Right-Wingers Who Want a Higher Fertility Rate... Somehow Never Think of Making Motherhood Easier and Better-Rewarded?

Greedy jobs, reproductive & human-capital biological clocks, & men who do not see what is in front of their faces; a short note inspired by reading Virginia Postrel's "Three Basic Facts That Affect Fe

Greedy jobs, reproductive & human-capital biological clocks, & men who do not see what is in front of their faces; a short note inspired by reading Virginia Postrel's "Three Basic Facts That Affect Fertility"...

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The extremely sharp Virginia Postrel is much more conciliatory than I would be, in commenting on a bunch of men who are, I think, being much less perceptive than they have any right to be about childbearing and childrearing in our society.

However, I think she looks at only one aspect of the knotty question of whether the low birth rate is a problem and what to do about it—the “how to rejigger society so that it makes sense for ambitious women with lots of potential social power to have more children” aspect. But on that aspect, she is spot-on. So let me focus on that:

The solution: (a) Create many paths to high-powered jobs with lots of social power in your 40s and 50s that (b) allow you to have children in your 20s and early 30s.

That is, create a real rather than a fake mommy track, involving what Claudia Goldin calls “non-greedy” but high-prestige and high-respect jobs.

Indeed, we have long known—or, at least, had no excuse for not knowing—that this is the biggest element of the problem for the potentially ambitious and high-powered. Indeed, twenty years ago Larry Summers’s lunchtime talk on diversifying the STEM workforce was primarily devoted to trying to convince the audience that this problem of greedy jobs is the most serious part of the problem:

Lawrence Summers: Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce: ’If you look at the top [prestige-job] cohort… the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children… There are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work… hours in the office… flexibility of schedules… continuity of effort through the life cycle… a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women…. 

What fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don’t want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? What fraction of young men make a decision that they’re unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week?… 

Is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity?….

It seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that… the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity…. We would like to believe that you can take… three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it… really doesn’t have any fundamental effect on the career path…. A whole set of conclusions would follow from that in terms of flexible work arrangements….

What should we all do? I think the case is overwhelming for employers trying to be the employer who responds to everybody else’s discrimination by competing effectively to locate people who others are discriminating against, or to provide different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care…. There’s a strong case for monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that there are enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing people like yourself is not allowed to take insidious effect….

Let me just conclude by saying that I’ve given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought… <https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-speeches-summers/2005/remarks-at-nber-conference-on-diversifying-the-science-engineering-workforce/>

Unfortunately, the only person I ever knew at all well who found this easy and straightforward to do was my (briefly: she lectured for half a course I took) teacher and my teachers’ teacher, the great late Judith Nisse Shklar (1928–1992), who landed into a job as a half-time Lecturer at Harvard. The way she put it was: “teach a year, take a year off, have a kid, rock the cradle, and write a book, teach a couple more years, have another kid…” 

At the age of 11, while she was living in Riga, Latvia, where she had been born, Judith N. Shklar’s uncle put her and her family on a plane to Sweden. Her memory does not quite add up—she says they left for Sweden “just before” Stalin arrived (which happened in June 1940), and that they remained in Sweden “far too long… well after the German invasion of Norway” (which happened in April 1940). They then managed to get out of Sweden to Japan via Russia and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, somehow evading detention as Lithuanian—hence after June 1940 Soviet—nationals. In Japan they bought—she does not say whether via bribery or not—a visa to Canada. Landing in Seattle in, I think, 1941, they were locked up as illegal “oriental” immigrants, before managing to get to Montréal and regularize their status. I never heard her say anything about this experience She did write that her standard answer when asked was that it “left [her] with an abiding taste for black humor”.

There are fewer Jews in the world today than there were in 1939 for Reasons.

College at McGill immediately after World War II, which she says she did not like save for two of the very most important things: first, meeting her husband Gerald M. Shklar, who became Professor of Oral Pathology at Harvard Dental School; second, American political theory and history professor Frederick Watkins. Moving with her husband Gerald to Harvard in 1949. Getting into the Government Department as a graduate student—which cannot have been straightforward. Loving Harvard, especially Widener Library, from the very beginning—in spite of its many, many imperfections: 

• McCarthyism debilitating in a “subtle and latent” way,

• young scholars who “boasted of not being intellectuals”,

• “unappetizing dirty-socks and locker-room humor”,

• callow and dweeby young men vaunting “false and ostentatious masculinity”,

• “a slavish admiration for the least intelligent, but good-looking, rich, and well connected undergraduates”

• with a culture “of protected juvenile delinquency”,

• “private school products… [of whom] few could put a grammatical English sentence”, and

• “if they knew a foreign language, they hid it well”, all plus:

so many people who should have known better, scorned the poor, the bookish, the unconventional, the brainy, the people who did not resemble the crass and outlandish model of a real American upper-crust he-man whom they had conjured up in their imagination…

And then comes the understatement:

For any woman of any degree of refinement or intellectuality, this was unappealing company…

Aside from that, Ms. Shklar, how did you like the play?

When Judith N. Shklar finished her Ph.D. she was:

offered an instructorship in the Government Department…. [But] I had just had our first child and I wanted to stay with him for his first year. That proved acceptable. I rocked the cradle and wrote my first book…. I would have liked to be a literary editor of the Atlantic or some such…. My husband, however, thought that I ought to give the Harvard job a chance…. So I more or less drifted into a university career…. There were always male friends telling me what to do and promoting my interests. I did not mind… as thinking ahead is not something I do well or often…

But:

The crunch came… when… tenure… came up. My department could not bring itself to say either yes or no…. Several male aspirants… [had] hung around for years while this cat and mouse game was being played. That was more humiliation than I could bear…. I… asked… [for] a half-time appointment with effective tenure and lecturer’s title… not exactly what I wanted, but… what I decided to arrange for myself, rather than wait for others…. My colleagues accepted this deal with utter relief…. It was by no means a disaster and it saved my self-respect, no doubt a matter of excessive importance to me. It also relieved me for years from a lot of committee and other nuisance work, though half-time never turned out to be exactly that…

And Gerald Shklar’s Dental School position made it the case that they could afford to have her at half-scale and still be comfortable.

However, the lesson I draw from Judith Skylar’s success is: If you are a superstar—and have powerful protectors who will look out for you because you yourself are “[not] thinking ahead… well or often”—allowances can sometimes be made. But what about those of us who are merely stars? Or planets, who shine largely by reflected light? Let alone those of us who are asteroids and meteors?

Virginia Postrel:

Virginia Postrel: Three Basic Facts That Affect Fertility: ’Worries over falling birth rates have replaced fears of the “population bomb” <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499>…. Lately, it seems, the subject has been the topic of columns and blog posts by everybody and his brother…. James Pethokoukis… Ross Douthat… Michael Huemer… Robin Hanson… Brink Lindsey…. You get the idea…. These… guys… downplay… crucial facts… don’t put two and two together: [1] Women over 35 cannot easily and safely have babies. [2] People build crucial human capital… certainly before the age of 40. Men can devote these years to their careers and still easily and safely have children. Women cannot…. [3] Some careers are “greedy,” to use economist Claudia Goldin’s term. Greedy jobs are distinct from jobs that require child care during predictable work hours…. Only one partner can successfully pursue a greedy job….

Leave aside the fraught question of finding a partner…. An ambitious young woman [who] meets and marries her ideal mate by her mid–20s… must forgo developing vital human capital until she is in her 40s…. The traditional careers pursued by the mothers of the baby boom, such as teaching and nursing, are ideal for late reentry…. Many others are not…. Employers often discriminate against people over 40…. Good luck finding an internship when you’ve been out of school for decades.

Pro-natalist policies that do not address the Three Basic Facts will be, at best, only marginally successful. Every time I read yet another article by yet another man who is ignoring these facts it makes me wonder what he was doing in his 30s…

Three Basic Facts that Affect Fertility

What Virginia Postrel does not say—but, I think, should, so I will say it—is this: Boys in the band who do not focus on the Three Basic Facts (biological clock for reproduction, biological clock for building human capital, greediness of jobs) wind up shifting from considering the question “how do we rejigger society so that it makes sense for ambitious women with lots of potential social power to have more children?” to “how do we rejigger society so that even ambitious women with lots of potential social power find themselves under immense pressure to have more children?” And thus they begin drifting toward talking about sticks rather than carrots: reinforcing patriarchy rather than empowering mothers.

And what Virginia Postrel does not cover, but is I think a bigger part of the issue by far applies not just to women seeking upward mobility and prestige professional jobs but, rather, to all potential mothers. The bigger part of the issue is that we still have a society in which motherhood is relatively low-status: not well-paid, not well-respected. And it won’t be until we here in the United States pay our mothers as well as we pay our doctors.

Think about that, if you want to truly think productively about all of this.

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References:

Goldin, Claudia. 2023. “Gender Pay Gap? Culprit Is ‘Greedy Work’”. Harvard Gazette October 17. <https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/excerpt-from-career-and-family-by-claudia-goldin/>.

Postrel, Virginia. 2023. “Three Basic Facts That Affect Fertility.” Virginia’s Newsletter.

Three Basic Facts that Affect Fertility

Shklar, Judith N. 1989. A Life of Learning. Washington: ACLS. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200802180324/https://publications.acls.org/OP/Haskins_1989_JudithNShklar.pdf>.

Summers, Lawrence H. 2005. “Diversifying the STEM Workforce”. <https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-speeches-summers/2005/remarks-at-nber-conference-on-diversifying-the-science-engineering-workforce/>.