Reporting on what is already well-known. Given the requisite training, inclination, and capabilities, if you want maximum productivity, you find those people who are willing to work full-time for long durations, with the flexibility to expand their schedule to accommodate unanticipated circumstances. Doesn't matter what race or gender or religion or other circumstance. Extended work for lengthy periods with the necessary capabilities gives you the maximum achievable productivity.
There is no gender discrimination. Claudia Goldin among many others have demonstrated that repeatedly. The issue which creates income disparities are any of those factors which preclude focused, extended work over long periods. And that usually circles around two factors - health and family.
If health precludes such work effort, your productivity falls. If family obligations preclude such work effort, your productivity falls. Men and women. Childless men and childless women, with otherwise the same backgrounds, earn exactly the same amount.
And the productivity drop from full-time, sustained, accommodating dedication to more limited time commitments is non-linear. A 10% reduction in time might lead to a 30% reduction in productivity. Cech reports:
Nearly half of new moms and a quarter of new dads leave their full-time STEM jobs after they have their first child, according to a new study.But notice that Cech and Blair-Loy never focus on productivity. This is a huge issue in these kinds of studies.
Researchers found that 43 percent of women and 23 percent of men leave their careers in science, technology, engineering and math within four to seven years of the birth or adoption of their first child.
Women have been underrepresented in the male-dominated STEM fields for decades, especially as they moved further up the career trajectory. Parenthood may contribute to the gender gap, in part, due to gender-related cultural expectations and workplace obstacles, the researchers say.
"Not only is parenthood an important driver of gender imbalance in STEM employment, both mothers and fathers appear to encounter difficulties reconciling caregiving with STEM careers," said the study's lead author Erin Cech, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.
Cech and Mary Blair-Loy, professor of sociology at the University of California-San Diego, analyzed nationally representative longitudinal survey data from U.S. STEM professionals collected between 2003 and 2010 by the National Science Foundation.
They say that new moms are more likely than new dads to switch to part-time work or leave the workforce.
Some new mothers—about 1 in 10—continue working in STEM on a part-time basis, but that situation isn't without setbacks: businesses and universities typically pay part-time work substantially less per hour than full-time work; is less likely to be accompanied by benefits, like health care; and is less likely to provide advancement opportunities.
They follow up with some appeals which are presumably heart-felt but ungrounded in reality.
"Our results indicate the need for employers to establish highly valued and well-paid part-time options as well as ramp-up policies that allow part-time STEM professionals to transition back into full-time work without long-term career penalties," Blair-Loy said.Tosh. It is pretty astonishing that we are producing academics with such monomaniacal focus on ideology and such ignorance of history that they seem unaware of the alarm bells which go off when an academic calls for a cultural revolution. That they don't know that the most recent and most infamous call for a Cultural Revolution had a butchers bill of 3-10 million is alarming.
If parents leave the STEM workforce, they are unlikely to return by the time their children are old enough to attend school, the researchers say.
"These findings point to the importance of cultural shifts within STEM to value the contributions of STEM professionals with children and the need for creative organizational solutions to help these skilled STEM professionals navigate new caregiving responsibilities alongside their STEM work," Cech said.
Blair-Loy says profound change is needed.
"We need a cultural revolution within many fields to recognize and reward the full value of professionals who also care for children," said Blair-Loy, who also directs the Center for Research on Gender in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine at UC-San Diego.
More to the point, their study supports none of their conclusions. Their study highlights the income penalty (arising from the productivity penalty) associated with less than full-time commitment to a task.
I went through this in the 1980s and 1990s, trying to find equitable alternative work arrangements, particularly for young mothers. My industry is management consulting and there is, like medicine, and law, a huge premium on deep continued experience, with long hours and long time frames and a capability and willingness to fit one's personal schedule to the demands of the business. That sort of dedication is what drives such high compensations.
Provided below is a single simplistic example of the productivity impact, this being an amalgamation of multiple trials.
One early model which was popular in the business press was job-sharing. Two women both have young children at home and both want to continue their career in consulting but need additional time flexibility. OK - why not split one job between the two of them, they both work half-time, they both stay involved, they both continue on their career track (albeit more slowly), and they both continue to earn compensation. Sounds equitable all around. Win, win, win.
Until you look at the practical and measured impact on productivity. Such high pressure demanding jobs are not easily susceptible to division. Think about the impacts. Employees come with a high fixed cost in terms of office space, equipment, insurance, etc. Say they both earn $100,000 and there is a fixed cost of $25,000 for each employee for all the overheads.
So now you have two employees for the price of one. Each is now only earning $50,000 and your salary cost remains $100,000 plus $25,000. But of course that is not right. Your salary cost indeed remains $100,000 but your overhead cost is now $50,000 since you have two head count. You have gone from a cost structure of $250,000 for two full time people to $150,000 for two part-time people. Your costs have not halved.
In addition, you have increased your supervisory time, i.e. your leadership talent, your scarcest resource. It is another fixed cost. People are regrettably not self-managing. If you had to spend two hours a week per person supervising full time jobs, you now have to spend four hours a week for two people doing one job.
They are both now working 20 hours a week, one in the mornings and one in the afternoon. You really need extra productivity from both of them now.
But that is not what you are going to get. Switching from the cost side, to productivity, it is easy to see what happens. Even with two great employees, you have doubled your risk factor. Two commutes to work instead of one and there are twice as many no-shows. Unexpected developments come during the day so the person with second shift often ends up with a disproportionate part of schedule impacts. An additional handoff during the day introduces further variance into the system. More people per job means more time keeping one another up to speed - increasing transactional coordination costs without increasing productivity. Two personalities means more interpersonal conflicts.
The list goes on and on.
You used to have two full-time employees doing two jobs full time and producing $250,000 in value each. Your income statement looked like:
2 X $100,000 = $200,000
Overhead @ $25,000 per = $50,000
Plus Supervision/person X 2 = $30,000
Total Operating Cost $280,000
Total Revenue 2 X $250,000 = $500,000
Net Income = $220,000
Now, with job sharing, your income statement looks like this:
2 X $50,000 = $100,000
1 X $100,000 = $100,000
Overhead @ $25,000 per = $75,000
Plus Supervision/person X 3 = $45,000
Total Operating Cost $320,000
Total Revenue 2 X $250,000 = $500,000
Net Income = $180,000
By going to job share, you have reduced you profits by 20% or so, theoretically doing exactly the same work.
For Cech and Blair-Loy pursuing an ideological goal where everyone has to want the same thing to the same degree and we need to see the same outcomes, it is obvious we do indeed need a revolution.
Then you look at productivity and you begin to see just how daunting the issue is. What is it that you can do to increase the productivity of individuals when you are at the same time making their jobs much more complex and with much more risk? Not a lot. Everyone is always chasing that goal, but all the easy fruit has been picked.
Cech and Clair-Loy would be far better off exploring how to make people more productive given their personal life and career choices rather than waving magical wands hoping for cultural revolutions that cannot happen with desirable outcomes.
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