Closing the gender pay gap starts at home

For obvious biological reasons, there is no arguing about who should do the pregnancy part. Shortly before and after the birth, the only possible choice is that the working woman should take a break from work.

The possibly less obvious choice is who should stay after that. And it is often a simple economical one: the parent who is earning less should.

Parent A happens to have the necessary biological features to bear a child. It also happens that parent A earns less than parent B. It doesn’t have to be much, but because of this income gap, parent A will either work part time or stop working altogether for some time.

Meanwhile, parent B pursues his or her career goals unimpeded and the pay gap between the two parents keeps increasing.

When the second child comes, there is no question anymore whose time is more valuable : there is only one viable economic model left.

We need working women to want to have children. And we want to make this choice easy for them. The next big resource shortage is not going to be water, battery storage or Internet access. It’s going to be a young working population. Young men and women alternatively going in and out of the work force to take time to raise the next generation.

Women shouldn’t have to make a choice between their careers and having children. Neither should humanity risk collapse for such a trivial cause.

A widening salary gap between both parents makes this an increasingly difficult choice.

A child needs attention and one parent has to take time off from work or reduce working hours. A job change requires a temporary increase in commitment and working hours. A parent loses his or her job. With equal or close salaries within the household, there is no forgone conclusion. Either parent can take up the challenge. The salary gap has started to shift too much in favor of parent B? It may be time for parent B to do more unpaid parental time and free up time for parent A to look for a new better paying job. Time for a second child? The only hard constraint is still the biological one. The household economical balance hasn’t changed drastically since the first child, hence there is no obvious choice about who should take time off from work. Child three is not the final nail in the coffin either.

The gender salary gap is a false problem. The gender salary gap for the same job is tiny in comparison with the gender salary gap overall. That is, one gender is overly represented in well paying jobs. And that is the real problem.

Deliberately choosing a job that doesn’t pay well might seem self defeating. Especially for someone from the child bearing gender. The first argument about who should stay at home with the child is garanteed to be in this parent’s disfavor. Could it be that parent friendly jobs are also low paying jobs? Has the future parent already deliberately lost the stay at home argument when making the initial career choice?

Battles have to be fought to be won. And the battle here is not about a corporation’s responsibility to pay equal salaries for equal jobs, it’s about a person’s initial career choice. Chose the family friendly, low paying job and expect nothing to change. Chose the high paying one, refuse to give it up for a family (but refuse to chose one or the other) and everybody wins. The gender gap closes itself.

An aging humanity needs both young parents to work and to have children. Both parents. And not child, children.

First, other people are not going to do it for you forever. Second, enslaving the youth for the benefit of the elderly is in nobody’s interest. Third, it will pay off in the long run.

To keep the pyramid from collapsing, humanity needs a larger active workforce. The two main categories of jobs with a promising future are jobs requiring high qualifications, not easily replaced by a specialised artificial intelligence or jobs involving professional care for the youth or the elderly (school, university, nursing home, kindergarten etc).

Labor shortage would mean competition for resources, which is why active workforce should involve all genders. Moreover, it’s already the trend, it won’t stop and it’s a good thing. Since humans keep living longer and humanity will die out if we don’t have children, we shouldn’t have to chose between caring for the elderly and caring for the youth. Neither should young people of all genders have to give up their non-caring career dreams to save humanity.

In 5 easy steps:

Saving humanity in the long term might involve making life multi planetary and is an aspirational goal worth pursuing. In the short term however, by forgetting how we got where we are in the first place (it’s by having children, dummy), humanity is like a teenager starving itself to death.

It is time for humanity to embrace that child raising is not one gender’s responsibility nor is it a choice without consequences. No children means no future for humanity. It’s worse than war or global warming. A workforce with equally represented genders at all levels cannot be achieved at the cost of humanity’s future. And that means that society has to evolve, mentalities have to change, on all sides.

Raising children is a daily challenge, but so are many things about life. And it is definitely easier to work than to raise children. Both are great, nobody should be forced to chose. Both are necessary. There is no planet B, there is no human species B.

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