Kay Hymowitz responds to Claire Cain Miller:
The jumping off point of [Miller’s] piece will be familiar to anyone who has kept a casual eye on gender gap research. Mothers earn less than fathers with similar credentials and laboring in similar occupations. Citing research by sociologist Michelle Budig, Miller notes that “childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents.” Men, on the other hand, get a parenthood bonus. Their earnings go up when they become fathers.
Now, there are two plausible reasons for the motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus.
One is that women behave differently than men when they deal with the inevitable tradeoffs between jobs and children. That position is certainly consistent with Budig’s finding that men increase their work hours after becoming a parent while women reduce theirs—not to mention mother’s oft-repeated preference for part time over full time employment. Miller, however, seizes on the gender gap literature’s preferred explanation: The gap is caused by discrimination against women, or in this case, “old fashioned notions of parenthood.” Employers remain suspicious of working mothers, she believes, while they are forever patting working dads on the back with raises and promotions.
Megan McArdle also sees some inherent divisions in family roles:
The fundamental unfairness of reproduction carries over into the partnerships we form to assist it. The ideal of an egalitarian partnership in which both partners work outside the home and inside the home in equal measure isn’t achieved even in those Nordic paradises where everyone gets scads of fully paid parental leave and subsidized day care — and women are even less likely to end up in a private-sector job or management than they are in the heartless U.S.
Instead of talking about how unfair it all is, it’s probably more useful to talk about what we want to achieve. Do we want to encourage the formation of marriages in which one spouse charges harder outside the home and the other spouse assumes more domestic duties? Or should we penalize spouses who made the mistake of counting on their partner to provide the lion’s share of the earning power? That was the argument of many feminists in the 1970s; they didn’t want women to have the choice of becoming housewives.
A reader chimes in:
My husband benefited from the Family Man trope. I didn’t benefit so much. We made compromises – I made compromises – all through our marriage to help him meet the requirements of his job. That meant that my career got derailed and we moved to places where we had no support network and I had problems finding work. So his career flourished and I went along with it, because the more I compromised the less of a career I had. Critics of “wage gap” calculations will no doubt point out that I undermined my own earnings, so I have no right to complain about the wage gap, but in retrospect if I’d been paid more for comparable work when I started out, my job would have been a more powerful bargaining chip when we made joint decisions.
When my husband died unexpectedly from a rare and previously undiagnosed cancer before age 60 and I was a widow in my late 50s, I found out widow’s benefits don’t go far and sometimes aren’t even available until later. Pensions are reduced for widows and cut further when the pension holder dies before retirement age. Social Security isn’t much help for younger widows who earn a disproportionately smaller share of the family income. Even though he had life insurance (I insisted), and we had retirement funds, I am facing a rocky retirement that began earlier than expected after my dead-end job laid me off just after I turned 60.
I have good friends who made the same compromises, but their husbands are alive and the wives are working part-time or not at all, traveling, and facing a much different old age – because so far, their husbands are still earning money and clocking time on pension actuarial tables and contributing to Social Security (and they’re lucky because as far as I can tell, they have less insurance and retirement savings than we had, although a couple of the men have larger pensions than my husband did). It takes a lot of capital to produce the high cash flow that a living, successful spouse brings in.
While my problems may sound like the problems of privilege to single moms, I find there isn’t much awareness about how early death pretty much burns up all the financial advantages of having a Family Man who earns most of the family income. It’s very hard for a couple to calculate how career decisions will play out financially 30 or 40 years in the future. These days, I don’t recommend the Family Man model.
The Dish 