So says Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College in Britain, in this cover article from Prospect Magazine.
Among those consequences: the decline of middle class, working age female volunteerism and the reduction in the number of very bright women choosing to become teachers.
A path once followed by able women across the developed world led to university, teaching and then motherhood, homemaking and voluntary work. Such women are now too busy. The average amount of time that today’s British citizen, male or female, devotes to volunteer activities is four minutes a day.
She also talks about the way our current economic system has shifted the cost of having children.
[O]ur labour market, with its greater gender equality, makes childbearing a very expensive prospect for successful professionals. Rearing a healthy, balanced child requires intensive attention and large amounts of time, and is not something that technical progress is going to alter. The price of that time is especially high for high-earning, busy elite parents — female or male. If they give up or cut down on work, the opportunity cost in terms of income forgone and careers stalled is far greater than for an unskilled 16-year-old school-leaver. In addition, elite children are expensive. Children are dependent for longer, high-quality childcare is costly and formal education has become increasingly important as the route to success. Parents know this, and it explains why the professional classes devote so much money and attention to their children’s schooling.
As the American economist Shirley Burggraf has pointed out in The Feminine Economy and Economic Man, the financial disincentives to childbearing have become so high for upper-middle income families that the puzzle is not why professional women have so few children but why they have any at all.
The result, today, is “a very strong inverse relationship between education and childbearing.”
Wolf doesn’t propose that women stop working. But, she writes,
it is striking how little anyone mentions, let alone tries to quantify, the offsetting losses (or “social externalities”) when women choose work over family.
Another topic about which I predict we’ll be hearing more in coming years.
