They are incompatible goals

Claire Cain Miller has a useful article this morning, When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire. Miller approaches this with a certain amount of naivete, as if some of this is new or unfamiliar. And perhaps it is in advocacy circles.

Social Justice Warriors and those of that ilk are very good at highlighting inequities but then fairly incompetent at determining costs, benefits, and trade-offs. There are many ways in which we would wish the world to be better and for people to treat one another more kindly than they do. But the world is as it is. There are limits to time and money and people have materially different goals, objectives and trade-offs they are willing to make. You can't just wish all that away. There is a delicate balance between supinely accepting the world as it is and boldly trying to change it for the better when you don't understand it.

As a predicate, there is the simple fact that bearing and raising children has costs in terms of expenditures and opportunity costs. While only a woman can give birth, it is optional, within a household, how parental time will be allocated and there is no necessity that it only be the mother that has primary responsibility for raising children. Two adults may equally share responsibility but consequently sharply limiting their work flexibility in terms of schedules and hour volumes. Others might work the model of one full-time and one part-time adult in the labor force. Yet others will pursue a full-time worker model with a stay-at-home parent looking after the family. Each model has risks and benefits that vary by sector and time period and stage of life.

A second predicate is that there is a real and well established connection between amount of time, duration of time, intensity, flexibility and purposefulness of engagement with a job/career and the level of productivity and recognition attainment that can be achieved. And the relationship is not linear. A person who works 40 hours a week at a given task or role is more than twice as productive as the person only working 20 hours a week. Everyone, male or female, in every field of endeavor, who rises to the top in terms of productivity and/or recognition, works long hours, over long periods of time, with significant flexibility and with great purposefulness. No one who works part time, inflexibly, or intermittently demonstrates comparable levels of productivity or attainment.

Given those realities then, there are three separate goals that are often conflated but which in fact work against each other. I think most people would agree that all three of these goals are desirable.

1) Children should have sufficient parental time and attention to achieve their best.
2) Government policies should mitigate to some degree the costs (expenditure and in terms of career consequences) to parents of having children.
3) Women should be equally represented among high achievers as men.

Goal 1 is a bit of challenge as people disagree as to what constitutes sufficient effective parental time and attention. Let's pass on that for the moment.

Goal 2 implies things like guaranteed parental child care leave, guarantees regarding being able to work part-time, subsidized child-care centers, etc. All of these things make it easier for a parent to have a child and yet remain in the workplace if that is your goal. But all of them have costs that someone has to pay.

Goal 3 has several implications. Equality of outcomes can only be achieved coercively. Childless workers and parents with a stay-at-home spouse will need to restrict their hours of work to the same amount that mothers are able to work. Alternatively, you can accept that circumstances drive differential performance but decide that the goal of equity of outcomes warrants affirmative actions and quotas such that child caring parents are promoted in lock-step with adults who have no children or who have a stay-at-home spouse.

Regardless of which goals are chosen, there are costs that someone has to bear. Most often, governments choose to impose those costs on some class of people or institution rather than pay those costs directly out of government funds. Usually it is employers who bear the costs. Economically this is an undesirable approach. If being required to secure jobs for people to return to, to provide limited hours or flexible hours or to provide child care has a cost, as it does, you should spread that cost to everyone. All society enjoys the benefits of future generations of taxpayers. Regrettably, governments tend to shy away from transparency. It is easier to simply impose those costs on some category of taxpayer and hide that cost from everyone else. Lack of transparency has all sorts of consequences though, as do any policies that have costs.

If you make something more expensive, people will demand less of it. Supply and demand.

In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

The government wanted to make it easier for women to remain in the workforce but did not want to bear that cost itself. It imposed that cost on employers. Facing a more expensive workforce, employers can react in two ways. They can automate and employ fewer people or they can, if the law allows, pay less for that part of the workforce driving the new cost. But this is not unintended. This is entirely predictable. It is simply the predictable consequence of increasing the cost of a class of employees. The government may not like the consequence, but unless it is willing to absorb the cost itself, it does not hold the moral high ground.

Miller reports

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits.

Fundamentally, the government has to decide what it is willing to pay for. If it enacts pro-natalist or gender neutral laws, women (based on the experience in multiple European countries) tend to reduce their workforce participation rates and/or reduce their hours worked. Mothers spend more time with families which supports Goal 1 but the consequence is that while they remain employed to some degree, they come off the advancement track and no longer improve their productivity (part-time and inflexible hours). In Sweden, those women who do work, tend to work primarily for the government. The other consequence is that while it is easier for women to continue to work to some degree, there are far fewer women at the tops of different fields of endeavor.

With its low government intervention profile, the US makes it harder for women to remain in the workforce (little or no subsidies for childcare) but compared to Europe there are far more women in the US at the tops of every sector - sports, business, law, politics, art, academia, etc. Women are only about 15-30% of the top performers in most fields but they are there in virtually all fields in contrast to Europe where there are whole swaths of endeavor that are solely male.

There are two issues out of this. The first is that hiding costs has indirect but predictable effects. The more you try to hide, usually the more consequential are the negative outcomes. The second is that having children is societally necessary and desirable but the policies that encourage procreation tend also to reduce female labor force participation and achievement. There is no way to bridge the trade-offs, all you can do is choose, through ignorance or through conscious decision-making, one set of outcomes or another. You cannot be both pro-natalist and pro-equal gender outcomes. They are incompatible goals.