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?
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.