In contrast, when men and women examined examined the highly competitive curriculum vitae of the real life scientist who had gotten early tenure, they were equally likely to tenure the male and female tenure candidates and there was no difference in their ratings of their teaching, research and service experience.

However, when it came to examining the candidates who were fresh out of grad school, the study noted:

In one such study, 238 academic psychologists, 118 male and 120 female, evaluated a résumé submitted in application for an assistant professorship that was randomly assigned a male or female name. Both male and female participants gave the male applicant better evaluations for teaching and research and were more likely to hire the male applicant

The report also noted that there is a greater degree of skepticism regarding the qualifications of the female candidates:

These cautionary comments include such comments as, “We would have to see her job talk,” “It is impossible to make such a judgement without teaching evaluations,” “I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own.” Such cautionary comments on the male tenure candidate’s vitae were quite rare.

You see the same behavior exhibited towards minorities. The decisionmakers are all aware of the distortions caused by Affirmative Action policies where the less qualified are given a boost and sought out so as to meet management diversity targets. The tokenism distorts rational decisionmaking therefore there is more skepticism when analyzing unknown situations where the information can’t be trusted. It’s simply an expected value calculation where one of the variables has to be modified.

The problem that I can see is that once the decisionmakers can trust the information generated from within their organization there is likely to be an inertia that has built up over the years regarding salary increments which make a “catch-up” or “equalization” difficult to implement within the organization. You see this happening in other circumstances as well, such as when newly hired candidates who are in demand are given starting salaries near or above those employees who were in the organization for a longer period. This disjoint between the markets – one is a pool of new candidates and the other is a pool of existing candidates – is often arbitraged by the existing candidate leaving the organization and finding a new employer who will recognize their value. The problem for the quota beneficiaries is that if they try this maneuver they present the same “information distortion” to the new employers – did this female candidate achieve her accomplishments as a result of her talent or was she a quota beneficiary? Then the discount is applied once again so that the new employer can make their own assessment of the candidate’s skills.

This is something feminists have long argued, and that many other studies support. Gender wage discrimination is not just (or even primarily) a matter of women being directly discriminated against, but instead a matter of work done primarily by women being undervalued. In this way, even men who work in underpaid female-dominated occupations could be said to be hurt by the gender wage gap.”

I’m perfectly willing to believe that there might be a gender based pay gap. But this particular portion of the argument doesn’t require gender bias. It is perfectly normal when there is more competition for a job that either the employer becomes more choosy (qualification requirements go up) or the pay goes down. When the supply of something goes up (in this case number of people willing to do a particular job is augmented by women coming into the field) the price for it goes down. This is also one of the reasons why “women’s jobs” were often lower paying. When nurse, teacher and secretary were the only major professions available to women there was a larger pool of women competing for those jobs–allowing much lower prices than you would expect in a market where men and women competed for all jobs equally. Now I think there was a prestige (or lack thereof) issue with these jobs which is partially gendered, but the simple economics of the situation contributed greatly to the pay difference.

As is my husband, but I think we can agree that we’re both weirdos and an employer’s first assumption is not going to be that you or Mr. Mythago are the ones rushing the kids to the pediatrician.

Somewhat? I think indubitably.

You mean, anecdotally.

No, I’m the primary caregiver. (Sexist!)

The question is whether parents, and specifically mothers, overall, are such a drag on productivity that it makes sense for employers to heavily disfavor them as employees. I don’t think that’s been shown.

Heavily? Probably no. Somewhat? I think indubitably. I’ve just come off a three week cycle of being repeatedly short on a production quota because of a parent whose kids have had a run of bad health. If we hadn’t built up a track record of awesome previous performance, we would probably have lost the client – who contributes about 25% of our net.

Rather, your wife does, and that’s what your employer and probably your colleagues expect of both you and her. That’s what we were talking about originally, yes?

You may well get an uptick in responsibility–now you have another little mouth to feed and cover with health insurance.

The question is whether parents, and specifically mothers, overall, are such a drag on productivity that it makes sense for employers to heavily disfavor them as employees. I don’t think that’s been shown.

You’re right that my viewpoint is purely anecdotal (I could claim its empirical, and thus vastly superior to mere theories!) but what I mean by selection bias is that in my hiring decision, I’ve deliberately weeded out people who are intrinsically or basically flaky. Among the survivors, everyone is basically responsible, but I notice that people with additional life burdens like kids are more likely to have those burdens interfere with their economic productivity. I’m only dealing with the responsible subset of workers; among THAT set, I’ve found more problems with parents.

Hope that makes things clearer.

Your whole argument is based on anecdote, so I don’t know why you’re throwing around ’selection bias’. Non-inherently-flaky people without parents also have cars break down, parents get sick, pets develop sudden illnesses, and so on.

On the other hand, a male parent who takes time off to care for his kid will often be seen as *more* reliable – because he’s taking his responsibilities seriously.

I have to disagree with the ‘parents flake more’ observation. In my experience, it’s the young singles who flake the most, but they tend to be excused for it because nobody has hangups about 20somethings in the workplace they way they do about mommies in the workplace.

Kids are an externality in workplaces that focus on short-term goals (can we get somebody for the Tuesday shift?) and have regular turnover. For workplaces that want a stable, skilled, long-term workforce, you can’t beat families. It’s a lot harder to say “Bag this job” when your job feeds other people, not just an IKEA habit.

I disagree about whether the locus for changing this is in familial arrangements, or in the workplace. I don’t believe that parents should get any net benefit from their status in the workplace, and that probably means that there will be pay gaps between parents and non-parents; if this disproportionately affects women because women are disproportionately the primary childcare providers, I don’t see that as intrinsically problematic.

It WOULD be problematic in scenarios where the mother is NOT the primary childcare provider, the father is, but the mother still is perceived as such and treated as such in the workplace. That would be gross discrimination and unacceptable.

Saying “the design of the workplace” makes it seem as though some small group somewhere needs to change their priorities and change them now, bucko! When in reality, no such simple decision would have any effect.

Instead, family-friendly workplaces must come from an explicit valuation of those accommodations in the contracting decisions made by millions of people.

The real parenthood problem comes in the fact that kids are an externality to the workforce. It doesn’t do IBM much good to have parents as workers instead of single people, and the parents are going to incur higher costs for IBM. (“Sorry I missed the meeting, chief, Rebecca was throwing up everywhere and…”) Single people have their own issues but its parents who flake out the most, big time, in my own experience as an employer (and as a parent). Parents, male and female, probably need to be willing to recognize their reduced value to the employer, and accept a negative wage premium in exchange for the employer’s concessions to flexibility and flakiness.