Most of the research actually supports what op says. When you adjust for industry and such the vast majority of the remaining gap is due to motherhood. So much so that many researchers in the field call it the motherhood pay gap as opposed to the gender pay gap. Childless women make about the same as men (within 2-3%, some show higher, some lower).
Now is the fact women take over the majority of the childcare and are more likely to take off to raise their children misogyny? Depends on your definition and perspective.
> Now is the fact women take over the majority of the childcare and are more likely to take off to raise their children misogyny? Depends on your definition and perspective
Yes, given that:
- In conservative circles, there is a strong expectation that a woman's chief job is to be a mom,
- Many businesses are lead by conservatives, and
- Many states (at present) are run by conservatives and enact policy to make this so (anti-abortion laws being the biggest example)
Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Many of us developers justify our sky-high compensation packages in today's remote-first working culture by the "value" that we provide relative to the profit margins produced by our work.
If this is true, then this should apply equally apply to working moms since them being moms doesn't take away from the value they bring to the table. Moms don't stop being great programmers once they bring children into this world!
However, if we're going to use _availability_ as a compensation-affecting performance metric, then dads should also be paid less since, in an ideal world, they are just as involved in parenting as moms are.
Given that being paid less due to being a parent is de facto illegal in the US, then I think that any argument for suppressing women's wages is either uninformed or in bad faith.
(As an aside, we don't and won't have kids, but I am a huge advocate for equal-length parental leave; nobody is at their best when they're working on two hours of sleep because the baby's always crying through the night.)
I also think leave for father's should be as long as leave for mothers so families can decide how they divy up the childcare in a way that works for them.
> Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.
Whether a women wants to enter motherhood is irrelevant to her compensation. But how much time, effort, and experience she brings to the job is relevant to her compensation. And despite there being plenty of mothers who bring more of those things to their job than their childless counter parts, most people cannot bring as much time and energy to bare on work as they could if they were childless given how we currently divide up childcare. If you're on partner track at a lawyer, you're expected to bill 2000 hrs a year which means working 3000. It's very hard to continue to work 3000 hrs a year while raising a kid and the lack of billable hours will effect bonuses and promotions. How could it not?
Completely agree. And it’s just one more creepy weird thing that companies allow to be normalized. If you refuse to work in these conditions, you’re “burnt out” or you’re “a bad fit” or whatever other bizarre messaging folks want to astroturf on social media hangouts.
Not arguing that Christianity and other religions aren't misogynistic - I mean, seriously, there is a borderline unfathomable amount of serious misogynistic baggage there.
However, on the point of last names, I feel the urge to point out that I personally know several, very devout and traditional, catholic couples who kept their last names in wedlock.
We have records of patronymics as old as the writing itself. It's hard / impossible / pointless to decouple religion from culture though.
On a slightly different note: Hammurabi's name means literally "his uncle is a healer" (related to Arabic عم (ʕamm) meaning paternal uncle, and the latter part to rabbi).
I my mind there's a mildly funny* movie where Hammurabi, the person who created/codified the foundations of our law, someone remembered for 1000s of years... was an insecure overachiever. "You conquered the Elamites? And Larsa? Oh, that's cute my boy. Now get a real job like your uncle who is a doctor!"
You raise a good point (and I'd enjoy the hell out of that movie!).
Whilst I still stand by my point, I agree it's more of an anecdote and effectively meaningless in the context I presented it.
It’s not a strict requirement but it was part of the culture when the Bible was written, and fits with the general hierarchy which is specified in various scriptures – the most common justification cited is in Ephesians where there’s an injunction for wives to be submissive to their husbands. Coupled with the way the Bible assumes the traditions of the time (e.g. sons taking their father’s name, the patriarchal line of inheritance, etc.) it’s common to many Christian cultural traditions even though there are exceptions.
It was part of our culture before Christianity emerged, it remained part of the culture afterwards. Seems like Christianity didn’t have much to do with it.
It wasn’t “our” culture unless you still live in the Bronze Age but I’d think of it more as a historical artifact which was preserved in part due to reinforcement based on that religious text. If Christianity did not give that text special significance you wouldn’t have millions of people saying they _must_ continue the practice.
Culture is a continuity that builds upon the past - in that sense it's our culture. Also, I've never ever heard anyone say that wives need to take names of their husbands, because the Bible says so. Is that an American thing?
> Culture is a continuity that builds upon the past - in that sense it's our culture
Cultures share history but the whole point is that they’re not continuous. You specified the pre-Christian era, and there have been many significant changes since then which any common definition of the term would consider discrete boundaries.
> Also, I've never ever heard anyone say that wives need to take names of their husbands, because the Bible says so. Is that an American thing?
It’s not specific to the US but there are certainly American churches which have strong opinions on this point. One thing to remember is that these things aren’t just the literal text of the scriptures in whatever version of the Bible they use but also the collection of interpretation and custom around it, and people have a history of interpreting scriptural text differently based on a position which they want to support.
