They actually don't boil down to just those two things. They boil down to deciding not to stay home with the children (or not being able to even make that choice if they wanted to. I am not sure about the tax structure issue - parents with kids get all sorts of subsidies, which discriminate heavily against those who choose not to have children. It's unfair to single folks - gays who can't have kids and don't adopt.Warren Dew wrote:The "life decisions" that men make that lead to a higher annual salary really just boil down to (1) "deciding" not to get pregnant, and (2) "deciding" not to breast feed their children. Those decisions put the men ahead of the women by months. At that point, a tax structure that penalizes parents who choose to work and pay for child care pressures most women to continue to stay out of the work force for years. Lose 5 or 10 years of experience, and you have the pay gap.Coito ergo sum wrote:As reported by money.cnn.com, Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap – and What Women Can Do About It, believes this is a case of comparable pay versus equal pay, or apples and oranges. He says men are more likely to make life-decisions that will lead to a higher annual salary. He says males are more apt (than women) to relocate or travel for work, take on more dangerous jobs (over 90 percent of workplace deaths are reportedly men), work in the difficult (read boring) sciences, seek jobs that require financial risk and work jobs in unpleasant environments.
We can't fix the biology, but we could fix the tax structure. That would allow women to return to work after months instead of years, and the pay gap would shrink accordingly. Unfortunately, no one seems interested in addressing this issue.
I don't think the argument about more "dangerous" jobs holds up. Considering the tiny percentage of people who die at work these days, the pay premium for it ought at most be 1-2%, not 20%. That's assuming that the dangerous jobs are the ones that pay well, which I question.
Regarding the dangerous jobs thing - that wasn't just an "argument" - they had accumulated the statistics on those jobs.
Also included in the article was that women tend, simply, to go toward lower paying jobs with more flexibility. That's why the engineering, science and technical fields are male heavy, and the teaching and secretarial fields are female heavy.
