2)There seems to be an ambiguity in what you are arguing here. At first, it seemed that you were saying that mothers (mainly former stay at home ones) were underpaid for the skills that they were bring to the workplace. Now it seems that you are hinting that they should be paid at the same level of those who never left the workplace or “the system” is messed up and such people are being undervalued. Are you saying that they should be paid the same as others regardless of how they contribute to: running a department, writing code, making widgets etc because they are moms? Or are you saying that whatever skills they obtained from bearing and raising children makes them the equal of those who did not?

If you take the first fork where women are inherently as equally qualified for whatever job as those who never left the job market or who went on to get more education implies that women are the super sex.

3)How can you call such unjust unless you want to put forward an argument that bearing and raising kids inherently makes one a more productive employee in whatever industry we are talking about. I can’t see such an argument being made. That is setting aside the fact that moms typically need more flexibility in order to continue to take care of their children even after they are back at work. If we are going to pay them the same as others who is going to have to receive less compensation to make up the loss in productivity over hiring someone else? Do you believe that her husband or other husbands need to be paid less so that she can be paid more than here productivity requires? Should the shareholders expect lower dividends etc in order for her to be paid more? etc.?

4)In a capitalistic society, the ability to get whatever job done is what is valued. If being a mother helps that, then one will be paid appropriately. If such does not help such, then one wont be paid as much. That does not imply that women should not get married and have children. Sometimes one has to give up something that is a good for something that one considers a higher good. A similar thing could be seen if a father does not take a higher paying job because the hours would take him away from his family too much. A man who is not married with children or whose children have now left the house, may find such a position more appealing. Is such a situation devaluing of fatherhood?

2. Roles vs. Value. Yes, different roles should be valued equally. SAHMs should be valued at the same rate as their work away from home husbands.

3. My point is not to argue against differing roles but that the structures in which we apply those roles are fundamentally flawed. Women who take time off to raise families are paid a lower rate because the marketplace does not deem what she learns there as valuable. But if she were to take time off to pursue academic education or travel the world, it would be considered enriching and make her even more marketable. When she cares for a family, it is a negative on her resume; when she takes a gap year to live overseas, it’s a plus. This is fundamentally unjust.

4. I do not believe women are the super sex. I do believe they are equal image bearers and should be valued as such. In a capitalist society, we express value through money and promotion. To pay women at a lower rate is akin to valuing them and their unique calling less.

Next, if we do believe in different roles for men and women, why would we expect a proper and just world to see doing the same roles at anything close to the same rate?

Next, your cog analogy does not work. Stepping away from work to care for children is a great thing to be done for one’s family and for society in general but one should not expect such to make one more valuable in the workforce (especially the type of workforce that is dynamic and highly paid). To make such a claim, one would have to believe that the man or woman who never left the workforce were unable to gain anything from that experience if the mom who took time away is their absolute equal.

Lastly, the only reason that a woman should be able to walk away from the job and be just as useful as her husband when she returns, is if women are the super sex and gender roles are arbitrary and not based on the created order.

Quite frankly, one of the greatest problems within conservative structures (and I count myself as a conservative) is not that we believe in different roles for men and women but that we rarely evaluate the structures in which we apply those roles. Instead of questioning whether work and home intersect in a healthy way, we have a highly secularized view of work that sees employees as cogs in a machine and anything that interrupts that machine (e.g. stepping away to care for family) immediately makes them less valuable.

You’d be surprised at the management and multi-tasking skills a woman achieves by running a home and mothering children. To say that this makes her LESS useful as a worker should alert us to the fact that our workplace paradigms are seriously flawed, not that women deserve to be compensated at a lower rate.

*stepping off soapbox now*