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Notes -
I'd guess the vast majority of PhD holding women and men wouldn't want to be homemakers. But this kind of norm would nudge the marginal couple into having one of them being homemakers. This seems like it'd be beneficial if our goal is to support marriages and families, since shifting a couple from both full-time working to one full-time working and one homemaking helps that.
There's no way to tell, but I'd also wager that this is a stronger effect than the benefits to marriages and families that come from universities giving spouses nepotism jobs, because the effect on a couple's competence in raising kids seems far more impacted by whether one of the parents is devoting time to it than by whether both parents are working jobs at the same place that matches their passion and competence and whatever. There would be negative impacts to parents who are demoralized due to their personal disappointment in their own careers, as well as those who go the long-distance-marriage route with both partners pursuing academic jobs that match their competence in different places, but I'm skeptical that these would happen often enough and with enough severity to be greater than the marriage and family-supporting effect of nudging some marginal spouses to homemaking. There's certainly the possibility that these marginal spouses are so few that these downsides do outweigh them, of course.
Again, I don't see any way of knowing or finding out. At the least, we could also hit something closer to liberal fairness while doing this.
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