TD Economics conducted a study and found that women who take parental leave suffer from lower wages than those who don’t take time off work. (You can file that one under “duh!”)

So women who decide to give birth and become mothers and take any time off for these purposes will suffer financially; but somehow, this isn’t about women or gender.

“The research leads us to conclude that exits from the labour force, most often related to family or motherhood — not gender — are the culprit behind this unexplained wage gap,” said TD Economics deputy economist Beata Caranci, one of the report’s authors.

I don’t mean to be gender or sex essentialist, but come on! Trying to separate the physiological process of gestation and birth from “women” is ludicrous.

Even if a woman wants to place her career first after having a child and not miss a moment of work, pregnancy cannot be planned like that. Heck in today’s world nearly 1/3 of pregnancies will end in major surgery.

And this is all before we even get to the social pressure for a woman to stay home with the kids, over the father, or the fact that optimal nutrition for infants is still breastfeeding.

They go on to say that mothers are not seen as committed because they are more likely to take time off or leave early when their child is sick or has some other needs, plus they want to have “work/life balance”*.  Once again, we are looking at a fact and then pretending that it’s cause is not entrenched in sexism; that women should be the primary care givers. Women are still put at a disadvantage because men are either not taking an equal share in raising children or are not considered to be an equal partner in raising children. This is also a negative for men, but it doesn’t put them at an economic disadvantage.

This disparity is the essence of the gender problem; biological and social factors on the accepted role of women converge to put women at a disadvantage in their career should they decide to become a parent. Putting women into a position where they are often forced to choose whether to have their career or their children.

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*Life outside the corporation is not acceptable.