The Crusade to End the Gender Pay Gap Isn’t Helping Mothers
What's really behind the gender pay gap
What is the real cause of the gender pay gap? In this week’s original, Lauren Bari sets the record straight—and makes the case that in conversations about the pay gap, we cannot ignore the reality of sex differences and the demands of motherhood.
The Crusade to End the Gender Pay Gap Isn’t Helping Mothers
Lauren Bari
We can minimise the gender pay gap through many of the policies put forward by Goldin and others. We can address the cost of flexibility, remove barriers to women’s progression at work, and encourage involved fatherhood and increased domestic labour by men through shared parental leave and other workplace policies. We can explore pay and performance structures that might negatively impact mothers. Yet if, as we do all this, we pretend that motherhood is not something transformative, disruptive, and unique to women, then we are just going around in circles.
When we send the message that motherhood should not impact your working life or that it is a role that can be played just as easily by others, we end up putting mothers under more pressure.
This Week in Sex-Realist Feminism: Ungentle Parenting, WPATH and Regret, and Hag Horror
This week: Mary Harrington on parenting in a moral void, Eliza Mondegreen on WPATH's recent conference, and an editorial on "hag" horror. Plus: mothers and the birth rate, boarding houses as antidotes for loneliness, FD recommends a book, and more!
From the Archives:
ICYMI: Featured Author Rachel Lu on the most effective means of tearing down the “maternal wall.”
Tearing Down the Maternal Wall
Rachel Lu
In our time, mothers are especially hindered by a widespread failure of the potential employers to recognize how much we can do. Insofar as this is so, a flexible and less-regulated workforce can be especially advantageous to lean-back-in moms.