Women should NOT be economically penalized for bearing children and caring for their families. [View all]

[antigone382]

Last edited Tue Feb 26, 2013, 08:15 PM - Edit history (1)

I have to say I really don't understand why the substantial pay disparity between men and women is routinely justified as nondiscriminatory because "women take time off to have children," or the related "women choose careers that have fewer hours so that they can take care of children."

A thread currently trending in GD is a case in point of this phenomenon:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022430939

It references a CBS News report on the increasing percentage of men going into nursing, and the fact that these men are being paid more. While the article does emphasize that a large part of this is due to the more lucrative career paths that male nurses are choosing, it also mentions that even within the same occupations, male nurses are making more money than female nurses do. Even so, the disparity between women and men within nursing is less than the national average, where to date the average woman earns about $.77 on the average man's $1.00.

Now, I can't speak to the specifics of this profession because the article doesn't specifically reference it, but I have studied occupational wage differences within the last six months, and I can hypothesize with some confidence that a major reason for these wage differences is that women have gaps in their employment as a result of having children and caring for family members. I would wager that nurse anesthetists--the position which male nurses are going into at the highest rate--spend more time not only receiving an education, but also working on the clock; while LPN's, which are much more likely to be women, probably do not have the same educational requirements or time requirements. I would welcome clarification from someone more knowledgeable in the medical field. My guess is that the career choices of women in nursing, like women in most fields, are guided by the need to have time and flexible options to allow for family care-taking.

This by no means rules out plain old misogyny as a factor in wage differentials--controlling for every other conceivable factor (such as specific career paths, experience level, number of children, etc.), there are still differences between men's and women's average wages that seemingly cannot be accounted for by anything except sexism. Nevertheless, at this point in our history, the life-experiences of men and women are very different, due largely to the fact that women bear children and men don't, and our career choices reflect that.

However, I don't know about other women, but I never went to the uterus store to decide the particular role that I would play in the reproduction of the human race. Nor do I accept the contempt levied at women who carry out their reproductive role on the basis of the need for "population control." Even a stable or decreasing population is going to require that babies be born on a pretty frequent basis, and women are going to be the ones bearing those babies. As a matter of biology, women who have children bear the majority of the physical burden for creating and rearing new humans; it is unfair that we should also be saddled with the economic burden of this service to society.

Of course, a large part of the problem is that reproduction and care-taking are not adequately recognized or rewarded in our society as "services," though society would literally cease to exist without them. Perhaps another part of the problem is the notion that improvements in the structure of our work-lives that would facilitate these services should only benefit women (though to be honest, I don't know any advocates of greater gender equality who think this way). If we are to establish workplaces which allow individuals to prioritize their families, and social structures which offer some form of compensation for this activity, men should be able to reap its benefits as well. Perhaps the problem is not that women are denied entry onto a ladder-like career path that demands total dedication to one's work to succeed; perhaps the problem is that such a harmful and dehumanizing career path exists at all.