Archive for June 15th, 2009

Affirmative action irritates me. It prohibits employers from making employment decisions based on productivity, which ultimately lowers productivity. Today I’ll focus mainly on women in the workplace and leave the racial politics outside.

There is nothing really funny that follows, just political sorts of talk about women. If anyone takes it as being sexist then you’re silly.

For years women were passed over for promotion and I won’t deny that in earlier times there was some sexist impulses behind not hiring or promoting women. However it is always to the detriment of the employer if they hired a man lesser suited to the position than a woman more suited. While this may not be hugely obvious in every promotion, in most cases one employee or potential employee stands out only marginally above another.  Hiring a man who is only (lets invent some numbers here) 3% worse at the job than a woman might not cause drastic changes in productivity. However in aggregates a large company who continued to promoted the marginally less qualified would show lower long term growth. The employer may make a conscious decision that he does not like women and will not hire them, but this is to his detriment.

Why might an employer be sexist when faced with hiring or promoting a woman? It is possible that the employer has some social or psychological problem that simply causes him to hate women. Or likely it is because such a large number of women holding jobs outside the home is a fairly recent event. By recent I mean in the terms of the entirety of human history.

Women working in non-domestic jobs is a luxury. It is a sign of wealth; technological and economic advancement. Men were more suited to the rigorous labor in the past. Women had other duties around the home and with children who had to be raised. The maintaining of the household was a full time job but advancements in technology have created more free time for men and women. It no longer takes four hours to do the laundry, three for the dishes, three for cooking, two here, one there, and so on.

The domestic chores involved in maintaining a household are taken for granted in modern times. But in all times they were things that simply had to be accomplished. We must assume a few things here such as clean clothes being desirable, tasty meals being wanted, and not eating from the floor is positive. So to have clean clothes (even if we skip over the part about where the clothes come from) they must be washed. Now this is a quick and easy task compared to even a hundred years ago. Running water and soap have not always existed. Meat and bread did not always come in perfectly sized packages from the store. Even the flour to make the bread had to be made by hand. Ensuring these essentials was the full time job of a woman in most places.

I don’t suggest that women were trapped in their homes. Women still worked outdoors in the past to help men. But now we are no longer spending all our time on survival. Hours of a day devoted to these tasks are no longer necessary. Men and women have more free time to pursue other tasks. This is due to capital and technological improvements. The modern conveniences create time. Now that we live in a world of considerable luxury women work outside the home as equals.

As to the question of whether men truly are more suited to the rigorous jobs of the past there can be some debate. Whether you would rate the suitability on strength or dexterity there are always men and women who are better than the opposite sex at one thing or another.  But women are the only gender that can carry and nurse children. Small children cannot be raised while outside the home working. So due to division and specialization in labor, men naturally would be the choice for work outside the home because they have more time to devote to that task. Children were once considered an integral part of life and good to have, however this is not necessairly the case any more. So if we look outside a desire for procreation then maybe we can allocate the labor differently. However no “long-run” would exist in such a scenario since we would all be dead in the long run… But quite literally there would be no humanity.

Technology may change this in time, then the debate may open again.

comic from Bellen!