Paying stay at home mothers

This idea to pay stay at home mothers will have its supporters of course:

A new report by the Centre for Social Justice, one of Tory leader David Cameron's favoured think-tanks, recommends radical changes to the tax and benefits system which would enable parents to remain at home in the first three years of a child's life.

The changes proposed could be worth more than £500 a month to women who choose to stay at home.

I have top admit I've never quite understood why I'm supposed to pay for other people to raise their own children. Having them is a choice just like any other and if I choose not to make that choice myself why must I still pay for it?

However, there's a much larger problem here as well. This will increase the gender pay gap.

When you start to delve into the reasons for the existence of that gap you quickly find that it's the having of children and the staying at home to raise them that causes (most) of it.

So if we're going to make the staying at home and taking the career break more attractive then we'll see more of it and thus a wider gender pay gap.

There's not much that can be done about this other than to make the choice. What do we want? That people can raise their children and work as they wish? Or that we should insist that pay at work should be equal?

For as so often in real life, as opposed to political fantasies, we do in fact have to make a choice about what our goal is. Further, no we can't whine about the known outcomes of those choices.

So which do you support? Narrowing the gender pay gap or increasing the time spent by mothers at home with young children?

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