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Notes -
Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
It’s not really about feminism or women being “uppity”. It’s about incentives built into the modern economy.
From a purely economic perspective, it’s better for GDP if more people are in the workforce, so governments and industries push for higher labor participation, including women. But what’s good for GDP isn’t automatically what’s good for (non capital owning) people.
The real issue is cost of living. Housing, childcare, and basic living costs are now so high that a single income usually isn’t enough to support a family anymore. When both adults have to work full-time just to qualify for a mortgage, the idea that one parent could stay home becomes unrealistic.
If houses were affordable enough that one income could support a family, my hypothesis is that you would naturally see more more couples with a partner working less and also a higher fertility rate.
So the debate about whether women should work kind of misses the point, most families simply don’t have a choice.
That's it. Mother having a part-time job or no job while the kids are small, because Father can earn enough to provide a reasonable life, was the default. But the push for economic growth meant "get more women into the workplace" and now economic factors mean "if you want to pay the bills, both of you have to be working".
I don't know the solution to that. I don't think there's an easy solution.
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