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Comment by nnfy | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be sexist, but I've wondered purely out of curiosity if the decline in wages is related at all to the entry of women into the work force. You've nearly doubled the number of wage seekers without necessarily increasing the supply of jobs.

I also wonder if two income earners are likely to earn more money than a single income earner for a given labor demand, considering overhead of employment, which I think has also increased over time (e.g. benefits). That couple explain some of wage stagnation, I'd bet.

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It's not sexist to suggest increasing labor supply due to women's entry into the workforce might factor into decreased prices. (Though women were always in the workforce to a greater extent than many 1950s nostalgics want to admit, just in lower prestige and lower wage jobs). What would be sexist would be to suggest that the solution is to exclude women from the labor force in the future.

The nostalgic like to treat idealized middle class as standard - ignoring everyone else and ignoring most problems society had.

I don't think you're being sexist. I think that's a very good question. If we roughly double the supply of labor, but have roughly the same number of jobs - what would happen? Wages would naturally go down. It's obviously not that simple, but there's good reason to believe that the entry of more women in to the labor force put downward pressure on wages.

What will be interesting is if the more recent trend of young men leaving the labor force will put upward pressure on wages, or if the jobs will just disappear.

One interesting observation that supports this is that women's labor rate participation had a slower ramp. Not a doubling over night. Following that, their wage equality has slowly been ramping, too. Both of those sound like gradual dilutive trends on the labor supply/wage graph.

I REALLY like the idea of looking the cumulative burden of employer-born costs of employees as the percentage of dual earners goes up.

my "bet" is that you'd find that the cost of those benefits have been growing at par with the women's labor force participation rate. Take a look at the charts in the Slate Star Codex post on Cost Disease, and overlay the growth in Women's labor force participation rate, and growing pay equality. The relationship is likely not perfectly causal, but there might be a meaningful effect in there.

Why would we have the same number of jobs? If more women are working who didn't before, they will need some way to commute to said job, to buy work clothes as well as leisure clothes, have more disposable income, etc.

Yep, that's why I said "it's obviously not that simple". I also described "downward pressure" on wages, not a cutting of wages in half.

> I've wondered purely out of curiosity if the decline in wages is related at all to the entry of women into the work force

Adding workers adds wealth per capita; it's not a zero-sum situation. Adding more workers to the economy grows the economy, by more than the salaries of those workers (if they cost more than they produced, they wouldn't be hired). Now all these women are producing value, they increase productivity, and they also can afford to buy things from you.

Consider it this way: Where would you rather open your store, a town where only the men work, or where both the men and the women work?

no, that is quite unlikely to have much explanatory power here. you're applying static thinking to a dynamic system. women have been integrating into the work force for the past 100 years. it wasn't an instantaneous doubling all of the sudden. consumption grew in lock-step with labor supply over those many years, so labor demand rose as well to meet the new consumer demand. a so-called virtuous cycle.

wage stagnation is tied to the growing wealth of the top 1%, not working women.

The number of jobs in the U.S. has been increasing pretty steadily. You can look for the years in question here: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001

That alone isn't enough data to answer the question. I arbitrarily picked 1962 as a starting point, and while the number of employees since then has approximately tripled, the population of US citizens has approximately doubled, in addition to the gradual entry of women into the work force. Additionally, the page you linked shows number of employees, and does not account for the possibility of multiple jobs effectively replacing the work of one person because of job market saturation, and an associated depression of wages.

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