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by mschempp 73 days ago
Most of the gender pay gap can be attributed to children: See https://www.henrikkleven.com/research/published/kleven-landa...

On page 43, it shows very clearly, that women who do not have children have almost no earnings gap.

Society can "fix" this in two ways: - introduce the same penalty for fathers, so that both earn less - which would IMHO lead to even less children - lift up families/mothers and help women not experience this gap, by having full time high quality child Care, have laws that allow mothers to take their children to Work, etc etc.

Second one is much harder to accomplish, because it costs money and time and effort.

The first one is Just forcing fathers to stay at home while mothers go back to Work.
1 comments
snapplebobapple 72 days ago
I don't think that's the right context to put this in. The correct context would be that families that have children face costs associated with having kids and the monetary portion of those costs seems to express themselves disproportionately as a decrease in the woman's earnings. Those costs probably represent a real decrease in the value of labor so "fixing it" might push us further from an optimal outcome, not closer.
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mschempp 72 days ago
Not sure I understand you correctly, but the study I linked shows that mother's earnings drop significantly after the First child. That has nothing to do with the significant monetary cost of children, which are added on top of that.
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snapplebobapple 72 days ago
The alternative context that is probably correct is this is a cost of having kids because the kid makes the parent(s) less reliable/negatively impact a number of performance metrics and therefore make them less valuable. Families choose to make the wife the unreliable one and that is reflected in wages. "solving" that valuation pushes us further from an efficient market outcome making us all worse off. If the above is true, which I think it is, then the correct path is not compensating mothers for this cost, it's figuring out how to get families that can afford to bear said cost to have a lot more children.
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