How do you objectively measure the productivity of a programmer?
Or of a secretary / office assistant / whatever they're called these days (the person who's job is to make life easier for other people, so that said other people can get more of their own work done)?
If it was possible to objectively measure productivity, there wouldn't be any of these huge arguments about pay fairness.
You assume that, innate talents being equal, women are equal to men in terms of productivity. I mean, this is the stated intention of the Feminist movement in a nutshell, yes?
And then you take a look at the other stats (as I mentioned, females take more leave. And females are more likely to have a child and stop working [1]. And there are the liability issues, ironically caused by the Feminist movement.)
And so - equal productivity, but less hours for the amount of money you pay. It's a simple calculation, with the result that, if the above assumptions are true, women should, from an economic point of view, be paid less than men on average.
At which point, if you are still arguing that wage should be equal from economic terms, you've gone beyond saying women are equal to men and saying that women are better then men - and that is an entirely different ball of wax.
Given that employees only stay for a couple years on average anyway these days, you're far more likely to lose either a male or female employee to a job switch than to lose a female employee to maternity leave. It's a highly overestimated risk. Not to mention extremely unfair to women who don't have kids.
Given that employees only stay for a couple years on average anyway these days
All 8 people on my team have been around longer than that. I've been there 8 years, and the other senior person has been around slightly longer. Our boss has been with the company for I think 17+ years. (And our old boss, who took the other half when the team got split in a reorg, has been with the company for 30+ years.)
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http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm says: """The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.6 years in January 2014, unchanged from January 2012"""
"""In January 2014, median employee tenure (the point at which half of all workers had more tenure and half had less tenure) for men was 4.7 years, unchanged from January 2012. For women, median tenure in January 2014 was 4.5 years, about unchanged from January 2012. Among men, 30 percent of wage and salary workers had 10 years or more of tenure with their current employer, compared with 28 percent for women. (See tables 1 and 3.)"""
Or of a secretary / office assistant / whatever they're called these days (the person who's job is to make life easier for other people, so that said other people can get more of their own work done)?
If it was possible to objectively measure productivity, there wouldn't be any of these huge arguments about pay fairness.