*Switzerland

Bonnie, your explanation/clarification is amazingly clear and simple enough for even this ignorant guy to understand and recognize.
Thank you!

“An American friend of mine who is married to a Swiss and has lived her 40+ years says women didn’t care to vote because they were spending all their time cleaning. She’s only half joking when she says that.”
Thank you for that laugh out loud moment. Cultural differences are amazing and wonderful even if they don’t align with our own.

Flexibility *is* money, moreso than some other benefits, because flexibility is job security. Flexibility means that if your daycare changes mid-year, you can potentially change your start/finish time to accommodate that. It means that you can potentially take comp time when your kid is sick (or has kept you up three nights in a row), rather that eating into your PTO (and this year’s hope of a vacation). It means (sometimes) that you can work from home, to wait for the home-care appointments (handyperson, contractor, repairperson) or to watch a sick kid (who’s just going to lie there and watch teenage mutant ninja turtles, but still needs an adult).

It goes to the “mental load” – women need these things, still, because they generally carry the mental load of the home and kids (if/when they have home and kids). They know they need these things. They look for these things. They value these things. Men (often) don’t know that they need these things and don’t value them, because it just magically gets taken care of, so don’t know to negotiate them, to look for them, and how valuable they are in the long-run.

But, “most”, whether or not it is academically supported, is exactly what a stereotype is. Honestly, most women like you, perhaps. But as a HM, I’m not going to make any assumptions about your needs and wants. I’m going to ask you.

Of course not every woman values flexibility over money but according to Harvard Professor Claudia Goldstein, most do.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

Thank you. And, it’s exactly the type of stereotype used to rationalize the gender-based differences in the questionnaires cited.

I’ve heard the French-speaking areas are worse than the German-speaking areas, but purely anecdotally.