A reasoned, if dry, economic analysis of the social costs of highly-educated women leaving the workforce, from Becker-Posner Blog:
Even at the current very high tuition rates, there is excess demand for places at the elite colleges and professional schools, as shown by the high ratio of applications to acceptances at those schools. Demand is excess--supply and demand are not in balance--because the colleges and professional schools do not raise tuition to the market-clearing level but instead ration places in their entering classes on the basis (largely) of ability, as proxied by grades, performance on standardized tests, and extracurricular activities. Since women do as well on these measures as men, the student body of an elite educational institution is usually about 50 percent female.
Suppose for simplicity that in an entering class at an elite law school of 100 students, split evenly among men and women, 45 of the men but only 30 of the women will have full-time careers in law. Then 5 of the men and 20 of the women will be taking places that would otherwise be occupied by men (and a few women) who would have more productive careers, assuming realistically that the difference in ability between those admitted and those just below the cut off for admission is small.
While well-educated mothers contribute more to the human capital of their offspring than mothers who are not well educated, it is doubtful that a woman who graduates from Harvard College and goes on to get a law degree from Yale will be a better mother than one who stopped after graduating from Harvard.
But I have to try to be precise about the meaning of "more productive" in this context. I mean only that if a man and woman of similar ability were competing for a place in the entering class of an elite professional school, the man would (on average) pay more for the place than the woman would; admission would create more "value added" for him than for her....
I like this kind of analysis, which bypasses emotional appeal and goes straight for the costs, very much. He has some intriguing ideas (involving gender-blind tuition raises).
But perhaps the bit that stuck in my mind most was a new (to me) term to describe what women who leave the workforce are doing: "nonmarket activities."
Forget all this nonsense about "working mothers" vs. "non-working mothers," or the slightly-too-precious (and linguistically useless) "every mother is a working mother." Forget, too, the under-descriptive "housewife" and "homemaker" and the patently untrue "stay-at-home mother," even though we Internet users are all familiar with the term SAHM. No, no, we finally have an answer to that loaded question...
--- So, what do you do?
--- Oh, nonmarket activities mostly.
I'm a nonmarket activist! No, wait, a nonmarket activities specialist! No, wait, I'm in... nonmarketing. Nonmarket research!
Sometimes I just kill myself.
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