idk how the hackernews community feels about this stuff but..

this is the usual oecd “gender equality is good for gdp” framing, which is fine as far as it goes, but it still treats care work like some side issue instead of the foundation of the whole labor market. if you actually want equality, stop acting like childcare, eldercare, parental leave, and wage suppression are just personal choices. they’re baked into the system.

and things like pay transparency or getting more women into leadership aren’t enough if the system still rewards overwork, instability, and unpaid labor at home. the real fix would mean socializing care, shortening the workweek, and not tying basic survival to having a job.

The difference in level of concern between the gender pay gap and the gender death gap at work is stark.

Not just employment rates, women are also taxed for a “pink” tax on products they need…all while it now requires a working household to afford to live.

We'd only expect to see wage equality if women had exactly the same job preferences as men, which empirically is absolutely not the case.

I hate to say it, but there's something more fundamental going on. Take a look at open source for example - Very low barrier to entry, no one is getting paid, and there's no interview. I ran a project that had over 100 contributors, and of the ~20 that I got to know personally, there were 2 women, only one was cis. Either young girls are still be pushed away from the "hustle" culture, or different genders tend to care about different things.

An even more obvious example might be Uber drivers. Anyone can take Uber as a side income, yet there's so few women who do. How can you explain this phenomenon by anything other than "the way girls are raised" and "biological differences"?

As always, the OECD is leaving out other massive gaps. For instance, the working hour gap: even if you limit yourself to the class of full time workers, men work more hours than do women. There's the work satisfaction gap: women work in jobs that offer them more work satisfaction than men. There's the commute gap: men spend more time in their commutes per week than women do. There's the retirement gap: full time women retire years earlier than full time men. There's the workplace risk gap: men are far more likely to work in jobs that cause them injury or death. There's the on-call gap: men tend to work more inconvenient hours and do work outside of normal working hours.

I'd love for all these gaps to be reduced, but the situation is less "patriarchy stealing money out of women's pockets and undermining equal pay for equal work" and more "men face strong gendered pressures to sacrifice well-being in exchange for more income." There is definitely social sexism being surfaced by the wage gap statistic, but it's against men, not women.

As a father, I really can't understand how every article about this topic talks about as if fathers and mothers are just interchangeable. We are not.

Mothers carry their child for ~9 months, they give birth to that child. The bond between a mother and her freshly born child is bigger than that of the father.

Of course fathers are very important too, and yes fathers should spend more Time with their children in general.

But it's Just crazy to ask mothers to get back to work as soon as possible. Many mothers want to Work part Time, because they want to spend more time with their children. The issue is, that care work is not paid or valued nearly the same as work for money.

Also if you're feeding your young child like you are supposed to, the father simply can't feed the child, because we don't give milk.

Nearly all articles about this topic care only for how to get women back to Work instead of what's best for society and for families.

If that would be the Focus, we would talk way more about how to integrate children into the work Life and less on how to grow GDP.