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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?".
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.
Genuinely shocking result, thanks for that.
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).
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.
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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.
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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