Reproductive rights and other women’s issues are regularly written off as “identity politics side issues” not relevant to discussions of economic equality here at DKos. That is simply not true. Reproductive rights, paycheck fairness and other gender-specific issues are inextricably and intrinsically linked to economic equality for women. Take them out of the equation and what you are really talking about is economic equality for men.
The facts:
- The highest earning window for women, practically the only time they are not subject to the wage gap, is when they are single and childless, usually in their twenties. They have to live in cities and have gone to college.
- Evidence from experimental and audit studies finds motherhood discrimination in callbacks for job applications, hiring decisions, wage offers, and promotions.
- When a woman has a baby, her chances of being hired go down, compared to a single woman, by 44 percent.
- Having children reduces women’s earnings, even among workers with comparable qualifications, experience, work hours, and jobs.
- While motherhood reduces earning for women, fatherhood increases earnings for men.
- Controlling for labor market and family characteristics, the gender employment gap among the childless is only six percentage points, it goes up to 20 percentage points among parents.
- Among full-time workers, childless women earn 94 cents of a childless man’s dollar, while mothers earn only 60 cents of a father’s dollar.
- Research shows that all women experience reduced earnings for each additional child they have. This penalty ranges in size from 15 percent per child among low-wage workers to about 4 percent among the highly paid.
- More than 50 percent of children born to women under 30 are born to single mothers.
- The U.S. is the only country in the top 15 most competitive ones that doesn’t mandate paid sick leave. If a child gets sick, a single mother is faced with leaving work and risking her job (or at the very least, losing a day’s worth of pay) with no one else to fall back on.
- 60 percent of women with children under the age of three and 77 percent of mothers with school-age children remain in the workforce.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mothers works fewer hours, have to work part time more and cannot take on overtime.
- Working mothers are penalized in terms of long-term success by having to work in an interrupted fashion that perpetually erodes their career tenures or experiences.
In short, as much as the system is rigged against the “little guy”, it is infinitely more rigged against the “little gal”.
Women’s issues are fundamental to economic equality and when women vote on them they aren’t “voting with their vaginas”, they are voting for their fair place in this society.