Children are the cause of the gender pay gap

Yet another piece of research telling us what we've been telling us all for some time now. There is, in reality, no such thing as the gender pay gap. There's a motherhood pay gap and, obviously, children are the cause of it:

Mothers who return to work end up earning a third less than men as the birth of a child cuts their chances of getting promotions and pay rises, a study has found.

This is mainly as a result of mothers tending to work fewer hours than colleagues who are not parents, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

“Men’s wages tend to continue growing rapidly at this point in the life cycle (particularly for the highly-educated), while women’s wages plateau,” said the IFS.

From other research we find that each child reduces a mother's earnings, on average of course, by 9%. At the same time fathers earn around (but not dependent upon the number of children), some 8% more than non-fathers. That's all we need to explain the pay gap.

Another way to put this is that there is discrimination going on, indeed there is, but it's by parents themselves over how they wish to live their lives. And being the good little liberals we are we think that's just fine - the point and purpose of the whole system is that people get to, as much as is actually possible, live their lives as they wish to.

It may well be that you think matters should not be this way. We don't think it surprising, in a mammalian and thus viviparous species, that it is. But if you wish to change it from the way it is then you're going to have to change human behaviour. Given that the gap is produced by mothers, on average of course, desiring to be primary care givers to their brood, fathers to be primary providers, that's the behaviour which will have to be changed. Good luck with that.

Finally, we would note that the sort of thing that would need to change would be time off at the time of birth, insistence of flexible hours by fathers and so on. A different self-sorting that is of new and established parents. We made this point here, right here, over a decade ago and shared parental leave was the legislative result. Yes, that was us, in fact it was this writer.

Pay audits, equal pay for equal work, the usual shouts, just won't cut it. As long as there's a gender imbalance in primary carers, and such primary carers value that role more than climbing the greasy pole, then the gap will persist. At which point, well, whattchagonnadoaboutit?