Saturday, April 21, 2007
Working women and fertility
The current issue of the Economist has a chart that is going to be awfully confusing for some American conservatives, at least those remaining few who think that women should stay home and raise the children. It compares female participation in the workforce with fertility rates and reveals a positive correlation.
In the rich countries, at least, the smaller the gap between male and female labor force participation the higher the nation's fertility rate.
One is forced to wonder what Spanish and Italian women do all day long.
Or, perhaps, cause and effect are reversed. Children are expensive. Does more fertility mean that families need more money, so that a higher proportion of women feel they have to work?
5 Comments:
By 
Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sat Apr 21, 08:54:00 PM:
It is a bit counterintuitive, eh? Your cause-and-effect reversal sounds plausible. Rates of divorce/separation may be part of it as well. I believe that European couples forego marriage more often than American, but their rates of separation are lower. Single mothers would be more likely to enter the workforce. American women are also paid better, creating more incentive to take on paid employment.
By 
, at
Sat Apr 21, 08:56:00 PM:
Tigerhawk --
I doubt Conservatives want women to stay at home and have children, or want a rigidly defined set of gender roles: men work and women at home.
What I think is at play is what is not measured:
1. Affordable family formation. Having children requires surplus income and now, a safer, less crime ridden environment. I.E. the suburbs.
2. A feeling of hope/optimism, generally though not always correlating with religious feeling.
3. Relative balance between sexes at all income levels, i.e. not tremendous competition for high status men among high status women.
The first factor is self-explanatory, young people seek the opposite sex in cities/metro areas then seek suburbs when they are married. Cities encircled by water (coastal areas) with expensive real estate inhibit this growth, inland places like Dallas have lots of cheap land.
[Mark Steyn thinks Euros just "gave up" in having kids but it may be that they are priced out of the children market due to sky high housing prices.]
The second factor is hard to measure, but may or may not correlate between general religious feeling, degree of welfare-statism, and personal freedom/liberty with income growth.
The last is IMHO crucial. High status women complain constantly (see Maureen Dowd) that guys they date like Warren Beatty or Aaron Sorkin don't marry them. They marry Annette Benning, or Catherine Zeta-Jones, or younger/hotter women like that. Because there is a limited supply of high status men. And high and low status women are in competition with them.
Women select on status, while men select on looks. Oversimplified but a good rough model.
In order for a robust fertility rate to occur, duh men and women have to have kids by hooking up ("the duh moment"). Given women's control over their own fertility rate this would seem (excepting African-American women and the UK underclass who seem to have given up on marriage/long-term partnership) women would choose a man for at least long-term partnership.
IMHO this in turn demands excess amounts of women in the class (middle, working), because the working or middle class men are competing with higher-status guys they will almost always lose to.
This dynamic IMHO accounts for the lonely late forties women of high status wondering why they could not have children and the high status guys they had in their youth (answer: they got old), and the increasing amount of working/middle class guys unable to marry (not enough status).
If there are enough surplus women at the middle and working class levels, they'll end up probably with men slightly higher status and roughly equal class levels.
But I'd really look at the sex ratios by age group AND socio-economic status levels. I think that's probably along with affordable family formation the key. It might explain for example Ireland being higher than other Euro nations despite expensive real estate by having somewhat excess women at lower and working class status levels.
By Cassandra, at
Sun Apr 22, 09:24:00 AM:
When people talk about women "working", there are two vastly different models, TH.
First there is the one conservatives are talking about: the yuppie model where the wife has a college degree, probably a Masters, has 1.5 kids and a very high paying job and household help. That is one thing.
Then there are the vast majority of jobs women work at. This would have been me for most of my life: women who DON'T have a college degree and make under 20K a year in service economy or menial jobs with few benefits. BIG difference.
And I have to say that it's a whole 'nuther world, being on the other side. I went, in the space of a few short years, from making 13K to making over $70K. The difference was, frankly, a degree in a tech field and the conscious decision to place my career ahead of my role as homemaker b/c my children were now grown (and I needed to put them through college).
Amazing what a shift in priorities will do, all this talk of gender discrimination notwithstanding. Somehow I don't think I got any smarter in just a few years. I just changed my the resource allocation. Also, not having to worry about child care is absolutely huge, and that holds women back in the workplace, but someone has to worry about these things. But is this really a matter for businesses to take on? I don't think so. They didn't decide to have children.
Couples do. And they need to work out the pesky details of child care.
By , at
Sun Apr 22, 05:49:00 PM:
Cassandra, you IMHO make my point.
The UK Telegraph has a story on (linked from Instapundit) how women with degrees wait until their fertility window has nearly closed or has closed to try and have kids.
They don't have partners, or a house, and spend decades looking for both.
Meanwhile non-Degree women who are also working don't spend decades of their fertility window looking for the perfect partner and house, and just have kids.
Conclusion?
Getting a degree makes women in aggregate demand much higher status in their male partners. You went to over 70K. IMHO a woman in her mid-twenties would certainly reject a man who did not make appreciably more than her or had corresponding status (he's very handsome, or famous, or whatever indicator of status).
They search for this partner until it's too late, because there are not that many high-status guys around, and won't "settle" for a guy without that high status.
This is why lack of excess women at each status level has led to declining birth rates: so that men on one status level upwards can marry down with available partners.
Quite revealing that women without degrees have a lot more children than women with them. IMHO it all ties to status.
By Radish, at
Mon Apr 23, 03:26:00 PM:
IMHO a woman in her mid-twenties would certainly reject a man who did not make appreciably more than her or had corresponding status (he's very handsome, or famous, or whatever indicator of status).
No.
In the mid-twenties MEN reject women with professional careers and larger salaries--it's an insult to their masculinity. If I never want to see a man again, I tell him I'm a software engineer. There's an audible click as he realizes I probably make more money than he does, and the guys at the factory are never going to stop giving him shit about being a "housewife." Six months later, he's married to a beautician or a kindergarten aide.
If I'm ever 18 again, I'm majoring in Pre-Columbian poetry; no man is ever intimidated by a woman whose only employable skill is answering phones.
