Something I see a lot of people missing in the reblogs: KIDS KIDS KIDS THIS IS LIKE 92% ABOUT KIDS
Yeah, there’s other factors too, but “women don’t ask for raises” and “pink-collar jobs aren’t valued” are smaller factors than the simple fact that caring for your own children is mandatory for women and optional for men.
Here’s the life story of, I’m going to say, about half the women I’ve ever worked with:
- Had children. Possibly voluntarily, possibly through lack of contraception education and/or funds.
- Broke off relations with the father. Frequently this was for a reason that was not a choice on her part, like he abused her or went to prison or just plain disappeared.
- Kept the kids. Even if it was an amicable split, she likely has weekday custody and is the one who takes charge of the vast majority of their needs.
- Dad may or may not pay child support, but even if he does, the average child support is $2550/year and the average cost of raising a child in a low-income family is $8610/year.
- The mother can’t afford paid childcare, but she has some friends/family members who watch her kids, but they can’t commit to a consistent schedule, which means she can only work limited hours and has to take a lot of unplanned time off.
- This drastically limits both which jobs she can take and how much she can earn from those jobs, and completely locks her into poverty until the youngest child is old enough to be home alone. But by then she’ll have an unimpressive resume of assorted part-time gigs, plus likely health problems from 15 years of eating junk and barely sleeping, so it’s not a fabulous career launch point.
There’s lots of factors in why women get paid less than men, but lack of childcare is hugely, gigantically more important than stuff like “women don’t speak up enough in meetings,” or even stuff like “female neurosurgeons make less than male neurosurgeons.”
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