will raise them differently, boys and girls, according to what I see the most probably outcome (e.g. for each to be heterosexual). Sure, I might turn out to be wrong, but (1) you can't avoid putting some preconceptions in a child's mind (after all, that's what "raising children" means), and (2) as long as they can consciously choose a different path (e.g. "I'm actually gay, I'll optimize my life for that") I think that's mean-variance optimized choice.
It's like, well your kid could be Mozart but you screwed them completely because you taught them guitar, stupid you... but then, there's no way you could have known, and a guitar is probably still better than complete lack of music, so it's a good choice overall.
How are they not valued? A stay at home mom lives the same lifestyle as the husband that works (and vice versa for stay at home dads). They live in the same house, eat the same food, go on the same vacations... If you're doing those things for free then you're implicitly being paid equal to the other partner who's living the same lifestyle.
Although there is not a market for household care, one can show that there are substantial transfers involved when one partner stays at home. As an earlier commenter noted, a partner who stays at home enjoys the use of many of the same things -- all the property -- and has all of their own consumption covered. Working backwards from consumption would allow us to discover the nominal price of housework.
I am informed that gender is entirely socially constructed. So then motherhood must be too. Therefore the solution is straightforward: Require that men give birth to half of the babies.
People have careers today for the same reason they had farms or shops or a regular practice of hunting and gathering in former times: to support their own lives and those of their families. Whereas the motivation towards a career is conditional on its support of survival and the more adaptive urges, the twin motivations of survival and reproduction are invariant.
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
129 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadDo they emerge with the same level of training & experience? Difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
There's some perverse incentives to take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs.
If you actually wanted to produce medical professionals in an efficient way, there is no way that you would do it in the way that this currently works in the US.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/w... (picked mostly arbitrarily from a DDG search for 'well-rounded education') states the usual reasons for that approach.
For example, is the goal only 'to produce medical professionals in an efficient way'? Or does education also include 'acquiring general knowledge' and 'training in citizenship' (quoting that link).
There's also a complaint about 'what Duke University professor and interdisciplinary-studies expert Cathy Davidson describes as "the duck, duck, goose model."'
I had an odd exchange once, over lunch at a UK research site with mostly European graduate students. I found out that I knew more about European history than the others. My education in the US included a European history course, while most of the Europeans had specialized in science since they were teenagers.
Not that that knowledge has really proved useful ... but then again, neither has my training in quantum mechanics.
The advice you give - "it is the gateway to a career" - has rather large built-in flaw.
The student loan industry, and the increasingly profit-oriented universities, have basically looked at the overall earnings difference of getting a degree and exclaimed "I want me some of that!"
Young adults who start life $30,000 in debt, for that is the current average outstanding student loan balance per borrower, make for a more compliant wage slave.
Your complaint does not seem to be about universities, but rather concerns the lack of a respected vocational training path. Since you appear to understand the historical context of what 'well-rounded' is supposed to mean, I think your use of 'bizarre' was facetious.
Moreover, you have changed what you are talking about. In your previous comment you were focused on students who "take less-demanding courseloads, in order to boost your GPA for graduate school admissions, and expend most of your efforts training for the MCATs or LSATs." Most people who attend a 4-year college as 'a gateway to a career' do not plan on additional post-college education. As such, they do not have the perverse inventive you described.
That is quite true. In the early 1900s the US medical system was revamped specifically to make it harder for people to become doctors. This included making a college education a prerequisite. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
Only recently have new medical schools been built, after a hiatus of decades. Most of these are still going through accreditation.
Even with more schools, the residency requirement results in the 'jaws of death'. https://physiciansnews.com/2013/02/14/this-chart-is-scaring-...
It's a bit unfair to center the blame on (liberal arts) universities for the degree programs they offer to pre-med students when it's the medical school accreditation program which makes the requirement, and does so to make an inefficient system.
If you want an efficient system, look to Cuba. ELAM has 20,000 students.
Why do we prefer to send troops to other countries instead of medical doctors?
Not that everyone would become a doctor even if it were easier to attain, but to take it to the logical extreme, if everyone went through med school, doctors would have no more power than a sales clerk at Walmart. Power comes from scarcity.
This is only true if every doctor coming out of med school is exactly the same or if you can't tell the difference in skill among doctors.
But there is an expectation that med school produces doctors who are sufficiently equal in their ability (in that you should not need to worry about which doctor you end up with). That you are suggesting this is not the case is quite interesting.
If you don't think there are differences in skill between doctors just ask a friend or family member who is a doctor which doctors they would not recommend you see.
Having friends and family who work in the medical industry, I get to hear them talk about how every new patient they take on thinks their previous doctor was the worst doctor ever. And then when you talk to the people working at the practice of the previous doctor, they tell the exact same story, except about the doctor at the other practice.
You soon realize opinions don't measure much of anything.
I wouldn't trust a 23yo lawyer or doctor, no matter how smart they appear. Some things are learned only by experience, and not just by books.
Also, a huge chunk of tech's HR issues are mostly created by startups having very young founders and young managers that don't have real life experience. (to me, young is anybody younger than 30). Half of the firing/issues I have seen in real life could have been easily avoided if the people in the room had more experience.
Consider the ages of some key figures in the American Revolution in 1776 (https://kottke.org/13/08/the-surprising-ages-of-the-founding...)
Marquis de Lafayette, 18 James Monroe, 18 Gilbert Stuart, 20 Aaron Burr, 20 Alexander Hamilton, 21 Betsy Ross, 24 James Madison, 25
I wouldn't trust a 26 year old or 40 year old newly graduated doctor either, for the same reasons.
There are different stages of brain development that don't finish until around 25 in women and 28 in men, but these aren't necessary to be mature. Even people who are 40 will make decisions that their 50 year old selves will view as immature. And given that much of what we consider maturity is driven by experience, delaying acquisition of experience until after maturation will result in further delaying maturation for the next generation.
You have to be 35 to run for president in many countries....
etc...
There is obviously a sliding scale, but the 25-ish age range is more physical where your prefrontal cortex is still developing, while later stages are more experience based maturity.
"Neuroscience has shown that a young person's cognitive development continues into this later stage and that their emotional maturity, self-image and judgement will be affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed.
Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties says Antrobus.
"A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception," says Antrobus."
You don't need to.
After finishing their education, doctors and lawyers start working, but that work is largely training (i.e. further education) except that they're also earning money because they're already somewhat useful (not as useful as full-blown doctors and lawyers, but more useful than someone without equivalent education). In many countries in Europe, doctors need aditional 4-6 years of training before they can work without supervision and carry actual responsibilities... similar for lawyers, they need at least 2-3 years of work before they can pass the bar exam.
I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem...
https://www.imtj.com/news/bringing-medical-tourists-usa/
Just because something may have an impact that differs based on sex doesn't make it sexist. Would we call pregnancy sexist because it works differently for each sex?
Are you making the claim that an extended education has no impact on performance?
If I require my developers to have a degree, it doesn't violate this concept even though a degree isn't required to be a good programmer.
Yes. E.g. in the U.K., you can start practicing law around age 21. In the U.S., typically it's 25 if you go straight through. Somehow the U.K. still manages to be a center of commerce and finance.
Also, which actor is the one creating the disparate impact in your view? The one requiring the degree? The one setting requirements for getting into law school? The college that requires a high school diploma? The one lowering the standard in grade school so that kids are not ready for college sooner than they could be?
[1] Say you had to be 5'7" to vote. That would be facially gender neutral, but not gender neutral in fact, since the average women is shorter than that while the average man is taller.
Unless we start comparing apples to oranges (e.g. women who want to reproduce and abandon the child vs. men who want to reproduce, have custody over, and raise... - or vice versa) the career/family planning difficulties bear substantially equally on both men and women.
If career/family planning poses a greater burden on a sex, it's more likely men who lack the capacity to (apologies for the crudeness) "just go get knocked up." A man who wishes to have and raise a kid requires substantially more investment. He has to get a partner and keep them around for at least 9 months or indefinately. Indeed, it's that historical necessity of being able to "provide for a family" which imposed the burden of excessive career development.
So, in summary, it's not like women can't have kids in college, or at least, it's not harder for them to do so than it is for men.
In this case, women aren't actually shorter than men.
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
for med school, you could still have 5 years of academic training (as with the Indian model) and then do 4 years of apprenticeship (internship /residency) and be a fully qualifed doctor by 25.
for law school, 4 years of academic training and 3 years of apprenticeship and be a fully qualified lawyer by 23.
these are professional trades, so the apprenticeship piece is a crucial transition period to learn from those who came before you.
It's somewhat surprising that younger ages, especially 18 to 25, do not have this effect. I would have probably guessed that any hiatus in your professional career (including education) would result in a proportionally-delayed career advance throughout your career. I. e.: spend 2 years with children from 23-25 and your income at 60 is what you'd have made at 58 without children.
Not really. My hunch is that it's due to two reasons: (1) education is often much less intensive than a competitive career, so it's much earier to study while having a child (in many cases, you don't even need to attend the lectures, just pass the exams!); (2) probably the much bigger reason is that the "have children before 25" sample includes mostly people in non-professional careers where there isn't a lot of room for advancement anyways... someone with 2 years of experience as a store clerk or receptionist is worth about the same as someone with 4 years of experience, whereas the worth is significantly different in something like medicine, investment banking, programming, ...
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
One of the articles below says:
>He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do.
So yeah, if you are sampling 3:2 women:men with college education, then what you say is true if and only if that is the distribution in reality. I don't think that baseline assumption is supported by the evidence [1]. In actuality, they've just identified that college educated women tend to move to cities for work in greater numbers than men. However, if you compared only women with college degrees to only men with college degrees, then the difference would reappear.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
I think the stats I've read about were true for major cities (even smaller ones); in some the difference was up to 30%. So having a median 8% compound interest in ~7 years (1.7x multiplier) should give some nice cushion for having kids if women wisely plan for that and don't expect to get handouts from government once they are pregnant. For countryside that seems to be a different story, but there more traditional roles still work and men are more often responsible for keeping family alive and well financially.
If we want to govern wisely, we should stop squeezing every single area where women can get some benefit and look at it holistically; men are starting to get fed up with more and more demands and society can't really function well when one half of population is always treated with more priority than the other (easier admissions/exams at universities, easier hiring process, higher income during best years, less demanding work etc.).
There first sentence you wrote disagrees with everything else you said. The point is there study above oversampled college educated women 3:2. If you want to weigh the sample by which degree as well, then that would help get more comparable numbers too. But this study which claims 8% better for single women, clearly doesn't support your delusional follow up.
If you're a woman and you have non-standardized interests, you are "problematic" for society. If you're a woman and want to raise your own children, you're "problematic". If you're a woman and the number on your paycheck is not priority #1 in your life, you're "problematic".
> This seems to be particularly problematic for women building their careers, when they might have to work hardest and prove themselves most, and less so for women who have already established some seniority or who have not yet started careers.
There is no mention of women being problematic for society.
I'm not certain what a 'programme to help women re-enter the labor force' would look like, so I won't comment on that.
Flexibility is awesome, and in many jobs (particularly our own) it's possible. But in many other jobs (the majority, perhaps?) it's impossible, or has extreme costs.
I believe that over time we'll find that children raised by strangers will have various physical & psychological issues compared to those raised by their own families; while it's necessary in some cases I don't think that we want to encourage it as a society.
All three are useful for parents of young children. And, interestingly enough, the first tends to be anti-correlate to the latter two among professions.
Consider jobs where it's hard to reschedule work at the last minute: pilot, surgeon, lawyer, cop, cashier (at smaller stores), etc: all these jobs tend to allow people to choose schedules other than 9-5 rather easily.
In any case: I think these are all solvable problems, and the old saying that if men where responsible for childcare, we'd have more day cares than Starbucks and mandated home office policies for every company comes to mind.
Your last point of parent's being the only ones capable of raising a child is idle conjecture not supported by any research. And in any case, it would still allow to distribute child care more equally among both parents. Flexible schedules
This has been studied. There is very little evidence for your hypothesis.
If that could work, then the children would love their paid caregivers, and the family ceases to exist.
Human relationships require time, and this time can not be scheduled. One must be there for the bruises and scratches.
OP's point was specifically that the wage gap may be caused by women's focus on child care instead of career advancement.
Yet, as I was trying to say: that idea is hard to square with the study's findings. Presumably, those emphasizing time with their children would tend to also have children rather early, possibly before they are 25. But in that age group, the study did not find a sustained reduction in income.
What I was suggesting is that they are choosing to have children earlier so that they have older children when it is time to start focusing on a career.
Who presumes that? I would presume people who are looking to start a family would want a solid foundation to start from. That means holding off on having kids until you've gotten some sort of stability. Most people in their early 20s don't have any sort of stability.
Sure, some women would continue to downshift their career to focus on raising children. But many women who just want a couple of kids but aren't otherwise gunning for mother of the year (all of the women in my family) can have them at a convenient time and return focus to their career without loosing ground permanently.
I'd argue that that is best time we're better at everything. As living beings, our lives are optimized to produce offspring. Therefore our body and mind will be at its peak at the same time we're more fertile. (This is for both men and women)
Do we know that? I see a study suggesting that women who earn more relative to their male partners will be more likely to divorce (so called "independence effect"). I see a study that suggests that lower income families are more likely to divorce. These two bullet points alone make me think there is not a clear cut story about how the income of one partner effects marriage and divorce rates.
>Results showed a woman’s employment status has no impact on whether she chooses to divorce, but an unemployed man faces a greater increase his wife will file.
(https://www.themarkslawfirm.com/marital-problems-linked-to-u...)
> A Harvard University study declared “job loss” the biggest factor in divorce.
> she learned that divorce is more likely when husbands are not employed full-time. In fact, those without full-time jobs increase their odds of divorce by roughly 30%.
(https://thebigsmoke.com/2016/12/29/harvard-study-finds-job-l...)
> Others looked at the how income affects the marriage and divorce decisions of young Americans; they found that high earnings capacity increases the probability of marriage and decreases the probability of divorce for young men.
(https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...)
It feels pretty well established.
The last one, that actually might have said something about earnings vs divorce is a study done from 1957–1964. A fairly different time for women in the workplace, and male-female relationships in general.
One do not have to believe that the breadwinner model exist as a gender role, or that the pay gap exist, but then discussing them together becomes moot. There is no study to show that spouses which have the same education, same experience, same job, put in the same number of hours with the same responsibilities have different pay. No such apple to apple comparison exist.
If two working people have a child, and one is going to partially leave the work force to care for the child, who's salary would you pick?
The uneven salary, on top of the cultural biases we all absorb, mean it's practically a given the man will stay in the workforce and the woman will become the caregiver.
Equal pay for women means more men will get to take on childcare roles. Feminism is humanism.
Yet you ignore that the article goes on to state that the biggest gaps were the ones that started with the women making more. It seems on average the couple is picking the wife to absorb the hit regardless of the paychecks.
In nature vs. nurture, with humans, comparative anthroplogy is pretty conclusive - there are VERY few things all humans do regaurdless of culture.
“what do men do” or “what do women do” is so much more a function of history and how we’ve organized our society (aggricultural / industrial) than a product of in-built characteristics. I’m not saying there are no inherent differences, i’m just saying nobody knows what they are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...
The ability to give birth is another obvious difference that has nothing to do with nurture but is directly relevant to the topic at hand.
Yes, there are differences between the average man and the average women physically. Height, muscle mass, etc. but that does not say much about what is a natural role and what is one that is a product of culture. Because we don’t spend, and probably never spent that much of our lives doing very heavy lifting or giving birth.
Why do you think we evolved sexually dimorphic features if not to help us in specialized roles?
* patriliny,
* the incest taboo,
* relative prevalence of monogamy, even in societies that allow polygyny,
* the universality of religion.
Much of the "nuts and bolts" of human society are found to be shared cross culturally.
What's the importance of that? If we see the same behavior show up in many different, unrelated cultures, all across the globe, it would seem to suggest that there is something fairly deep and structural about it. Maybe some cultures can function with something different, but it's not necessarily up for debate, or something that is likely for any one culture, like our own.
With regards to anatomy, you can see a similar situation. Some people are born with six digits on their hands, some without certain organs, some with organs of greatly changed size or shape. These exceptions are a part of nature; but great regularity of structure is a part of nature, too. Variation doesn't necessarily indicate "choice" or "arbitrariness".
There sure is a lot of assumptions here too. More and more men are becoming stay at home dad's...myself included. Guess what, it impacts our career too. Possibly more so...I can't tell you the number of people that seem shocked to hear I stay home. Some literally are speechless.
if household management was a good to be bought and sold, we could discover its price curve through market mechanisms. since women do more house work, we would be able to appropriately account for that gap.
but do we want a society where household care is simply another market good?
but the real question is, would we want to?
Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be.
the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is.
that's my take on it, at least. =)
It's not because they aren't valuable; they're just not more valuable than our leisure time (for the majority of people). Of course, even this varies--for example, outsourced child care is very popular.
> patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power.
I don't think the patriarchy/power theory is a particularly good one. Men have never behaved as a social class nor monopolized social power. While it's true that men are overrepresented at the very top of almost every society, it's also true that men are overrepresented at the very bottom of almost every society. Theories of patriarchy don't predict this anywhere at any time, much less in almost every human society that has ever existed on the planet.
I don't know what the right answer is, but it's very likely that for hundreds of thousands of years, a society's survival has depended on reproductive success where men are expendable and women are crucial. As such, men are left to do the risky work while women added social value in low risk (but important!) areas of life like tending home and family. These dynamics incentivize risk taking and competition among men, which explains men disproportionately occupying the tops and bottoms of every society. Working outside the home has only been the less risky occupation in the last hundred years or so, and our society is still adapting to the change. This is probably wrong on some of the particulars but right in general.
that's gonna need some backup as you're going up against the likes of foucault and nietzsche on this one. besides, what happens at the bottom of the hierarchy is a non sequitur here. you can't just claim that power theory is wrong because not all men are at the top. that's an odd stipulation to impose.
> ...men are expendable and women are crucial...
this is also an odd statement. both men and women are crucial to species survival.
that's actually the crux of my argument: both men and women do valuable work, but the power dynamic has disporportionately placed value on "manly" work and less so on "womanly" work. what do you think incentivized women to enter the workforce in the first place?
Sorry, I don't follow. What needs backing up? That men are disproportionally represented at the bottom or that this observation is incompatible with patriarchy theory? Regarding Nietzsche and Foucault, I'm afraid I don't put much stock in philosophy as a discipline.
> besides, what happens at the bottom of the hierarchy is a non sequitur here. you can't just claim that power theory is wrong because not all men are at the top. that's an odd stipulation to impose.
Agreed, but that's not what I claimed! :) I claimed _patriarchy_ is wrong because _men are disproportionally represented at the bottom_. This is different than "not all men are at the top". Patriarchy predicts a distribution in which men are skewed toward the top and women toward the bottom (as you pointed out, this is compatible with overlap in the distributions); instead we see that the distribution of men is relatively flat compared to that of women (more men at the extremes and fewer in the middle compared to the distribution of women), but no measurable skew.
> this is also an odd statement. both men and women are crucial to species survival.
They're not _equally_ crucial to _reproduction_. The society with 49 women and 1 man is much more likely to survive than the society with 49 men and 1 woman. The society that prioritizes the safety of its female constituents is the society that survives. This predicts the universally gendered nature of work and distribution of power without needing to invoke collusion.
> the power dynamic has disporportionately placed value on "manly" work and less so on "womanly" work
Society is a complex beast, but here's my best attempt at explaining the most relevant bits of the system (this mostly applies to any time between the Paleolithic and ~1900, inclusive): A household needs to bring in resources and it needs general maintenance/overhead. The best way to bring in resources tended to be to render services to the community (market). The highest value services were often the riskiest. Because men are less reproductively critical, men specialized in the high-risk, high-value work while women tended to take care of the maintenance/overhead (like caring for the family). The men who were very successful at their risky enterprises rose to the top of society, and the men who were not very successful sank to the bottom. Even though men brought in the resources, they didn't keep them for themselves, but shared them with the family, thereby compensating their wives equally for their work.
> what do you think incentivized women to enter the workforce in the first place?
There were 2 major catalysts: out-of-home, high-value work began to get significantly safer in the wake of the industrial revolution and two world wars killed off tens of million of men, creating huge economic opportunities for survivors who were disproportionately women.
> since women do more house work
What if it is valued appropriately? E.g. (1) I don't value the housework you do at all, nor does pretty much anyone else in the society... sure, you can put a $ value on e.g. cleaning (hiring a cleaning service) or cooking (hiring a chef), but it won't be clean to your standard and it won't be your favourite food; (2) it's possible, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience quite likely, than women value household care more than men - so they want to do more of it. Of course, not everybody, but even on average that could have a significant effect.
Why?
In my opinion, only if you can replace it with something better... E.g. speaking English is culturally formed, but so what?
I don't have kids yet, but I've thought a lot about how to raise any future children I might (well, want to) have. My current thinking is that I will raise them differently, boys and girls, according to what I see the most probably outcome (e.g. for each to be heterosexual). Sure, I might turn out to be wrong, but (1) you can't avoid putting some preconceptions in a child's mind (after all, that's what "raising children" means), and (2) as long as they can consciously choose a different path (e.g. "I'm actually gay, I'll optimize my life for that") I think that's mean-variance optimized choice.
It's like, well your kid could be Mozart but you screwed them completely because you taught them guitar, stupid you... but then, there's no way you could have known, and a guitar is probably still better than complete lack of music, so it's a good choice overall.
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