While I think there are unnecessery harms caused by inflexible expectations for academics and by insufficient societal acceptance of male caregivers I’m uncertain that this amounts to gender inequity and totally unconvinced that gender fairness requires universities to redress the problem. After all while we have a societal obligation to eliminate the biases causing women to be paid less for the same work¹ (and thus get less stuff per unit work) it doesn’t follow that gender fairness requires apple to charge women less for a computer. But let’s save the deep theoretical questions about the nature of inequity and fairness for another post and assume for the moment that: the statistically greater career cost children impose on academic women demonstrates a gender inequity that universities have a particular² responsibility to address. Does this provide an argument for the university to subsidize or provide free child care?

There is a temptation to view things like subsidized child care, health insurance for dependents or free health club memberships purely as positive contributions to the beneficiaries. When the benefits of a policy are concrete and easy to see while the harms are diffuse and widely shared it’s hard to give the policies costs fair consideration. Much to our detriment in the legislative process. So for the moment let’s assume there are no externalities, i.e., in the absence of university subsidized child care the day care would still be housed in the same location, the same people would make use of it and the only difference is whether they pay for the child care out of their own pockets or the university covers (part of) the cost. In this case subsidies for child care are a pure transfer from the people without children (or who don’t use child care) to the people with children.

Now some of the people who don’t use child care are the male academics whose wives stay at home. But in my experience few academics still marry women willing to stay at home the whole seven years until their kids start school and even then sometimes their wives may be busy. Thus this is primarily a transfer payment from the university employees who don’t have children to those who do have children. But the very problem we were trying to redress was that succesful female academics are much less likely than their male counterparts to have children. The article I discussed yesterday cited the figure that 70% of men with tenure are married with children while only 44% of women. Thus on net subsidizing child care is likely to take money out of the pockets of female academics and place it in the pockets of male academics.

Now maybe free child care would increase the number of female academics with children enough that it would be a net transfer from male academics to female ones. Heck, maybe social factors even mean that male academics would take advantage of child care services at such a low rate that it would be a net transfer to female academics without any shift in the numbers. However, these are tough empirical questions that require hard data and don’t dispute the central point that this isn’t a well thought out way to address the supposed inequity.

Ultimately, if the goal was for the university to redress the inequity created by the uneven division of child raising duties between the sexes no program that doesn’t compensate female academics who choose to give up having kids should be considered. Moreover, the benefits that a daycare can provide are limited parents still need to take care of the children at home. If the goal was either to redress an unfairness or to stem the loss of women in academia wouldn’t a strictly better solution be to pay women more than men? This would capture both the women who gave up kids and those who didn’t and let them use the money to pay for child care or hire a maid to clean up after the kid or whatever.

It’s considerations like this that make me unable to escape the conclusion that the fairness based demands for child care have more to do with emotional wants than any compelling policy analysis. The fact that people will support subsidizing child care but are unlikely to support direct cash payments suggests a fundamental incoherence that is better explained in terms of emotional salience than by theoretical considerations. I speculate that the demand for subsidized child care arises because female academics find the tension between academic success and raising their children frustrating and feel it’s unfair they have to make a choice when they see men getting to have both. Since the cost of child care is a salient obstacle to the ‘fair’ outcome it is understandable that people would assume the lack of free child care is unfair. However, the fact that the beneficiaries don’t line up with the supposed victims of unfairness and the lack of a sound theoretical principle that picks out this agent (the university) and this fix (free child care) suggest that emotional salience and valid moral principles diverge in this case.

Note that I fully believe the university should act to help parents when it is doing more than making transfers from non-parents to parents. For instance I think the university should help avoid the inefficiency and difficulties of finding nearby daycare by creating on campus childcare. It should just charge the users of the facility what it costs them to run it. I also think universities should offer special loans to graduate student families to pay for that child care they don’t need to pay back until they are earning more money (in general it should offer more of these loans to grad students for other reasons too but I suspect families are good credit risks). There are lots of good reasons for many of these policies. However, the correct arguments for many of these policies will be data heavy analysisses comparing relative costs and benefits not outrage inspiring calls for gender fairness.