Despite progress in gender relations over the last 50 years, women still earn less than men, roughly 80 cents to every dollar men earn. This is an improvement, however, as women earned 62 cents to every male dollar in 1979. Unfortunately, this climb seems to have stalled and recent data suggests that the upward trend in female earning power has reached a ceiling.

Economists suggest that the wage gap can be explained primarily by two factors. First, women tend to follow lower-paying degrees and careers such as English and teaching. Though some critics argue that these professions earn less because of their feminine association and not because they perform less valuable services, that argument does not make sense. If true, women would also earn less than men in their same field, but that is not the case.

Second, women have to take time off from work to have babies and raise them. During this period, their husbands continue to earn money and receive promotions. Aside from the immediate costs of having a baby (hospital fees, diapers, extra food, etc.), the mother thus loses the income she would have earned working. The time spent out of the workforce then slows down the pace of promotion and lowers the gains of future wage growth. For women in higher paying fields, this opportunity cost can be very high (i.e. it costs a lot more for a lawyer to have a baby than for a waitress). And if a woman wants more than one child, she may face several years of withdrawal from the workforce. There is a large cost to having children and it explains a significant amount of the persistent wage gap.

I can think of two solutions. The first is to offer paternity leave: If men miss an equal amount of work as women because of their children, then the wage difference should narrow. Since this would come from men having less earning potential (and women more), it is easy to see that many men may not like this idea. In addition, few corporations offer paternity leave. When I asked a Deloitte & Touche USA LLP representative, a firm which prides itself on its generous maternity leave, if it offers paternity leave, the man responded, in surprise: “No. Why would you need that? When you are 28 or 29, we expect you to be pursuing your career.” Men should not be looked down upon for wanting to help raise their newborn child.

Though further off, I think an equally practical answer is a pregnancy machine. Once the woman is pregnant, she would have the option of removing the fertilized egg and leaving it in the care of a machine that recreates the womb experience. After 38 weeks, the new parents could pick up their children at the hospital.

Once we think about the strides in childcare made since the Industrial Revolution, the idea is not as crazy as it initially appears. For most of human history, those we consider children were not viewed as people, as viable beings, until they reached a threshold, often three to five years of age. Not until the creature survived the threat of disease and malnutrition did its parents view it as a child, a human being to which they could become attached. As technology and medicine progressed, we started to view children as viable from the moment they exited the womb, and invested them with the emotional care that is standard today.

But our view of children has been shaped by technological advances, not some ethical progression. Even now, babies born with fewer than 38 weeks of gestation can survive; the youngest birth recorded was at 22 weeks, almost half the anatomical requirement. My point is that technology will one day make babies viable at day zero, and women will have the choice to not go through a standard pregnancy and its requisite economic costs.

I do not know when this will happen, and it probably will not be before we have children. But I am convinced that closing the wage gap requires overcoming the costs of pregnancy, and a machine which obviates the entire process will close any part of the pay gap not due to different choice of professions.

It might seem cold and dystopic to us now, but in the future people may look back on us just as we do on our ancestors: as a society with repressed women and backwards attitudes toward children.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a staff columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

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