Why U.S. Women Are Leaving Jobs Behind
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1) It creates a supply-side surplus for labor, which lowers the value of labor, which
2) Causes people to be paid far less, and
3) Causes people to have to work harder to keep their jobs, thus
4) Causing the greatest slowdown in wage growth ever, with record-setting productivity numbers
I don't have any data on it, but my supposition is that most households have at least one, if not two individuals working jobs they would rather not be doing, but have to for financial reasons.
A basic income would solve this problem by taking workers out of the system who would rather be doing something/anything else, all the while, jacking up the cost of skilled labor immensely. A wild ass guess? By 3-4x, judging from trends before wage increases flatlined.
I'm not saying we should return to that at all, but I do think we should be looking at this (like most things) from a quality-of-life perspective. Now, working outside of the home gives many people fulfillment and helped reduce sexism, so I don't think one worker per household should be the goal.
I guess I don't know what the solution is before becoming a post-scarcity society.
I would encourage my life partner to pursue their dreams, especially if that includes having a career because, as my mother has put it, being at home all the time for some people is boooring
I'm in a situation right now in which only I am working and my wife's at home with the kid. This is for visa reasons (H-4). My wife's self-esteem has plummeted because of this situation. She indeed complains it is extremely boring to stay home all the time. I completely support her desire to get back to the workforce, and I really look forward to the added benefit of our combined income.
I also find it interesting that this article uses the terms "ahead" and "behind" to describe much of Europe compared to the US, but the details show a much more ambiguous picture. European women are more likely to be in the workforce, but European women in the workforce are much more likely to be working in low-level positions with low wages, limited hours, and reduced opportunity for advancement. So it might be better to say that Europe and the US have chosen differently on the tradeoff between number of women working and the quality of jobs women hold.
They mean "enforces" women's employment because the family has less money and needs the additional income. Yay for women's liberation. Yay for "careers" as waitresses and Walmart cashiers. Yay for not recognising time spent with children as worthwhile.
"Since Kerry Devine, 32, and her friends began having children, she has noticed a stark difference between her female friends in Auburn, Wash., where she lives, and those in England and Cyprus, where she grew up. In the United States, they almost all stopped working outside the home, at least until their children were in school. Yet, she says, she can’t think of a friend in Europe who left work after her children were born."
First of all, let's remember that men are also leaving the workforce, and the decline of men in the workforce is a much older trend than women leaving the workforce:
https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/wlfp1.j...
As to Europe, please see here:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS
Let's start with overall female participation rates in the workforce:
France: 51%
Germany: 54%
United Kingdom: 56%
USA:57%
By this measure, the USA rate seems a little elevated, but not dramatically so.
Europe is catching up, but has not yet caught up:
http://www.thefinancialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/fe...
A few Scandinavian countries exceed the USA rate, but most of Europe lags behind:
https://www.dss.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/women/Gene...
But what about mothers with kids? There the reality is the opposite of the one suggested by the quoted paragraph. Women with kids are more likely to work in the USA than in Europe. Look at the high rates of women with kids in the USA in this graph:
http://www1.eeoc.gov/eeoc/meetings/archive/4-17-07/boushey.h...
It is true the peak of the trend was many years ago, but the numbers are still high. The USA has a very high level of single moms, much more so than in Europe, and most of these women need to work, so the number of women with kids working will probably remain elevated in the USA.
Figure 1 shows that in Germany the rate remains below the USA level until the children are 10 years old:
http://www.public.asu.edu/~abick/bick_childcare.pdf
This is the pattern in most of Europe: as children get older, the percent of mothers who work approaches USA rates, but if we talk about mothers of young children, the USA has the highest participation rates in the world. Again, this is driven by single moms, and the lack of welfare benefits in the USA, compared to the richer social safety nets in Europe.
This article offers some insights about the USA:
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/us-working-mot...
"In recent years, more mothers of young children have entered the paid labor force. While the share of mothers with children under age 6 in the labor force has risen sharply, the rate for all working-age adults has remained relatively flat. The recent economic recession, the steady decline in men's real earnings, the growth in single-mother families, and the increase in women's educational levels are some of the factors likely contributing to the growth in the proportion of mothers of young children in the workforce."
Also here, scroll way down to the graphs:
http://www.frdb.org/upload/file/paper_delboca.pdf
Again, you can see that the Scandinavian countries are ahead of the USA with both fertility and women working, thanks to more supportive policies for women, but most European countries are behind the USA rates.
Please stop doing that, comparing the USA to some fictional country called Europe to prove a point. I agree with many of your arguments, but where the author of this piece is generalizing based on anecdotes, you're generalizing based on stats. And opportunistically picking and mixing stats from different countries on top of that.
For someone who likes to throw around stats and pretend to make a scientifically based argument, what does a conclusion like "most European countries are behind the USA" even mean? Europe has countries the size of a few football fields. It has large, thinly populated countries, small, densely populated countries and everything in between.
I would really appreciate it of people would stop using this fictional Europe for their ideological political arguments about the USA.
Full disclosure: I happen to be from a country in Europe that has higher participation rates for women than the US, is not Scandinavian, doesn't have particularly strong supportive policies (better than the US, but that isn't saying much) and on top of that: despite these stats women in this country are leaving the labor force in large numbers when they get kids, which particularly shows up in a lack of women in senior leadership positions. These things vary wildly per country and culture.
There IS a place called the European Union, which tries to unify things in those regards though. Sure, the European Union is not Europe, but that's like saying "America is not the US, it's the whole continent" (that is, correct, but nobody cares, people will still use the name).
>Europe has countries the size of a few football fields. It has large, thinly populated countries, small, densely populated countries and everything in between.
So, sort of like the states? New Hampshire is not really the size or population of Texas or California. And not all of them have the same rates and policies.
Besides, he did gave listings and talked individually about different european countries.
It's not that big of a stretch to then check the aggregate, and speak of how "Europe" is doing. The European Comission does exactly this all the time.
I think that is a bad comparison. When anyone says "America", they almost always mean "USA". There are also a lot fewer cases in which most people want to talk about the Americas as a whole, and each continent tends to be denoted by South- and North-. "Europe", on the other hand, seems to always refer to the whole continent (people can disagree about where the Easternmost point is, but other than that the usage of the word is very crisp). I don't see how conflating the EU and Europe is appropriate at all, and I haven't seen much of it.
Perhaps that's a bias from being in the USA? In Latin America it's far more often to want to talk about Americas as a whole (or about North/South America as a whole).
That can't be the case for me.
It's also not just Europe. The USA is similarly non-uniform. Coasts and Bible-Belt differ significantly, arguably more that certain European countries.
74% - 69% US
71% - 79% Germany
69% - 76% France
etc.
So what we have is not anecdote vs. data, but conflicting data sets.
The article is titled:
> Why U.S. Women Are Leaving Jobs Behind
But should be titled:
> Why Americans Are Leaving Jobs Behind
And then it could be a single sentence article:
> Because the economy sucks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/the-rise-of-men-who...
http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/arbeid-sociale-zekerheid...
The Netherlands is also pretty Scandinavian for a Benelux country.
The opening paragraph of this article is a stunning
victory for anecdote in its long war against data
If the US had better policies for maternity leave and part-time workers, then it seems likely to me that we'd have many more women workers because employment would "avoid upending their family life".
If the US had better immigration policy, then we wouldn't be turning away thousands (tens of thousands?) of diverse, highly talented, tax paying tech workers from pushing forward innovation in our country.
I'm sure you could make similar statements about our healthcare policy, education system, political system, the grand jury system, etc. Why isn't every single police officer wearing a camera while on duty yet? Why does changing (fixing) these things take so damn long? The worst part is that the people who are in control of really fixing these things and the entire system itself don't seem motivated enough to do so (to me at least, please correct me if I'm wrong).
Because:
a. Established interests profit from the current arrangement or worry that their interests will be compromised if things chang.
b. Our system is set up to resist rapid precipitous radical change.
c. Changing institutions takes a long time and requires much political will, or at least alignment with social forces in play.
d. Change has costs; even if the existing system is wasteful, dysfunctional and cruelly indifferent to the pain it causes to some subset of the people in contact with an institution. The costs of changing that institution are unknown and unknowable and the argument against from fear of the unknown will always have weight with decisionmakers.
e. Institutional change always has winners and losers, and often the ones with the most to lose are close to but not at; the top of the hierarchy.
That's the short version. The long version involves quantitative social science and figuring out which nodes of the power network have the capability to drive change and which must be routed around to effect change and which ones are likely to be obstacles to change. Modeling the political economy of even a small institution is a considerable effort; and since it's hard to get people to precisely quantify their biases and predilections even if they are cooperative; a large amount of it is guesswork or inference from extremely thin sources ( like trying to divine someones political allegiances based on the corpus of emails that are sent to internal mailing lists ).
And since Psychohistory is bunk, there is no plausible way to predict second or third order effects ( the response to the response to the change you are trying to achieve if it were successful ).
There are only a few organizations that have the mathematical ability, computational power and access to significant communications between decision makers to even attempt to do this at scale. In fact I can only think of one that could attempt to do so at a global scale; and it's a TLA whose initials start with N, end with A, and have an S in the middle. But they wouldn't try to manipulate their host society like that; or would they?
Why only maternity leave? What happened to equal rights?
1 year maternity + 0 year paternity = should we really hire this female candidate over a man? She might get pregnant.
6mo maternity + 6mo paternity = Who is the better candidate?
Not only that, but why should women be the only ones raising the kids? The joys of child rearing should be shared by both parents.
Why are things so hard to fix? Because quick fixes everyone suggests are poorly considered.
Just considering goals, you have listed a lot of (very good) ideas for improvement. But everyone from voter up to politician is going to have their own pet ideas they want to do first and spend the most money on. Everyone gets to arguing and nothing gets done.
Not to mention the many interest groups with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Public sector unions represent nearly half of union members nowadays and are very resistant to change.
Education reform and police reform are often blocked or made politically unviable by their respective unions.
Healthcare reform in a way that would benefit all including young people is overpowered by large groups like the AARP.
These groups all have a created interest in maintaining their power and increasing the benefits paid to their members.
A politician, however idealistic, usually just ends up running into a wall and giving up.
they are already in control. Why would they try to change anything?
A Pew Research Center survey from 2007 reported that 41 percent of adults say it is bad for society when mothers with young children work and just 22 percent say it is good.
The US has a significant population of people who are hostile to the women's movement. They want women to move back into the kitchen. They see systems like subsidized child care as an attack on their traditional family values.