Fun story: my wife and I tried to game the system by having me (the father) be the oncall parent. No one thought to mommy track the dad, and then she was able to work full steam and advance her career at the same time. It worked for quite a while!
But, opting for flexibility did eventually catch up with me, and now she earns more than I do. Happened after about ten years.
Here's another comment, because my last one was getting too long.
Anecdote time!
I practice a martial art. Most of the other people in my dojo are men. When I got pregnant, I went to my instructor and explained my situation: I will keep practicing until I start "showing," but I can't exert myself, so I'll have to step back if the practice gets too vigorous, and I absolutely cannot do any sparring where I might get kicked or punched in the stomach. My instructor agreed and was very supportive.
As I went around the dojo and told all my colleagues about my pregnancy and what it meant for my practice, no fewer than four of them beamed at me and said, "Congratulations! BTW, what a coincidence, my wife is pregnant too!"
Over the next few months, as I grew more exhausted and to pull back from practice more and more, finally quitting it altogether, all these men continued to practice as hard and as regularly as ever. Once each man's wife gave birth, he would disappear for about two weeks, then reappear, bleary-eyed and exhausted (these are all good husbands and dads, who did their share of nighttime baby care) but otherwise fit and eager to practice.
I, on the other hand, not only had to stop practice altogether about 4-5 months into my pregnancy; it also took me months, plural, to get back into sufficient shape to be able to return to the dojo. It took me a *long time* to catch up with my male friends once I returned.
The point of this anecdote is: pregnancy is brutal on the body, even "healthy, easy" pregnancy (such as the one I was lucky to have), let alone a complicated one. It's easy to forget when you focus on intellectual jobs, where a person can be thought of as a "brain on a stick" and their physicality and body doesn't matter so much. If your job requires a high level of physical exertion, such as being an athlete, being pregnant/giving birth is a wrecking ball. Even in low-exertion jobs, the reason women take more leave after a baby is born is not just "society's norms dictate that women look after babies," it's to give their bodies some time to heal from the ordeal that is childbirth.
Truly, we won't have 100% gender equality in the workplace until artificial uteri are widely available. I'm kind of kidding, but not really.
Working mom here in tech management. For the last 9 years, my husband has had a remote job and been the on-call parent, as I work long hours and travel somewhat frequently. We've been through the usual struggle to get schools to call dad, but we've mostly avoided him being mommy-tracked at work.
The big danger to watch out for is if remote work becomes female-coded. We are already asking questions about whether remote work limits advancement opportunity and/or productivity. I am hybrid office but have spent several years working in secondary offices at different companies, so I've always had to work harder to have the same presence and visibility as people who work at HQ -- the f2f struggle is real. If WFH becomes perceived as a way for moms (or parents) to work less hard, we haven't solved the advancement problem, just shifted it around.
Technological determinism is a great term for the view I have hardcore, non-jokingly converted to recently, especially after becoming a mother. My most recent realization along these lines is that before the rise of electric pumps, refrigeration, and high-quality formula, there was no really scalable way for a woman to work outside the house while keeping a baby fed! (There were wet nurses, there was the thing my grandmother apparently had in Mao's China where her workplace had an attached daycare center and she would go over during breaks to nurse, there were probably other workarounds...but these are all clearly less scalable.)
Does she also look at the effect of the long revolution in home appliances—an example of technological unemployment often overlooked—on women entering the work force?
"Goldin’s research seems to me to imply that remote work will be yet another boon for working women."
Does Claudia Goldin have any children?
I don't mean to be snarky, congratulations to Goldin on her Nobel Prize, I'm sure it's well deserved and I'm glad that women in the workforce are considered a Nobel-worthy topic! Just, this completely glosses over the reality of looking after an infant.
Here's that reality:
1. Nurse baby
2. Burp baby
3. Change baby's diaper
4. Rock baby to sleep, long bouts of inconsolable crying optional
5. While baby is asleep, collapse in nearest chair and close your eyes, trying to recover from being woken up every 2 hours last night
6. Wake up when baby wakes up and cries lustily to let you know he's hungry
7. Repeat the above
8. Somewhere in there, run several loads of laundry, bathe baby, take baby to doctor as needed.
This isn't a question of, "Oh, I could hold down a full-time job and look after my baby like a champ if only my job was remote," this is "I'm too fricken exhausted to do ANYTHING non-baby-related other than eat, sleep, and maybe take a shower every other day." Sure, remote work helps on the margin - if I can work on my computer without commuting and changing out of spit-up-stained clothes into something presentable, that saves some time and energy, i.e., the two things that are in desperately short supply for a new mom, and that's all to the good. But it doesn't SOLVE the problem.
What a new mom needs is not remote/flexible work, it's reliable and affordable childcare, which runs smack into our old friend, Baumol's Cost Disease. It's a hard problem.
And yes, of course childcare gets less time- and energy-intensive as your child grows up, but that takes years (toddler care is super intense too, just in different ways from what I described above), and if those years coincide with your prime career-establishing years, that's going to make gender equality difficult.
I think the most important question about technological determinism, a concept with which I am in broad agreement, is how technology nudge people toward peace can rather than war? OR toward pro social behavior rather than antisocial behavior? Massive, but critical topic. Any thoughts, Noah?
Alfred Nobel thought the invention of TNT would make war so horrific that humanity would recoil and never have one again. Could a more sophisticated application of technological determinism have a positive impact?
Why has industrialization done so much to reduce gender inequality in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore but so little in Japan and South Korea?
Alice Evans has blogged about her general theory of the case (strong demand for factory labor changes the cultural preference for women's seclusion) but she doesn't seem to have an explanation for why Japan and Korea are outliers.
Noah: why do so many of your posts drop early in the morning? The most obvious explanation is that you are a night owl. Or perhaps your sleep habits are irregular like mine.
Nice column -- good concepts, in theory. But, just guessing, by some extraordinary happenstance, women will be the only ones "privileged" with working remotely, while men happily leave the house and kids, and go off to a fun day in the office with friends, lunches, accolades, and maybe even cocktails after! Unless everything is equally shared and lived, there is no equality. Think human equality, not gender equality which is parceled out over several lifetimes by definition.
I personally do not know enough about Claudia Goldin's work to form an opinion, so it would be much appreciated if someone could help me understand why I have come away with two opposite opinions about whether Claudia Goldin should have won the Nobel or not.
Fun story: my wife and I tried to game the system by having me (the father) be the oncall parent. No one thought to mommy track the dad, and then she was able to work full steam and advance her career at the same time. It worked for quite a while!
But, opting for flexibility did eventually catch up with me, and now she earns more than I do. Happened after about ten years.
Here's another comment, because my last one was getting too long.
Anecdote time!
I practice a martial art. Most of the other people in my dojo are men. When I got pregnant, I went to my instructor and explained my situation: I will keep practicing until I start "showing," but I can't exert myself, so I'll have to step back if the practice gets too vigorous, and I absolutely cannot do any sparring where I might get kicked or punched in the stomach. My instructor agreed and was very supportive.
As I went around the dojo and told all my colleagues about my pregnancy and what it meant for my practice, no fewer than four of them beamed at me and said, "Congratulations! BTW, what a coincidence, my wife is pregnant too!"
Over the next few months, as I grew more exhausted and to pull back from practice more and more, finally quitting it altogether, all these men continued to practice as hard and as regularly as ever. Once each man's wife gave birth, he would disappear for about two weeks, then reappear, bleary-eyed and exhausted (these are all good husbands and dads, who did their share of nighttime baby care) but otherwise fit and eager to practice.
I, on the other hand, not only had to stop practice altogether about 4-5 months into my pregnancy; it also took me months, plural, to get back into sufficient shape to be able to return to the dojo. It took me a *long time* to catch up with my male friends once I returned.
The point of this anecdote is: pregnancy is brutal on the body, even "healthy, easy" pregnancy (such as the one I was lucky to have), let alone a complicated one. It's easy to forget when you focus on intellectual jobs, where a person can be thought of as a "brain on a stick" and their physicality and body doesn't matter so much. If your job requires a high level of physical exertion, such as being an athlete, being pregnant/giving birth is a wrecking ball. Even in low-exertion jobs, the reason women take more leave after a baby is born is not just "society's norms dictate that women look after babies," it's to give their bodies some time to heal from the ordeal that is childbirth.
Truly, we won't have 100% gender equality in the workplace until artificial uteri are widely available. I'm kind of kidding, but not really.
Have you ever written a full explanation essay of your technological determinism? Think I may be a convert to the idea
Working mom here in tech management. For the last 9 years, my husband has had a remote job and been the on-call parent, as I work long hours and travel somewhat frequently. We've been through the usual struggle to get schools to call dad, but we've mostly avoided him being mommy-tracked at work.
The big danger to watch out for is if remote work becomes female-coded. We are already asking questions about whether remote work limits advancement opportunity and/or productivity. I am hybrid office but have spent several years working in secondary offices at different companies, so I've always had to work harder to have the same presence and visibility as people who work at HQ -- the f2f struggle is real. If WFH becomes perceived as a way for moms (or parents) to work less hard, we haven't solved the advancement problem, just shifted it around.
Technological determinism is a great term for the view I have hardcore, non-jokingly converted to recently, especially after becoming a mother. My most recent realization along these lines is that before the rise of electric pumps, refrigeration, and high-quality formula, there was no really scalable way for a woman to work outside the house while keeping a baby fed! (There were wet nurses, there was the thing my grandmother apparently had in Mao's China where her workplace had an attached daycare center and she would go over during breaks to nurse, there were probably other workarounds...but these are all clearly less scalable.)
Does she also look at the effect of the long revolution in home appliances—an example of technological unemployment often overlooked—on women entering the work force?
"Goldin’s research seems to me to imply that remote work will be yet another boon for working women."
Does Claudia Goldin have any children?
I don't mean to be snarky, congratulations to Goldin on her Nobel Prize, I'm sure it's well deserved and I'm glad that women in the workforce are considered a Nobel-worthy topic! Just, this completely glosses over the reality of looking after an infant.
Here's that reality:
1. Nurse baby
2. Burp baby
3. Change baby's diaper
4. Rock baby to sleep, long bouts of inconsolable crying optional
5. While baby is asleep, collapse in nearest chair and close your eyes, trying to recover from being woken up every 2 hours last night
6. Wake up when baby wakes up and cries lustily to let you know he's hungry
7. Repeat the above
8. Somewhere in there, run several loads of laundry, bathe baby, take baby to doctor as needed.
This isn't a question of, "Oh, I could hold down a full-time job and look after my baby like a champ if only my job was remote," this is "I'm too fricken exhausted to do ANYTHING non-baby-related other than eat, sleep, and maybe take a shower every other day." Sure, remote work helps on the margin - if I can work on my computer without commuting and changing out of spit-up-stained clothes into something presentable, that saves some time and energy, i.e., the two things that are in desperately short supply for a new mom, and that's all to the good. But it doesn't SOLVE the problem.
What a new mom needs is not remote/flexible work, it's reliable and affordable childcare, which runs smack into our old friend, Baumol's Cost Disease. It's a hard problem.
And yes, of course childcare gets less time- and energy-intensive as your child grows up, but that takes years (toddler care is super intense too, just in different ways from what I described above), and if those years coincide with your prime career-establishing years, that's going to make gender equality difficult.
I think the most important question about technological determinism, a concept with which I am in broad agreement, is how technology nudge people toward peace can rather than war? OR toward pro social behavior rather than antisocial behavior? Massive, but critical topic. Any thoughts, Noah?
Alfred Nobel thought the invention of TNT would make war so horrific that humanity would recoil and never have one again. Could a more sophisticated application of technological determinism have a positive impact?
Why has industrialization done so much to reduce gender inequality in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore but so little in Japan and South Korea?
Alice Evans has blogged about her general theory of the case (strong demand for factory labor changes the cultural preference for women's seclusion) but she doesn't seem to have an explanation for why Japan and Korea are outliers.
One important thing that this essay elides is that 'remote' work and 'flexible' work are not at all the same thing.
Noah: why do so many of your posts drop early in the morning? The most obvious explanation is that you are a night owl. Or perhaps your sleep habits are irregular like mine.
Nice column -- good concepts, in theory. But, just guessing, by some extraordinary happenstance, women will be the only ones "privileged" with working remotely, while men happily leave the house and kids, and go off to a fun day in the office with friends, lunches, accolades, and maybe even cocktails after! Unless everything is equally shared and lived, there is no equality. Think human equality, not gender equality which is parceled out over several lifetimes by definition.
A very interesting and inspiring article. Well worth reading. W.
This might be the best thing you’ve ever written. Lots of exciting ideas here!
Thank you for this post! It would really cool to hear your thoughts on King's posts here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/07/the_goldinkatz_1.html and https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-latest-economics-nobel-prize?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=338673&post_id=137795652&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=aa0da&utm_medium=email
I personally do not know enough about Claudia Goldin's work to form an opinion, so it would be much appreciated if someone could help me understand why I have come away with two opposite opinions about whether Claudia Goldin should have won the Nobel or not.
Thank you in advance for reading this comment.
Nice informative essay... was not aware of the difference between Economics Nobel and pure science.
Well done.