This comment here seems to sum up one of the main proposals by folks like the author who respond to claims of low fertility among educated women:
Quote:Quote:
CJ Anton • 33 minutes ago
Anyone who was serious about increasing the fertility of highly educated women would offer some policy proposals that would make child bearing and child rearing less overwhelmingly expensive for them. Only women at the highest income levels can have children without largely sacrificing all of their other goals. Universal preschool, longer school days and school years, and a more flexible and humane work culture (for everyone) would go a long way towards encouraging educated, middle-class women to have more kids.
And he's right-those things would make it easier for women to have more children, and I suspect they would create a slight uptick in the fertility rate.
The problem is that we can't really afford them.
We have budget issues right now that make funding more expansive public education curriculums challenging. Can the US government afford to oversee a vast expansion of its public schooling system (paying for longer days, longer school years, universal pre-school, more staff to manage all of this, etc) and deal with the other burdens it maintains?
I don't know. I'm not going to bet on it.
The problem here is that we have competing forces at work. Women are becoming more ambitious and want to move further and further up the ladder, but are hoping that they can keep some vestiges of the "old days" around. Those vestiges include the ability to find and marry a reasonably attractive male at or above their socio-economic level and the ability to raise a family reliably.
The problem is that their goals clash with these desires. Female dominance in higher education has resulted in fewer men who meet their standards. Educated women still generally prefer men at or above their educational and financial level-this preference has softened lately by necessity (more women are settling, sometimes unhappily so) but remains quite strong and is likely a product of innate female hypergamy. Women, more often than not, want to date up-it is as simple as that.
When women increased their numbers in college and in the workplace, they displaced men. Society did not merely create more jobs for them, women simply took a larger share of what was available. This means fewer men with the means to satisfy these females' requirements for a good husband/provider down the road, and more men who don't come close to her socio-economic level and frankly couldn't give a fuck about it.
Though a vocal minority of women say that they could care less about this (they either abstain from children or are happy to marry down/settle), the vast majority of them still seem to want the ability to make this choice, and many of them can't any longer. An increasingly large block of the female populace is finding itself unable to get what it wants romantically, despite their having been told for most of their life that it would certainly come to them.
The workplace conditions show us another clash. Women wanted the ability to excel in the traditionally male spheres of the working world, making equal salaries for the effort. This means doing equal work-there is no way around this. If we do begin to make more allowances for women to take more time from work voluntarily, we'll have to accept that the pay gap may never really close. Female employees will be rendered less productive because of this, and thus could not be compensated at precisely the same level. Many feminists simply will not accept this.
If we try to compensate for this by forcing men to take time off concurrently, we risk lowering productivity of the workforce as a whole, and endangering our ability to maintain the economic strength and the wealth we now take for granted, the same strength/wealth that funds many of the benefits feminists are demanding. When we artificially lower male productivity in order to compensate women and enforce gender equality, we pay for it. There's no guarantee that we can afford that price.
The only viable solution would be for these women to accept an inability to succeed in the male professional sphere AND raise a family in a traditional sense without some massive compromise. These women would perhaps accept increased work flexibility and parental leave, but would have to accept the persistence of a pay gap in return. These women would have to be willing to sacrifice their ambition for the sake of raising a family in the traditional way, and accept that there is no way to avoid making that compromise.
As I said before, many of these privileged women (we are discussing an issue that deals almost exclusively with white, middle/upper class American women here) simply will not accept this. So long as that is the case, there is no real solution.