On single sentence here aids in explaining the gender pay gap:
They started living together only two weeks before Sonny was born, and got married when he was 14 months old; they now have four more sons. At about the time they became a couple, Richard and his bandmates formed the Feeling. “I definitely felt a massive drive to up my game,” he says.
“They” include Sophie Ellis-Bextor which gives us the opportunity to parade our age and dodderiness. We’ve been around to see that whole cycle of “Who?” “Rising talent” to “Established star” and back to “Who?” again. In fact, we’ve been around long enough to recall the scandale bénin concerning Ms. Ellis-Bextor’s brother.
This does mean that we’ve also been around long enough to note that often enough there’s a gendered reaction to the arrival of children.
As the TUC says:
Fathers working full-time get paid a fifth more than men with similar jobs who don’t have children, according to a new report published by the TUC
That’s before accounting for age, education and so on - higher ages are associated with a greater probability of being a father of course. But the effect is still there when all of those other factors are accounted for.
The report shows that dads who work full-time experience, on average, a 21% ‘wage bonus’ and that working fathers with two kids earn more (9%) than those with just one.
The findings are in stark contrast to the experience of working mothers, says the report. Women who become mothers before 33 typically suffer a 15% pay penalty.
That mothers have that pay penalty is just one of those standard scientific facts:
Mothers tend to receive lower wages than comparable childless women. This ‘motherhood wage gap’ has been reported in numerous studies.
The possibly excessive period of child helplessness - even for mammals - among humans means that we’re, largely enough, descendants of those who pair bonded. That appears to have effects among us now over who does what.
At which point Occam’s shaving kit comes into contention. We would like to explain this world around us and the simplest explanation is often the best. It is possible to explain the entirety of the modern world’s gender pay gap with just these two points. Fathers get paid more, mothers get paid less. Not men get paid more, women less, but that event of parturition leads, on average and across the society, to slightly different behaviours among men and among women.
This isn’t inevitable, if men and women acted differently - say, there was an entirely equal distribution of primary child caring on average across all couples - then the effect would disappear.
We can also muse on whether we should change this, how we would and even whether we could. But it’s still true that a significant part of that gender pay gap is simply that the arrival of children incentivises men to up their game. Yea, even bass players.
Now what?