[quote=Brovo][b]@Jorick:[/b] Something to take into account when looking at the wage gap is pregnancy and maternity leave. That will put a woman months behind a man in terms of career opportunities and factors into the reason why women have that average 20%-ish lower median income. (Men have a greater chance at promotion than women in those months of maternity leave, pay raises, etc.) This isn't sexism, this is biology.[/quote]

Yeah, I know, I've been taking that into account. If you go look at my last post, particularly the large paragraph responding to Zaresto's thing about the pay gap, there are even some hard numbers provided by people who were trying to show how there supposedly isn't a pay gap. According to their most generous estimates, pregnancy and related things only account for a 7.3% pay difference between men and women. The fact that you can look at only full-time workers (removing the probably not sexist aspect of women working part-time jobs more than men) who are in the same fields (removing the aspect of different genders working predominantly in different fields), look at the pay gap that exists in each of those fields, then average them out to still find a 20% gap (before accounting for that 7.3% due to pregnancy) means that it's not just pregnancy and maternity leave.

Like I said to Gwazi, it may or may not actually be a matter of sexism, but it's a real issue that affects women so it's something worth bringing up in a gender equality discussion.

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[quote=Magic Magnum]-Circumcision Snip-[/quote]

I just have to note that I find this hilarious for obvious reasons. Moving on...

[quote]Losing something of value before or after knowing you had it is a debateable/gray moral issue. 
I think we can agree here at least that it is that, debatable. 

Personally though, I think parent's shouldn't have say over a child's operations [u]if[/u] it's cosmetic and not for any actual need or purpose.
That's a human being/child you're supposed to be raising and protecting, not accessorizing.

Over all, with the fact circumscison does seem to be a debatable topic, while women and abortions is a cut and clear issue of body rights and health concerns.
It's probably safe to say that in terms of bodily rights women have it worse atm.[/quote]

Yup, definitely agreed that that's a very debatable grey area.

I agree that cosmetic things shouldn't be allowed for a child, this included. Circumcision gets into another troublesome grey area though, that of religion and culture. People can claim that not allowing them to circumcise their male children would infringe on their right to practice their religious beliefs. Bleh.

And thrice agreed on who has it worse in bodily rights, which shouldn't be surprising since that was my starting position in this back and forth. :lol

[quote]*Looks at it*

That is interesting.
Brovo below did bring up some good counter points to it, but they were counter points I already said before so I assume you've already taken Brovo's points into consideration.

Being 100% honest, I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect some sexism involved when it comes to hiring women or promoting them in the more well paying jobs.
But, to review.[/quote]

Yup. I very much took maternity things into consideration, as that's a wholly valid and not really sexist reason for a pay gap existing. My issue is with the remaining gap that doesn't have an explanation. Also yeah, I'd be very surprised if there was no sexism involved there, but assuming that it exists without having any evidence to back it up is a bad starting point, as it makes you seek evidence to support your conclusion rather than looking at it as objectively as possible.

[quote]A worker being out of the workforce for a couple of years can keep you back a bit from higher pay and positions.
This multiplies even more so in career's where the higher ranks require constant work, where leaving and needing a replacement can become a massive burden (such as say, a Company head).
A woman taking just 2-5 years off for children can make all the difference in this regard.[/quote]

Wait, what? A couple years, 2-5 years? How long do you think maternity leave actually is? In the US, the bare minimum that must be provided (given a few requirements like the employer must have over 50 employees to need to give it, and the woman has to have worked there for at least 12 months and worked for at least 1,250 hours) is 12 weeks unpaid leave. Smaller businesses aren't legally obligated to give any maternity leave, and women who haven't met those work requirements don't have to be given any maternity leave. From what little I could find on the subject (which was [url=http://www.today.com/health/two-weeks-after-baby-more-new-moms-cut-maternity-leave-4B11229443]this article[/url], and their data source was apparently the National Center for Health Statistics), the average time off actually taken for maternity things is 10 weeks. The figures they cited also said that 1/3 of women took no formal maternity leave at all and went right back to work soon after (I'm assuming this means less than a week after, given phrasing and context) giving birth, and a further 16% only took 1-4 weeks off. I would wager that the reason for this is that most people can't afford to take all the unpaid time off, so they get back to it as soon as they feel capable. Anyway, that's roughly half of working women that take less than a month off for maternity leave. It's not a matter of taking years off for the vast majority of women, it's a few months at most unless they happen to work for a company that goes above and beyond the federal requirements for maternity leave, which are apparently fairly rare.

Seriously, if it were a year or more taken off from work for each child then the wage gap would not only be explained, I would expect it to be even higher. :lol

[quote]Then there's the matter to consider of hazard pay.
Women biologically are not as fit, strong or big as men. Making less woman then men qualify for more dangerous jobs.
So Men by simply being more likely to be allowed to work in hazardous work, are more likely given higher pay.[/quote]

Fair point for work in fields that have conditions that require hazard pay (though some hazard pay is just a working in generally dangerous conditions thing and would be given to all workers regardless of their actual duties), irrelevant to fields like financial managers and such.

[quote]Yea... I was off my bonkers when I said that. :/
I don't know what messed up math was going on in my head at the time.

Ratio to men to women shouldn't matter when it's Job/field specific, which is what I think I forgot about.
I'm normally used to addressing the overall pay gap period, where a valid argument is that "women tend to flock to lesser paying fields".

I was probably in a tired state where I tried to translate that argument over to a career specific scenario and naturally it fell flat on it's face.
Sorry about that, rather embarrassing mistake for me to of made. :/[/quote]

Haha, no worries, it happens. I was the first one to make a dumb mistake about pay gap things and had to correct it, so that makes us even I guess. :lol

[quote]So... when career specific we can rule out the biology argument of build as well, since now we're simply comparing the men and women who were fit enough to enter the field so pay should be equal.
This lead's us with the arguments of basically maternity leave... A factor? Yes, but you're right in that this shouldn't be explaining a 20% gap in a specific field.

I suppose the best other defense (which does loop back to biology) is that the men workers probably are on average more strong and fit than women, allowing for more work and better performance.
Leading to better pay and positions more easily. But honestly, most of these jobs are mainly machine/technology based anyways so even that isn't a good enough defense.

So yes, I will admit. You've highlighted an issue where I originally thought there was none. Well done. :)
Now it's really a matter of finding the answer as to why this pay gap exists, and that would be a far more complicated issue and would need professional opinion from those in those fields of work to figure out.
[/quote]

The only field I can think of that is truly so physically intensive that there's a solid reason for a gender pay difference even when accounting for use of machines making things easier is construction, and ironically that has one of the smallest pay gaps of all work fields (7.8% gap, subtract that 7.3% that is reasonably caused by maternity leaves, you're left with 0.5% and that's not an unreasonable difference given the nature of the work). Other work that was very physically intensive in the past, like mining and farming, now seems to be predominantly machine operated as you said, so their larger pay gaps are weird. Same goes for all the desk jobs and such, where greater average physical capabilities shouldn't be a factor at all.

I agree that it's rather complicated and would require professional assessments. The kind of general data we've been looking at only gets you so far, understanding why the pay gaps exist in particular fields of work would need some in-depth studies and such. It'd be easy to cry sexism and start bitching about it, but that would be drawing a conclusion without evidence, and doing that is just plain awful.