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Women's decisions are the big change but women's behavior is downstream of massive change to economic conditions. Gender norms that evolved in economic conditions where women were economically dependent on men, and where the opportunity cost of child raising was small aren't going to survive in a deindustrialized economy where nurses out earn factory workers.
Being the primary caretaker of children, as most wives end up doing, is a really bad career decision. You're committing to a part time job that doesn't build skills you can use in other careers, and you can't move easily between "employers"/husbands. Unlike other jobs where success increases your choice of employers, being a 10x mother probably isn't going to help you land the hot rich doctor if your husband turns out to be a wreck. Furthermore you're expected to make this long term choice at a young age with limited ability to predict the course of your partners future life.
Is signing a 20 year contract with a non-compete clause to do ~30 hours of unskilled work a week for a similarly aged peer in exchange for a share of their future earnings an advisable career choice? Only if you think their future income is much larger than yours would be if you pursued your own career.
Traditional cultures evolved in settings where men's superior strength at manual labor was really important and domestic labor was a time consuming full time job. Now it's not obvious that men always have higher earnings potential, domestic labor has been largely automated, and the nuclear family model means stay at home moms are often isolated. Travel and entertainment is cheap, healthcare education and housing are expensive. For educated people social status comes from career achievement, and available careers can be highly stimulating and meaningful rather than rote drudgery. The opportunity cost of motherhood gets larger and larger and so unsurprisingly fewer women are choosing it.
If the opportunity cost of marriage and motherhood relative to singledom keeps getting higher and higher is it unsurprising women have higher and higher standards for men? If cultural and gender norms evolved under conditions with massive disparities in economic power would we expect them to change if economic power equalized? Aren't men going to have to 'sweeten the pot' and offer a better deal in order to get women to sign that long term childcare contract?
My read on this is that economic power shapes relationships. We have millennia of human cultural evolution where men have had way more economic power and that has shaped the cultural models for relationships between men and women. Now that we have a few decades where economic power has been somewhat equalized those norms are going to start shifting slowly but surely. The question isn't why has women's behavior changed, that's obvious, it's how will men's behavior change to adapt.
This is a really good comment, mostly because I dislike it's conclusion (viscerally) and yet it is well argued enough that I had to re-examine my own view.
This part in particular was a solid analogy:
And yet, even after consideration, I think it misses the mark on it's own terms.
Because it views marriage as an employer-employee relationship when it is perhaps better to consider it a co-equal partnership in a joint venture. After all, that 20 year contract w/non-compete applies to the other party just as strongly.
So what you're getting in exchange isn't just their future income, but it's a promise of stability in terms of your own employment. The idea is that by you taking over some portion of the duties that might otherwise fall to the other, you're enhancing their earning potential, and thus the share which you can expect to collect. Under truly ideal circumstances (not assumed, just making a point) it also gets your retirement plan squared away well in advance, as you will have decades of accumulated savings and someone to share it with at the end.
The way I view it, the economic case for marriage has always been based on the fact that you're intentionally splitting many costs and combining many expenses that would be larger if they were separate, so as to ease the burden on both parties. A marriage partner is a reliable 'roommate' who will (hopefully) never miss their rent payment. If you home cook meals regularly you're saving on eating takeout/delivery, you can get joint health insurance, you can share a vehicle, you can borrow the other person's belongings, their Netflix password, they are able to care for you if you're sick and otherwise complement your weaknesses. Basically it's incredibly valuable to have a life partner who pays a high cost for welching on any promises they make you. A guaranteed cooperative partner in the prisoner's dilemma to help you get to the better payoff.
And these benefits will compound over the course of the marriage assuming neither party goes off the deep end and does anything fiscally irresponsible. Which can absolutely happen!
But a consistent partnership over the course of decades can reap exponential benefits for the parties involved, which is the whole point.
Now, the point here:
Absolutely still stands. I just wanted to draw the analysis out a little further.
I appreciate the comment.
I agree a long term childcare contract is a very different thing from a loving marriage, which has a variety of financial, psychological, and spiritual benefits. But the cost splitting benefits you bring up don't require having children and sacrificing careers. Specializing in childcare and domestic labor to support someone else's career only confers stability and "retirement benefits" if you correctly identify someone with high earning potential & stability. That means delaying marriage until a similarly aged man is credentialed, or marrying an older man which many women are uncomfortable with.
But even if the benefits of marriage are larger than the contract analogy portrays I think the key point is that the change over time in the "opportunity cost" women pay up front is increasing and the benefits are constant (if not falling due to the Baumol making everything needed for children expensive and living single and traveling the world cheap).
I don't think I agree with this, ultimately. Or, at least, I think what has happened is that women have been able to acquire an outsized amount of financial support/security at nearly every level of society, so there is almost, almost ZERO chance that any given woman will be left destitute and homeless if she doesn't get married.
That is, women have almost zero downside risk exposure from being single. Putting it bluntly (without adopting the point) the risk of being left broke and without prospects was a MASSIVE incentive for women to achieve stability by finding a reliable provider. Stability with a partner, even if they're not necessarily wealthy, still beats out living on the streets.
That incentive has been removed, while their upside opportunities have also increased.
So I think that the benefits have increased in many ways. The synergistic effects of getting and staying married are probably stronger than before. But the "penalties" for being unmarried are no longer so severe.
Yeah, and it's easier to identify such person if you have
A) Good examples in your own life to use as reference, and
B) are willing and able to have your parents, who are also very invested in the decision, have some input.
So many people growing up in broken families are probably less able to identify those high-value mates, which likely exacerbates the issue.
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The issue is that there's no guarantee that the partnership will continue. Imagine a 23 year old woman who pairs with a similarly situated man and agrees with the traditional breakdown of labor. 10 years later, the man will be in a much more powerful position than her: if he reneges on the deal, he'll be better situated than she was and can take the large majority of the extra human capital that accrued due to the agreement to continue his job and find a new (younger, hotter, more in line with his ideal) partner. Alimony/child support/splitting of assets doesn't help the wife much there. And the woman will be older, have kids, and will have basically nuked her position in the job market; any future jobs or partners will be much worse than if she had not chosen to enter the initial agreement.
And that's a real risk. It's entirely rational for her to want to hedge her bets by building her career at the expense of fertility.
Most divorce courts will take account of the relative financial/wealth positions of the parties in parceling up assets and determining alimony. The goal is explicitly to keep the disadvantaged spouse at the standard of living they have become accustomed to.
But yes, the ability of the man to scurry off (maybe after the kids have left) with a new, younger lady is indeed a risk.
And that imposes a cost on younger single men as well by taking an otherwise eligible woman off the market for a time.
If we don't have strong social taboos on either adultery or men dating substantially younger, that would be a hard 'problem' to solve legislatively.
Personally, the way I'm looking at marriage now is something like "I am making an almost irrevocable 25-year commitment, I will accept heavy penalties for for breaching this commitment if you will do the same, and then at the 25 year mark, after the kids have been raised, we will discuss whether the partnership will continue." Perhaps both sides agree that some portion of the man's income should go into a trust which will be inaccessible to either party (except in dire emergencies) until the relationship hits the 25 year mark.
I honestly doubt that pure financial or emotional incentives suffice to replace the role that religion previously filled. It is a hard problem.
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Why do you portray motherhood/marriage as something like a rather shitty corporate job performed daily, solely for some entitled dudebro? Isn't it something that women normally do for the sake of their children, and also themselves?
Obviously being a wife/mother in a loving relationship is very different from being a long term childcare provider/domestic worker. I'm trying to illustrate motherhood's consequences for women's career trajectories/economic circumstances and in that way it's roughly analogous to signing a long term contract to provide childcare care with a non-compete.
Many, probably most, women want a loving relationship and children and are willing to pay a cost in terms of income and future career prospects in order to have them. Men pay a large cost in terms of income and autonomy to have children, as well. But if you're trying to explain the change in time in women's fertility preferences it's worth noting that the change in women's career prospects, and this the opportunity cost of motherhood, coincidences with the fall in TFR.
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It's not a given that there is anything men can do to adapt, I know there have been some bad eggs but the deal in the past was the man spends his labor to provide everything a woman needs to have children, it is definitely possible that there is just literally nothing men can do to adapt. But I don't quite buy that it's the economic power equalization and nothing social that is convincing women to make these decisions. There is a popular and powerful subculture that has defined the traditional child bearing lifestyle as toxic and is constantly warning women away from it. It is very possible that this is bad advice and women are taking it.
Also the question of what is meant by adaptation?
I've seen plenty of men adapt to maximize their chances of casual sex in the current environment and thereby get laid a bunch, but the alternate adaptation path that leads to actually reproducing seems a bit nebulous and confusing at this point.
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The social is downstream of the economic. In the past there was little prospect of women being able to support themselves, and so they had an economic dependence on men. This economic dependence resulted in social memes that encouraged and promoted women being reliant on men by way of justification for the status quo. As women have become more economically independent social memes have proliferated that encourage that same independence. If men want to adapt they'll need to accept a more equitable division of the labor of maintaining a household and raising a child.
In the choice between a life where one has a 24/7/365 job (raising a child) and is entirely reliant on another person (housewife) vs an 8/5 job where one is the master of their own destiny it is no surprise many choose the latter.
The social and the economic defy such simple modeling. What is the good life is socially mediated, if that conception includes kids I can't really say the woman is getting the worse deal, if it doesn't then it is a bad deal. Seeing as women can't really directly compare the two experiences they need to rely on the stories society tells to inform them, and society does not seem to be trying very hard to sell parenthood.
The group that does this, or at least advertises they'd be willing to do this, is having significantly less children than the group that doesn't put any effort into advertising this. And, frankly, the meme that men aren't pulling their weight in domestic tasks doesn't ring true to me at all, it seems like just an empty grievance from centuries past that only persists because of the women are wonderful effect. Men seem to be pulling their weight and the domestic tasks besides the ones directly involved with caring for the baby take only a handful of hours a week to maintain. I would know, I personally do nearly all of them each week while working from home just during calls. If your best idea about why women aren't having babies is that men aren't washing the dishes frequently enough then you have no ideas about why women aren't having babies.
I mean the advent of work from home is relatively recent and has the potential to increase fertility among educated people. Even if directly caring for the child is not time consuming you still have to be physically away from work to do it.
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Fair enough. What I mean to convey is the idea that our economic conditions to some extent determine which social narratives we find compelling. The idea is that ~everyone is presented with competing social narratives that explain their present (or future) life situation. What narratives we find compelling is, in part, a product of our actual experience. As the actual facts about individuals experience shift, so too do their decisions about what narratives are convincing explanations. Historically the nature of labor made it easy to accept the social narrative that regarded men as the productive worker and women as the child carer or homemaker. As economic conditions have shifted, so too have the narratives women (and men!) have found compelling.
I think this fact is due to other causal factors than this attitude, but fair enough.
Can you back up this "seems" with data? According to Gallup both men and women agree that women generally shoulder more of the burden with respect to domestic duties and child care.
I am a little confused. In another comment you say you are "working on" becoming a father, or pumping out babies. Do you currently have children? My impression (admittedly from my brother rather than personal experience) is that babies take much more than "a handful of hours a weeK" in care.
Even in that link when it gets broken down to both earn similar amounts there really isn't that big of a gap. The show it reducing both with newer generations and with both people earning similar amounts but not combined, both combined probably gives "both equally" a plurality. it's already 50% for "care for child on a daily basis" just with equal incomes. This is actually surprisingly egalitarian.
I do not, I'm referring to all domestic tasks besides the direct child rearing. Perhaps we're confusing terms, a lot of the discussion that does happen about domestic work refers to things like cleaning, laundering, cooking, and shopping. There actually isn't really that much public discussion at all about the proportion or types of time spent directly caring for the kids. Likely because no one really wants to be spending time doing the dishes but people have more complicated relationships with the time they spend directly caring for a kid. Which is at the same time some of the most meaningful time and frequently consisting of unpleasantness. It's the kind of thing divorced parents frequently fight viciously for more of.
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No, especially with more than one child to handle.
I'm talking specifically if you're serious about being a housewife, not a part-timer who sends the kids off 6 hours a day to be handled by radical progressives.
If breastfeeding, that baby will wake you up 3-4 times a night or maybe just one after being sleep-trained.
Think special force bootcamp but do this over and over again for a decade if you're serious about having kids.
Then you're handling that baby, changing it, breastfeeding it during the day, and your other child(ren) are doing whatever they want in some other part of the home, and you end up having to clean up the same spot several times a day.
You can be very good at instructing/training kids, but you most likely won't have them tidy all the stuff they mess with before 5 yo.
Then you probably want to have your children wear clean clothes every day, that's a lot of laundry.
There is no day off in that career, and vacations can actually be more stressful (no you cannot just stuff your kids in a separate hotel room).
I don't disagree with those who say that men do less than women in the household.
Yet, I still have to deal with lack of sleep (to a lesser extent), family-related stress but I also have to remain competitive in the workplace.
I don't disagree with the assessment but I do think that it's easier for women to deal with that kind of life.
It seems to me in general that they get more out of being around little babies (or even little animals) than men do, or even organizing/arranging the house.
Their hormonal systems allow them to adapt to rapid changes in their body from pregnancy to breastfeeding back to pregnancy.
Their psychology is more prosocial, they are better at understanding and managing others' emotions, which is essential for small children.
On the other hand, the world of business discourages emotional display, as the men who created it see it as a nuisance in the way of getting things done.
The issue is that the people who complain about the unfairness of the burden placed on women are also the ones that have destroyed the social systems that made that burden lighter.
If HR departments were gutted and Western corporations were more sexist like Japanese ones or Western ones 100 years ago, how many women would find that they would rather have their water cooler gossip session at home around children?
I don't think we're in all that much disagreement, I did specify the non child rearing aspects like laundry. I think a lot of the gender expectation stuff starts breaking down around the direct child care aspects which is why I'm questioning what extra exactly men are really supposed to be offering here.
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Or if you care about things other than income in your life. This is a self-fixing problem.
The Amish have no issue reproducing and perpetuating their society. The career-women-enabling society only has about 10 generations in it, and we're reaching the end of it.
I contend that Amish women are happier than the average girlboss out there*, but this is due to several factors:
1- their family gave them a healthy upbringing giving them both the desire to have kids
2- and the skills to successfully raise kids (and a lot of them)
3- their community is supportive of child-rearing, with no CPS-caller, no drug dealer, no peddler of sterilizing hormones and surgery, jobs you can bring your kids on, other women willing to help with child care
While the modern tradwoman might have the 1st from a happy accident with cosplay, tumblr and what not, the 2nd is unlikely and the 3rd impossible for non-Amish adjacent.
Therefore their life might be just as stressful as the average spreadsheet-enjoyer.
*educated women are more likely to be alcoholic for example
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