Some stayed at home to take care of the kids. Others upleveled and went for jobs that pay better wages. A bunch of people died as well, I wonder of this affected the job market.
I'd love to read a study on this specific topic.
the need to keep a high paying job (men being bread winners and all
Right, the study is useless if it doesn't say what they did instead - did they cross train and become successful lawyers, for example?
If you click through a couple of links to the Fortune article, it seems to say that most of them simply stopped working altogether. That's an option most people don't have. Presumably they had partners to support them, as you say.
But all those workers that have moved on - where have they gone? I can understand restaurant workers moving on for example, but that should mean they have filled positions elsewhere. It just doesn’t seem like the numbers add up. But your comment about women staying home to care for children might be it.
Yes. And if you read to the end of that section, you (a) discover that the changes were minimal "working hours dropping one percent for men, three percent for married women, and five percent for unmarried women" and (b) discover that the reason was "Mothers spent more time rearing newborns, and the educational impacts are regarded as a success. Students in these families showed higher test scores and lower dropout rates. There was also an increase in adults continuing education"
There’s also a theory that the larger proportion of women in the workplace post-1960s exacerbated this. By increasing the supply of employees, it drove down wages to a point where a single-income household is out of reach for most in the current structure. So even if they wanted to stay home, they can’t because their spouse isn’t likely to earn enough to support the household alone financially.
What are the demographics of those that dropped out of the work force? Didn't some UBI studies observe that while there are people that dropped out of the workforce, these people consisted of mothers that can now go back to child rearing or younger people that can now pursue an education?
It is strange that the top known factors for this are not even mentioned in this or other similar news stories. First, closing of schools caused large numbers of women to leave the workforce in order to care for children. Until schools are fully open and day care is available those women will probably not be going back to work. Second, all markets are cultivated things. Employers in the most troubled sectors have recently spent roughly a year and a half telling desperate workers they have nothing for them. Now that there are openings it should be no surprise that workers have moved on and have little interest in transitioning back.
All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on.
Same here. To be sure, those women (i.e. my grandmothers) were definitely hard working. Raising lots of children, without "modern" appliances like dishwashers etc. in the household. But the money that came from one income was enough.
> Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.
At least the worth that reaches the worker after taxes etc.
This was shown. When household incomes increased as women working became the norm, households had more to spend on housing, which meant house prices ballooned. Much of the rest of the money was taken by things like childcare, gardening, cleaners, etc.
This had the end result that those who want to stay at home can't, society is now based arround two decent income salaries.
I think what happened was that more and more women entered the workforce, either out of necessity or out of personal desire (I think largely the latter) and the market adjusted accordingly. Because the work pool roughly doubled, the wages decreased over time. Add to that the fact that one of the two largest expenses a family typically has, a car, doubled because both parents work, and also the fact that we generally live in houses that are larger and better equipped than the previous generations, and I think it makes sense that we have adjusted our lifestyles to using up the full capital we receive when both parents work.
There's a book I read recently that I thought did a good job looking into the demographic and social shifts associated with women having high workforce participation. It's 'XX Factor' by Alison Wolf, in case you're interested. She gives a convincing tour of some thorough data, but also makes it into a manageable narrative. She also did a decent Podcast interview on Econtalk, if you want a short version.
I'm not so sure a lot of women had the choice of being full-time mothers and have good living standards. My mother worked, and so did her mother, and both households required both parents working to make ends meet.
I'm also not sure there has been wage erosion. Since I've been alive, wages have only been going up. However, cost of living has also been going up, and at a faster rate than wages. So while I don't have any source to support my hunch, I'd guess the problem is that living is more expensive than it ever was, not that women entered the workforce.
And don't forget that a side-effect of the war was a drastic increase in inflation. A single-earner household often didn't cut it any more, even if one spouse wanted to stay home.
The women's movement also made it "not wierd" to want a job outside the home, and for some a badge of honor. It's hard to articulate exactly what that meant for women, but for my older sister, "not wierd" was being a teacher. For my wife, OTOH, being an attorney was "not wierd", and in fact past the point of being a meaningful badge of honor, it was just a job. We're talking a 10 year time span.
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And by "just a job" I don't mean to imply that discrimination against women completely disappeared overnight. I remember the day after a re-org, the new incoming manager walked into my neigbor's cube, my neighbor being a rather consistently excellent (female) engineer, and he said, abruptly: "I don't like women engineers.", turned and walked out. Those of us that overheard had a total WTF reaction to that. Luckily those dinosaurs are largely gone from the planet.
Another possible factor is that women who lose their job may be less likely to seek another. I've heard at least one anecdote already of a woman who lost her job and decided to just stay home for the time being.
It wasn’t their choice. Most women wanted to keep their jobs after the war and were refused rehire.[1] I would argue that the history of female employment demographics is highly complex and has a multitude of factors, with each factor constituting of many sub-factors. The study in this thread provides an excellent evidence of one behavior, but the amount of heuristics that feed into this behavior is up for massive debate and question, many of which are politically unattractive on both sides, resulting in dissatisfaction of any academic research into any one influencing factor and also any research into a holistic heuristic evaluation... by focusing on this example, you may be over-simplifying the behavior the study is representing.
Another factor I don't see talked about is the increase in women's participation in the workforce. When wages were higher it was common to only have one breadwinner in the family. Today women are more likely to get a job (or two), which is bound to depress wages. The perverse effect of lower wages is that families are forced to take on more jobs than they did before, which depresses wages further. Not sure if there is causation between women's participation and wage stagnation, but logically it seems possible that this would cause a downward spiral. The more wages suffer, the more jobs/hours/years people are forced to seek to work, the lower the wages.
I believe the hypothesis behind this is that women entering the workforce in large numbers disrupted the labor demand/supply equilibrium while also portending major changes to family structure and aggregate social dynamics.
I don't think its a very interesting hypothesis though. The increase was fairly gradual post-WWII [1]. It also seems like it probably points the causal arrow in the wrong direction. Women probably would not have entered the workforce in such broad numbers had economic conditions supported a single income earner per household.
Exactly. More people entering the labor force was only good for the owners and employers, it destroy the bargaining power of the actual workers. Add to that the fact that having two parents at work seriously harms the family, making it more difficult for their children to develop in healthy ways. This is the future we asked for. Given the statistics that say women only want to marry men who make more money than them, it seems to have done even more harm than we might imagine, because there are few women wanting men to stay home and fill the role certain ideologues claimed would be open to them.
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