Why Women’s Wage Equality Has Killed The Marriage And Kids Market
Nothing comes without consequences, not even something as good as women achieving wage equality.
izusek, Tsekhmister | Canva Women getting wage equality has priced out many men and women from ever having a chance of getting married and having children. That statement, I admit, sounds very much like one a red pill influencer would make, which is especially crazy, seeing as I’m a feminist and have been all my life.
But fear not, I haven’t turned to the dark side, quite the opposite, what I’m going to highlight here is a serious problem that we have to fix, which is the mass inequality women getting wage equality has created — and no, before you think it, the solution is not women giving up wage equality.
Women getting wage equality has created inequality — and to fix the problem, we must understand how.
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Humans are a very unique species, and not just because of our technology or our ability to speak, but because we are a species where our men and women now directly compete with each other.
There are no other species on earth who behave this way. Yes, females compete with females, and males compete with males, but never males and females competing directly with each other, especially not ones who might want to mate with each other.
It makes sense why no species would adopt this behavior; it’s a risky endeavor mainly because it risks the males and females pushing each other out of the mating market and, by default, making it so only the most successful people can have offspring. In terms of why this happens, the best way to explain is by looking at the marriage market.
It’s well-known that married men earn more than everyone, and though there are several reasons, which I’ve talked about before, the primary is that men who earn more are more likely to marry. It makes sense why. If a woman wants marriage, she also typically wants children, which means she will want someone who can help her avoid the motherhood tax.
This is an important factor for understanding the unexpected side-effect of women getting wage equality. Here’s why. Though it’s popular to sell the idea that poverty leads to high birth rates because of a lack of education in the women and agricultural societies lead to high birth rates because of children providing such families a net positive in earnings, it’s not the actual truth.
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The actual truth is only one thing leads to population booms: when women feel they have nothing to lose from having children.
How History Works illustrated this concept brilliantly in a short documentary they made. Poverty, no poverty, men coming back from war, wealth, whatever, it doesn’t seem to matter, all that seems to matter is women’s feelings over potential losses.
If they feel they have nothing to lose, regardless of the circumstance, statistically speaking they will have lots of children, if they feel they have lots to lose, statistically speaking they will have none. Here is the thing though, women entering the external workplace and getting equal wages has created a situation where it is harder for them to avoid the motherhood tax.
If women are only competing with women, and men are only competing with men, then in a cross table, there will be a man and a woman at each rung of the ladder. This is why if you look at the old world, where women were all in the internal workforce and men the external, every man and woman got married.
Why would they not? Women were not competing for what they wanted men to have, men were not competing for what they wanted women to have, meaning every man could give a woman a net positive, and every woman could do the same for a man. Perfect for marriage, children, and happily ever afters.
However, in the modern world, the opposite is true, and it’s not just women competing with large numbers of men out of the marriage and children market, men are doing the same in return, and for a very good reason. We are no longer family units, we are all individuals.
We are so many individuals; technically, married couples are even in competition with each other. This is perhaps one reason divorce is so prominent and single mothers struggle so much. They are the easiest to push aside, as a study for wealth by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showed.
In terms of what I’m getting at, this competition is born through women entering the external workplace and gaining wage equality, which means paradoxically, even the motherhood tax is a byproduct of women entering the external workplace and gaining wage equality. I’m not joking about this; hear me out.
In a world of individuals — everyone is competition, which makes individual wealth the prime glory.
When we live in a world set up around families, and men bring one thing to the table, women another, the result is inevitable: no motherhood tax. How could there be? Men bring external wealth and women the babymaking and internal wealth, and neither can have the other without the other.
However, when we are individuals, and both men and women can bring both things to the table, the game changes.
This is why now if a woman wants to get married and have children, to avoid losing something, she must marry a man who can afford to provide for her, i.e., a high earner or be a high earner herself.
The same is true in reverse for a man, if a man wants to get married and have children, to avoid losing something, he must marry a high earner or someone he can afford to provide for — which means he must be a high earner himself.
This is the paradox women entering the external workplace and getting wage equality has created, by taking external wealth from men and getting it themselves, when women have children, they lose a large chunk of that wealth but the men can’t pick up the slack unless they are high earners.
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When this happens, goodbye goes marriage and children to all but high earners, which can be seen in the data.
For example, it’s well known that single women without children earn more than single men without children — single women without children typically have $65,000 in wealth versus $57,000 for their male counterparts.
If we consider that should a union be made between single men and women based on these levels of wealth, it would lead to a big lifestyle hit should they have children, things start to make sense.
After all, a big reason for single men’s lower levels of wealth is that the figures are heavily distorted from all the higher-earning men getting married. That means the lower wealth of single men shows that women are not selecting such men because of the lifestyle hit it may cause should they have children.
But it’s not just that way, the lower-earning men are vice versa, not selecting the similarly lower-earning women for the same reasons. This reality becomes even more apparent when it is considered that it’s also well-known that married men and women have the highest levels of wealth, the latter being an especially new thing, as a study by the Institute for Family Studies showed.
Something else that is important to acknowledge is that it’s also well-known that men and women with university degrees are more likely to be married, be successful, and have children. Some even argue that a large part of the earnings gap between married women and non-married women is based on education.
Women entering the external workplace and getting equal wages has brought so much good but it is time we started fixing the downsides it has created.
One thing that is becoming pretty clear is that successful women are more likely to get married, just as successful men are. It is becoming crystal clear that marriage and children are heading to a place where they are becoming affordable only to the successful.
In the end, this is the problem women competing with men over income and getting wage equality has created. A market where only the men who earn more than women, or the women who earn very high incomes, have enough to ensure that should a couple get married and have children, they won’t lose out.
Until we come up with a way to change that, women in the workplace and wage equality are unfortunately going to cause a lot of harm to large numbers of men and women, and in the most brutal place, the heart, which is a tragedy. No matter how good something is, it will always come with downsides.
Elicia Jane is a writer, therapist, mother to three children, and a former performer. She is a popular writer on the writing platform Medium.