We’ve been subjected to half a century or more of gibberish on the matter of women and work. The conventional line is that the workplace is dominated by the patriarchy that discriminates against women just because they are women. This creates a “glass ceiling” that keeps having to be shattered in profession after profession. In this story, men are the bad guys, and women in the office always represent liberation from home imprisonment.
The story was always ridiculous—essentially a reframing of the Marxian story—but new trends are unraveling it. It seems that, in the post-lockdown world, women are less willing to go back to the office. Men, on the other hand, are required to go back as a condition of professional advancement.
“The difference between male and female remote-work rates is currently about 3.3 percentage points. This has doubled since 2022.”
The story behind the data will be familiar to you. When the lockdowns came, everything closed, and all workers were sent home. Child care was at an end. The schools shut too, and the kids were home. Someone in the household was responsible for education. That led to a nationwide upheaval against the woke curriculum. Once parents discovered what was going on, they said, “No more.”
At the same time, the household discovered what Adam Smith called the division of labor. The mom took care of the education while juggling online work, while the dad was more focused on keeping the income rolling in and saving his career for the sake of the family. Moms also discovered that they rather liked being at home.
This went on for the better part of a year or two, when offices started pressuring people to come back. Meanwhile, moms discovered that they had adjusted to domestic life. There were groceries to buy, laundry to do, household chores galore, and she had just gotten the place functioning in ways that had not been true for years. Some of them even started homeschooling, so going back to the office was out of the question.
This is why more men than women have returned to the office. It’s not because women have discovered that domestic servitude was better than office liberation. It’s because they discovered that the overall household functions better when women are the primary caretakers of household matters, while men found their value in job protection through in-office work.
The big lie was thereby exposed. Men/husbands/fathers are different from women/wives/mothers. They have different specializations, and they work together as a unit, with each partner doing what he or she is most suited to do and chooses to do in the interest of the whole.
The big difference between the sexes was always left out of modern ideological bromides. Women bear children and are uniquely suited to care for them, while the father is uniquely suited to protect and provide the material means for the family. That is a pattern that should be obvious and certainly not be considered unsayable.
Let’s assume that men and women can do each other’s jobs. Let’s even go further: One of these people can do everything the other can do but better. There are only a limited number of hours in the day, and everyone has to focus on the one set of things he or she can do best, leaving the other things to be achieved by the other party. The division of labor is a gain for both.
This is the very essence of Adam Smith’s theory. It is the basis of wealth creation, in his view. The more cooperation we get of this sort across the community, the nation, and the world, the better off we will all be. We must all pursue our comparative advantage, even if we possess an absolute advantage in every task.
This turns out to apply to the household also, which is why, typically in the past, mothers have primarily focused on domestic life, and dads have focused on at-the-office business life. In saying that, I’m merely stating the facts of the case. I’m not unenlightened or deprecating one or the other party to the exchange. I’m merely observing that it has usually always been the case.
Statistics from gendered work habits in the 1910s and 1920s—the very beginning of urbanization and the end of the agricultural life for most—tell the whole story. It was typical that women worked before marriage. U.S. Census data indicate that in 1920, about 23 percent of women aged 14 and older were in the labor force, with higher participation among single women (about 40 percent for those aged 20 to 24) compared with married women (less than 10 percent).
This was a pattern, and it held long ago, long before we were hectored about sexual equality. Young women were schoolteachers, nurses, telephone operators, secretaries, nannies, and laundresses while single. When they got married, they left the workforce to have children and raise them and take care of household matters. As children left the nest, they made their way into society and then into other forms of volunteer work in the community and sometimes back into remunerative employment.
Note that there was no systematic “discrimination” against women as a dominant cultural pattern, at least not after the 1880s or so in the United States. They could work if they chose to. Crucially for this evolved (not imposed) system, one income took care of the family finances. This is something most people cannot fathom today or would not tolerate because of expectations.
In the 1970s, and even dating back earlier, the whole pattern came to be denounced as unfeminist and despotic. Men were named as the enemy. They were keeping women from realizing their potential as pants-wearing office executives. Most people have come to accept this version of history.
In the late 1970s, there was a terrible inflation that ruined household finances. Women and moms were pushed into becoming wage earners who paid taxes. The pressure for them to do so came mostly from household economics. It was the only path to continue the trajectory of rising prosperity. Sure enough, by 1985, it became more typical than not for a mom with nonadult children to have an office job. This was called liberation. It was anything but, as all women who have gone through this know with certainty.
This has been the situation for decades, as prevailing cultural tropes deprecated “stay-at-home moms” and celebrated women bosses. We saw it everywhere in movies, TV, and the major news. “Trad wives” were considered reactionary and not with the times.
None of this was sustainable. It clearly goes against the principle of the division of labor. It also mischaracterizes wage earning at the office as some kind of liberation. It further leads to dependency on public schools, child care, summer camps, and more things to buy with the household income. It turned out to be less emancipation than a rat race in which no one finally wins.
All of this strikes me as a good thing. One wishes it had not taken such a brutal upheaval as lockdowns to cause people to rethink the dominant patterns and rediscover the division of labor, but that is where we are. Nothing in the future will be the same as it has been for many decades.
