A girl who attends a school with classmates whose mothers work is more likely to be in the workforce when she has a child herself than a girl who grows up in local circles where most mothers stay at home, Cornell researchers have found.
“Role models pull girls in different directions in adolescence, a period when preferences are formed, when they decide what to do in their life,” said Eleonora Patacchini, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “When they decide whether to return to work after having a child, they remember the mothers and fathers of their peers.”
Women trail men in the workforce largely because of the “child penalty” – women leaving work upon having a child and not returning. Social norms and culture influence a girls’ later decisions about participation in the work force; when she looked into precisely how, Patacchini, with doctoral student Giulia Olivero and Henrik Kleven, professor of economics at Princeton University, found that greater exposure to working moms at a very local level – the school – decreases the child penalty for girls. Meanwhile, exposure to working fathers increases the child penalty, a “striking” asymmetric effect, Patacchini said.
Girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers work are more likely to develop a gender-role ideal that reconciles career and motherhood, they conjecture, compared with girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers stay at home.
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It’s not about getting women to work (for others) but to help them be independent in their decisions. Societal pressures have forced most women to be dependent of men (which in itself goes hand in hand with patriarchal violence) as it likewise forced men to be in this detached breadwinner position. Women in relationships with traditional roles have suffered and still suffer immensely from domestic violence, financial dependency and many other problems. Saying “encourage people towards capitalism” makes it sound like you see women in traditional relationships to be somehow less trapped inside capitalistic pressures. If you’d study the history of capitalism and patriarchy a bit more you’d find that this whole concept of heterosexual monogamy and stay at home moms have been a capitalist invention in the first place. In this, women are a free labor force to do the reproductive work at home. So wanting to free women out of this dependent role is an anticapitalist undertaking. Maybe you didn’t think this through enough and should read up on a bit of feminist theory?
I think your point is valid that motherhood (and all household, care and reproductive work) is actual real work, too, and there is evidence that in heterosexual couples that identify themselves as “emancipated” the women actually do more work as in couples with traditional roles. This is because men in these “emancipated” relationships tend to not take responsibility and let their partner not only do reproductive work but also wage labor.
Imo what we can learn from this is that we do need to give women the independence to make their own decisions free of societal norms and pressures. But we also need to educate men to do their part and start actually taking responsibility and also do their fair share of reproductive and care work.
This is an excellent response, thank you.
I agree that much of feminist theory states that freeing women (and those of other genders or lack thereof) from being forced into such roles is a good thing, however it also states that letting women (and people of other genders or lack thereof) choose is also good which is where it gets a bit muddled sometimes as some may take that to mean “free to be oppressed” even though it means “free to take on caregiver roles without oppression”, so your point about educating men and (my own read) hopefully disintegrating patriarchy is well taken.
Thank you very much for helping me see it in another light as I did read it but interpreted it one way and didn’t see the choice and freedom from oppression angle rather than it seeming to suggest that people should all be working (outside of home caregiver roles) regardless of desires or circumstances.
Edit: All in all I agree with your assesment and do think that people should be free to choose without oppression, though a lot more could be done on scales both small and large to achieve this such as UBI and letting go of the idea that we all have to do things individually, as well as building up community and ensuring those physically close to us are alright, getting rid of the idea that it’s bad to interfere if people are being oppressed etc.
Glad you could something from my comment. Regarding your edit, I think I understand where you are coming from. If one looks at pop-feminism and big companies nowadays having “girl bosses” while simultaneously continuing to exploit people not caring about civil rights, sure it seems like fighting sexism is only a secondary aim after dismantling capitalism. You may want to have a look into intersectional movements then that teach us how intertwined various forms of oppression, environmental exploitation and capitalism are. You cannot dismantle without the other. Capitalism works by oppressing and exploiting people as well as natural resources. We shouldn’t argue about what comes first, because all of these struggles are connected. Movements of white, privileged people fighting for more civil rights tend throw others under the bus to gain more power in capitalist society. So do white socialist men fighting against capitalism while forgetting about oppressed people. We should try to work together, take others’ struggles seriously and fight for a world free of oppression and masters.