I thought this was an excellent little article.

We’ve seen plenty of wives in this position in recent years. But it’s hard to imagine that political husbands are haunted by the nightmare that it might happen to them.

Perhaps that’s because they know their wives have lower expectations of spousal adoration than their male peers, or because unfaithful women tend to have affairs with equal or higher-status men, who have an equal or higher stake in discretion.

If a female political leader did get caught in a sex scandal, having her husband stand silently by the podium while she sought forgiveness would probably make matters worse. Many Americans would conclude that she was a castrating witch married to a wimp.

We do indeed seem to have something of a double standard here. I’ll also admit that I really don’t know why Eliot Spitzer’s wife didn’t simply slam the door of the family home on him and tell him to get lost. But, well, not my life to run, is it?

It’s also true that infidelity itself is thought of rather differently these days. It’s not all that long ago (yesterday in some countries, and tomorrow as well) that infidelity by men was almost normal. infidelity by married women being regarded as something much more serious (although sex in an age without effective contraception explains at least some of this).

This though is the meat of the piece for me:

This double standard can be seen in business as well as politics. Outright discrimination on the basis of gender has been all but eliminated in the workplace. But women still face discrimination on the basis of family status. Today, unmarried and childless women earn just about as much as men, and in several American cities women in their 20s earn more, on average, than their male peers.

Yet, once spouses and children enter the picture, the gap between men and women again widens. Married men have an earnings advantage over unmarried men. Married women, however, have no such advantage over their single counterparts, and women with children face substantial penalties.

In 2005, Cornell researchers Shelley Correll and Stephen Bernard created 600 fictitious resumes for midlevel marketing positions. Half mentioned relocating with their families and indicated participation in a school board; the other half simply mentioned relocating, with no reference to family. Women who did not mention family ties were almost twice as likely to be deemed hirable.

And when applicants with discernible family ties were selected, men with children were offered a salary of, on average, $6,000 more than childless men, while women with children were offered $11,000 less than the childless women.

I’ve long been proposing the contentionthat we don’t in fact have a gender pay gap. We have a child care pay gap, one which for a number of reasons (you can argue for societal expectations or for biological determinisim, doesn’t affect my main point) is carried almost exclusively by women.

Now, whether we want to do something about it or not is one matter: but only if we correctly identify the problem, accurately divine the causes, will we in fact be able to do so.

If we should so wish, that is.