Last week the Economist featured a new study from a group of authors from Princeton University, the London School of Economics, and the Danish Ministry of Taxation, who tried to understand the so-called child penalty and what causes it. The “child penalty” is how economists define a woman’s earnings, which have fallen behind because she has been raising children in lieu of working.
The child penalty itself, to start with, is always an interesting phenomenon. If this is true, and it appears to be, it confirms what conservatives have been trying to say for the last decade or more: Effectively, there’s no actual wage gap between men and women when the two are compared side by side, apples to apples. Show me a female neurosurgeon and a male neurosurgeon who both went to Johns Hopkins, did well in residency, and pursued their career in brain surgery working the same hours, and I will show you a man and a woman who probably make the same amount of money.
Of course, that’s usually not what happens because eventually, even the neurosurgeons of the world have children. The problem (or the benefit) of having children is that someone has to raise them.
Women are not the only ones who can care for children, obviously, but women tend to be drawn to this nurturing role — even in 2018. I once had an OBGYN who delivered at least two of my children. She also had three children herself and wanted to work less and spend more time with them. However, she felt pressure to work more hours because of all the effort she had put into medical school. So she hired an au pair and continued the grind.
Some people object to the term “child penalty.” “Children offer joy,” they say. Children do offer joy, and that is hard to quantify. But in terms of pure finances, I can see why it’s called the child penalty — because financially speaking, it is. Facts don’t care about your feelings, and neither do economists. Still, there is more to life than money and there is more than one way to be happy. One of the many paths to fulfillment is to have children. This is where the second research comes in.
The researchers found that in the cases where women pulled back in their careers to raise children, their mothers did so as well. The Economist reports:
Even so, this has liberals puzzled: Does this mean people are not progressing? I would say this doesn’t mean people are going backward. It just makes sense. If you’re a woman whose mother stayed at home to raise you, she valued that, and likely you would grow up to value that. In economics, as well as in life, there is always a trade-off. One of the most valuable pieces of advice ever given to me on this topic was never to give away what is unique to me, such as being a mother to my four children, for what is general to everyone else, such as being a writer. There will always be writers, editors, researchers, economists, doctors, lawyers, and electricians — but kids only have a certain set of relatives.
The article in the Economist closes: “All of which is a lesson to those mothers who want their daughters to bridge the gender pay gap. Their wishes are more likely to come true if they lead by example when their girls are young.”
They’re missing the entire point. Even this research shows the pay gap is not a pay gap; it’s a choice gap. You will never, as long as society evolves, be able to convince some people that time with their children is less valuable than a promotion or a raise.
What progressives seem to want is not a narrowing of the wage gap but a narrowing of a value gap. What will we have then? If all of the women bear babies just to foist them off to the nearest sitter, what then? Will anyone worry about the child care gap? Probably not. Someone must raise the children. It will either be men or women, or a mix of both; mom, dad, or a mix of both. But someone must do the job. It is a job, it is a calling, but it is work, it is effort, and it is not easily rewarded by a paycheck.
There’s no way to quantify the efforts or rewards of child-rearing just as there’s no way to quantify the efforts or rewards of marriage, of caring for elderly parents, of striking up new friendships, of keeping old friendships, and so on. That doesn’t mean child-rearing will be penalized beyond finances but that the trade-off will always stand in the gap between value systems.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
