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I ask this as a general question, as someone with a passing interesting in history, but no formal training: how do we know that free time caused women to enter

I ask this as a general question, as someone with a passing interesting in history, but no formal training: how do we know that free time caused women to enter the workforce, rather than women entering the workforce gave them enough money to trade money for time in household work, thus craeting a housework automation economy? In history, things seem so... fuzzy[0]... that identifying the cause from effect seems so arbitrary. [0] More formally, we never really know the full history, we generally rely on unreliable/biased narrators, and we don't know what information we don't know.

wahern 9y ago
FWIW, my point isn't predicated on why women were able to enter the workforce. I was merely arguing against the claim that informal labor isn't reflected in nominal GDP. See my reply elsethread. IIRC, I first came across the claim about women disrupting the labor economy in one of Francis Fukuyama's books, probably either "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" (1995) or "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order" (1999). It's been awhile since I read it, however; but I've read many books since then and while I don't know if any other source I've personally read made such a straight-forward claim, I think the contention is largely accepted and, especially more recently, widely acknowledged that women entering the workforce (for w'ever reason) substantially suppressed the nominal wages of men.
sulam 9y ago
In general we can establish causality for socioeconomic theories using natural studies. For instance your question can be answered by comparing the timing of introduction of technology into the home and the rise of women in the workplace. You can ask people how much time they spend doing housework and compare to what people with technical alternatives spend. This is a relatively easy natural study since so much of the data was well collected at the time. Harder ones that are more recent ask things like whether or not raising the minimum wage increases unemployment. You’ll be able to find studies that used Seattle’s minimum wage law to determine the answer to that question. In the narrow case of women entering the work force, the biggest factor was the employers being willing (forced) to hire women because they were the only workers available quite suddenly. Women would have entered the work force in more substantial ways before that but they were perceived as taking jobs from men. WW2 changed all that. One reason they were able to keep working after the war is because they had money and the products were available to allow them to get the housework done in less time. It was a status symbol in the 50s (and probably still today) to have a very bored wife at home.

wahern 9y ago

FWIW, my point isn't predicated on why women were able to enter the workforce. I was merely arguing against the claim that informal labor isn't reflected in nominal GDP. See my reply elsethread. IIRC, I first came across the claim about women disrupting the labor economy in one of Francis Fukuyama's books, probably either "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" (1995) or "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order" (1999). It's been awhile since I read it, however; but I've read many books since then and while I don't know if any other source I've personally read made such a straight-forward claim, I think the contention is largely accepted and, especially more recently, widely acknowledged that women entering the workforce (for w'ever reason) substantially suppressed the nominal wages of men.

sulam 9y ago

In general we can establish causality for socioeconomic theories using natural studies. For instance your question can be answered by comparing the timing of introduction of technology into the home and the rise of women in the workplace. You can ask people how much time they spend doing housework and compare to what people with technical alternatives spend. This is a relatively easy natural study since so much of the data was well collected at the time. Harder ones that are more recent ask things like whether or not raising the minimum wage increases unemployment. You’ll be able to find studies that used Seattle’s minimum wage law to determine the answer to that question. In the narrow case of women entering the work force, the biggest factor was the employers being willing (forced) to hire women because they were the only workers available quite suddenly. Women would have entered the work force in more substantial ways before that but they were perceived as taking jobs from men. WW2 changed all that. One reason they were able to keep working after the war is because they had money and the products were available to allow them to get the housework done in less time. It was a status symbol in the 50s (and probably still today) to have a very bored wife at home.