Beat me to it. The episode is basically an interview with Claudia Goldin who is about as qualified a person as you could hope for to speak on this matter. [1]
tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting due.
As the father of a 10 week old baby girl, it isn't as simple as just society enabling parents to contribute equally.
I am SO into being a dad. I want to do as much caregiving as possible. However, breastfeeding kinda throws a monkey wrench into the "split all the work equally" plan. For newborns, eating is what they do most of the time (when they aren't sleeping). If you breastfeed your child, which all pediatricians say is the best for them, I can't do the most time consuming part of the job. Now, we get around this some of the time by pumping and bottle feeding breast milk, but you can't do that all the time, and even then the mom has to pump as much as you feed in order to keep up her milk supply.
This means mom is going to be the primary care giver for an infant. While this could change once the kid starts eating solid food, by then the pattern is going to be established.
I am not saying we shouldn't work to make it more equal, but it isn't as simple as you make it out to be.
It seems that you and this "mom" person you mentioned, may have stumbled upon a truly workable form of equality.
What if men and women were to form small teams -- and divide labor between themselves however they saw fit. Such a team would be able to cover for each other -- in sickness and in health and all that jazz.
Marriage is about love, not economics (division of labor, risk mitigation, specialization even), and anyone with other opinions on this subject is a bigot.
One of the things that I did to compensate for that was to take on a significantly greater share of "common duties" such as dishwashing, laundry, paying bills, taking out the trash etc. Before our baby, these used to be generally done around 50-50. I took over all of them.
After month 6, once the baby starts drinking more formula milk and eating solids, things start becoming potentially more egalitarian, since either parent can handle those.
The funny thing about breastfeeding is that advice varies between countries, despite WHO advice. Which is very short on data, IMO. China, France say bottle up, UK has a strange and emotional culture around bonding with your baby, as if men and adopted parents are unable to do so without mammary glands.
I have very little time for the breastfeeding brigade, particularly those who think it induces some kind of superhuman immunity in their kids. It's plain wrong in my experience and only serves to perpetuate the exclusion of men and those who didn't give birth to their children.
I think the data's pretty unequivocal about it affecting the IQ of the baby.
This study's *1 got the result down to 7 points increase for 90% of babies when breastfed, whereas the figure I hear thrown around most often is 4 points. That's definitely not insignificant! I don't know about the strength of the data around immune systems.
If one study is enough to convince you, without being skeptical of its methods, fair enough, but consider this:
--
a) despite controlling for socio-economic status, non-breastfeeding in the 1970s (when this study first got underway), in a period of much stricter gender-roles, could be indicative of mothers who were slightly less concerned with IQ scores than those who breastfed. Mothers' IQ does not control for general educational support and encouragement throughout life. Nor does the IQ measurement taken at 5 years old.
--
b) the milk formula used for comparison with breastmilk was that of the early 1970s. The study does not mention if the formula has improved over the intervening ~40 years. One could reasonably hypothesize that it had. In fact, the study mentions:
> Infants not breastfed received formula feeding (before LC-PUFA supplementation became widely available in the U.K.)
Look it up. The ingredient that caused the effect mentioned is now included in all formula products.
--
c) if you believe that children's IQ is set from the age of 5, when this study measured it, and cannot be increased through tuition or other external factors (lowered or raised), then this must all seem very unequivocal to you. May I remind you that many countries (Scandinavia, Germany) which tend to produce extremely well-educated adults don't even start school until 7+.
--
The unquestioning approach of 'there's a study so it must be right'/'this confirms my bias so it must be right' strikes me as going against everything science stands for, and in an industry that so heavily relies on old wives-tales and 'common knowledge', there's every reason to perpetuate the status quo. It's not only intellectually dishonest, it's morally dishonest. All studies should be made to highlight their weaknesses on the front page, and not leave it up to well respected charities (UNICEF) to unthinkingly promote half-truths.
It's not even the strength of the data that bothers me. It's the fear-mongering (which is very real in the UK, worse in other places, I hear) and guilt laid on to mothers based on these spurious studies which none-to-few of the health advisors have ever read in detail. If all of the data was laid out honestly and people were not pressured into making a choice either way, I'd be fine with that. But the way that women (and men, but mostly women, still) are allowed to essentially bully other women, many of whom have very little choice in the matter, into an activity that often depresses and exhausts them for months on end, when a shared feed from a bottle would have no material effect on the outcomes at adulthood, that makes me frustrated. Don't get me started on when the NHS literature in the UK mentioned increased cancer-rates for non-breastfed children without citing the study, parameters, and knowing full-well that few people understand that correlation != causation should be a consideration in decision-making.
So, in full consideration of the study, if you could raise a nation's IQ by x points by feeding them breastmilk, why aren't governments a) funding studies into which active ingredient causes the effect, whether it be synthesized, how long the optimal exposure period is etc. and b) ensuring every child gets that headstart? Oh, they did. And it's already in formula. And you struggle to produce it naturally if your diet is bad. So you struggle to breastfeed. See how flawed the study and its interpretation can be?
One study isn't what convinces me, it's the existing body of evidence that does so. Organisations like WHO don't recommend a minimum of 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding because of a single study, and I don't claim to be able to interpret any of the studies better than them. Your complaints about the 'breastfeeding brigade' don't seem to square up with existing medical advice.
The NZ study is an interesting one because of its huge scope and the fact that NZ at the time (for some reason) didn't have a big link between socio-economic status and breastfeeding, like in Europe. So I do believe it was instrumental in changing medical advice around the world when it was published.
So you think it is plain stupid to pause your career so that you can breastfeed your kids? Obviously kids grow up without breastfeeding, although that alone doesn't tell us much - kids tend to grow up no matter what you do, and in some cases we probably simply don't know how to measure the impact of their experiences as toddlers.
Anyway - why can't the preference to breastfeed at least be accepted? Clearly some parents make that choice, and it shows in the numbers. As a result of a choice, not because of discrimination.
> Don’t tell me that you want your husband to work part-time, because aiming for the impossible 50/50 split leads to divorce. First, because it’s the road to eternal poverty; part-time jobs are low pay, without advancement, and they are the first to go when it’s time to cut jobs. So you create massive financial instability by having two people work part-time.
You are correct! People are so stupid when it comes to these gender discussions. I'm glad my wife and I have a traditional household. It works great and both of us are happy. Good luck to those with the "eye for an eye" mentality. You will never be happy.
> Good luck to those with the "eye for an eye" mentality.
It's about what you put in, not what you get out.
> You will never be happy.
This is where I think people mess up. They think that relationships somehow magically equate to an immediate jump from miserable to bliss. This couldn't be further from the truth. You need to find your own happiness before someone else can step into your life and make it blissful.
> society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute
With very few exceptions, mammalian females are almost entirely responsible for child-rearing across the board. So all signs point that its also hormones too. We as a society need to start equalizing hormones. Women need to start taking testosterone and men need to take estrogen. We will only be equal once there is a single androgynous gender. This is the equality we are fighting for. This is the equality we deserve. #androgyny2016
Seriously though, there are some gender differences worth leaving to freedom of choice. Propensity to child-rear and hormone levels are among them, IMO.
I don't understand why we want a society where everyone is trying to both parent and work full time. Specialization is a powerful tool. Speaking personally it makes a lot more sense for my wife to stay home and have primary responsibility for raising our kids and managing our household while I focus on my career. Implicit in this discussion is that the woman who choose flexibility and child-rearing options are oppressed or less than and it's not the case in reality.
I don't think people want it, but it has become a bit of a necessity due to the widening income gap and stagnant wages. Used to be middle America could afford to have one parent stay home and job stability was much better.
These days both parents need to work to have a hope of affording rent/mortgage, and job stability is a thing of the past so to have two bread winners substantially reduces the risk of being completely out of an income or health insurance.
Specialization is indeed a powerful tool, but in this case it is a lower priority than security and shelter.
The problem is that we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing, which is not economically valued or rewarded, and men to specialize in earning income, which wields huge social and economic power. And the reason this happens is that men withhold their parenting labour, and women are forced to pick up the slack.
It's just like the feminist saying... "If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on earth." Women get stuck with this unrewarded and devalued specialized role.
> we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing
I see no evidence of any force being applied. Women are free to chose their own relationship types same as men. Exceptionally few choose to be breadwinner supporting a stay at home father. Vastly more choose to be stay at home mom married to an income earning dad.
I actually think this is a mirror image of "companies don't hire women / because there aren't enough qualified women!" discussion.
I think there is healthy demand from women to marry a stay at home father, but not enough supply of men who prepared to be a stay at home father from a young age, dreaming about it, excellent at cooking and homemaking, etc. Pipeline needs to be fixed before stay at home fathers can be common.
And there is a bit of a game-theoretic problem here. As a guy, I've dreamed about being a father and raising kids since I was young, but for me the path to that always seemed to require getting a well-paying job.
Also, healthy demand in the abstract doesn't mean that there is actually a way for men who really care about being a father to advertise that fact without creeping out potential dates.
My observations are the opposite. Most high-earners I know are men, so if I wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, I would have a hard time finding a high-earning partner (so the choice shifts from "who stays ar home" to "do we live a poor or middle-class lifestyle").
One way to deal with this, is to make it equally viable for men or women to be stay-at-home patents. Viable socially (no stigma) and viable economically, so that the family simply chooses for the higher earner (if income is their determined) to have the job responsibility and the other to say home. So the problem is in the family dynamics. Society has to allow for the family dynamics to fall on either side without side effects.
Essentially, it happens from a tax perspective. Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that. From their perspective, a childcare centre with a staff:child ratio of 1:4 is more efficient than a stay-at-home mum with a nine month old baby at 1:1 (and the older siblings already in school).
Socially, we might like flexibility in terms of it being a choice whether to look after the kids yourselves before they start school; for the beancounters though, they'd really like you both to be paying more income tax please, and the daycare centre to be employing more people too...
> Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that.
This theory conflicts with the fact that the trend over time has been toward more support for parental leave, not less, on the part of government.
Parental leave only after women entered the workforce in such large numbers, and we've seen (and felt) the negative consequences from trying to outsource child-rearing so completely. Parental leave was not as necessary because there were more stay-at-home parents; and before early 1900s it was more common for both parents to work from home (i.e. on a farm).
This is totally fine, as long as society supports any specialization choice (men or women taking either role). As long as we support both choices equally, it doesn't matter if one gender ends up doing one of the roles more than the other.
That's not what people want though. What people want is for it to be socially acceptable for men to be the ones that take on the more flexible, lower paying, schedules to care for their kids as well as for it to be socially acceptable for women to /not/ take on that role and instead be the breadwinner.
I don't see anyone on this thread saying that a family must have two breadwinners. I think the argument is that the opportunity should be there, so anyone can follow the career path that best supports their chosen family roles.
It's not just society, it's also biology. Even if "parenting" roles were completely equal, "childbirth" role would fall only on women, so they would still take more time off for children (and hence get lower pay).
Technically correct but irrelevant. Childbirth itself takes a couple weeks. A proportional pay gap from that would be well under one percent, and it could be offset by the fact that women live five years longer.
> A proportional pay gap from that would be well under one percent
If only pay gap were proportional... I'm afraid that employers penalize time off work disproportionally, probably exponentially; part-time work doesn't have half the salary of full-time work, and when employees take a few weeks off, they don't forgo only those weeks' salary, but also slow down their future learning, progress and promotions. Whether that's fair or not is debatable (I'd say it makes sense from employers' point of view, but they're probably unnecessarily harsh with it for game-theoretical reasons), but it probably affects all employees taking time off equally, not just women.
This is a hypothetical scenario where parenting roles are equal, meaning lots of men are taking off months, and lots of women are taking off months plus a couple weeks. People take off a couple weeks all the time; it's called vacation. I can't see any meaningful pay difference making sense.
> … because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting.
You're assuming that even if society enabled the sexes to take equal time off that the sexes would, in fact, take equal time off. I suppose we could force people to take equal time off, but that hardly seems fair or right.
I would expect no less for the majority of companies. If you put in X hours for Y salary/wage I don't doubt they'd give the same amount as compensation regardless of sex, age, race, etc. Money is money and work is work. Social norms are the real culprit in terms of inequalities in society. Sometimes businesses do push back against these norms since more often than not it hurts their bottom line (ex. racial segregation laws hurt the private bus companies). So, if a social norm can be toppled to boost revenues or productivity I always expect a business to wave their progressive banner.
tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting due.
[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/biocv