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I think it's pretty uncontroversial that roughly doubling your labor force will result in substantial growth to the economy. For less extreme gender gaps than n
by TimPC 3y ago
I think it's pretty uncontroversial that roughly doubling your labor force will result in substantial growth to the economy. For less extreme gender gaps than not being allowed to work the growth is obviously less, but I think the same intuition/argument holds.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoNo? Thousands of HN users complain ad-nauseam, every week, that many types of jobs are of no value or even net negative. e.g. health insurance billing departments
- BurningFrog 3y agoBut how do women get out of the home and into the labor force? Historically, it's made possible by economic and technological development making running a home no longer a full time job, so women are able to take jobs. Countries that don't let women work in that stage are pretty rare (Saudi Arabia and a few others).
- TimPC 3y agoHistorically there has been some of both. Even in the west there have been substantial social factors that have delayed adoption and the labor force participation rate for women is much lower than that for men. Doubling is an exaggeration, at least if the long term stable point is nearly all of both genders working it clearly takes a lot longer than 100 years to get there. I'd argue that in more traditional cultures than the west the social factors that push women away from work are even more extreme. So it doesn't take a society outright banning it to prevent a lot of it. It takes social change to make it happen in many cases. I do agree the technological development is a precursor but that technology has been available for a long time now and shouldn't be the bottleneck in many cases.