Saturday, January 2, 2010

Women in the Workforce

From The Economist: "Women in the Workforce - Across the rich world more women are working than ever before. Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades."
The conventional wisdom presented in the following sentence has been sticking in my craw for sometime.
"A growing proportion of married women have also discovered that the only way they can preserve their households’ living standards is to join their husbands in the labour market." I submit the these women (and why not the couple?) are asking the wrong question. It shouldn't be, how do we maintain this standard of living, but is this standard of living necessary and what else are we sacrificing if we both choose to work?
Our current standards are out of whack. You like nice things? Fine. But are those nice things worth the cost of having little parental involvement in the rearing of children? No. I have a friend who is one of three siblings. He and his older brother benefited from having a stay-at-home parent - in their case, the mother. By his account, both performed exceptionally well in the their high school and university studies and have gone on to serve our country (one as a federal law enforcement office and the other as a military officer), and enjoy a modicum of "success." At any rate, one could reasonably argue that both have become solid citizens. The third, much younger, who has been reared by a day-care and a nanny, is described as being much different from the rest of the family and basically a nitwit, not nearly on the same trajectory as his older brothers. Correlation is not causation, but this is clearly not a one off scenario. Mother goes to work to maintain the aforementioned living standards and the offspring suffer and becomes that jack___ who doesn't return his grocery cart to the designated pen, among other social offenses.

Do I suggest that it should be the mother alone who remains at home? Absolutely not. Women in the workforce has become the norm and I believe it is good. Having them in workforce shouldn't mean that unless they stay at home, the child will remain neglected. Maybe the standard of living by which we measure, should be how well we rear our children ourselves, not in the accumulation of the stuff we think we need to do it. And the decision about who must decide not to work, shouldn't there be an equal shot of it being the man?

5 comments:

..... said...

Disclosure: I do not have children, yet.

Smoothfur said...

Your question hit the nail squarly on the head."Is this standard of living necessary?" This should be followed up with How much STUFF do they need. One can have a comfortable standard of living without surrendering to the God of accumulating STUFF.

Financial advisor Dave Ramsey sums it up very succinctly in his motto "If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else." Or another of his sayings, "The paid off mortgage replaces the BMW as the status symbol of today."

http://www.daveramsey.com/tools/beat-daves-plan/

Mudge said...

"I don't have digital
I don't have diddly squat
It's not having what you want
It's wanting what you've got"

- Sheryl Crow, "Soak Up the Sun"

"The Hammer" said...

You might be forgetting women had to enter the workforce in the late 60's just to maintain their lifestyle as a result of all the social spending (and taxes) LBJ gave us. It wasn't about DVRs and plasma TVs and iPhones; the mortgage had to be paid.

AZ said...

I agree with your point and wish to add this. A great number of women in the workforce (married and single mothers) work to provide an education and good future for their children, not in pursuit of luxury and greed. Unfortunately, they don't have the option to stay at home.

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