Hmmm. Bourgeoise norms seem popular.

From Children and gender inequality: Evidence from Denmark by Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Jakob Egholt Søgaard. An interesting acknowledgement which has long been known but little discussed in the media - gender income inequality is not a function of misogynistic wage discrimination. It is a consequence of the personal decisions people make about what works best for them in raising and caring for children.

It drives control fanatics crazy that people broadly follow historical cultural norms as the best means of maximizing familial well-being, financial return, and minimizing exogenous risk. The Social Justice Jacobins would much rather ensure equality of outcome by making these sorts of decisions for other people rather than let them choose for themselves what work best for them given their circumstances.

The last century has brought considerable convergence in the labour market outcomes of men and women. However, despite the reversal of gender gaps in educational achievements and the implementation of strong anti-discrimination policies, a significant amount of gender inequality in earnings and wage rates remains in developed countries, and the process of convergence appears to have slowed down (Blau and Kahn 2018).

In a recent paper (Kleven et al. 2018), we provide a simple explanation for the persistence of such significant levels of gender inequality – the effects of children on the careers of women relative to men are large and have not fallen over time. As a result, almost all of the remaining gender inequality can be attributed to children.

To reach this conclusion we leverage unique administrative data for the full population of Denmark since 1980 and follow couples who have a child together over a period from five years before they have their first child to ten years after. For a range of labour market outcomes, we find large and sharp effects of children – women and men evolve in parallel until the birth of their first child, diverge sharply immediately after childbirth, and do not converge again.

This phenomenon is best exemplified in Figure 1. The figure shows the evolution of total labour market earnings of men and women over time relativeto the year of birth of their first child, while controlling for the underlying wage growth in the economy and the effect of individuals getting older and more experienced over time. In the years up to the birth of the first child, men and women follow almost the same trend, but in the years just after the birth, the earnings of women drop by on average 30%.1

This 30% gap is driven in part by labour supply adjustments, as women take the majority of the parental leave granted to Danish parents. But interestingly the earnings of women are still depressed by almost 20% even after ten years, reflecting a large and significant gender gap in wage rates. Investigating the sources of this wage rate gap, we document the fact that women adjust many margins of their behaviours in the labour market (occupation, family friendliness of the working environment, career track, etc.) after the arrival of children, while men do not. All these adjustments combined have large and significant effects on the dynamics of wage rates for women with children.

Figure 1 The impact of children on the earnings of men and women

Click to enlarge.

Note: The graph shows estimates of the evolution of the earnings of men and women as a function of the time in years since the birth of their first child, while controlling for the underlying life-cycle profile of earnings. Estimates are relative to the earnings level of event time -1, that is the last year prior to the birth of the first child.
Source: Kleven et al. (2018)

[snip]

Following this insight, it is natural to ask why the arrival of children still disproportionally affects women after decades of effort to create gender equality through equal opportunity legislation, childcare policies, and job-protected parental leave. One possible explanation is that the effects that we are observing are driven by gender norms and that these norms only change slowly over time.

Household income takes a hit when working couples have children.

The person undertaking the primary care of children takes the largest income earning hit.

People, on average, choose the male as the primary earner and the female as the secondary.

Instead of several decades of falsely claiming that it was all about discrimination and instead of railing against historical norms, Social Justice Jacobins would be better off demonstrating that there is a better approach than that which historical norms and the experience of millions suggests works best.

It is a fair question, but one I have not seen well researched. And most research in this area fails to take into time discounting, the consequences of forecasting, and risk uncertainty.