Your morning graph of patriarchy.

[andrewducker]

From the BBC.

Comments

[zz]

the union at work have been fighting to get the time it takes to get from the bottom of a payscale to the top shortened to at most 5 years. Supposedly they've successfully argued in one of the EU courts that 8 or 10 year or worse journeys discriminate against women, who are more likely to have interruptions in their careers.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Patriarchy. What's next, elves?

How do you propose to compensate workers who regularly leave their posts for 9-18 months?

How do you compensate their colleagues who stuck around in that position, gaining experience and skills, and who continued to contribute to the company/organisation?

[andrewducker]

You're saying that all of that difference is down to pregnancy?

[broin.livejournal.com]

No, I'm asking two questions. =)

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Well, the recent extension of paternity leave should help quite nicely, then.

[andrewducker]

Two questions about pregnancy. So either your questions have nothing to do with my post, or they're predicated on the idea that the reason for the difference is pregnancy.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Yes! That was a really pleaant surprise.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

If you decide that a pregnancy/child-rearing should not retard someone's earning ability you simply make a law that it shouldn't.

I'm not saying such a law should be made, I'm merely saying it's very doable, if as a society we decided we wanted to do it.

Similar laws already exist for other terms and conditions - for example I'm at present on 39 weeks maternity leave and I shall continue to accrue holiday entitlement during that time just because that's what the law says must be.

As it happens, all the organisations I have worked for for the last 20 years have benefited from the fact that I never use anywhere close to all my holiday entitlement and probably never will. That I use my onwn spare time to acquire additional relevant skills and qualifications. That I work long hours of overtime for no extra pay and this is the first paid extended break I have ever had and the only one I ever expect to have (unlike my partner who gets an extended paid break every summer because he's a teacher).

[broin.livejournal.com]

I absolutely believe one of the big contributors is pregnancy, yes.

So - what would you do?

[broin.livejournal.com]

Good stuff, thank you.

In a previous job, I got to play with data on roles, salaries, age, gender, experience, and location. It was a big government quango. Obviously, women's salaries trailed behind the men's, especially when the women were 30 and over. I've haven't yet seen a good solution, though.

For example, if a parent takes time off for child-rearing, and their skills atrophy, or they lose sales contacts, or their department takes a different direction, then isn't their value reduced?

Is 'pregnancy' special, or the role of women (typically) special? That is, if I as a guy wanted to take 12 months off to do voluntary work, is that different from me taking 12 months off for child-rearing?

One big problem I saw in the data wasn't so much that women were outright paid less from the get-go, but that they weren't around for as many yearly reviews, and were somewhat forgotten about. It's not right... but I'd love to know what specific changes would make it better.

(There were other challenges in the data, like how to pay someone with experience outside the organisation versus inside, which was also out of whack. But women's salaries were a big one).

[andrewducker]

About pregnancy? Probably not much.

About pay differentials which happened due to gendered occupations? I'd want to continue (and improve) the work that's already being done. To do more research into why pay levels in an occupation go down when women become a higher percentage of those workers.

I'd make all pay information public, so that people could see who was being paid more (or less) for the same job. This apparently mitigates well for women being normally unwilling to negotiate strongly. I'd also try to raise awareness of the discrimination women face when they exhibit the same behaviours as men.

Oh, and more paternity leave, of course :->

[broin.livejournal.com]

Apart from occupations with a strong lean towards one gender, what would you do in occupations that were ~50:50?

Like in my example below, how do you reward some workers who regularly take a year off work? How do you prevent those left from being resentful?

More paternity would definitely, definitely help.

Paternity Leave

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

I'd make paternity leave 6 months and compulsory. That way there's no financial advantage over employing a man in his child rearing years over a woman in her child rearing years, and would be likely to decrease the amount of unpaid leave that women take.

So far I've met about five senior people who've expressed the sentiment that when hiring it's desirable to avoid women of child bearing age as maternity cover is extremely expensive for the employer (partially directly, but mostly in opportunity cost), and of those five senior people, four were women.

Of course, one way to run a successful organisation is to offer excellent maternity cover, childcare, flexible working but comparatively poor salaries, you'll be over subscribed with women who wish to have children but that's okay - you can employ more people due to the lower salaries. The additional benefits would not be displayed in the graphs from the BBC which focus on hourly wage only. I believe - but don't have statistics to back up - that there is a gender bias for women in public sector jobs which have lower hourly salaries but far superior pensions, again not reflected in the BBC graph.

I don't think it's possible to legislate non-discrimination when there's a huge financial incentive for employers to discriminate.

[andrewducker]

Depends what effect going 50/50 has. I'd want to more about the mechanisms behind it. So far we only have an effect, more research needed to tease out the different contributory factors.

And people will always be resentful when they lose some advantage. Sometimes you can do things in a way that keeps people happy, and sometimes you can't.

The number of births per person in the uk is 1.8 - so most people aren't regularly taking a year off. I'm sure some people are, but according to this link it's only about 15% of the population that have 3 or more kids.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

I feel I'm a little too close to the question to formulate good answers at the moment, but I think that there are several major difficulties with the idea of the value of person being reduced by a period child-rearing.

Firstly, how does the organisation assess value? I've never worked anywhere where I felt that it was done in a sensible way, in most places I've worked there's no serious attempt to do it at all (although much time is wasted in the pursuit of appearing to do it).

Secondly, I see not much evidence that workers are paid according to value, even when there's an attempt to assess it. Sometimes that's because the law requires otherwise, such as in the case of maternity leave, but more often it's for other reasons, length of service, pre-existing and entrenched pay scales, tradition, sexism, racism, nepotism, etc, etc.

Thirdly, society seems to have (just barely) decided that women having babies can be a good thing, and they ought to be empowered to work afterwards, hence the current state of our employment law. Organisations of all kinds, including the most commercial and market-led, are part of society, and to allow organisations to remunerate according to their assessment of the value of each employee to the oranisation, including penalising women for taking time off to reproduce, I think would necessarily involve the organisation abdicating from any wider social responsibility. Which I think would be bad.

[simont]

It's interesting that the red graph has two distinct differences from the blue one. For a start, it's generally lower; but also, the blue graph has a nice smooth bell curve, whereas the red graph looks like a bell curve in which somebody has made a dent with their thumb.

My immediate thought when I saw the dent was that that probably marked the "danger" area due to pregnancy, but then I noticed that the centre of the dent is at the 45-49 mark, which sounds a bit late for that to me.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

I'm no statistician (as this reply will doubtless demonstrate!) but could that be cause it's the cumulative effect of women having babies being reflected ... as in the effect first becomes noticable in the 20-24 age range and then gets larger because the total number of women in the workforce who have had children at some stage, increases and never decreases (although the rate of increase slows dramatically after the mid-thirties)?

I think I know what I'm trying to say. :-)

[simont]

Ah, I think I see; you think it's related to the derivative of the number of women in the process of having babies? Could be, I suppose.

eta: integral! I meant integral. Perhaps I should stop posting on LJ until I'm properly awake.

[beachpsalms.livejournal.com]

God, that's depressing.

I think that the conversation upthread on maternity leave is a red herring. It's not my time off with babies that has really interfered with earning - it's probably more some of the constraints that the gender imbalance in parenting creates.

I've got two kids, who have two different biological dads - neither of whom is around, and one who disappeared without contact for over 10 years. Guess what? He was free to do whatever the hell he wanted, including work in the oil patch, earning terrific money (very little of which ever arrived as child support). Meanwhile, I worked half time and put myself through grad school. So it's not a surprise that my earning is lower.

Being a custodial parent can mean that you don't have the flexibility to pursue higher income employment: because of child care needs, or trying to provide some stability, or because you can't work endless hours of overtime.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

Slightly off topic perhaps, but the first time I saw this graph, I think the thing that struck me most was that wages at the 70% percentile are really not all that high (particularly for women), assuming full time working hours.

I do wonder how the issue of lower wages for part time worker might impact on the bandings for women, given so many more work part time.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't better paternity leave just transfer the resentment issue to those who don't have children?

[broin.livejournal.com]

Definitely. I don't know how I feel about having, say, an equivalent leave for those who don't want kids (how would you even prove that?) or if that's missing the point. Or some point. Dunno.

Re: Paternity Leave

[broin.livejournal.com]

That's some really good stuff. Thank you.

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

According to Google:

1 U.S. dollar = 0.64821417 British pounds

So then, I make $13.58 an hour.

13.58 U.S. dollars = 8.80274843 British pounds.

I will be 38 this year.

Yyyyup.