alt Hacker NewsThe paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children. What percentage should have children? If you want a zero mean paygap, the answer has to be zero.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
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You've actually disproven your claim.
> The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children.
> A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
Your claims are disproven by your own math.
A paygap over that period would be a 3% to 8% drop due to child rearing, not 10%, if we accept your claims.
In reality, in the US women do not usually take 1 year off per child. Paid maternity leave is 12 weeks by federal law. That creates a "motherhood-caused" paygap of only 0.75% to 2%.
Even if this is true, the obvious solution in my mind is to allow sharing of parental leave.