Is The Gender Pay Gap Forever?
Equality Can Be the Enemy of Choice
National Review published an article this week by Carrie Lukas on the subject of “Equal Pay Day” — the feminist “holiday” marking how many days into the year a woman would have to work in addition to the previous year’s work in order to catch up to what a man makes in one year.
Equal Pay Day operates from the comparison of the median earnings of full-time working women vs. the median earnings of full-time working men, then figures out how many days it would take for a woman to make up the difference. Lukas argues that chalking up the 17% difference to work-place discrimination is an oversimplification:
The Department of Labor ignores, for example, that the average man working full-time spends two hours more each week on the job than does the average full-time working woman. It shouldn’t be a surprise — or considered unfair — that someone who works longer hours also earns more money. They also don’t take into account differences in industry, years of experience, education, and specialty. Men suffer the overwhelming majority of workplace deaths and major injuries. To get people to take on dangerous and physically grueling jobs, businesses have to sweeten the pot with higher pay. Men even have longer commutes on average than women do. They often take on the extra commuting burden in order to take a job that pays more.
Lukas goes on to say that, if these factors are taken into account, the wage gap shrinks to only a few percentage points.
People can debate why men and women continue to make such different choices about work, and why women end up making choices that lead to lower pay. Undoubtedly, the extra responsibilities women take on at home are a big part of the equation.
If Lukas is correct, the pay gap may never disappear unless women start making different choices and setting different priorities. Many equal pay activists lay the blame at the feet of societal norms which lead men and women to expect that the woman will be the one who will take on the bulk of childcare and housework. This may be true, but again, it’s only part of the story. Societal norms usually exist for a reason, and the reality is that women are the ones who are facing pregnancy, childbirth, and (should they choose to, which many do) breastfeeding. No matter how much her husband or partner “leans in”, he can’t take those things away.
When I was pregnant with our first child, I had a terrible first trimester. My morning sickness was ever-present — the only relief I got from it was sleeping, and it didn’t really go away until week sixteen or seventeen. Imagine having the flu for about three months, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it was like. Thankfully (and by design), I didn’t have to worry about dragging myself into a job every day, but if I had had a full-time job, I can promise you that the last thing I would have wanted to do was to work late.
After our daughter was born, it was a month before I was fully recovered, physically, and if I tried to push myself to do much of anything besides breastfeeding and resting, my body let me know in no uncertain terms that I was overdoing it. Recovery time is even longer, and more debilitating, if you have a c-section.
Oh, and then there’s the “fourth trimester”. Never heard of that? Well, babies know all about it. As far as they’re concerned, they have a right to mom’s undivided attention and constant physical presence for the first 3 months of their life.
Breastfeeding is a whole new ballgame. For some women it comes easier than for others, but for me, just the stress of shopping for, buying, and moving into our new house was enough to cause me to lose my supply. If I had been working a stressful job with lots of overtime, I doubt I could have breastfed at all.
I’ve known women who are absolute superheroes in this season of their lives. Women who work up until the day they give birth and return mere days later. Women who cart an electric breast-pump to work and use their breaks to pump. Women who work from home and accomplish amazing things in spite of having an infant attached to them 24/7. I even knew one woman who competed in and won a piano competition while pregnant with twins.
However, that is a lot to expect, and not everyone is that dedicated to their career. It is not really unreasonable to expect that women who want to have children might, at least during their childbearing years, prioritize flexibility and convenience over higher pay, especially if they are in a two-income family and their husband makes a decent living. It’s also not surprising that women, since they are unavoidably the ones to whom pregnancy and childbirth will fall anyway, might be the parent who decides to take a few years off to stay home with their child, even if they know it will set them back in their career.
The pay gap is getting smaller, but unless women can be convinced to change their priorities, it is probably never going to completely disappear. But should women adjust their personal choices in order to meet some arbitrary measure of gender equality? Is equal pay more important than women making the choices that are best for them and their families? And can we stop assuming that what’s best is always linked to the highest dollar value?
Equal pay is set up as the finish line in gender equality: only when we cross that, will we know that we are no longer living in a discriminatory, sexist society. But when feminism demands this OCD level of sameness between men and women, it is setting equality up to be the enemy of choice.
