|
After taking into account job/career choice, seniority and overtime are probably the next two largest factors contributing to lower overall income.
Men take off little or no time when their partners give birth; women take off months and many take off a year or more. Beth and Bart start work on the same day, Beth has two kids in the next ten years; Beth has 9 years seniority and Bart has 10.
Men work more overtime; but if you're a woman with children you tend to not work nearly as much overtime. In his 10 years, Bart's put in a lot of overtime, taken some business trips, and has taken sick days only when *he* was sick. This signals high commitment. Beth has put in much less overtime, has taken off sick days for her kids, and hasn't wanted to be away from her small children overnight. This signals high commitment.
Who do you promote? The employee with 10 years' seniority and a high level of commitment or the one with 9 years and a lower level of commitment?
Once you've taken into account things that affect both men and women all that's left for externally applied to account for is a few percentage points.
I've known women who had essentially the same career and earnings path as men. A few weeks after birth they were back at work. They'd hire nannies, babysitters. Some felt guilty. Some didn't. Those I knew best had nannies, and changed nannies every year or two because their kids would be far too attached to their nannies, more attached to their nannies than they were to their mothers.
If you find women who put in the same overtime, make the same career choices, etc., etc., their income and professional advancement track pretty well. To within a few percentage points. It's the same with educational achievement: After you take into account family structure, parental occupation/income, income, and a few other factors the variance left for race to account for drops to a few % points. For that kind of study you find mostly-white communities with the same distribution of income, family structure, etc. And you get strikingly similar pass and drop-out rates, college attendance rates, etc.
In both cases you can argue that discrimination is internalized, or it occurs at an age earlier than that under study, or is consolidated into cultural views that are difficult to study. For example, why do women choose physics as a major less than social welfare? Gotta be discrimination, right? On the other hand, you hear ardent feminists arguing that women would make better leaders, that it's important for women to be properly represented, that women do X better or are more proficient at Y--and they point to things that make women better at social welfare than physics. I personally think that they're wrong, but it undercuts the demands for some kind of quota-based representation. Then again, I was raised in what amounts to a sexless, genderless household.
On the other hand there was this interesting study maybe 5 years ago--interesting because it disconfirmed my assumptions--that looked at recent hires in English humanities and social science departments and their stay-at-home habits after their kids were born. That group was chosen because they tend to be young, liberal, and highly educated--and the least likely section of society to harbor antiquted notions of gender roles. The university policies were genderless: Men could take off as much time with pay, get the same tenure extensions, etc., as women. The study surveyed both time off, how the time was spent, enjoyment/satisfaction from various activities, and the professors' attitudes. It found that men took off much less time than women; it found that most of the men that took off 6 months paternity leave used the time for research and writing, and more than a couple produced a book during that time while very few women used the time in that manner. In other words, for men it was an additional semester sabbatical. It even found that women self-reported higher levels of satisfaction and enjoyment changing diapers. And, of course, after they returned to work they reported what you'd expect. The women put in less time doing professorial work, attended fewer conferences, etc., while the men put in just about as much time as ever. Overall, women were dinged in their job advancement--but the men weren't, even if they took paternity leave: Instead of X years before getting tenure women had X + 1 years; but the time that male faculty took off actually tended to advance their tenure timeline because they cranked out publications.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
