I would have titled this post differently, as I believe women should absolutely have the right to work and we should ban nobody from doing what they wish with their lives, but Roosh still brings up some good points. Precisely how vital are women to the economy? I wish he would have harped on the public sector/non-profit sectors of the economy with some numbers (perhaps something I could do), but precisely what would happen at the office or factory if women weren't allowed? What would happen to government bloat if there were make-work jobs for them? What would happen if you had one strong disciplinarian vice principle in the high school and not a dozen "guidance counselors?"
Again, I am very much against telling people what they can and cannot do. But as an economist I am infinitely intrigued about what they "should" do in theirs and society's best interests.
It would be great if you dig into some statistics. It seems very probable that administrative bloat in the public and private sector is female centric. So you'd find increasing female employment the further away one gets from the core business or government responsibility.
ReplyDeleteCaptain, I am posting a link to an overview of my recently published book Employment Game, which provides practical workarounds to the challenges men encounter while searching for work in the feminized economy. I will send you a full copy for your late-night enjoyment.
ReplyDeletehttps://employmentgame.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/employment-game-preview-download/
At the very least they should not be allowed to vote. Yeah, I really mean that to.
ReplyDeleteIf women weren't allowed to work then
ReplyDeleteA: pay would go up as there are fewer eligible workers (a man could, once again, support a family all on his own)
B: the workplace would become ENORMOUSLY easier as it would, effectively, mean and end to HR, harassment policies, etc. not to mention men would treat one another a lot better since there'd be no throwing one another under the bus for female attention.
The simplest way of squaring this circle would be to simply enforce the First Amendment, and remove any and all government coercion on hiring. Organizations that want to get shit done will simply stop hiring women for anything but secretarial work.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on Roosh's choice of a title, as well as the tone. The argument is more effective when it's less about what women "should do" and more about what they "would do" if not subject to so much propaganda.
ReplyDeleteThis is just an anecdote I heard from a college student advisor, so take it for what it is, but they said whenever they talked with female students about they wanted to do with their lives, nearly all of them admitted they really just wanted to get married and have a family and weren't keen on college, but they felt horribly guilty about having that desire.
The problem is that what women are told they should do right now does not align with what they actually want to do. They don't need to be forced to be wives and mothers; they need to be coerced or prodded into avoiding it.
I am a female STEM graduate (B. Eng) and I agree with evilwhitemalempire's comments.
ReplyDeleteThe feminist movement was a way to get the 50% of people that didn't pay tax into the workforce so they could extract taxes from them and depress wages by expanding the labor pool. It also acted to destroy the family and bring children under state influence even faster through institutionalized daycare.
Almost everything that makes modern life possible was invented by a white male. If women ruled the world we'd still live in grass huts.
First we should acknowledge that whether women should work has always, as most feminist complaint have been, an upper middle class problem. Just 100 yrs ago, it was scandalous for a successful middle class father to let his daughters work, much less his wife. It was a signal that he was not up to class.
ReplyDeletePoor women on the other hand have always worked. There was some initiatives to ban married women from working in factories in Connecticut about a century ago. The argument was for the the survivability and health of the children. The improvement of men's wages was also proffered, but it died in the face of the argument it would incentivize immorality. The logical conclusion was that since a couple's income would be halved upon marriage, they would just forego marriage and live together.
One now obscured impact of women's full entry into the workforce has been not to raise women to the full liberty to contract that men had, cut to lower men to "wards of the State" as women were considered in matters of type of work, hours of work, minimum wages, etc.
You can have regulation of the hours of labor of a woman of full age in general employments, by court decision, in three States (Massachusetts, Oregon, and Illinois), … but the Oregon case, decided both by the State Supreme Court and by the Federal Court in so far as the Fourteenth Amendment was concerned, after most careful and thorough discussion and reasoning, reasserted the principle that a woman is the ward of the state, and therefore does not have the full liberty of contract allowed to a man.
--Popular Law-making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-making by Statute, Frederic Jesup Stimson (1910)
As to whether women should work, the answer as a sex, yes. As the liberty to work is a fundamental liberty, just as capitalism, i.e., the liberty to retain additional earnings in excess of subsistence and use them to better ones condition is a fundamental liberty (oft infringed).
But should any particular woman work outside the home is an individualized decision that has no general answer.
It is simply not true that that only upper middle class women could stay home.
ReplyDeleteAccording to this article
https://secularpatriarchy.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/the-feminist-explosion-1960-to-1995/
only 2.2 % of all married white American women in 1890 worked. In my country (Holland) the statistics have been available since the early 17th century and the total amount of women working outside home fluctuated between 10 and 20% until 1970s.
The idea that only wealthy women could afford staying home is another feminist canard.
Economically, it doesn't always make sense for a woman or the spouse who makes less, to work. She can be more valuable in the home. Years ago there was a calculator on the WSJ website about the cost of a second income. You could figure out if having a second income in the household was worth it. I played with the numbers and if 1 spouse is making 75K, the second spouse needs to make close to 40K to bring any money home after expenses like daycare, taxes, eating out more, etc. My calculation back then assumed 2 kids.
ReplyDeleteFrom a practical and lifestyle point of view, it is really hard to both work and have small children. You just can't get ahead of the cleaning, maintenance, or anything in your life. You are perpetually rushed and tired.
When you have kids, you have to remember it is not only about you.