Reminder to CDC: Women are more than baby-portals

No one likes to receive unsolicited advice; and government recommendations are no exception to this. But the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t heed that warning when on Tuesday it released a new alcohol advisory, aimed at child-carriers (who we in the 21^st century have started to call ‘women’).

The CDC has recommended that women of a childbearing age who are not using birth control completely abstain from alcohol intake to avoid an accidental, alcohol-exposed pregnancy.

From the CDC's Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat, M.D.:

Alcohol can permanently harm a developing baby before a woman knows she is pregnant...About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, and even if planned, most women won’t know they are pregnant for the first month or so, when they might still be drinking. The risk is real. Why take the chance?

Why take the chance? In the off-chance that a woman could get pregnant during 3-4 decades of her life, why wouldn't she abstain from alcohol (and while she’s at it, cut out raw fish, cured meat and soft cheeses, stop skiing, avoid overheating and sign up to antenatal courses too.)

Those outside the- 4-decade span haven't been excluded fully from the press release either. While the CDC mainly addressed the effects of alcohol on pregnant women, their infographic suggests far more ambitious plans to cut down on women's alcohol consumption alltogether. Keep in mind "heavy drinking" is defined by the CDC for woman as "consuming eight drinks or more per week".

Fear-mongering much?

Quite rightfully, the Internet went ballistic over the insinuation women should be prioritizing the biological possibility of pregnancy over their daily activities, which include drinking habits.

These recommendations in the States come just weeks after here in the UK the Department of Health changed its alcohol guidelines, lowering maximum unit intake to 14 a week for both men and women, making the UK’s recommendations some of the most restrictive in Europe.

The CDC's and DoH's recommendations are different, but the recommendations of both government bodies were created with the same, faulty assumption: individuals can’t be trusted to their own lifestyle choices, and if left to make up their own minds, will engage in risky behavior.

There is indeed an appropriate way to advise women about the potential consequences of drinking while pregnant, but terrifying non-pregnant women out of a glass of wine because of ‘what might be’ falls short of providing an education tutorial.

Flexible work hours may be the key to solving wage gaps

A paper from the American Economic Review thinks it has some more insight into the cause of the gender wage gap. It’s not sexism, employer discrimination, or really even children. It’s the flexibility (or lack there of) of work hours.

The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century. These aspects of the grand gender convergence are figurative chapters in a history of gender roles. But what must the “last” chapter contain for there to be equality in the labor market? The answer may come as a surprise. The solution does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn’t hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility. The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours. Such change has taken off in various sectors, such as technology, science, and health, but is less apparent in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds. [Emphasis mine.]

The data from this paper is fascinating, and challenges quite a few pre-conceived notions we have about women in the work place. For example, we often think of jobs in the sciences, medicine and maths as being most off-limits to women, but in fact, women make up roughly half of today’s medical graduate enrolments, and actually women lead men in study areas including biological sciences, optometry, and pharmacy.

What’s even more interesting is that the gender pay gap is at its lowest in the tech and science industries. The gap begins to widen when you look at the health industry, and it spikes when you look at the business industry.

The paper, “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter” argues that this is because the tech and science industries are more suited to flexible work hours, presumably because the quality of one's work output is based on results; whereas the business industry demands the constant slog of long work hours and 'face-time' - things which their clients have come to expect, and things that can be much harder for women to do if they are trying to manage both a family and a job at the same time. Claudia Goldin, author of the report, notes "a flexible schedule often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds...there will always be 24/7 positions with on-call, all-the-time employees and managers, including many CEOs, trial lawyers, merger-and-acquisition bankers, surgeons, and the US Secretary of State. But, that said, the list of positions that can be changed is considerable."

Workplace culture has been changing for years– jeans, pets, and company-sponsored Red Bull fridges are becoming widely established. A move towards flexible hours is becoming more relevant too, especially in some of the most innovative industries. Perhaps our best bet to solving wage gap issues is to encourage employers to adopt more flexibility (for both men and women) in the many industries that could suit, and even benefit, from it.

Non-discrimination laws matter least in helping women advance

On January 12^th, the International Labour Organization – a specialized agency of the United Nations – published its global report “Gaining Momentum: Women in Business and Management.” The report -

looks at the most recent statistics and information at a global level, and provides a unique insight into the experiences, realities and views of companies in developing countries.

It aims to create greater understanding of the barriers to women’s advancement in business and management. It points to possible ways of tackling the issue, highlighting good practices among private sector businesses and organizations that represent them.

Unlike a lot of reports that focus on the underrepresentation of women in the workforce, the ILO’s puts a refreshing emphasis on facts and figures, rather than resting on the assumption that all inequality comes down to inherent sexism on the part of male employers.

The data it compiles provides a huge range of insight into the state of female involvement in different areas of public life - exploring why less than 5 percent of CEOs are women while also explaining how a third of the world's enterprises have come to be run by women.

But the most telling table in the report looks at "company respondents to the ILO company survey conducted across developing regions" who "ranked what they considered the most significant barriers in order of priority" to women's leadership and promotion:

It will be surprising (dare I say frustrating) for many people to learn that the top two ranked barriers to women's leadership had everything to do with traditional views of women in society and the their role in the family unit, and nothing to do with employer discrimination (inherent gender bias ranks 12th on the list!).

It often seems in western society that radical gender equality advocates want the reason for gender inequalities - especially in the workforce - to be sexism. To be honest, I'm somewhat sympathetic to what, I assume, is their reasoning. If inequality in the workforce is mainly driven by something as awful as sexism, then we can shout about it, legislate against it, demand board quotas, demand companies publicise payroll figures according to gender. Combined, we can legislate and ban the discrimination away.

But this just isn't the case: all regions in the ILO's survey, "identified inadequate labour and non-discrimination laws as the least significant barrier" to women leadership and promotion. (Bolded is my emphasis.)

In places like the UK, gender inequality has very little to do with male bias - after all, women in full-time work aged between 22 - 39 are now, on average, are earning 1.1 percent more than their male counterparts. The reality is that women's life choices are determining how far they succeed in their career, including the kind of degree they pursue, when and how they go about having kids, and how long they spend out of the work force.

We shouldn't harp or judge women for the choices they decide to make - different people have different priorities, and that's okay - but if we want to attack the institutionalised sexism that still exists in our culture today, it would be far more productive to target the teaching, training, and conditioning of women to become 'mothers and wives' than to go after the employers who, based on all recent evidence, seem to be giving women an equal and fair shot at having a career.

That's a big ask, I know. Solving sexism by reforming ourselves and our traditions will be a big change from legislating things.

Can we stop talking about the alleged 'gender wage gap' now?

Many are boasting good news on the ‘gender wage gap’—I agree, it’s great news: the Office for National Statistics’ findings offer more proof that wage gaps have very little to do with gender, and much more to do with choices each gender is prone to make. From the BBC:

The average full-time pay gap between men and women is at its narrowest since comparative records began in 1997, official figures show.

The difference stood at 9.4% in April compared with 10% a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, a gap of about £100 a week.

This as well:

Hourly earnings figures reveal that, in April 2014, women working for more than 30 hours a week were actually paid 1.1% more than men in the 22 to 29 age bracket and, for the first time were also paid more in the 30 to 39 age bracket…

…The government said that, from next year, it was extending the rights for shared parental leave. It had also invested in training and mentoring for women to move into higher skilled, higher paid jobs, and guidance to women looking to compare their salaries with male counterparts.

Women, from the start of their careers, are now earning a higher salary than men; and, if they choose to make the decision to stay in the work force, they are more likely to be promoted than their male counterparts as well.The real gap, it seems, is not between women and men, but between mothers and child-less women. Leaving a job early on in one's career or for an extended period of time to have children will impact a women’s salary when she returns to the work force.

As this is the case, I think the government is probably right to extend rights for shared parental leave (though the money put into training will surely be a waste; women who are ambitious and attracted to careers in science, business, and formerly male-dominated sectors aren’t having much trouble pursuing them). But anything legislated from the top-down can only go so far to change cultural opinions that have been in place for centuries about the role of women and the household.

In reality, women’s choice in their private and home lives will be the greatest determinate as to what further changes we see in wage gaps. It seems there's evidence that good economic climates actually lead more women to stay at home with their kids rather to go out and get jobs - at the same time, we are witnessing an increase in stay-at-home-dads, which, most likely, has multiple reasoning to it: more women are demanding to work, and more men feel comfortable making the choice to stay home.

Either way, it seems there is no obvious discrimination between men and women when they enter the work place; as far the element of motherhood is concerned, we should be less focused on the numbers and far more focused on ensuring that women are not being socially pressured, either way, to make any decision that is not completely their own.

There is no such thing as a gender pay gap

Actually, there is a gender pay gap, but the entirety of it is determined by 'legitimate' factors—things which make men's and women's labour different. As well as women having jobs they rate as more pleasant, and jobs that are objectively less risky, as well as doing more part-time work, women leave the labour market during crucial years, setting them substantially back in labour market terms. That is, the gap comes down to women's choices.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, since childcare seems to contribute to mothers' well-being and happiness, and looking after children is certainly not an unimportant task. But it implies that, whether or not society as a whole, through schools, culture, upbringing and so on, is the reason women do most of the labour in the home and in child rearing, firms are not discriminating against women.

Two new papers add to the formidable base of evidence for this conclusion. In "The Gender Pay Gap Across Countries: A Human Capital Approach", authors Solomon W. Polachek and Jun Xiang take a lifetime labour supply approach. They find that the wage gap increases with women's fertility, the size of the average age gap between men and women at marriage, and the top marginal tax rate, all things which affect women's total labour supply over their lives and at crucial points. (It decreases with the prevalence of collective bargaining).

An even more interesting approach came in "Fertility Effects on Female Labor Supply: IV Evidence from IVF Treatments" by Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen. To abstract from the possibility that women who decide to have kids have systematically different characteristics affecting what kind of career they'd have, they look at those who try to have children via In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF):

This paper introduces a new IV strategy based on IVF induced fertility variation in childless  families to estimate the causal effect of having children on female labor supply using IVF  treated women in Denmark. Because observed chances of IVF success do not depend on labor market histories, IVF treatment success provides a plausible instrument for childbearing. Our IV estimates indicate that fertility effects are: (a) negative, large and long lasting; (b) much stronger at the extensive margin than at the intensive margin; and (c) similar for mothers, not treated with IVF, which suggests that IVF findings have a wider generalizability.

The results are pretty clear. Women are on a steady upward trajectory, likely in line with comparable men (as seen in previous studies). They then decide to take time out to have and raise children, and never make it back to their previous trend-line, perhaps moving to more flexible work or less demanding jobs. Even those who go back to similar careers are far behind in experience and have to catch up with movements they have missed.

So, while there might be such thing as a gender wage gap, the alternative is completely changing how children are raised in society, and while this would certainly have the potential to raise measured output, it may not necessarily raise total social welfare.