[gruez]

Again, you're not disagreeing with the OP here. Basically the argument chain has gone like

1. "women only make 70 cents for every dollar a man makes!"

2. "actually, when you account for various factors, women make about the same amount as a man does. it's just that women have different job preferences compared to men"

3. you: "yeah but those preference are due to women having to raise babies and do chores"

I can see why someone might think it's unfair that a women gets paid less because she has to take care of children and do chores, but at the same time that's a separate issue than the original question of pay inequality. It's pretty hard to argue for why a women should get paid less than a man for the same job, but it's at least plausible to think why someone who's working less (because they're taking care of children) should get paid less.

[lapcat]

I wouldn't say that women necessarily have different job preferences. Rather, I'd say that employers are inflexible. Suppose that someone, male or female, wants to get a 75% or 50% time software engineering job at Google. Can they? AFAIK they cannot. It's not even a question of whether they can get 75% or 50% of the compensation of a full-time employee: they'll get 0% of the compensation, because Google won't offer the job at less than full time. Employers like this don't give a damn about fathers any more than they give a damn about mothers. After all, many fathers would love to spend more time with their kids.

Our economy is designed around the "single breadwinner" model (which isn't even working for the single breadwinner anymore, who often has a side job nowadays). The way lifetime employment compensation works, it's optimal for at least one of a couple to be exclusively focused on their career and not take any significant breaks from work, and if the couple has kids, then it rests on the other member of the couple do an "unfair" share of the child rearing and household maintenance, and if they work at all, seek out less lucrative careers that are more flexible about time and more accepting about gaps in work. It may be true that women are more naturally inclined to want to stay home with their kid after carrying the kid around inside for 9 months, and thus the forced choice of who becomes the single breadwinner usually falls on men. (Furthermore, if the couple has more than one child, and one of the couple has already "fallen behind" in their career to stay at home, then they become the natural, rational choice to be the stay at home caregiver again, because the single breadwinner is already maximizing income.)

And let's be clear, men are working too much! I just saw another article on HN, "Less than half of U.S. workers use all their vacation days" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35403776 Employers are inflexible, so it's difficult for the single breadwinner to work fewer hours. And working more is not helping men "get ahead" at work, because everyone is doing it! The sole beneficiary of these working hours is the employers. Workers in high compensation positions are particularly vulnerable to this, because they tend not to be organized into unions, perhaps because they mistakenly believe that compensation is the only issue for unions, not working conditions.

The inflexibility of our employment system creates a massive financial disparity between the lifetime compensation of the "single breadwinner" who never takes significant time off from work and everyone else. It doesn't have to be this way. What's happening is that the natural differences between men and women are getting exaggerated to an unhealthy degree by the system. More flexibility would help both. We've seen how inflexible employers can be, however, now that they're demanding everyone return to the office after allowing them to work from home during the pandemic.