I don't dispute much of this article, but I think the implication that women's work in places like early childcare is poorly compensated because that work is "not valued" is counterproductive.
Work is compensated based on market factors. I don't mean that the market is fair or just or accurate. Quite the opposite. I mean that people get paid more when what they provide is scarce and in particular when they have unions or other means of blocking entry from competing laborers. This doesn't work in daycare very well.
There's also a difference between willingness to pay and ability to pay.
Early childcare is paid for by families with very limited resources. When you have a child, you are likely to be young, meaning you have a lower paying job and less money, if any, saved.
Framing the problem as being about "what is valued" obscures these dynamics. It implies that wages are granted by a considered judgement, sort of like a teacher's grade or audience applause. They don't. Wages are*extracted* via a negotiation, just as profit in business is an extraction.
Women's financial situation will improve when we start demanding policies that give the workers in fields where they work more power and access to more subsidies for those who pay for their services. Those subsidies have to be demanded and negotiated, with deals cut in backrooms if needed.
The explicit goal here is to make the child care market as dysfunctional and artificially expensive as the housing or health care markets? And this is supposed to help women?
Not to mention that childcare is extremely labor intense: one person will only ever be able to watch about five to ten children. That means that for these childcare subsidies to be successful, they will have to pull people away from other major middle class employment like teaching and nursing. New mothers gain to the explicit detriment of other mothers and old and sick people.
I’m not trying to put you on blast. But this is a very hard problem, and I’m not sure your solution is going to help much of anything.
Yeah, you could interpret it that way. As I'll explain in my response to Eliza, _fair_ pay looks like _overpay_ to a lot of people. So fair pay for childcare workers would, in the minds of many, perhaps you , make the market dysfunctional or artificially expensive.
I really haven't given much thought to the best policies, so it's quite likely that the specifics of what I've suggested are foolish. But the principle is clear: fair wages should probably seem too high to about half of people and too low to the other half, with most people saying that they can tolerate the error. That applies to my most jobs.
Right, in this case when you ask the question “too high for whom”, the answer is “new mothers”. You’re rearranging money between young women: each $6,000 increase in annual salary for a daycare worker is a $1000-1500 increase in daycare costs for young parents for purely mechanical reasons.
It might be nice for childcare workers if the government subsidized child care, but that would come at the expense of anyone in hospitals or care facilities or with children in school — unless we increase immigration (which we should!) there’s no way to massively increase the supply of service workers in one area without lowering them everywhere else.
In some sense yes, we can say these are synonymous. But usually when we say "what we pay shows what we value," we mean it that the money reveals an implicit value. That's different from saying that if we choose to value this job more, the wages will rise.
People in the jobs that get paid the most are, for the most part, _*not valued*_ by society. They are resented or begrudgingly acknowledged. Bankers, lawyers, athletes. The valuing only comes from customers or the employer who really doesn't want to pay so much but has no choice.
My son went to a fabulous day care. It was not cheap, but we would have paid even more. It was so good. But that would have required the teacher/owner to treat us more ruthlessly. Price discriminate, perhaps, like the universities so that she got as close to the "marginal willingness to pay" as she could. This would have gotten her more money and more bitterness.
Or, in other words, fairness of pay starts with a bit of pain for the payer. For this reason, it will never be very successful for elites to try to "value" who they pay. Non elites need to compel them. I'm not a childcare worker so I can only suggest this to them.
Again, I'm not saying the world is good this way. I'm saying everyone else who is getting paid fairly is already doing this or benefiting from someone who does.
“Contrary to the theory of “compensatory differentials,” which holds that worse-paying jobs compensate workers with better benefits, evidence suggests that workers in female occupations are less likely to be offered employer health insurance or retirement plans”
The theory of compensating differentials would consider retirement and health benefits as compensation.
Non-compensatory things would be like workplace safety, flexible or predictable hours, working in a prestigious or meaningful field, etc.
Hi Allan! Fair point on the benefits framing — you're right that healthcare and retirement are not classic compensatory differentials, like a wage premium, and I've added a clarifying edit to the piece. That said, I think my challenge to the clean wage/benefits tradeoff, and the notion that women accept lower wages because of other non-wage things (including, but not limited to, benefits), still stands.
"Of course, these are bad times for everyone. Inflation has eroded most of the wage growth that occurred after the pandemic"
My God, nothing will stop these takes, will it? Real wages - meaning adjusted for inflation - have been steadily rising since the pandemic, continuing their upward trajectory from before the pandemic. Wages in the *bottom quintile* grew the fastest. Listing the nominal price increases in a bunch of cherry-picked goods does not change this.
The shock absorption has nothing to do with who pays more of the household expenses but that women tend to be in charge of how the money is managed. They are more aware of economic fluctuations from their day to day lived experience.
But your argument seems to me to be that women are objectively more precarious than men. If they're *reporting* more precarity because they spend more time thinking about the price of milk, then the explanation is affective: they're not really worse off than men, they just feel that way. And "economic shock absorbers" is a bit grandiose if that's all we mean.
The title of the article is Why do Women FEEL so Broke. There was empirical economic data to give you a fuller picture of the facts on the ground but how people perceive the economy was the point. Basically women pay closer attention so they worry about it more.
I subscribe to The Argument because it promises evidence-based rigor. This piece doesn't deliver.
The claim that "the cost of housing, health care, and education made women's participation in the labor market an economic necessity" reverses the causal arrow of Warren's Two-Income Trap — which argues that dual-income households bidding on positional goods with inelastic supply is what drove those costs up in the first place. The article isn't unaware of the framework. It names Warren's exact trio of goods and flips the mechanism. That's not an oversight.
Similarly, the passage about childcare productivity — you can't make watching kids more efficient with smartphones — is Baumol's cost disease described without being named. Naming it would let readers discover that Baumol links wage pressure in low-productivity sectors to gains in high-productivity sectors, which complicates the "women's work is systematically undervalued" conclusion the piece wants to reach.
Two major economic frameworks, both present in degraded form, both stripped of the parts that would challenge the thesis. I expect this from Vox. I'm paying for something better.
I would love to read an analysis on what causes something called occupational feminization: when women take over a job force and become the majority of its workers, the wages for that field stagnate. Pharmacy is an example.
Medicine more broadly saw a large influx of women as a percentage of doctors but wage growth remained high. This could be due to long hours — no compensating differential — or fixed residency slots — no supply increase — but either explanation gives sole insight into the broader phenomenon
The wage stagnation in pharmacy has to do with the huge buildout of pharmacy schools and the squeeze by PBMs. It is crap that the boards didn’t do their job of protecting us, but those are the reasons.
I don’t think sex had anything to do with it. What happened was that people on the payroll of large chain pharmacies got appointed to state boards. It was a deliberate act, but I don’t think it had anything to do with gender.
I think people assume women are married to men and therefore don’t need adequate salaries. That’s why we love shitting all over teachers unions but not coal miners unions.
That’s true, but I don’t really think it’s applicable to pharmacy, which never really became female dominated anyway (there are plenty of male pharmacists). It’s not a union profession because it’s intrinsically a part of management, though it probably should be. I have mixed feelings about unions as a whole, but there’s plenty of reasons to unionize pharmacists.
The author takes a roughly 14% difference between men and women and then generalizes to women feeling broke. The reality is that 14% is a relatively small difference relative to the fact that large proportions of both genders are feeling the same way. I see this false reasoning used over and over again by authors seeking to assign victimhood to people based on factors such as gender, race, and "generation". It is not only false, it creates resentment and division.
No offense to Kyla Scanlon, who I really root for, but these numbers do not imply a "vibecession" to me. That is a huge number of people who don't feel like they can cover basic necessities.
I don't dispute much of this article, but I think the implication that women's work in places like early childcare is poorly compensated because that work is "not valued" is counterproductive.
Work is compensated based on market factors. I don't mean that the market is fair or just or accurate. Quite the opposite. I mean that people get paid more when what they provide is scarce and in particular when they have unions or other means of blocking entry from competing laborers. This doesn't work in daycare very well.
There's also a difference between willingness to pay and ability to pay.
Early childcare is paid for by families with very limited resources. When you have a child, you are likely to be young, meaning you have a lower paying job and less money, if any, saved.
Framing the problem as being about "what is valued" obscures these dynamics. It implies that wages are granted by a considered judgement, sort of like a teacher's grade or audience applause. They don't. Wages are*extracted* via a negotiation, just as profit in business is an extraction.
Women's financial situation will improve when we start demanding policies that give the workers in fields where they work more power and access to more subsidies for those who pay for their services. Those subsidies have to be demanded and negotiated, with deals cut in backrooms if needed.
The explicit goal here is to make the child care market as dysfunctional and artificially expensive as the housing or health care markets? And this is supposed to help women?
Not to mention that childcare is extremely labor intense: one person will only ever be able to watch about five to ten children. That means that for these childcare subsidies to be successful, they will have to pull people away from other major middle class employment like teaching and nursing. New mothers gain to the explicit detriment of other mothers and old and sick people.
I’m not trying to put you on blast. But this is a very hard problem, and I’m not sure your solution is going to help much of anything.
Yeah, you could interpret it that way. As I'll explain in my response to Eliza, _fair_ pay looks like _overpay_ to a lot of people. So fair pay for childcare workers would, in the minds of many, perhaps you , make the market dysfunctional or artificially expensive.
I really haven't given much thought to the best policies, so it's quite likely that the specifics of what I've suggested are foolish. But the principle is clear: fair wages should probably seem too high to about half of people and too low to the other half, with most people saying that they can tolerate the error. That applies to my most jobs.
Right, in this case when you ask the question “too high for whom”, the answer is “new mothers”. You’re rearranging money between young women: each $6,000 increase in annual salary for a daycare worker is a $1000-1500 increase in daycare costs for young parents for purely mechanical reasons.
It might be nice for childcare workers if the government subsidized child care, but that would come at the expense of anyone in hospitals or care facilities or with children in school — unless we increase immigration (which we should!) there’s no way to massively increase the supply of service workers in one area without lowering them everywhere else.
I mean, there are plenty of unemployed and underemployed, but only a certain percentage of them are hireable for care professions.
Yes, I agree. Subsidize and then import workers.
Isn't valuing women's work what motivates people to demand such policies?
In some sense yes, we can say these are synonymous. But usually when we say "what we pay shows what we value," we mean it that the money reveals an implicit value. That's different from saying that if we choose to value this job more, the wages will rise.
People in the jobs that get paid the most are, for the most part, _*not valued*_ by society. They are resented or begrudgingly acknowledged. Bankers, lawyers, athletes. The valuing only comes from customers or the employer who really doesn't want to pay so much but has no choice.
My son went to a fabulous day care. It was not cheap, but we would have paid even more. It was so good. But that would have required the teacher/owner to treat us more ruthlessly. Price discriminate, perhaps, like the universities so that she got as close to the "marginal willingness to pay" as she could. This would have gotten her more money and more bitterness.
Or, in other words, fairness of pay starts with a bit of pain for the payer. For this reason, it will never be very successful for elites to try to "value" who they pay. Non elites need to compel them. I'm not a childcare worker so I can only suggest this to them.
Again, I'm not saying the world is good this way. I'm saying everyone else who is getting paid fairly is already doing this or benefiting from someone who does.
“Contrary to the theory of “compensatory differentials,” which holds that worse-paying jobs compensate workers with better benefits, evidence suggests that workers in female occupations are less likely to be offered employer health insurance or retirement plans”
The theory of compensating differentials would consider retirement and health benefits as compensation.
Non-compensatory things would be like workplace safety, flexible or predictable hours, working in a prestigious or meaningful field, etc.
Hi Allan! Fair point on the benefits framing — you're right that healthcare and retirement are not classic compensatory differentials, like a wage premium, and I've added a clarifying edit to the piece. That said, I think my challenge to the clean wage/benefits tradeoff, and the notion that women accept lower wages because of other non-wage things (including, but not limited to, benefits), still stands.
"Of course, these are bad times for everyone. Inflation has eroded most of the wage growth that occurred after the pandemic"
My God, nothing will stop these takes, will it? Real wages - meaning adjusted for inflation - have been steadily rising since the pandemic, continuing their upward trajectory from before the pandemic. Wages in the *bottom quintile* grew the fastest. Listing the nominal price increases in a bunch of cherry-picked goods does not change this.
By far the most likely explanation for the gender gap is the one you're dismissing: women tend to be more neurotic and anxious than men. This is the only explanation consistent with the fact that the gap persists in heterosexual couples. A description of women as economic "shock absorbers" is nonsense: men pay a higher share of household expenses than women. www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0917/Who-pays-With-money-matters-traditional-gender-roles-stick
The shock absorption has nothing to do with who pays more of the household expenses but that women tend to be in charge of how the money is managed. They are more aware of economic fluctuations from their day to day lived experience.
But your argument seems to me to be that women are objectively more precarious than men. If they're *reporting* more precarity because they spend more time thinking about the price of milk, then the explanation is affective: they're not really worse off than men, they just feel that way. And "economic shock absorbers" is a bit grandiose if that's all we mean.
The title of the article is Why do Women FEEL so Broke. There was empirical economic data to give you a fuller picture of the facts on the ground but how people perceive the economy was the point. Basically women pay closer attention so they worry about it more.
I subscribe to The Argument because it promises evidence-based rigor. This piece doesn't deliver.
The claim that "the cost of housing, health care, and education made women's participation in the labor market an economic necessity" reverses the causal arrow of Warren's Two-Income Trap — which argues that dual-income households bidding on positional goods with inelastic supply is what drove those costs up in the first place. The article isn't unaware of the framework. It names Warren's exact trio of goods and flips the mechanism. That's not an oversight.
Similarly, the passage about childcare productivity — you can't make watching kids more efficient with smartphones — is Baumol's cost disease described without being named. Naming it would let readers discover that Baumol links wage pressure in low-productivity sectors to gains in high-productivity sectors, which complicates the "women's work is systematically undervalued" conclusion the piece wants to reach.
Two major economic frameworks, both present in degraded form, both stripped of the parts that would challenge the thesis. I expect this from Vox. I'm paying for something better.
I would love to read an analysis on what causes something called occupational feminization: when women take over a job force and become the majority of its workers, the wages for that field stagnate. Pharmacy is an example.
I would be interested in how closely tied these wage degradations are to the complete corporate take over of the pharmacy industry.
Medicine more broadly saw a large influx of women as a percentage of doctors but wage growth remained high. This could be due to long hours — no compensating differential — or fixed residency slots — no supply increase — but either explanation gives sole insight into the broader phenomenon
The wage stagnation in pharmacy has to do with the huge buildout of pharmacy schools and the squeeze by PBMs. It is crap that the boards didn’t do their job of protecting us, but those are the reasons.
And what quality about your cohort do you believe made your board fail to protect you?
I don’t think sex had anything to do with it. What happened was that people on the payroll of large chain pharmacies got appointed to state boards. It was a deliberate act, but I don’t think it had anything to do with gender.
I think people assume women are married to men and therefore don’t need adequate salaries. That’s why we love shitting all over teachers unions but not coal miners unions.
That’s true, but I don’t really think it’s applicable to pharmacy, which never really became female dominated anyway (there are plenty of male pharmacists). It’s not a union profession because it’s intrinsically a part of management, though it probably should be. I have mixed feelings about unions as a whole, but there’s plenty of reasons to unionize pharmacists.
Articles like this would be more persuasive if the factual assertions were supported by footnotes or links.
The author takes a roughly 14% difference between men and women and then generalizes to women feeling broke. The reality is that 14% is a relatively small difference relative to the fact that large proportions of both genders are feeling the same way. I see this false reasoning used over and over again by authors seeking to assign victimhood to people based on factors such as gender, race, and "generation". It is not only false, it creates resentment and division.
No offense to Kyla Scanlon, who I really root for, but these numbers do not imply a "vibecession" to me. That is a huge number of people who don't feel like they can cover basic necessities.