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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 obviously more efficient for the general economy and trade to have half your population working than sitting around at home doing nothing productive and no amount of "traditional values" or desires will change that basic fact.
Even history, despite the poor conceptualizations of it among many nowadays, does not refute it. Women historically did work plenty, they just didn't do it at a typical job. Almost all of the "women's work" nowadays is the easy baby casual mode difficulty of what they had to do back then. Doing laundry manually is exhausting and that's despite our understanding of detergents and cleaners being better (a lot of women would burn their hands from the lye and not know better). Cooking and handling food before refrigerators, modern preservatives and supply chains that help keep the food fresh even before you get it and widespread electricity (and thus appliances) is quite difficult. Clothes were way way more expensive and that's if you could even buy them (during the Great depression things were so bad you might even make clothes out of flour bags) and thus sewing wasn't a relaxing hobby but a time intensive necessity so your kids had functional clothing. Even many of the lower noblewomen, who might have a few servants but not many, had a fair bit of of work to be done. And of course many of those servants were women too.
The modern tradwife stereotype is a fiction, one created by automation and modern supply chains. Women were spending their days doing work and being productive, it's just work that isn't needed nowadays.
I mean it’s only short term more efficient. Essentially, the idea is the same as eating your seed corn. Sure, short term it’s more efficient to eat every single seed of corn you produce. Except that eventually you come to the next season, have no corn to plant and thus will have no future crops to harvest. And essentially, I think this is how our entire society is structured— what matters is not long term success, but the next quarter, the next year, or the next whatever, *even if it means destroying the long term future of your company and society.”
Considering that women were already participating in labor intensive work, just unpaid domestic work that doesn't fit the "job" archetype, I don't see much reason to believe that working is the general cause of people not having babies.
Maybe there's some sort of difference in the work of sitting typing in an office into a spreadsheet vs doing laundry manually for hours, spending hours sewing clothes, getting fresh water and the other types of hard and time consuming house work that women were doing which promotes fertility in the latter but not the former but it's not a very clear difference.
It’s not just working that’s at issue. It’s working for other people outside of the home, thus creating a situation where the woman is tasked with keeping house and cooking after a full on workday. Add to this that such an arrangement pretty much requires that the family fork over tens of thousands of dollars a year to warehouse the kids while mom and dad work, and that if anything less than ideal happens to the kids, they’re blamed, and you have a situation where having a child (let alone 3-5) is just so daunting time and money wise that a lots of couples don’t even try.
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It's the double whammy of having to have a job outside the home, then you come home and the ordinary work still has to be done, plus you have to be available for demands of work. If you need to take time off for bringing kids to the doctor, dentist, stay home with a sick child, etc. then you find yourself falling behind or even let go because "yeah you're not here to do the job you're being paid to do". If you want to get on in your career, you need to be able to devote yourself to the job at least in the early years. If you want a life where eventually you can afford to have kids, you need that career. If you have kids early on, you can't have that career. It's catch-22.
Now, it's not impossible, I'm working in a place where lower middle-class to middle-middle class are working, and managing to have families. But it's not going to be the kind of "this is High Value Human Capital Driving The Economy Line Go Up Better World Through Progress" work and careers that is also complained about (not enough Smart Productive People having babies, why not? Because it's very damn difficult to eat the cake and still have it, is why).
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The obvious difference is moving from an environment where it is easy to watch children to one where children are effectively prohibited. A pre-modern woman doing domestic labor is working fairly hard, but it's work that (for the most part) allows you to keep one eye on the kids and can be easily interrupted. As work increasingly moves out of the home, that stops being practical. This isn't that big a deal when men do it, because they weren't doing much childrearing anyway, but when women do it forces a choice between working and taking care of your children.
A lot of modern jobs could replicate this - the biggest problem letting white collar workers take their young children to work is that it might be distracting - but making every day Bring Your Child To Work Day doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar. And I imagine managers and business owners would not be thrilled about it.
It's not just effectively prohibited, it's actually prohibited, even for child care workers. The children cannot be with their parents, they must be enrolled, taxed, and watched by someone else.
I'm talking about children young enough to not be enrolled in school. The truant officer isn't going to come and arrest you for bringing your 1-year old to the office, but your boss will probably be annoyed if you keep doing it.
That's what I'm talking about as well.
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The other thing you need is an environment where it's acceptable to keep only one eye on the kids rather than both, and if the kids do escape supervision and get into trouble, it's considered normal and not neglect.
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I recall the topic of corporate-provided childcare coming up in a company-wide chat at a medium-sized tech company I once worked at that considered itself employee-friendly and kept a sponsored GP doctor on site to encourage annual physicals. At the time the executive response was largely centered around insurance costs and liability. To be fair, the response was similar when asked about a pool for the company gym, but it does seem a reasonable concern that a jury would find the company liable for incidents regardless of the internal structure in ways that a separate building next door with no legal ties.
Observation: as far as I know, there aren't any large corporate chain daycare (and many other large-scale child service providers), possibly because liability risk bounds the benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions.
Although I did also once work at a startup where someone started bringing their dog to work daily. At least it was pretty well-behaved.
Multisite corporate daycares are a thing in the UK, but the reason you don't see large corporate chain daycares is the lack of economies of scale. It is a business which depends on the quality of on-site management, and the best way to motivate and retain quality on-site management is to let them own the business. This is why so many chain restaurants are franchises. And there is no point in franchising daycare because there is no travelling trade of people who have to choose their daycare based on a national brand.
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You could do it, but it would be expensive. And also probably taxed, because it would be considered benefit-in-kind. Would people be willing to work for Company A if it paid less because "and we include subsidised/free child care" than Company B which pays more (but you have to source and pay for your own child care)?
Also, just thinking about most office buildings and where they're located, it probably would be tough to convert part of the building into childcare facility (e.g. you need some kind of outdoor space/playground area for the kids to run around. Believe me, you got a room full of hyped-up four year olds, you want them to run around and burn off that energy). I do imagine your insurance premiums would go up by a hefty amount. Here's an example from Irish insurance provider for child care centres:
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