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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I always find these 'we need more women in X' arguments funny. Because the advocates never say which industries we need fewer women in. Their rhetoric seems to imply that women are an infinite resource than haven't been tapped, whereas in reality female labour, like everything in economics, is a scarce resource. More women in construction means fewer women in e.g. healthcare.

But to your point, there's surprisingly little relationship between the female employment rate and the birth rate. The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa, which is also the region with the highest birth rates. The next highest is East Asia, the region with the lowest birth rates.

The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa,

Genuinely shocking result, thanks for that.

Because if you don't work you starve. But the real story is further down the page - with very few exceptions (notably South Africa and Namibia), women in SSA are almost entirely employed in the informal sector. Many countries it's 98 or 99%. Basically, cottage industries, little hustles in the village, the gigs one has to take to survive, are counted as work, but they don't look much like what we would consider a "job", more like what our ancestors did before the modern single-earner family. I'm also fairly suspicious of their data quality in Africa for the Female Employment Rate map, some countries have weird spikes and troughs in overall female employment of the size that could only be methodology changes or war-related (what's going on in Niger?), and many have no recent data.

Sure. But informal employment is just how they do it in Africa. Ugandan overall employment is 90% informal, for example.

Certainly. But it makes the data impossible to compare to more developed countries imo if we're talking about the difference between a "working woman" and a "housewife". What it means to be employed is too different, and many of the things we would still consider "jobs" are recorded as informal sector.

Certainly employment looks different. Not a lot of girlbosses in Uganda. It's nevertheless striking that so many Ugandan women sell goods and services outside of the household.

I mean in a more general sense as well. When we think of a "job", we tend to think regular wage labour for an employer or owning a business that does a dedicated thing. It gets a lot fuzzier there - for instance, pretty much everybody is selling or bartering whatever's on hand to somebody else. It has a very different relationship to the family and household, since it's basically inter-household trade in goods and services rather than structured labour in the sense an American uses the word "job" or "business".

The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.

Also remember that before the invention of modern appliances, women in paid work was a sign of poverty, not a sign of feminism. 50+ hours a week of housework was needed to achieve a respectable working class standard of housekeeping, so women only worked outside the home if they really needed the money (there was so much housework that modern women with full-time jobs do more hands-on childcare than 1950's housewives).

50+ hours a week of housework was needed to achieve a respectable working class standard of housekeeping,

Work done in the home and consumed in the home is explicitly excluded from this accounting.

What do you mean?

I mean that if a woman is a housewife and does housework that doesn't count as labor force participation.

The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.

The denominator is working age women above the age of 15, so it already excludes women of retirement age.

My read was that it defined working age as 15 and over with no upper limit.

female working-age population (ages 15 and over)

Looks to me like the words inside the brackets explain the locally used meaning of the words before them. Given the very wide range of female retirement ages around the world, I think they would say what maximum age they were using if they were using one.

Hmm, this document uses 20 to 64 as working age, which gives us an upper bound but a different lower bound.

This source suggests that labour force is defined crudely (as you suggested) as anyone over the age of 15, but it also says it excludes people who are retired. And since the average life expectancy is only 62 in SSA, I don't know whether that means African women are retiring to be supported by their (large) families or whether they just work until they drop, especially since for subsistence farmers, there's probably always something that can be done around the farm, even if granny isn't really contributing much.

In conclusion, I'm stumped.

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