Christina Hoff Sommers writes Lessons from a Feminist Paradise on Equal Pay Day in The American, 4/9/13.

Excerpts:

Generous parental leave policies and readily available part-time options have unintended consequences: instead of strengthening women’s attachment to the workplace, they appear to weaken it.  In addition to a 16-month leave, a Swedish parent has the right to work six hours a day (for a reduced salary) until his or her child is eight years old. Mothers are far more likely than fathers to take advantage of this law. But extended leaves and part-time employment are known to be harmful to careers — for both genders. And with women a second factor comes into play: most seem to enjoy the flex-time arrangement (once known as the “mommy track”) and never find their way back to full-time or high-level employment. In sum: generous family-friendly policies do keep more women in the labor market, but they also tend to diminish their careers.

According to Blau and Kahn, Swedish-style paternal leave policies and flex-time arrangements pose a second threat to women’s progress: they make employers wary of hiring women for full-time positions at all. Offering a job to a man is the safer bet. He is far less likely to take a year of parental leave and then return on a reduced work schedule for the next eight years.

HKO

“The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.”  Laws forcing gender equality make women more expensive employees and causes private sector employers to avoid them.  Furthermore there are other sources of inequality besides pay:

from Mark Perry in his blog Carpe Diem, Equal Occupational Fatality Day, 4/9/13:

 Based on the BLS data, the next “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” will occur more than ten years from now — on April 17, 2023. That date symbolizes how far into the future women will be able to continue working before they experience the same estimated loss of life that men experienced in 2012 from work-related deaths. Because women tend to work in safer occupations than men on average, they have the advantage of being able to work for more than a decade longer than men before they experience the same number of male occupational fatalities in a single year.