Working girls

One could interpret today's feminist assumptions as reflecting the appetite of global capitalism for all talent, female and male, at the expense of the family. Certainly our economic arrangements offer precious little support to family formation. On the contrary, they erect barriers in its way. We all know by now that in most developed countries, birthrates are well below replacement level. Less recognised is the extensive change in incentives to have children.

In the past, adults had no tax-financed welfare state to depend on. Their families were their social insurance policies: children paid.

Today, they expect the state to help out, regardless of whether they have six children or none. The benefits we get are completely unrelated to whether we contribute a future productive member to the economy. Moreover, our labour market, with its greater gender equality, makes childbearing a very expensive prospect for successful professionals.

Rearing a healthy, balanced child requires intensive attention and large amounts of time, and is not something that technical progress is going to alter. The price of that time is especially high for high-earning, busy elite parents, female or male. If they give up or cut down on work, the opportunity cost in terms of income forgone and careers stalled is far greater than for an unskilled 16-year-old school-leaver.

In addition, elite children are expensive. Children are dependent for longer, high-quality child care is costly and formal education has become increasingly important as the route to success. Parents know this, and it explains why the professional classes devote so much money and attention to schooling.

The financial disincentives to child-bearing have become so high for upper-middle income families that the puzzle is not why professional women have so few children but why they have any at all. American economist Shirley Burggraf observes: "No society until recent times has expected love alone to support the family enterprise. To put it another way, parental love has never cost so much."

Personal fulfilment for both sexes is increasingly evaluated in economic terms. Yet we still rely on traditional values and emotions to produce the next generation. It is fortunate that children are so intrinsically rewarding or our birthrate would be lower still.

The hard economics tells us that professional women will have to give up most if they have children and so will be least inclined to do so. "The rich get richer and the poor have children" still applies, but this time it is women specifically that we are talking about. There is no reason to believe that teenage and uneducated mothers are any less loving and devoted than others. But there is plenty of evidence that their children are likely to be relatively unproductive future citizens, less skilled in their turn and more likely to experience unemployment.

There is a very strong inverse relationship between education and childbearing. The occupational emancipation of women may create intransigent problems for the future of our societies. Shirley Buggraf’s view is that the tension between the modern workplace and family wellbeing is real and irresolvable so long as our societies place no financial value on the activities that take place within the home - and that feminists and economists share the blame. For the feminist, unpaid home-based activity is labour performed under the lash of patriarchy. For the economist, unpaid work does not contribute to gross national product and so does not exist.

There are negative economic consequences of any barriers to female participation in the work force and of losing half the country's best brains to the kitchen sink. I am in no hurry to go back there myself. But it is striking how little anyone mentions, let alone tries to quantify, the offsetting losses (or social externalities) when women choose work over family.

Women today are no more homogeneous a group than men, and the service ethic that traditionally supported civil society and public service has weakened. Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation, yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from marriage or childbearing. The repercussions for our futures are enormous and we should at least recognise this fact.