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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.
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".
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