More Reasons Jamie-Lynn Is a Bad Example

Reasons seem to be never ending for for Jammie-Lynn!

Emma

That's interesting about women in their thirties becoming wrapped up in their newborns. Here's a corollary thought: delaying childbirth probably won't help women a few decades from now.

Here's the idea. Suppose employers discriminate among women mostly on statistical grounds. The average woman is more likely to give birth, work fewer hours and fewer years, and be less able to travel. Therefore, employers will avoid hiring women (and if they do, pay them less).

But wait -- some women don't become mothers, or are able to be just as productive as men while they have children, and the employer loses by excluding these productive women. So they set up a probation period during the prime childbearing years to distinguish "productive" from "unproductive" women. Professional school, medical residency, the race for tenure -- a period of low pay and heavy workload in your 20's and early 30's. If a woman can survive that, she's productive enough to be worth a high salary.

The trouble is, women game the system by delaying childbirth -- and then, apparently, spending all their time on their babies. My guess is that employers will eventually get wise and continue extending the "probationary" period up until the biological limit of childbirth.

So we're all doomed, I guess.

I'm not in love with this paper- the "terminal" earnings they looked at were at age 34. She outright says in the paper that the findings should not be applied to women who had children after age 33.

I'd be much more impressed if she had actually looked back at earnings at retirement age and found the same results. The problem is that there are likely very few women of retirement age now who delayed motherhood until their 30s for career reasons.

Anecdotally, I would say that my experience in the workplace would support her findings that having children early in one's career delays advancement. I was once told unofficially that I had been passed over for a promotion because I had to pick up my kids from daycare at 6 pm and they wanted to avoid any potential conflicts with mandatory overtime. Also, business travel is much easier without children.

However, what I saw in my mid-late 30s was that women in that age group having children for the first time were much more likely to change their fixation from work to motherhood and quit work or go part time as a result. When you wait until 39 or 40 to have a baby, my observation is that it tends to be your end-all and be-all when it finally happens.

Meanwhile, women who had children early and were maybe a bit delayed in promotions as a result continued to plug along as their decision to stay in the workforce was usually cemented by this time.

The question to me is--- will the younger mothers who keep at it ever catch up? My guess is that they will, but it will be in their 40s when their children are mostly grown and the older mothers have small children. This study doesn't address that.

Will's argument that having kids causes a lot of bad stuff to happen is certainly true, but not enough stress has been laid on the point (which Will himself has repeatedly made) that all this just proves that people value things besides happiness. The younger you have children, the more of their lives you'll get to see and experience; the older they'll be when you die; and the more opportunity they'll have to know their grandparents at ages when child is not too young nor grandparent too old for the interaction to be meaningful. These kinds of things and others are very important to people. I doubt they influence measured "happiness" much, but I imagine they might well influence something like "contentment," the sense that one's life has been a full and satisfying arc from start to finish. I'd give up some lifetime earnings for that kind of contentment, even at some cost to day-to-day happiness.

Will, thanks for this post, those figures are staggering.

The more I read of this exchange, the more amazed I am at how much I really, really do not want children, at least for a very long time. My life would be completely different, and significantly worse, if I had had a child when the opportunity arose. I would be living with my parents, working retail or maybe clerical, and I would be stuck in a tiny room with a noisy sticky 18 month old every night. I would never be alone, I would never get to read or relax. And that's if I had had a kid after graduating college!

Instead I have a career I love, I support myself, and get to enjoy reading your blog posts in wonderful, peaceful privacy.

Other commenters who think there are currently limitations on life after having children but these can somehow be removed, either through men helping out more or government intervention or whatever--none of these things can give you back your own life, to have all to yourself, without an intruder on your time and space that you may end up not even liking all that much.

Waiting longer to have children is also a good way to combat over population.

While it is conventional wisdom that 2.1 children per couple stops population growth, this is actually only part of the story. The age at which a mother has the children also impacts population growth.

A woman who has a child at age 17 has the same impact on population as a woman who has twins at age 34. To stop over population, getting women to wait longer to have children can have just as large of impact as having them have fewer children.

More information on this here.

Right on John Doe. Will's numbers may be right but obviously they are a big problem that we should look to remedy. Women should be having their kids from age 20 - 35 for a myriad of reasons and if that hurts their career earnings substantially then we should figure out how to fix it. Much of it is probably cultural as men learn how to bear more of the brunt of having children and acting as HausFraus thus freeing up more time for their wives' careers.

But much like Will is defending his lifestyle choices with this long-running argument I'm probably doing the same. My wife had kids at 23, 25, and 27 and she makes 6 figures and finished in the top ten of her class at a top ten law school. Overall, having kids young may be a limitation as is, but there's no reason it has to be. And besides, there is no better time to take off a few months for a newborn then during graduate or professional school.

Well, that should give you pause -- rather than just accepting it as a fact of nature and urging women to wait, think more deeply for a second here. For women, the prime childbearing years are the late teens. Childbearing ability goes down after that, and by age 35, childbearing is way more dangerous -- fertility is down, risk of Down's syndrome is up, etc. There's something deeply wrong about a system that makes women choose between 1) having children at the biologically appropriate time, vs. 2) a heavy financial penalty.