Gender Pay Gap Widens With This Pandemic -- November 23, 2020

Gender pay gap: it will be interesting if Mark Perry picks up on this. There is no question that working mothers -- the majority of them in the same age group as mothers raising children at home -- are the first in a two-person couple to be asked to stay home with remote learners / streamers. 

This graphic at this link captures the sad effect Chinese flu will have for women age 20 - 40 raising a family.

If I'm interpreting the graph correctly:

• there are two curves: a) a "normal" recession; b) the "current" Chinese-flu recession;
• the timeline is divided into fiscal quarters;
• the timeline starts with the first quarter of the recession ("normal"; Chinese flu);
• the timeline extends from the beginning quarter of the recession to the 80th quarter, for twenty years out;
• the graph suggests that in a normal recession, the gap between women's pay and men's pay narrows to 83 cents for woman; $1.00 for men (again, if I'm reading this correctly) -- that's for a normal recession -- the gender pay gap actually narrows;
• but, for this recession, with working family moms now forced to stay at home, the gender pay gap widens -- approaching 75 cents for women vs $1.00 for men (assuming I'm reading the graphic correctly);
• the return to "normal" takes about the same amount of time in each case: 20 years
• that, for me, is most interesting; finally, we're seeing how long a recession affects the gender pay gaps -- although to be fair, there's not a whole lot of difference between 80.5 cents (Q0) and 81 cents/79 cents nine quarters out -- but nine quarters is still about two years

By the way, I once spoke to a blue collar worker who was on strike against his employer some years ago; his union regularly went on strike every five years or so. 

He said that the union always "won," getting pay raises and better benefits, but the employee with whom I was talking, said it always took two years to recover from the strike;

• likewise, every time the military moved me to a new geographic assignment, it took me two years to get back to where I was;
  

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The Literature Page

I could have read the book, Sarah Weinman's The Real Lolita in one evening. It's an easy read.

But it's so well written and so incredibly interesting I am purposely reading it very slowly. I am just now over the halfway mark.

The story of the real Lolita, Sally Horner, is now over (in the book). The rest of the book, I assume will be a) about Nabokov; and, b) the subject of pedophilia, rape, in the US in the 1950s. 

Pedophilia and rape. Interesting timing for me -- so coincidental -- Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell is still locked up and telling "a" story.