I know I’ve posted about this far too many times already but articles like this one just make me so mad. So you don’t have to read the stupid article it calculates the “salary” a stay at home mom would make if she were paid for all the aspects of her “job” ($138,095 if you cared). While this might be a useful number to know if you were trying to figure out the right settlement in a wrongful death suit or the amount of child support a woman who abandons the family should owe the implied valuation of the work a single mom puts in is so absurd I don’t even know where to start.

One place might be to note that if you added up all the work anyone put in cooking their own dinners, doing their own shopping, cleaning the house and the like they would all deserve a large ’salary.’ So if we subtract all the work housewives would have to do for themselves anyway it would be a much smaller number. Not to mention the fact that housewives are paid for their work (housing, food, spending money). But what about the work stay at home women do caring for the children or husband? This question is best answered with another question: what about the benefit women get from the children and the chance to stay at home with them?

I propose a simple test for these child raising fairness questions. Would you feel the same way if we replaced children by dogs. Imagine that we find out that it is primarily men who want to get dogs (though women benefit from them too) and that therefore men spend far more time and effort caring for the dog than women do. Would you conclude this was obviously unfair? Of course not, like any other hobby it is only reasonable that the parter who gets more benefit out of it take more of the responsibility. In particular many men would probably not choose to have kids on their own if they had to put in the work for them that women generally do.

Ultimately one can’t simultaneously hold that women are getting a raw deal in terms of child rearing, are intelligent enough to know this, yet still desire to have children as much or more than men do. If women thought that doing what they do for the kids was a net negative they could simply choose not to have them. Moreover, since women often choose to be stay at home mothers without any threats other than the fact the man’s unwillingness to make this sacrifice to have kids it gives us prima facia evidence that they must judge the trade off to be worth it. Sure one might argue that this is a result of an income disparity in the workplace between men and women (but once you discount childrearing choices much of that disappears) but even so it is not an additional harm women suffer but actually a minimization of the salary unfairness (rather than taking a lower salary they would prefer to stay at home).

Ultimately people’s choices are the only real evidence we can get about their preferences and hence the only grip we have on what is a fair distribution of work and reward. If we take these choices into account we can’t possibly conclude that the greater work women put into child care is unfair though it still might be better social policy to encourage men to take a greater hand. On the other hand if we refuse to take choices into account for fairness and we really believe that having children is the great benefit people seem to assume it is then it is the people who don’t have children who are really getting the raw deal and deserve extra vacation time and other benefits.