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Well, SOME women's work.
It would absolutely fair to study and figure out if there are areas where female-dominated industries (and/or certain departments within an industry/company) are in fact creating an economic net negative. I am specifically thinking of the massive increase in bureaucracy and administrative costs which are endemic to certain sectors of the economy, such as education, healthcare, and, increasingly, finance. A whole lot of what females produce for the economy is actually designed to slow down some other sector of it.
We could slice these sectors out of the economy tomorrow and immediately see increased productivity and less waste. And we'd also see hundreds of thousands of women unemployed.
You're making a sweeping claim that isn't inherently backed up by data. I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.
This is especially obvious if you look at the gender makeup of those jobs that are either fundamental to society (energy production, mining, farming, construction, heavy industry) or that are producing the most marginal value (designing computer chips, computer programming, maintaining the tech stack that enables the internet to continue existing).
If females by and large aren't doing the work that enables society to exist at all (childbearing/rearing notably being the exception), and aren't doing the work that produces the most excess wealth, then how productive are they, really?
I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')
The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.
That is, if a given family is paying $3000/month on average for childcare tasks that could be handled by the mother (or, to be fair, the father), then she would have to be producing $3001/month in value on average to actually be producing a net economic value.
I'm not convinced that >50% of women currently in the workforce are in fact producing more value than they would produce if they were instead taking on the childcare role themselves.
Pretty soon, I imagine. First thing you'd probably hear about is a lot of people dying in hospitals as the majority of nurses disappear. Or you'd see most activity in the retail sector comes to an abrupt halt because few stores have enough staff on hand to handle purchases. A huge recession as public demand drops due to half the adult population suddenly finding themselves without a source of disposable income. And so on.
How many people die in hospitals normally?
Why would retail activity halt? Isn't a huge portion of such shopping done online?
How much "disposable" income is really being lost, exactly?
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I mean, I think the prima facie case is pretty simple: entities that have an incentive to be profit maximizing have decided that paying these women to do the work they do is, on margin, worth it. The market is not perfectly efficient, of course, but I am not sure why I should believe you are more likely to be correct than the people actually making the decision to hire them.
I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.
Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?
Yes, hence my proposal. One disparity here is that the value produced outside the home is partially returned to the women in question in the form of money she can use to acquire shelter, food, and all the necessities of life. If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.
ALMOST making my point here.
Who would notice if nurses and physicians disappeared? People with doctor's appointments, or the elderly and infirm who depend on nursing care.
Most people wouldn't notice right away because most aren't going to see a nurse or doctor very often.
Compare that to say, if your local power plant shut down because all the staff left. Who would notice? Literally every person whose electricity just switched off.
In the case of physicians, the economic impact wouldn't be immediate because economic activity could still continue even as the healthcare system suffered from a huge backlog. We kinda 'proved' this during Covid. Work continues even if the hospitals are overwhelmed.
In the case of energy production, or internet infrastructure, tons of economic activity would INSTANTLY cease because those inputs are NECESSARY to said activity. So we'd "notice" immediately.
10% of construction workers would indeed be a hit, but with some reshuffling construction would continue.
Also, it is of course likely that just because they make up some significant portion of the workforce, it does NOT imply they're actually responsible for the same share of actual productivity.
If the female 36% of all farmers are only producing 10% of the food, the actual felt impact is less severe than the first number would imply.
And that's a good distillation of my point. Its likely that 80% of economic productivity is the result of the efforts of 20% of the people. And I'd bet my left testicle that the most productive members of the economy are mostly male.
So if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce, I would guess we'd lose closer to 10% of economic productivity. Which is to say... we'd survive.
And if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce but actually devoted themselves to raising kids such that all childcare costs were internalized, the actual hit would probably be negligible.
I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.
The huge glaring irony, though, is that almost any female-centric industry can be to some extent 'replaced' by technology (I will grant that this is NOT the case for Nursing)... except bearing and raising kids.
Like, any job that a female can do, a male with the right tools, automation, and basic support can presumably also do. EXCEPT THE PRECISE JOB THAT FEMALES EVOLVED OVER MILLENNIA TO PERFORM, which men still struggle with despite better tech. In the case of bearing children, men are literally incapable of doing it.
So it seems like steps toward a solution require us to 'un-taboo' the idea that females bearing children is in fact a good social priority and women should be encouraged to become mothers.
Surely the play is to give her a portion of her offspring's income, no?
Maybe? Seems likely to produce some real disincentives.
Like what? In essence this already happens in a round about way through social security.
Worst case, if we accept that males are likely to make more money over their lifetime than females, there's a bias towards having male children.
It certainly places the children in a situation where they may decide to earn less salary since some portion of it is being taken away from them with no promise of return.
Could have some of the daughter's share of income from her offspring flow to her mother. Should be some mathematical way to make this work out.
If this were the case it'd already apply to social security. And, frankly, I would be surprised if a large number of men would be that resentful of a formalized way to discharge their financial obligations to their parents. I'm reminded of Scott on how pledging to give 10% actually resolved a lot of his anxiety of whether he's doing enough.
Interesting to have wealth flowing in 'reverse' down the Matrilineal line.
Well, we can imagine some that are upset that their parents were abusive or neglectful growing up yet get to share in their wealth. Perhaps there would need to be a process for cutting off parents for cause.
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You're equivocating between "wouldn't notice" and "wouldn't grind to a halt".
Fair, I was working from the OP's statement about whether economic activity would be "seriously disrupted." I'm not sure how serious it would have to but I think all the examples I give would qualify.
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Not OP, but the obvious rejoinder is that the company but outsources all of the opportunity cost to the employees. The real question is why the prospective employee is so heavily discounting the opportunity cost.
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
I think it’s because they don’t trust men to do what they say they’ll do. The feminist attack on Harrison butker- aimed at their own audience- wasn’t ‘you deserve a career’. It was an evidence free assertion that he beats his wife. A lot of the ‘why do women give up X to not be dependent on a man’ has an answer, and that answer is ‘they think a man will abuse them if they’re dependent, or otherwise not fulfill his side of the bargain because he thinks he can get away with it’. This belief may be neurotic and unfounded, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t exist and inform the behavior of a lot of very risk averse people.
I encourage you to go talk to the socially conservative housewives in whichever sect that practices female domesticity is easiest to access; they will tell you that their particular sect has figured out how to make men behave, but women out in the world have to go into the corporate world, poor things, because they can’t depend on their men.
This is where fathers (and to a lesser extent brothers and uncles) are supposed to provide that safety net. I need to be wealthy enough to take care of my girls if they get into a bad situation with a future husband.
I'd argue your father, brothers and uncles are actually supposed to provide you with a safety net if you get into a bad situation with your fiancé/husband by giving him a severe beating.
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I can second that, and I've heard exactly the same sentiment from my wife (who is very successful in her well-paid career). This was instilled in her by her mother, who worked a fake government job helping applicants fill paperwork for farm subsidies. She was paid peanuts compared to her husband, but she prided herself at being independent (even though everything was actually paid for by her husband).
Women just don't want to be dependent on their husbands, because they heard a lot of horror stories of abusive husbands, and so they want to maintain a put option ready to exercise. Usually, however, they suck at pricing this option, especially the theta.
You're both right. At the end, this is what all this eventually boils down to.
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Maybe this comes down to a drive for status and status alone? If they are encultured in a society that gives less status to mothers/housewives than it does to those in corporate positions, moving up the corporate pecking order would be the rational choice for a status-seeking agent. The exceptions—Mormons, traditional Catholics, Amish, etc.—are cultures that afford status to mothers of larger broods of children.
It's not a drive for status. It's a terror of being dependent on men. Mormons, tradCaths, Amish, etc have gotten around this by convincing their women and girls that their men will treat them well, it's the ones outside, out in the world, that you should scared of. Obviously that's harder to do on a society wide scale.
Or perhaps by convincing their men to actually treat them well?
If the rumors of (for instance) the Black community are remotely true, then, yes, it's better to be dependent on the US government, despite its flaws.
I’m not doubting that- poor treatment of women probably varies on the exact same axes as everything else, which means church attending middle class white men are fantastically unlikely to mistreat their wives and poor black men are likely enough that being dependent on one is foolhardy. And sure, Mormons and tradCaths have some social technology that makes it even less likely.
Just that this is a pitch which is hard for an entire society to make because it kind of depends on being a socially conservative minority subculture with strong endogamy norms.
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My model of modern western women™ is basically this:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.
Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.
If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.
Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her endeavours in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.
This is my lived experience, but it took my wife entering a well-compensated corporate position in her mid '30s where her superiors were mothers of young children for her to entertain the idea of kids. Before that (and I mean, from her late-teens when I first met her), she had a laser-focus on her career.
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I think I touch on this in my last paragraph. From the perspective of the person choosing to have children (or not) a lot of the social benefit of having and raising a child comes in the form of a positive externality they don't receive. Maybe it's an opportunity cost for society to, in some sense, have someone work rather than raise children but that externality isn't an opportunity cost for the people doing the choosing, they were never going to receive that benefit anyway.
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