The framing does make a difference, as it sets the perception of which gender is being "wronged".
I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.
Well put. Likewise, you can reframe the difference as 'women are paid less overall than men' or as 'men get less leisure time and less time with their families overall'. It would be interesting to see a campaign for shorter hours for men without changing pay.
I understand that people want a different work-life balance, but I do not understand why they expect higher compensation per unit of output while working less. Increasing the number of workers a company will need to achieve the same product will add overhead and a great deal of ancillary costs; if your goal is to get people to spend less time at work, you should be willing to accept a pay cut (at least proportional to the decrease in output). Labor is the largest cost for most companies, and expecting them to remain in business while dramatically increasing their costs is unrealistic.
To be clear, this is not about being 'fair' to the companies, it is about having realistic expectations of the results of our actions.
People who work less and have a better work-life balance can get more done in less time.
Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks.
I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers to focus on improving 'output per worker hour' in addition to 'output per worker'.
To be clear, if we want this we have really only have one option: Increase demand (for jobs or products from) companies that do this well. Good work-life balance is a non-salary perk like many others that companies offer.
You can't legislate this focus on the part of employers, all you can do is incentive it.
I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year.
I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years.
Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers.
My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.
> they are usually less productive per week/month/year.
You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?
> "you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less
I am not. I said "if we want this".
However, I think I would have a much easier time backing up the assertion "people want to work less" than you would have backing up " happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year" as a causal relationship.
>"You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?"
I never said low stress and low happiness cause low productivity; I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
>"I said "if we want this"."
You imply that less work and more play is 'better' work-life balance, which assumes that people want to work less.
> I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead.
Working fewer hours is correlated with higher productivity, possibly high enough that the increase in efficiency is high enough to overcome the reduction in hours when it comes to total output:
>"> I am only saying that less hours means less total work output.
That is not what you said originally, but go ahead and back up that assertion instead."
That is actually what I said originally, as can be seen from the following quote:
>>>>"I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year."
Worker productivity is usually defined as work per year; I refer to specific or hourly productivity as the amount of work you get done per hour in the office.
Both are true and both need to be fixed. Yes, men are often pressured to be the breadwinner of the family. That is a problem too, and it should be less stigmatized for the women to be an equal breadwinner.
You are implicitly assuming that there are no differences between male and female preferences (on average). It seems plausible that biologically-originated gender differences may extend beyond genitalia. Is there any reason to believe men and women have the same priorities, abilities, and preferences, and that we should expect them to attain the same outcomes?
You'd need to show that our incredibly complex artificially created environments are built with biological gender differences at their core, or acknowledge that a huge part of human existence is learned behaviors.
The fact is, huge amounts of "gendered culture" have swapped genders over the centuries.
For example, everything you learned from a book, or from spoken language is not part of your innate biology. Only a part of how you gravitate toward that material may be biologically gendered.
If you believe that gender-correlated differences in life outcomes are largely due to societal norms, there are some issues which should be much higher priorities than (relatively) small differences in earnings due to choices of professions. For instance, almost all inmates on death row are male, and 90-95 percent of the prison population are male; this is a terribly disparate outcome with a much greater impact on the lives affected (and likely due mostly to mens' life choices, not a biased legal system). Perhaps you might argue that we should encourage men to stop committing crimes, but alas, we already do that, and it does not seem to work. Should we then use affirmative action to start encouraging women to take risky decisions to be more like men and be imprisoned at similar rates (or perhaps just imprison women at random if we are only after equality of outcome)? I don't know that this would work, but it would be 'fairer', would it not?
I believe that men are affected by a great number of factors including their biologies, and struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise.
Does that support the narrative that caregiving is shunted onto women against their will/without their say?
For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for.
Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.
I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the objective facts.