The Gender Pay Gap and Discrimination: Why Voluntary Choice Doesn't Resolve Moral Concern

At the median, women make around 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. This gap hasn't closed much since the early 2000s. There are different explanations for the pay gap, ranging from differences in career choices and parenting, differences in salary negotiations, discrimination, and so on. Among these various explanations, the parenting gap is one of the most significant predictors of wage disparity. Studies find that men and women start with similar earnings after college but experience a shift around the time women start to become mothers. Even when we look at men and women in similar professions and with similar education levels, childbearing marks the point where women's earnings begin to drop in comparison to men's. The reason is that women assume greater responsibility for raising children, taking more time off work and doing more childcare even when they work full time (what some have called "the second shift").

It is sometimes argued that the wage gap (WG) does not represent something morally objectionable in so far as it is explained by women's parenting choices. If discrimination were involved, then matters would be different. Where voluntary decisions drive disparate outcomes in wages, the argument goes, these disparate outcomes are (for the most part) morally un-concerning. 

There are at least three ways to push back on this argument: (a) resist the claim that discrimination plays a small role in explaining the WG; (b) resist the premise that mothers' choices are voluntary; or (c) resist the premise that, if the WG is (largely) driven by voluntary choices, it is (largely) morally un-concerning. In this post, I focus on (c). 

Consider that there are at least two ways an inequality can be morally concerning:

Causes: it was caused or produced in a morally concerning way (as with the Black-white wealth gap which probably has a lot to do with historic housing discrimination).

Consequences: it will produce morally concerning consequences (as with massive income inequalities that have the potential to produce monopsonies––monopolies over labor, often leading to wage stagnation and inefficient markets).

I want to suggest that the WG might be morally concerning for each of these reasons, even if women's parenting choices are, to a large extent, voluntary. 

For starters, "voluntary choice" is a rather low bar to achieve. Plausibly, all it takes for a choice to be voluntary is that it is not coerced. In that case, all sorts of intrusive influences, adverse possibilities, and foreseeable costs could be impacting a mother's "voluntary" decision do a greater share of the caretaking. For example, some mothers might voluntarily decide to do more caretaking because they're responding to the following considerations: the potential stigma of working full time as a mother, the low trustworthiness or diminished competency of their male partner when it comes to caretaking (arguably, gender norms often give men a free-pass when it comes to learning how to do caretaking...men aren't encouraged to learn these skills), a lack of real support from male partners when it comes to career pursuits, a sense of "un-entitlement" that leads mothers to defer to their partner's career ambitions or feel guilty about requiring more from them, inflexible work conditions that incentivize mothers to pick more accommodating careers (even if they pay less) or to refrain from going back to work sooner, "mom guilt," and so on. 

These are morally concerning influences on women's decisions about parenting, and they are unequally felt. Women experience these influences and weigh these potential costs more than men (speaking anecdotally, I know virtually zero fathers with young children who wrestle with guilt and feelings of stigma because they work full time). This is not to say all women who do a greater share of caretaking are responding to these pressures or that they wouldn't make the same decisions if those pressures were gone. My point is merely that appeals to voluntary choice don't resolve everything that is potentially concerning about the WG. If influences such as the ones sketched above are real, and if they unequally impact women's decision-making, the claim that voluntary choice renders the WG morally un-concerning is tenuous. 

Finally, the WG might be morally concerning because of its potential consequences. To borrow a term from philosopher Susan Okin, things that seem morally innocuous at the outset may led to asymmetric vulnerabilities down the line. Possibly, the WG does this to women. For example, studies find that women's income after divorce falls 41% compared to men's 23%. What's more, women generally have less bargaining power during divorce because of their comparably lower financial status. This all has something to do with our divorce laws too, to be sure, but it is plausible that the WG makes matters far worse. On top of all this, I also wonder about the WG's impact on political inclusion. Might the WG tilt political access and influence even more strongly toward men? Finally, might parenting differences enshrine problematic gender norms in children? For example, when children witness one parent doing the bulk of the caretaking, might they begin to internalize norms about what men and women are expected to do, even what they are entitled to do...or not entitled to do? 

In sum, I doubt voluntariness resolves all the moral concerns we ought to have about the WG. Decisions about motherhood and parenting explain a lot of the WG, but those decisions are made against a context of factors and influences that strike me as unfair to women. And the consequences of it all may be greater than we realize.