Long, but worth a read. Here's a section from the middle of it:
> Right now, the burden of child rearing disproportionately falls on women
> Some of this could be by choice — but there are also cultural forces outside of a woman’s control at play.
> Consider a study of lawyers’ salaries from Mary Noonan at the University of Iowa. She found that men see their salaries decrease more than women when they switch to a part-time schedule for a year.
> "It seems that men in the legal profession who take on non-traditional gender roles (i.e., taking responsibility for child care) pay a high price for that behavior," Noonan and her study co-authors write.
> If the workplace penalizes men more than women for taking breaks from work, then it could be the wiser financial decision for a mother to take on more caregiving activities — the decision that society overwhelmingly expects.
> And even before having children, just the act of becoming pregnant will mean more doctor appointments and actually delivering a baby — all things harder to do in jobs with rigid schedules.
> There are some arguments that women have lower salaries because they don’t negotiate salaries as well or aren’t as naturally competitive
> Studies do find that women negotiate their salaries less frequently than men — but also that they may choose to do so with good reason. One series of experiments found that managers were less interested to work with women who asked for higher salaries in job negotiations.
> The data tells us that this can’t be the entire story. It can't explain why the wage gap is so much bigger for those with kids than those without. One 2015 study found that childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns. Remember that study we started with, the one about the MBA graduates? It showed that women with kids had a wage gap twice as large as women without.
> "There are really three groups: men, women with children, and women without children," says Bertrand, who worked on that research with Goldin. "Things like negotiating skill might matter on the margin, but it is not the core issue."
> If the problem were that women aren't competitive, it couldn't address why the wage gap is smallest when women are youngest. It's not as if women would lose their negotiating skills over time.
Long, but worth a read. Here's a section from the middle of it:
> Right now, the burden of child rearing disproportionately falls on women
> Some of this could be by choice — but there are also cultural forces outside of a woman’s control at play.
> Consider a study of lawyers’ salaries from Mary Noonan at the University of Iowa. She found that men see their salaries decrease more than women when they switch to a part-time schedule for a year.
> "It seems that men in the legal profession who take on non-traditional gender roles (i.e., taking responsibility for child care) pay a high price for that behavior," Noonan and her study co-authors write.
> If the workplace penalizes men more than women for taking breaks from work, then it could be the wiser financial decision for a mother to take on more caregiving activities — the decision that society overwhelmingly expects.
> And even before having children, just the act of becoming pregnant will mean more doctor appointments and actually delivering a baby — all things harder to do in jobs with rigid schedules.
> There are some arguments that women have lower salaries because they don’t negotiate salaries as well or aren’t as naturally competitive
> Studies do find that women negotiate their salaries less frequently than men — but also that they may choose to do so with good reason. One series of experiments found that managers were less interested to work with women who asked for higher salaries in job negotiations.
> The data tells us that this can’t be the entire story. It can't explain why the wage gap is so much bigger for those with kids than those without. One 2015 study found that childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns. Remember that study we started with, the one about the MBA graduates? It showed that women with kids had a wage gap twice as large as women without.
> "There are really three groups: men, women with children, and women without children," says Bertrand, who worked on that research with Goldin. "Things like negotiating skill might matter on the margin, but it is not the core issue."
> If the problem were that women aren't competitive, it couldn't address why the wage gap is smallest when women are youngest. It's not as if women would lose their negotiating skills over time.