Friday, December 16, 2005
Sacre Bleu!
Women agonize over the trade-offs between family and career. Now, thanks to Amalia Miller, a young economist at the University of Virginia, there is a new and particularly vivid way to think about those trade-offs.
On average, Miller has found in a new paper, a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part of that is because she'll earn higher wages—about 3 percent higher—for the rest of her life; the rest is because she'll work longer hours. For college-educated women, the effects are even bigger. For professional women, the effects are bigger yet—for these women, the wage hike is not 3 percent, but 4.7 percent.
So, if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you're giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings. The wage hit comes in two pieces. There's an immediate drop, followed by a slower rate of growth—right up to the day you retire. So, a 34-year-old woman with a 10-year-old child will (again on average) get smaller percentage raises on a smaller base salary than an otherwise identical woman with a 9-year-old. Each year of delayed childbirth compounds these benefits, at least for women in their 20s. Once you're in your 30s, there's far less reward for continued delay. Surprisingly, it appears that none of these effects are mitigated by the passage of family-leave laws.
Where in the holy hell is Ted Kennedy when you need him? This young woman's work threatens to undermine 30 years of legal progress in the area of women's issues. There must be a way to get this dangerously unproven academic theory suppressed.
Existential question of the day: If Nancy Hopkins falls and there's no one around to hear her, does it make a sound?
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Dec 16, 10:20:00 AM:
I made that choice. It didn't work that way for me. I had a child at 25, and tripled my income within 5 years.
That's because my then-husband was a bum that was not interested in supporting a family, and an accidental pregnancy blew the whole thing apart. I checked into graduate school, got a job to support the two of us, moved out, and got a great post-doc position.
Fast-forward nine years. I re-marry, have one kid, have another. Present income is just a little over what it was before I had the first baby. Why?
My (second) husband makes insane amounts of money, in part because he works some insane hours at times. Somebody has to hold down the fort, and I can affort NOT to work very much.
My contemporaries include women of celebrated accomplishment, but the ones at the top of the heap have remained single and childless. I wouldn't trade, and I haven't had to. I have repeatedly decided to take the hit on my income, and my husband has repeatedly decided to take the hit on his time. Being able to make those choices for ourselves is a good thing.
Statistics mean nothing to the individual family.
By 
TigerHawk, at
Fri Dec 16, 10:47:00 AM:
Oh, goodee. A working mother post. Too bad Screwy Hoolie isn't female.
To me, this has always been one of those tedious topics about which public discussion has suffered only because I have not written on it. :)
The way I look at it, some marriages are partnerships of specialists, and some are partnerships of generalists.
In a specialist marriage, one spouse (usually the male) concentrates on the making of bread and bring home of bacon. The other spouse ... er, takes care of the other stuff.
In a generalist marriage, both spouses have careers, and both (in theory) take care of the other stuff.
Specialists have an advantage in what they do. Specialists who have careers can devote a lot more time to them than generalists, because the specialists who have careers generally have a Domestic Goddess (as you might say) to handle the other stuff. No worries there, mate. The result? I bet the data show that even men who have "stay-at-home" wives are paid more than men whose wives have careers.
The domestic specialists also have an advantage -- they are always there to make a really sweet Halloween costume or be a chaperone on the class field trip, thereby doing a "better" job than the poor generalist who has to delegate a lot of that stuff, or blow it off.
Notwithstanding the advantages of specialization, many couples choose to be generalists. There are at least two dominating reasons why this happens. First, the happy couple cannot agree about who should stay at home all day with the rugrats, so they become generalists as a compromise. Second, they decide that specialization involves shouldering too much risk. The bread-winner loses his or her job, and the specialists are in a lot of trouble. Not so the generalists, unless they are living too high off the hog. Same is true if one of them dies, or if they get divorced. The surviving specialist is in a lot more trouble than the surviving generalist.
So, the way I look at it, this whole work-family thing is really all a decision that turns on personal preferences. If one spouse wants a career and the other one wants to make Rice Krispie Treats(TM) and deal with the cable TV installer and go on field trips and if they are both willing to absorb the extra riskiness of specialization, the career-primary spouse will probably perform better and be paid more as a result. Even in a perfectly fair world, that seems like a fair result.
By Cassandra, at
Fri Dec 16, 11:43:00 AM:
Statistics mean nothing to the individual family...
Precisely. And this happens to be what I do for a living :) But in general, they *can* be used to make generalizations that are, more often than not, true about the behavior of a general population (IOW, to tell you what will happen 9 times out of 10, or 7 times out of 12 or whatever). Of course if you're the exception that really doesn't disprove the general rule, that's not much consolation.
Interestingly enough, we started off (to use TH's theory) as specialists - I was the Happy Homemaker, being a Domestic Goddess by day and greeting him at the bedroom door dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap and an evil grin at night. Once the boys grew up, I went to college and within about 4 years I was making about 2/3 of his rather considerable salary (he hit that in-your-40's income surge, or I'd have been even closer to equalling him, and I also chose to limit my salary for increased autonomy).
My brother and his wife both work but they both have PhDs and are grossly underpaid by most standards. They make less than we do but they also have fairly flexible schedules. Of course now my brother is having to leave his ivory tower position (he's not a teacher but his job involves arcane research-oriented stuff) to enter the dreaded Management for a few years, which will be a hoot. And my sister-in-law is leaving the lab to do something completely unrelated but very interesting.
And I'm in a tech field, which is really not my first choice, but I'm there because I'm a late entrant into the work force and as a woman that was my best shot at earning good money to put my sons through college. By rights I should have gone to law school and worked for a think tank or as an analyst for the NSA.
Go figure.
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Dec 16, 11:58:00 AM:
The NSA's probably reading your stuff, anyway! :)
Well, my great Aunt Lucy got a PhD from Columbia in botony at age 60, so you still have lots of time for law school!
Of course, I only support that plan if you promise to keep blogging -- Cassandra's daily report from torts class or constitutional law would be huge for traffic (me being a man, you know I care about that).
I kill me.
By Cassandra, at
Sat Dec 17, 09:40:00 AM:
I haven't done any law-blogging in a while. Maybe when the Alito hearings start.
