[drran]

> why it is mostly women who reduce their work hours while the kids are small and why not more men do the same.

Because evolution did this decision for us. Woman stays with children, while man risk their lives, because those, which did the opposite, lose evolutionary competition.

[Ma8ee]

No, it didn’t. You may choose to follow old traditions that don’t make sense any more, but that is something you choose. There are very few jobs today where physical strength make a difference, and before the industrial revolution the fathers were mostly at home and played important parts in raising the children.

[flavius29663]

I would say there are A LOT of jobs today where physical strength makes a difference. And a lot of them are high paid jobs too: oil rigs, ships, linemen, construction, mechanics etc. There are a lot of these examples. Sure, there are women in all of these fields, but because of the strength difference, the balance is tilting the other way. This can at least in part explain some of the pay gap: there are 7 million construction workers alone.

Compare a similar education man and woman: one does construction, the other is a cleaner.

[drran]

If you look at birth and death rates, you will see that more boys are born, but mortality for boys is higher[0]. Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference. Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/infant-death-rates-by-cau...

[Ma8ee]

Your link says that infant mortality rate is slightly higher for boys. How is that supposed to help your argument?

> Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference.

Is your argument that since there seem to be a correlation between mortality rate for boys and higher salary for men, that there is some kind of causation that make it good? You really have to expand on that if you want to make it comprehensible.

> Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow.

Here you reveal that you don't understand natural selection. Natural selection doesn't select for what is beneficial for society at all. Often what is good for the gene is bad for society, and the other way around.

Natural selection works on time scale much longer than the industrial revolution, and most factors are probably older than agriculture. It would be rather stupid to let what was useful behaviour 100k years ago control our lives today. We live in very different environments, in very different societies, and faces very different dangers.

[andrekandre]

so is the point that difference of salary of men vs women is because of natural selection?