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.
That's an interesting fact but I'm wondering about whether you feel it was worth it? Like if you'd had the choice would you have preferred to be a man so you didn't have to be the one who gets pregnant but you didn't get to carry the child yourself and had to find someone who could carry a child willing to carry yours?
Based on what I've heard pregnancy seems like it has huge costs but also huge upsides.
Would I have preferred for someone else to carry my child for me? No, I wouldn’t. But it is a burden.
I don’t know what you’ve heard about pregnancy, but my first thought re: “huge upsides” is “yeah, no.” I mean, yes, there’s the joy of carrying your child, and the sense of accomplishment at having gestated a new human being and… that’s about it.
Downsides include constant exhaustion, nausea, feeling like a beached whale, not being able to do lots of things I could do before (or doing them only with great difficulty), having to pee every 15 min, having to go to a ton of obgyn appointments, general feeling that some alien force has taken over your body. And that’s to say nothing of all the complications that may arise if you’re unlucky.
Yes, those are what I meant by the upsides. I only called them huge because I keep hearing from people how burdensome the experience it is and when I ask them if they'd, all things considered, have preferred someone else to have carried the child they say no -- I take that to be a implicit valuation of the upsides as being as large as those downsides.
Very true, but here’s we are discussing how pregnancy affects women’s participation in the workforce. “A sense of wonder at creating new life” does not help you *at work* anywhere near as much as “constant exhaustion and having to vomit” hinders you.
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.)
My mother, born in 1922, was fed on a mix of evaporated milk and corn syrup, because her mother couldn't nurse for some reason. It was apparently pretty common. Mom was completely fine, graduated from Stanford, lived to age 90.
Interesting! But would it have been possible to convince a whole generation of families not only that this was an acceptable alternative if necessary, but that it was *as good as* staying home and nursing even for women who have a choice? Even with today's formulas, a large fraction of the population goes to great lengths to breastfeed just in case breast milk has some minor benefit. (I did, and frankly doubt my choice passed cost-benefit analysis, but I couldn't talk myself out of it.) I think it matters a lot to economic dynamics that other modern baby-feeding options are not only _almost_ as good as nursing but genuinely indistinguishable.
Oh, I'm sure you're right. I was just commenting that "formula" has been around for a long time. It wasn't really lack of access to feeding options that kept women home. My mother was my grandmother's fifth unwanted child. The lack of access to contraception was far more troubling for her (and her cohort) than lack of access to formula.
Oh yeah, I agree that contraception is the bigger deal of the two. I just meant to say that there are a lot of technological problems you have to solve before feminism is plausible, and like 500 years ago none of them were solved.
Interesting point, though formula was pretty commonly used in 1960s -70s onward (high quality or no). Enfamil hit the market in 1959 but probably took awhile to become popular.
There seems to be a curve we see for many replacement technologies, where there's a few decades after it's introduced that it is dominant, and then a slower period when the original starts coming back. We see it with breastmilk/formula, we see it with fresh/frozen foods, and I expect we'll see it with generative AI texts.
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?
I don't know of any papers of hers on that topic, but it's very well-studied in economics, and the consensus that these appliances allow women to enter the workforce at higher rates is very strong!
"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 would also argue that a new mom probably needs a father who is committed to the family. My job was not flexible per se but offered a night shift option. My wife was going to grad school when she got pregnant, and I just switched to nightshift. I could do more of the daytime childcare, chores etc. and she could finish her education and get her career started.
It was a rough few years because I only got to sleep a few hours of sleep on my working days but we made it worked. I knew other of guys at my work who did this at about the same time...we even had a little dads club where a few of us would meet up at the parks or go to the zoo with the kids as they got a little older.
I think it's more that children are the most inflexible job in the world, so the flexibility of a job that can be even partially remote fixes the problem of work being equally inflexible. Say your kids get sick so your childcare falls through. You can muddle by for a couple of days doing some work during the day while they nap and then catching up that night after they've gone to bed. Sure it's not a sustainable thing in terms of energy and your house will start to fall into disarray and it makes it harder to do "deep work," but it can get you through a couple of days. Contrast that with a job where you have to be in the office 9 to 5. In that case you can do no work and could lose your job over it/may end up being mommy tracked. Remote work isn't a replacement for child care...it just allows a stop gap for the maximum inflexibility of the parenting job.
I say this as an academic mom with a two year old. Both me and my partner have jobs that can be done partially remotely and this has saved us with our young child's many early colds. But yes, he is in daycare whenever he isn't sick.
Certainly doesn't feel like she is a mother, based upon what I've read. I enjoyed your post on BJJ above as I practice vigorously as well. Men and women aren't equal, and that's to the good. The adjusted pay gap (occupation, education, experience, etc) is 99% equal. The last 1% is "sticky" and interesting, I think. Probably related to assertiveness.
Note that there is a difference between "Goldin’s research" and what that "seems to [...] imply" to Noah.
I noted above that 'flexible' work and 'remote' work are not at all the same thing. Merely offering "remote" does not necessarily solve problems - particularly when the division of work inside and outside the home in unbalanced. If one parent has full responsibility for child care and the other none, then the former may find it extremely difficult to invest much time in paid work, particularly when children are very young and require near-constant attention.
"I noted above that 'flexible' work and 'remote' work are not at all the same thing."
And you're absolutely right, but my point is that neither remote nor flexible work is the answer when the woman is looking after a baby and her entire day is consumed with either caring for the baby, doing some necessary household chores and self-care like eating or showering, and trying to get enough sleep to stay functional. It's not like "I can't work 9-5, but I can work 10-4 and 7-11, no problem!" works when you're caring for a baby.
What do you mean "solve the problem"? Yes, raising a kid requires a bunch of time and energy and a certain amount of sacrifice. Certainly, it shouldn't be required that the woman does this rather than the man -- if that's how you and your partner split it up -- but why is there some appropriate amount of time/energy it is supposed to take?
If it's not worth the costs to you then don't do it. Most people I know with children claim that the rewards are very very much more than the costs. Why is it a societal problem to solve anymore than it's a societal problem to make sure everyone can spend 2 years backpacking in Europe?
Ok, this will make me sound like a horrible elitist, but here goes.
Historically, everyone who was capable of having babies, did have babies (with a few socially acceptable exceptions, like women who became nuns).
Nowadays, when having children is a choice, who is most likely to forego it? Ambitious, driven people who value intellectual pursuits that are incompatible with child rearing.
By telling such people “if children aren’t worth it to you, don’t have them,” you are telling them to remove themselves from the gene pool. That means, over time, ambition, drive, and valuing intellectual pursuits will be *selected against* especially given assortative mating (highly educated, career-oriented men and women tend to marry each other).
Is this what you want? Is this good for society in the long term? If all the female scientists say, fine, I won’t have any children then, fast forward a few hundred years, who gets to invent the vaccine against the next pandemic?
I don’t want to sound all deterministic, of course regression to the mean is a thing, but it’s also true that most human traits are partially genetic. If you tell all the visionaries and career people, “choose between your career and your children, if you don’t want children don’t have them,” then you are going to have fewer children with the inclination to go into ambitious careers in future generations. I don’t think that’s a great thing for an advanced technological society.
I *deliberately* refrained from making any allusions to Idiocracy in my comment, because I didn’t want to come across as an evil eugenics enthusiast: “see, the people who choose to have children are DuMb and iNfERiOr!”
Just, it takes all kinds to make a world, and when we select against ambition and intellectualism, something important is lost.
Society depends for its long-term projects on ensuring that there continue being new adult members of society. The only way you end up with new adult members of society is if there are new children that someone has raised. Society has created a lot of structures in the past century or two that take on a lot of that child-rearing work (schools, pediatricians, playgrounds, etc.) and that all seems reasonable, in the same way that society has created a lot of structure that take on the work of raising animals or making buildings or planting trees whose shade will be valuable in several decades, or engaging in any of the other projects that help make society function into the long term.
For a lot of these things, we've done it by creating a professional workforce whose responsibility is doing that thing. But there's no reason why it couldn't be done via "cottage industry", where we ensure sufficient supply by compensating people for doing small amounts of piecework at home. This is how textile production was done for a few decades in the 18th century, when spinning wheels and the like enabled people to produce more textile at home than needed in the one home, but weren't efficient enough to be a full-time job like factory work turned out to be.
First, I'm not against the idea that this may be a place where societal money can be spent that best increases utility, I'm only against the framing as some kind of duty. In particular, the issue of cost disease isn't something that creates a need to do even more it's a higher cost which should count against such interventions as being the best use of resources.
Also, we've done studies about the best way to incentivize higher birth ratea and it tends to be things like direct cash payments/tax rebates at birth. So this is about making life easier not really increasing birth rates. Moreover, that seems like it only really becomes an answer once you've increased immigration rates to the point where that's not increasing welfare either.
As I said it still may be that there is some particular reason why expenditures here are more beneficial but the point is that it needs to be a cost/benefit justification not a claim that society has some kind of duty.
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.
As 'drosophilist' notes below, it is often 'flexible' work that makes 'remote' work possible. If one can work flexibly, when and how one wishes, it is easier to make that work 'remote' than if one is dependent upon contact with others at specific times (or places).
Nor is 'remote' work necessarily 'flexible'. Remote customer service has been used since before the pandemic, but it is generally not at all 'flexible': the worker must be present at their computer during their assigned hours, and is not free to 'flexible' either in their hours nor in what they choose to do during their assigned hours.
In addition, on-site work can also be flexible. I work in the Netherlands, in IT (which is somewhat flexible), and it is quite common for my co-workers to flex their working hours in various ways to deal with household and child care issues, even when working in the office. The same holds for remote work, as well, but this is an issue of working conditions and employer support, not so much with the difference between 'on-site' and 'remote'.
Does remote work increase flexibility, or does remote work *select* for the kinds of jobs that are more flexible?
I mean, many jobs are neither remote nor flexible. If you’re a dental hygienist, you have to be at work when your patient is there, and you can’t clean their teeth over Zoom.
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.
In this case I actually did finish it at night, because I was out earlier. But almost all of the time, I write the post in the morning and then wait until night to release it. I also try to release some posts in the afternoon, to switch things up!
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.
Bravo! I love two things: your generosity and your success at gaming the system.
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.
That's an interesting fact but I'm wondering about whether you feel it was worth it? Like if you'd had the choice would you have preferred to be a man so you didn't have to be the one who gets pregnant but you didn't get to carry the child yourself and had to find someone who could carry a child willing to carry yours?
Based on what I've heard pregnancy seems like it has huge costs but also huge upsides.
Interesting question.
Would I have preferred for someone else to carry my child for me? No, I wouldn’t. But it is a burden.
I don’t know what you’ve heard about pregnancy, but my first thought re: “huge upsides” is “yeah, no.” I mean, yes, there’s the joy of carrying your child, and the sense of accomplishment at having gestated a new human being and… that’s about it.
Downsides include constant exhaustion, nausea, feeling like a beached whale, not being able to do lots of things I could do before (or doing them only with great difficulty), having to pee every 15 min, having to go to a ton of obgyn appointments, general feeling that some alien force has taken over your body. And that’s to say nothing of all the complications that may arise if you’re unlucky.
Yes, those are what I meant by the upsides. I only called them huge because I keep hearing from people how burdensome the experience it is and when I ask them if they'd, all things considered, have preferred someone else to have carried the child they say no -- I take that to be a implicit valuation of the upsides as being as large as those downsides.
Very true, but here’s we are discussing how pregnancy affects women’s participation in the workforce. “A sense of wonder at creating new life” does not help you *at work* anywhere near as much as “constant exhaustion and having to vomit” hinders you.
Have you ever written a full explanation essay of your technological determinism? Think I may be a convert to the idea
I haven't! I should do that.
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.
Oh that's a great point.
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.)
My mother, born in 1922, was fed on a mix of evaporated milk and corn syrup, because her mother couldn't nurse for some reason. It was apparently pretty common. Mom was completely fine, graduated from Stanford, lived to age 90.
Interesting! But would it have been possible to convince a whole generation of families not only that this was an acceptable alternative if necessary, but that it was *as good as* staying home and nursing even for women who have a choice? Even with today's formulas, a large fraction of the population goes to great lengths to breastfeed just in case breast milk has some minor benefit. (I did, and frankly doubt my choice passed cost-benefit analysis, but I couldn't talk myself out of it.) I think it matters a lot to economic dynamics that other modern baby-feeding options are not only _almost_ as good as nursing but genuinely indistinguishable.
Oh, I'm sure you're right. I was just commenting that "formula" has been around for a long time. It wasn't really lack of access to feeding options that kept women home. My mother was my grandmother's fifth unwanted child. The lack of access to contraception was far more troubling for her (and her cohort) than lack of access to formula.
Oh yeah, I agree that contraception is the bigger deal of the two. I just meant to say that there are a lot of technological problems you have to solve before feminism is plausible, and like 500 years ago none of them were solved.
Interesting point, though formula was pretty commonly used in 1960s -70s onward (high quality or no). Enfamil hit the market in 1959 but probably took awhile to become popular.
There seems to be a curve we see for many replacement technologies, where there's a few decades after it's introduced that it is dominant, and then a slower period when the original starts coming back. We see it with breastmilk/formula, we see it with fresh/frozen foods, and I expect we'll see it with generative AI texts.
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?
I don't know of any papers of hers on that topic, but it's very well-studied in economics, and the consensus that these appliances allow women to enter the workforce at higher rates is very strong!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40043126
Thanks for that link.
"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 would also argue that a new mom probably needs a father who is committed to the family. My job was not flexible per se but offered a night shift option. My wife was going to grad school when she got pregnant, and I just switched to nightshift. I could do more of the daytime childcare, chores etc. and she could finish her education and get her career started.
It was a rough few years because I only got to sleep a few hours of sleep on my working days but we made it worked. I knew other of guys at my work who did this at about the same time...we even had a little dads club where a few of us would meet up at the parks or go to the zoo with the kids as they got a little older.
I think it's more that children are the most inflexible job in the world, so the flexibility of a job that can be even partially remote fixes the problem of work being equally inflexible. Say your kids get sick so your childcare falls through. You can muddle by for a couple of days doing some work during the day while they nap and then catching up that night after they've gone to bed. Sure it's not a sustainable thing in terms of energy and your house will start to fall into disarray and it makes it harder to do "deep work," but it can get you through a couple of days. Contrast that with a job where you have to be in the office 9 to 5. In that case you can do no work and could lose your job over it/may end up being mommy tracked. Remote work isn't a replacement for child care...it just allows a stop gap for the maximum inflexibility of the parenting job.
I say this as an academic mom with a two year old. Both me and my partner have jobs that can be done partially remotely and this has saved us with our young child's many early colds. But yes, he is in daycare whenever he isn't sick.
Very good point, thank you.
Certainly doesn't feel like she is a mother, based upon what I've read. I enjoyed your post on BJJ above as I practice vigorously as well. Men and women aren't equal, and that's to the good. The adjusted pay gap (occupation, education, experience, etc) is 99% equal. The last 1% is "sticky" and interesting, I think. Probably related to assertiveness.
Note that there is a difference between "Goldin’s research" and what that "seems to [...] imply" to Noah.
I noted above that 'flexible' work and 'remote' work are not at all the same thing. Merely offering "remote" does not necessarily solve problems - particularly when the division of work inside and outside the home in unbalanced. If one parent has full responsibility for child care and the other none, then the former may find it extremely difficult to invest much time in paid work, particularly when children are very young and require near-constant attention.
"I noted above that 'flexible' work and 'remote' work are not at all the same thing."
And you're absolutely right, but my point is that neither remote nor flexible work is the answer when the woman is looking after a baby and her entire day is consumed with either caring for the baby, doing some necessary household chores and self-care like eating or showering, and trying to get enough sleep to stay functional. It's not like "I can't work 9-5, but I can work 10-4 and 7-11, no problem!" works when you're caring for a baby.
What do you mean "solve the problem"? Yes, raising a kid requires a bunch of time and energy and a certain amount of sacrifice. Certainly, it shouldn't be required that the woman does this rather than the man -- if that's how you and your partner split it up -- but why is there some appropriate amount of time/energy it is supposed to take?
If it's not worth the costs to you then don't do it. Most people I know with children claim that the rewards are very very much more than the costs. Why is it a societal problem to solve anymore than it's a societal problem to make sure everyone can spend 2 years backpacking in Europe?
Ok, this will make me sound like a horrible elitist, but here goes.
Historically, everyone who was capable of having babies, did have babies (with a few socially acceptable exceptions, like women who became nuns).
Nowadays, when having children is a choice, who is most likely to forego it? Ambitious, driven people who value intellectual pursuits that are incompatible with child rearing.
By telling such people “if children aren’t worth it to you, don’t have them,” you are telling them to remove themselves from the gene pool. That means, over time, ambition, drive, and valuing intellectual pursuits will be *selected against* especially given assortative mating (highly educated, career-oriented men and women tend to marry each other).
Is this what you want? Is this good for society in the long term? If all the female scientists say, fine, I won’t have any children then, fast forward a few hundred years, who gets to invent the vaccine against the next pandemic?
I don’t want to sound all deterministic, of course regression to the mean is a thing, but it’s also true that most human traits are partially genetic. If you tell all the visionaries and career people, “choose between your career and your children, if you don’t want children don’t have them,” then you are going to have fewer children with the inclination to go into ambitious careers in future generations. I don’t think that’s a great thing for an advanced technological society.
Have you seen, "Idiocracy"? The first 10mins runs with your fifth paragraph to kick off the film.
Yes, I have seen it.
I *deliberately* refrained from making any allusions to Idiocracy in my comment, because I didn’t want to come across as an evil eugenics enthusiast: “see, the people who choose to have children are DuMb and iNfERiOr!”
Just, it takes all kinds to make a world, and when we select against ambition and intellectualism, something important is lost.
Ahh yes, that is the slippery slope when mentioning that film. Thank you, and my apologies.
"Why is it a societal problem to solve"
Society depends for its long-term projects on ensuring that there continue being new adult members of society. The only way you end up with new adult members of society is if there are new children that someone has raised. Society has created a lot of structures in the past century or two that take on a lot of that child-rearing work (schools, pediatricians, playgrounds, etc.) and that all seems reasonable, in the same way that society has created a lot of structure that take on the work of raising animals or making buildings or planting trees whose shade will be valuable in several decades, or engaging in any of the other projects that help make society function into the long term.
For a lot of these things, we've done it by creating a professional workforce whose responsibility is doing that thing. But there's no reason why it couldn't be done via "cottage industry", where we ensure sufficient supply by compensating people for doing small amounts of piecework at home. This is how textile production was done for a few decades in the 18th century, when spinning wheels and the like enabled people to produce more textile at home than needed in the one home, but weren't efficient enough to be a full-time job like factory work turned out to be.
First, I'm not against the idea that this may be a place where societal money can be spent that best increases utility, I'm only against the framing as some kind of duty. In particular, the issue of cost disease isn't something that creates a need to do even more it's a higher cost which should count against such interventions as being the best use of resources.
Also, we've done studies about the best way to incentivize higher birth ratea and it tends to be things like direct cash payments/tax rebates at birth. So this is about making life easier not really increasing birth rates. Moreover, that seems like it only really becomes an answer once you've increased immigration rates to the point where that's not increasing welfare either.
As I said it still may be that there is some particular reason why expenditures here are more beneficial but the point is that it needs to be a cost/benefit justification not a claim that society has some kind of duty.
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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 (or three) of these things is not like the others
Please elaborate. I am sufficiently clueless that I do not know which difference you are referring to.
One important thing that this essay elides is that 'remote' work and 'flexible' work are not at all the same thing.
They're not the same, but remote work tends to increase flexibility a lot.
It is not obvious that this is true.
As 'drosophilist' notes below, it is often 'flexible' work that makes 'remote' work possible. If one can work flexibly, when and how one wishes, it is easier to make that work 'remote' than if one is dependent upon contact with others at specific times (or places).
Nor is 'remote' work necessarily 'flexible'. Remote customer service has been used since before the pandemic, but it is generally not at all 'flexible': the worker must be present at their computer during their assigned hours, and is not free to 'flexible' either in their hours nor in what they choose to do during their assigned hours.
In addition, on-site work can also be flexible. I work in the Netherlands, in IT (which is somewhat flexible), and it is quite common for my co-workers to flex their working hours in various ways to deal with household and child care issues, even when working in the office. The same holds for remote work, as well, but this is an issue of working conditions and employer support, not so much with the difference between 'on-site' and 'remote'.
Does remote work increase flexibility, or does remote work *select* for the kinds of jobs that are more flexible?
I mean, many jobs are neither remote nor flexible. If you’re a dental hygienist, you have to be at work when your patient is there, and you can’t clean their teeth over Zoom.
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.
In this case I actually did finish it at night, because I was out earlier. But almost all of the time, I write the post in the morning and then wait until night to release it. I also try to release some posts in the afternoon, to switch things up!
Thanks for the Intel.
Hmm, switching things up. You know that rattles the markets.
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.
Thanks, will read!
Nice informative essay... was not aware of the difference between Economics Nobel and pure science.
Well done.