In my last post I discussed the views of UC Berkeley’s graduate Dean on academic support for families at length. Here I want to offer the quick 10,000 foot conceptual overview and some thoughts about why people have the strange views they do.

The arguments given about the problems for women with babies in academia all focused on the extra time and energy women put into childcare. Now if women put more effort into children simply because they find raising children more rewarding (relative to men) the fact more women than men drop out to raise children is actually the desired outcome. It’s what would result from perfectly fair mutually beneficial trades. On the other hand if you think that the extra effort women put into childrearing isn’t the result of fair deals then the target should be on encouraging women to put less effort into childrearing, not making the unfair division of labor slightly less bad for women.

The only plausible argument (and that wasn’t mentioned) for gender inequity is the biological constraint that women face. Yet once again looked at from an appropriate economic point of view most women seem to on net value the experience of giving birth to children more than they dislike the constraint of having to reproduce early. Moreover, once these sorts of biological differences are taken into account the greater difficulty men have finding random sex or their shorter lifespans are unfairnesses that employers ought to take into account.

What then to explain this widespread convinction that it is a type of gender inequity not to offer support for having families? Well whenever we are frustrated we would like to find something unfair to blame it on and this case makes that particularly easy. The nature of parenting is to obscure relative differences in desire to childcare. No one comes out and places dollar value on offspring and our culture strongly discourages doing so thus it is difficult to emotionally appreciate the statistical differences in attitude towards children that account for the difference in childrearing effort. Moreover, our culture makes it easy to think of having kids as some kind of unquantifiable inherent good rather than something with different values to different people.