Since Donald Trump regained the White House, news consumers have been inundated with stories about “pronatalism”—the ideology and movement gaining ground on the right that views falling birth rates as an existential crisis and encourages families to have more children. Trump has called himself the “fertilization president”; his ex-henchman Elon Musk has 14 children (give or take); and Vice President J. D. Vance has called for more children to be born and derided childless women. Because some of the movement’s loudest and most-covered champions are staunch conservatives with clear, if only sometimes overtly stated, ambitions to restore traditional gender roles, or even advance eugenics, many progressives’ initial reaction has been to consider the movement creepy and distasteful. Others have expressed concern that it will lead to the walking back of women’s rights. Yet a current of curiosity has crept into left-of-center media as people wrestle with what dramatic depopulation would really mean for standards of living across the globe. Vox published a story on pronatalism in May with the subtitle “Don’t let polarization distract you from one of the most important issues the world faces.” A month later, The New York Times ran a feature on the subject, “The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate.” 

A new entry into this conversation is Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s After the Spike. Spears and Geruso, both economists at the University of Texas at Austin, make the case that we should all be concerned about population decline as an existential threat. They contrast “two futures”: one in which global population peaks at 10 billion about 60 years from now and then stabilizes; and another in which it begins to fall, shrinking to 2 billion—the same as in 1927—within the next three centuries. Unless something changes, the authors contend, the second scenario is more likely. In such a world, they warn, standards of living will stagnate; fewer people means fewer innovations to improve our quality of life, from music to coffee to vaccines. More gravely, they claim, less innovation and fewer resources would cripple humanity’s ability to tackle major challenges, whether developing climate solutions or deflecting an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.

Spears and Geruso’s second scenario can sound alarmist. The first two chapters of their book lay out widely acknowledged facts. The birth rate is already below replacement rate in more countries than not. Further, as countries get richer, their birth rates go down; population decline will not be contained to currently wealthy, whiter countries. Nonetheless, not everyone sees this leading to catastrophe. The UN, for example, agrees that there is an 80 percent chance that the world population will peak in this century, but predicts that the peak will be followed by a “gradual decline,” not a crash.

Still, quibbling about the speed of population decline risks missing Spears and Geruso’s central point: Concern about shrinking numbers need not imply conservative views on gender roles, reproductive freedom, or indifference to climate change. (Geruso, after all, served on Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.) They know that persuading progressives is an uphill climb, which is why, after establishing the demographic facts, they immediately turn to dismantling the case against population growth. This early section, “The Case Against People,” tackles fears that more humans would worsen climate change, undermine women’s equality, or simply condemn children to suffering. The following section, “The Case for People,” flips the script: More people, the authors argue, means more creativity and innovation, and thus a greater capacity to solve problems large and small. They also advance an ethical claim: Future people “have a stake that counts,” and we should believe that they want to exist and that their lives will “have value.” The book ends by dismissing the usual policy levers—cash incentives and coercion—as either ineffective or immoral, and calls for new thinking on how to avert a demographic collapse. 

Spears and Geruso’s choice to rebut their critics before making their own case is unusual but effective. Their climate chapter, in particular, forces readers to confront a basic reality: The timelines for climate change and population decline don’t match. Barring something drastic, the global population will keep rising for the next 50-some years—well past the deadline for cutting emissions to avoid the worst climate scenarios. Depopulation half a century from now will not save us.

A chapter titled “Population Starts in Other People’s Bodies”—true enough, though a little glib coming from two men—argues that fertility need not decline further for gender equality to advance. A fertility rate around two, they contend, is compatible with women’s equity. They note that among countries with rates between one and two, the gender pay gap shows no correlation with birth rates. And in the U.S., from 1975 to 2010, when fertility stagnated, the pay gap narrowed significantly. Their conclusion is that stabilization and feminism can coexist—if men simply help more at home. “The clearest reason why stabilization need not be bad for women,” they write, “is that men could and should do more parenting and housework, across the many years it takes to raise a child.” But optimism alone won’t get men to change their behavior. What’s missing is policy to push them toward it.

Leaning on optimism is the through line of the book. “Progress happens wherever people are solving problems,” Spears and Geruso write, and they take this faith to its limit. The existence of more people, in their view, means more ideas, more discoveries, more resources. Depopulation, then, would be disastrous, choking off the innovations needed to tackle “fixed-cost” threats like climate change (or a killer asteroid). Their belief that sheer numbers will generate solutions to humanity’s gravest challenges is far more convincing than their suggestion that numbers alone  will mean that future men will cook dinner for their family. Men have begun to do more unpaid care work over the past few decades, but significant disparities remain stubbornly sticky. Women with children under six, for example, spend a third more time on child care each day than their male counterparts. While innovation has made it easier to recycle and drive an electric car, it has not made it easier to leave work in the middle of the day and pick up your sick kid from school. We need policy solutions that help turn optimism into reality.

Spears and Geruso have little to suggest. They can tell us with certainty that governments’ efforts at addressing population decline (or population growth) have never significantly moved the needle. Plans for government control aren’t just immoral, they’re also failures. The authors write, “Attempting to force fertility has influenced birth rates, especially over the short term, but has never actually had enough power and leverage to shove the world on or off the path of depopulation.” Likewise, the solution often promoted by progressives dabbling in natalism—public spending to make parenting easier—hasn’t seemed able to reverse the general trend. Denmark and Sweden, for example, both spend double what the U.S. does relative to GDP on family benefits and still have lower birth rates. Notably, the Trump administration’s proposals so far include small gestures at money and larger moves to limit reproductive choice, including reserving scholarships for people who are married or have children, “baby bonus” grants to new mothers, and restrictions on abortion paired with government education programs focused on fertility. Spears and Geruso would say none of these are likely to work. 

While the authors are clear that they are short on solutions, they do advance an interesting theory about the decline in global population: opportunity cost. People often claim they aren’t having as many children as they want to because they can’t afford them. This is a tempting explanation, especially in the U.S., where the cost of child care is too expensive for many families. Spears and Geruso, however, show that the decline in birth rates holds across states even as the cost of children—child care, housing, and so on—varies significantly. Why, then, are people telling us that kids are too expensive? The authors argue that they are saying that they have to give up too much to have children—not just money, but opportunities. As our choices about how to spend our time and make money and meaning in our lives have expanded, the opportunity cost of having a child has gone up. “A better world with better options makes parenting worse by comparison,” Spears and Geruso write.

If we are going to answer the authors’ call to find policy solutions, looking for ways to make parenting a better option seems like a good place to start. Money can help, but it’s insufficient; time is necessary, too. How do we make it easier for parents to leave work when their kid is sick without fearing the loss of either their next paycheck or essential opportunities? How do we support parents so they don’t have to choose between delaying having children and having a career? How do we get men to do more work at home? 

That final question is not just about feminist principles. Recent research from the Nobel Prize–winning economist Claudia Goldin suggests that more equitable distributions of caregiving within families might be essential to increasing fertility rates. Goldin found that the countries with the lowest fertility rates are ones that experienced the most rapid GNP growth. Opportunities opened up for women, but men’s attitudes had not shifted, and they remained unwilling to increase their share of housework and care duties. The ensuing conflicts—extreme versions of the stubborn gender disparities in the U.S.—led to a sharp decline in birth rates. The division of work at home appears to be significant to people’s fertility choices. 

These insights point toward a progressive agenda the book itself only gestures at: lowering the opportunity cost of children by giving parents more time. This means policies that let people leave and reenter the workforce more easily, that redesign careers so advancement doesn’t hinge on never stepping away, and that actively push for more equal divisions of care. Research needs to be done on what this kind of agenda could look like in the U.S. 

There are international models, among them Tokyo’s four-day workweek for municipal employees, and Iceland’s near-universal 36-hour week and its parental leave policy that assigns equal time (six months) to each parent. It is too early to know if Japan’s plan, rolled out this spring, will raise birth rates, as it is intended to do. Early studies from Iceland show not just happier families but also men spending significantly more time on child care and housework. And Iceland’s birth rate, while still below two, has remained higher than the rate in other Nordic countries.

Just as we should be using international comparisons of workweek and leave policies to learn about reducing opportunity costs by redistributing time, we can also compare the experience of different career paths to lead us to policy solutions. More than a century of gendered job segregation has also meant that careers traditionally dominated by women have developed career paths where the opportunity cost of children is lower. Take, for example, teaching and nursing, the two most common occupations for women today. Both typically require post-secondary degrees, but the training and the job itself are significantly different from advanced-degree career paths historically dominated by men. These jobs include more flexibility about when to enter training, how schedules align with caregiving, and how to step in and out of the workforce. There is surprisingly little research comparing fertility rates across specific professions in the U.S. (although there is quite a bit on how fertility correlates to education levels), but one preliminary analysis suggests that rates may be higher in certain woman-dominated professions. More rigorous research on this subject could help us understand if adaptations that originally grew out of gendered inequality now offer models for reducing opportunity costs of having children across professions.

Spears and Geruso compare themselves to the “climate pioneers of the 1950s.” While they believe we are near the peak of the population spike, they know we are at the beginning of building the body of research to support stabilization. Whether or not you accept their unique blend of alarmism and optimism, it’s clear that the opportunity cost of children is currently too high. Research to support stabilization is a worthy cause, because we should all want a world where children are seen as an opportunity, not a cost.

The post Running Out of People appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The first two decades of this century held the promise of a steady—if slow—march toward greater gender equality. The Internet and social media gave a microphone to millions of formerly voiceless women all over the world. The #MeToo movement brought consequences to perpetrators of sexual harassment and violence. Nancy Pelosi won the Speaker’s chair and an unprecedented number of women are serving alongside her in Congress. The Democratic primary field had several qualified female contenders, and Joe Biden has promised to choose a woman as his vice president. Finally, and not insignificantly, Taylor Swift out-earned Kayne West last year by $35 million.

By all indicators, it seemed highly plausible that 2020 might be the long elusive Year of the Woman. Yet the kudzu-like grip of traditional expectations for women is so tightly wound round the neck of our culture that even the advances mentioned above will not kill the vine. Today, gender stereotypes are what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls Zombie Ideas: “Ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”

No wonder life is scary out there for women challenging the traditional stereotype of nurturing caregiver without professional ambition or creative inspiration of her own. Even after so much progress, women who behave outside the confines of expected gender roles, continue to be perceived and treated as deviant.

Take Elizabeth Warren for example. When she dropped out of the presidential race, she said issues of sexism and likeability were factors. In a New Hampshire poll, voters thought highly of her overall competence—67 percent—but her likability numbers were a dismal four percent. In other words, her competence was unattractive and off-putting, so she was pushed to the outside. Sadly, research and experience show that Elizabeth Warren is not alone.

A 2018 Ohio State study found that hiring managers preferred women of modest academic achievement to those who had top grades. That was because they thought the not-so-smart women would be nicer. Managers “not only gravitate toward women who are moderate achievers who are described as sociable and outgoing, but regard high-achieving women with much more skepticism,” the researchers said.

At the same time, a 2016 study in the Psychology of Women Quarterly discovered that gender stereotypes remained constant between 1983 and 2014, despite impressive gains for women over the past forty years. Women are still expected to be passive, suited more for caring roles than for leadership, and primarily concerned with the welfare of others. Shockingly, the survey found that expectations that women will behave in these narrow, constricted ways are actually growing stronger. Other research has more or less confirmed this. A 2018 global online research study by Harvard University of more than 200,000 participants came to similar conclusions.

Worse yet, the COVID-19 pandemic will most likely accelerate these trends. An ongoing study by researchers in the U.S. and Germany finds that the crisis is likely to make inequities worse, “as more women than men will be strongly affected by the rise in child-care needs.”

When a family with school-aged children faces the reality of closed schools, the mother is likely to assume the bulk of childcare because, as the data overwhelmingly shows, she most likely earns less than her husband. In many marriages, her paying job will be the expendable one. That will mean thousands of women losing potential earnings and disrupting their career progression; many will drop out of the labor force entirely.

So, why are these gender paradigms so strong? And why do they hold on so relentlessly?

As Time reports: “In almost every society, from Baltimore to Beijing, boys are told from a young age to go outside and have adventures, while young girls are encouraged to stay home and do chores.” These findings come from a 2017 six-year study of 10- to 14-year-olds and their parents in 15 countries.

Early adventures give boys a sense of freedom and power that they don’t associate with girls. In later years, this power can morph into male dominance in the workplace. That is the way it has been for decades now. And as we know, once a group has power, it rarely surrenders without a fight. Up until now, the fight has been on legal grounds, andwomen have won many anti-discrimination battles in society and the workplace. But we haven’t yet fully won the battle of breaking down the stereotypes that led to such discrimination in the first place.

In today’s world, young women are in a Catch-22. They are caught between the progressive voices urging them to live authentic lives, and the deeply entrenched forces determined to push them back to traditional roles. The “Please Others” imperative is a huge ball and chain dragging down the dreams of girls and women. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg sees this issue as the major force holding women back as they try to rise. She writes, “As a man gets more successful, he is better liked by men and women, and as a woman gets more successful, she is less liked by men and women.”

Many men are champions of women and support their advancement. Yet even those men sometimes inadvertently slide back into traditional mores. Malcolm Gladwell says they are in the grip of what behavioral scientists call “moral licensing.” As the author of Blink describes: “When a favored majority group performs an act of generosity toward an outsider, it doesn’t necessarily signal that more acts of generosity are coming. Sometimes it just gives them license to then go back to their old ways.”

How, then, can young women pursue their dreams without second guessing themselves? So far, our efforts to counter harmful gender stereotypes have been scattered, not given high priority and have not kept up with the newest research. We need a new approach, especially as the pandemic puts this issue on the back burner.  

First, we need to address the problem from the root. We need to break the strangle-hold of one-size fits all gender stereotypes for toddlers and young children. Then, we need to broadly recognize that traits are not all innate; most are learned and developed. As a society, we need to celebrate the girl who takes risks, dares to follow her interests, and takes her cues from her passions. Luckily, there are a set of policies we can embrace to help us with this task. They include:

• Eliminating the “Gender Gap.” Women employed full-time had to work three months into 2020 to earn what men made in 2019. Women earn 82 cents for every dollar that men make. Black women have it worse, making only 62 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
• Repairing the “Broken Rung.” Females often stall out in entry level jobs, whereas “men hold 62 percent of manager-level positions. Women hold just 38 percent of them.
• Getting rid of the “Motherhood Penalty.” Mothers who work do less well financially than both non-mothers and men, the Harvard Business Review has reported.Mothers are perceived as “less committed to their jobs, less dependable, less authoritative, more emotional, and more irrational” than non-mothers. Disturbingly, men who have children get a substantial “Fatherhood Bonus” in wages because they are perceived as stable and committed to work.

But that’s not all. It will take a calibrated and well-coordinated effort among policymakers, activists, and scholars to think of ways we can reverse the gender stereotypes profoundly embedded into everyday American life.

If we want today’s young girls to take the Nancy Pelosis and Elizabeth Warrens of the world as real role models, we must stop treating high-achieving women as outliers. We must see them as they are—people who have realized their own potential. Otherwise, the so-called Year of the Woman will remain out of reach.

The post Will It Ever Really Be the Year of the Woman? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg may well be the most media savvy Supreme Court justice in American history, the only one to truly become a cultural icon. From the best-selling 2015 book, The Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to Kate McKinnon’s frenzied and kinetic Saturday Night Live impersonation of her, to a CNN documentary that billed itself “an intimate portrait of an unlikely rock star,” Ginsburg has penetrated the public consciousness in ways no other justice has.

Fitting then that Hollywood has now decided to immortalize her in a film “inspired by true events.” On the Basis of Sex—which was released in select cities in December but hits all theaters this Friday—follows a 39-year-old Ginsberg (Felicity Jones) arguing a 1972 tax case that challenged the constitutionality of a single man being denied a dependent-care tax deduction simply because he was a single man. (The deduction was allowed only to women, widowers, and divorced men.)

Written by Daniel Stiepleman and directed by Mimi Leder, the film tries to be a testament to Ginsburg’s trailblazing feminism, exemplified by her winning a case that sought to eradicate gender discrimination–against men. Regrettably, the filmmakers seem so enamored with wanting to make an inspiring Hollywood feature that, in the process, they actually dumbed down the subject they wanted to lionize.

On the Basis of Sex begins in the 1950s, with a sea of young white men in gray flannel suits entering the storied halls of Harvard Law School. There are only a few young women, one of whom happens to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Already married, the Brooklyn native must deal with male indifference, a cancer-stricken husband, and a baby daughter all while pursuing a legal education.

Ginsburg is full of enthusiasm for the law and the possibility of using her skills as an intelligent, capable, and competent woman. Unfortunately, the 1950s doesn’t have much use for women of her caliber. While a biography would painstakingly detail the many professional rejections she incurred as a woman, despite graduating from Cornell at the top of her class, On the Basis of Sex short circuits this chapter of her life. To its credit, the film doesn’t fall into the biopic trap of going from the beginning of its subject’s life to the end; it picks an event around which it can tell story.

Early on, Ginsburg appears in the office of a seemingly sympathetic potential employer, but he says he can’t offer her a position: this would evidently set off a panic from suspicious wives of the firm’s associates, who would view her as a marital threat. Realizing that her options are limited, Ginsburg takes a job as a professor at Rutgers Law School.

When the 1970s roll around, American campuses are hotbeds of revolt and dissension. Ginsburg’s snarky daughter Jane (Cailee Spaeny) finds her mom too accommodating and not radical enough for the times. At one point, Jane mocks her mother for preparing for another one of Martin’s firm’s cocktail parties. Surely, a woman of her legal ability can’t be content with playing a supporting role while her husband rises the ranks of a major law firm.

Ginsburg finally gets her chance to break out when Martin (Armie Hammer) brings her a tax case. “I don’t read tax cases,” she tells him. Not long after, she’s representing the plaintiff in Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Her client, Charles Moritz, was denied a deduction for expenses used taking care of his ailing mother. Because he had never married, he was ineligible under the tax code.

The film dramatizes Ginsburg’s struggle to win the case, even though she had never before litigated anything, much less make an oral argument before an appellate court. Despite the support she receives from her husband, who is co-counsel, and the assistance from an obnoxious ACLU attorney (Justin Theroux), Ginsburg struggles to find the right tone and pertinent argument before the Tenth Circuit panel of three male judges.

Legal dramas are usually resolved with a big moment in which the truth is revealed and justice rolls down. On the Basis of Sex does not transcend this impulse. RBG eventually finds her mojo, so to speak, when standing up to the government’s counsel, who accuses the Ginsburgs of manipulating their client to pursue a “radical social agenda.” After some initial blunders, Ginsberg rises to the occasion. Just as Martin is about to make his closing argument, she grabs his arm and assertively tells him, “Babe, I got this.” Of course, she does. She’s RBG.

The problem, however, is that this kind of depiction seems more fitting for the Hallmark channel. Moritz was, indeed, a groundbreaking case, but its significance is reduced by a Hollywood formula deigned to generate a feel-good outcome.

On the Basis of Sex is not a bad film, per se, but merely an unimaginative one.

The post Laborious RBG appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I don’t know who in the Trump transition team is behind the inquiries that are being made of various cabinet agencies. We just got over the controversy at the Energy Department over efforts to identify officials who work on climate change and now the State Department is absolutely freaking out that they’ve been compelled to turn over information on people who work on “gender-related staffing, programming, and funding.” More specifically, the inquiry demanded that “each office should include information on all existing programs and activities that ‘promote gender equality, such as ending gender-based violence, promoting women’s participation in economic and political spheres, entrepreneurship, etc.’”

It’s true that this inquiry could have an innocent explanation, like the transition team is looking to promote gender equality and help women excel at entrepreneurship, but I’m not betting on it.

It seems like these inquiries are designed to give the new administration a head start on purging government agencies of employees who believe in climate science or empowering and protecting women.

Despite that ambiguity, fears spread quickly Wednesday throughout State Department headquarters that the incoming Trump administration might use this information to single out both political appointees and career officials who worked on these programs.

“These types of requests send a cold chill through the Department and career diplomats dedicated to their work and service to the country,” a different State Department official told me. “It’s devastating to morale.”

I’ve got news for the State Department. They haven’t yet begun to understand what a devastating blow to morale looks like.

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