Exhibit 3 - The Great Revealing

They are getting so close to understanding but their prior assumptions are still clouding their understanding. From Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy.’ by Claire Cain Miller. Miller actually is a pretty good writer on this topic. She keeps inching to a better understanding but doesn't quite get there.

In old feminist circles, it has long been an article of faith that

Women are precluded from educational achievement.

Good old boy networks keep women out of top levels of achievement.

Women do not earn the same amount of income for the same amount of work.

This income inequality is a consequence of primarily unconscious bias and discrimination.

The Europeans do a markedly better job of helping women achieve their full potential.

Women are precluded from STEM fields because of cultures of toxic masculinity.

Seven years ago Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote Why Women Still Can't Have It All decrying why she as Ivy League professor, with a fully supportive husband, fully supportive employer (Princeton) and a dream opportunity creating foreign policy in Washington, D.C. and working for a woman, still couldn't make it all work due to her having children.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

Most of the old hypothesized issues from feminist theory were alluded to in the article but Slaughter was beginning to see that the theory and reality were not aligned.

We now know all these old feminist theory premises to be false.

Women have been better and more educated than men as measured by HS completion and college completion since 1900 (HS degrees) and since circa 1970 (college degrees).

There are beneficial affiliative networks that are both intra and intersex. Good Old Boys, Good Old Gals, Mixed Networks.
They can be net beneficial, they can be net negative, it all depends on the circumstance. There is no secret cabal.

Women earn the same amount of money for the same work.

Europeans do a much worse job at opening up work opportunities for women with far fewer women in the upper echelons of achievement in any field in Europe.

Women are systemically encouraged, recruited, and passed for employment over men in STEM.

Miller's article actually accepts most this evidence. Still, she can't quite shake herself free from the comforting old assumptions.

There are many causes of the gap, like discrimination and a lack of family-friendly policies.

But as she progresses through the article, she constantly introduces and accepts evidence which shows that the gap has nothing to do with discrimination or the absence of family friendly policies.

There’s no gender gap in the financial rewards for working extra long hours. For the most part, women who work extreme hours get paid as much as men who do.

[snip]

In European countries, with more family-friendly policies, women are likelier to work than they are in the United States — but they’re even less likely to reach senior levels.

And by a fair amount it is worth noting. In the US, in virtually every field of endeavor, women are 15-30% of the top performers in the field. Law partners, judges, accounting partners, doctors, literary prize winners, etc. In Europe, more women work, but they rarely appear among the top performers in any field. In a few fields they might be as many as 5-10% of performers, but that's it. More American women climb higher in far more fields than their European sisters.

Miller does quote Claudia Goldin a fair amount, a rigorous researcher in this area.

I have been writing on this issue for a number of years (here, here, and here.)

What Miller, and Slaughter, and Goldin fail to do is free themselves from the old assumptions, accept the evidence and reframe the issue. The do not focus on risk, risk mitigation, uncertainty, and most especially, PRODUCTIVITY. What researchers have been finding is that sustained and reliable productivity is what garners the greatest compensation.

Miller, and Slaughter, and Goldin instinctively frame this as a male versus female issue whereas the data says that men and women are being treated equally and are earning the same money for the same work. The differentials occur because of different life choices.

I prefer to reframe the issues as that of familial structure. The competition is between different family structures, not between men and women. There is a clear hierarchy of economic productivity as measured in terms of income between different familial structures. I explore these issues of family structure competition here and here and here.

I think the hierarchy is something like this (I will use the traditional sex roles to simplify the language but it does not matter which sex plays which role. It is the structure not the sex.):

Golden Model - Husband works full-time and is fully-committed to work and is married to a wife who is an occasional and part-time worker with full-time focus on raising children and managing the home.

Modified Golden Model - Husband works full-time and is fully-committed to work and is married to a wife who focuses solely on raising children and managing the home.

Single Elite - Either sex, works full-time and is fully-committed to work with no family commitments whatsoever.

Modern Model - Husband and wife both try and maintain full-time work commitment while trying to simultaneously raise a family.

Single Parent Functional Model - Parent works full-time but not fully committed. Maintains schedule structure to support child(ren).

Single Parent Dysfunctional model - Parent does not work but focuses on raising children.

What Miller, Slaughter and Goldin are lamenting is that Golden Model on average is more productive than the Modern Model to which they are committed. They want all the benefits which come with the productivity of the Golden Model without any of the downsides.

Wanting something for nothing is no sin but is also not a compelling moral case.

The analogy might to a differentiated and undifferentiated business partnerships. In the differentiated business partnership, both partners make the same commitment to the partnership but each makes their contribution on their differentiated capabilities. One focuses on selling work and one focuses on delivering that work profitably. They make more profit (they are more productive) than the undifferentiated partnership because they are leveraging their respective specializations.

In the undifferentiated partnership, both partners make the same commitment to the partnership and both do the same work equally divided. But because they do not specialize their labor, their model is less efficient and therefore less productive.

Miller, and Slaughter, and Goldin want the productivity of the specialized model but are only willing to commit to the activities and work of the unspecialized (and therefore lower productivity) model.

Claudia Goldin a number of years ago began advocating for a change in business structure and focus in order to reduce the premium arising from dedicated, flexible and high volume work.

The most effective way to do that, Ms. Goldin’s research has found, is for employers to give workers more predictable hours and flexibility on where and when work gets done. One way that happens is when it becomes easier for workers to substitute for one another.

Conventional wisdom, especially in the greedy occupations, is that this is impossible — certain people are too valuable and need to be available to clients anytime. But some professions have successfully challenged that notion.

It is regrettable that Miller introduces the putative moral condemnation inherent in "greedy occupations." 1) It basically turns this into a Marxist critique which is not especially productive, and 2) It is an unworthily clumsy attempt to tilt the scales based on emotion rather than reason.

More to the point, Goldin's recommendation is self-defeating. When you make workers fungible you both make it more likely that they will be replaced with automation and you also reduce income. Fungible labor pools are larger labor pools. Larger supply for fixed demand drives down costs (wages.) Goldin's recommendation is an example of the sociology getting ahead of the economics.

“It may mean rearranging jobs, but you’d think there’d be a lot of money in it,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford who studies companies’ management practices. “Firms have enormous incentive to really design jobs so they can access these highly educated people who want to work 40 hours a week and not 80.”

And there you have ideological desire outstripping observed reality. It is also an example of revealed preference.

You ask anyone working 80 hours a week and almost uniformly the answer will be "Yes, I want to work only 40 hours and have a life with my family." But the statement is incomplete. What they are really saying is "Yes, I want to work only 40 hours and have a life with my family AND I want to still earn as much as I do working 80 hours." No one is forcing them to work the long hours, especially in a hot market. They are working those hours because it yields an outcome they want to achieve given a range of complex trade-offs for themselves as individuals as well as for the family unit.

Indeed, one of the subjects of the article says as much.

“I think I’d be happier in life if I was home more with my children and if I didn’t have the same stress at work,” he said, “but I think this was the best decision for our family.”

Miller ends her article with a First World Problem.

Ms. Jampel feels angry that the time she spends caregiving isn’t valued the way paid work is. “No one explains this to you when you’re 21, but in retrospect, it was not a smart decision” to go into debt for law school, she said.

She said she feels lucky that she’s found substantive, interesting part-time work. He feels lucky that he found a firm that doesn’t require him to do all his hours at the office. But if they could rewrite their lives? They wish they could have had better options.

They wish they could have had better options. They wish they could make a lot more money with a lot less effort. But don't we all?

What they appear to have done is make a range of choices given the circumstances they face and given the limits they have. And it appears that they have made a reasonable set of choices for themselves.

Miller is basically acknowledging that the traditional feminist diagnosis is incorrect. This is not about bias or prejudice or discrimination. This is about people making informed choices regarding the various balances of risk, uncertainty, and obligations and anticipated outcomes.

The irony here is that, based on the best information, the best solution, on average, for most people, given their typical choices, is the very Ozzy and Harriet nuclear family of the 1950s with fully committed dad in the workplace and mom raising the children with part-time work on the side. The Golden model. It increases the upside productivity potential, mitigates the downside risks, and establishes a harmonious blend of fulfilling multiple, sometimes conflicting, goals.

One of the problems with these kind of articles, at least to me, is that they come off as classist, entitled, arrogant, and frankly kind of appallingly privileged. This was especially the case with Slaughter's Atlantic article. Not only do the subjects have more income, more wealth, and more security than 95% of other Americans, but they have more choices. Their complaints come across as special pleading by the most privileged for better treatment by all the rest of the 95% who bear so much greater a burden.

It comes across as unseemly privilege.

One last thing. Miller tries to frame her criticism as a critique of the winner-take-all sweepstakes. The problem is that virtually all sectors are winner-take-all in nature. Rather than trying to understand what is causing the problem, Miller leans on the pejorative "greedy professions" slander.

Miller and Goldin are hypothesizing that with the right business strategy and the right national policies, we can circumvent the winner-take-all phenomenon. They hope then, Modern Model women will reap the rewards of the women in the Golden Model.

I agree that winner-take-all is a harsh dynamic. It is also clear that as business sectors were freed from war-time control (WWII), a process which continued into the 1970s, then deregulated, then globalized, the natural consequence was an increase in productivity and an increase in inequality.

But is that the entire reason for the increasing dominance of the winner-take-all phenomenon? I don't think so.

I suspect that a further, and perhaps primary, driver is the steepening of the innovation S-curve post-WWII.

Click to enlarge.

As you can see, innovation S-curves used to be perhaps 45-years. They are now down to 10-15 years.

Competition at the top of the S-curve is brutal, being in a commodity market.

Risk and uncertainty are painful at the bottom of the S-curve when it is unclear whether there is in fact a market for the innovation.

The great money to be made is in that middle area where the product has hit the market and been accepted and there are not yet competitors. If that period lasts for thirty-five years, there is reasonable opportunity to spread the wealth around among all the participants. If the window of opportunity is steeper, five or ten years, then the early innovators have to carpe diem and hoard the excess productivity of that middle period.

People have to decide fast, act fast, and implement fast. There is no time for job-sharing, limiting hours etc. Miller and Goldin are chasing a chimera. The big money is in fast action based on good decision-making and admits to no interference, distraction or anything short of total focus. Hoping that there is a possibility of redesigning the middle most productive period into an easy-going, limited hours employment environment is like hoping for a snow cone in the desert. It simply isn't there.