Countries That Close Gender Gaps See Substantial Growth Returns | Hacker News Reader

Countries That Close Gender Gaps See Substantial Growth Returns

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25 pointsrbanffy21 comments

The biggest underutilisation of females in the labour force is in the military.

If either Russia or Ukraine were willing to conscript women at scale it could make a huge difference.

It would also make a big difference to their future demography. If a country kills off its young women then you can't birth the next generation.

Both Russia and Ukraine have abysmal demographic pyramids.

It’s horrible to say, but that only really applies for women under 40.

The average age of soldiers in Ukraine is 43 [1] so there’s likely an untapped pool of women aged 40-55 that could be used in the military without affecting future birth rates.

[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraines-average-soldier-...

Knowing Eastern European culture what's more likely to happen is male relatives will volunteer in stead of these women.

Either way, this is pretty grim thinking.

> The biggest underutilisation of females in the labour force is in the military

Bigger than strength-based manual labor?

Military: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/09/10/the-chang...

Construction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/434758/employment-within...

I'm not sure how those numbers differ in Ukraine or Russia, but here in the US your claim would not be true.

The correlation is clear, but what says it's not "Countries with substantial growth see closing gender gaps"?

I think it's pretty uncontroversial that roughly doubling your labor force will result in substantial growth to the economy. For less extreme gender gaps than not being allowed to work the growth is obviously less, but I think the same intuition/argument holds.

But how do women get out of the home and into the labor force?

Historically, it's made possible by economic and technological development making running a home no longer a full time job, so women are able to take jobs.

Countries that don't let women work in that stage are pretty rare (Saudi Arabia and a few others).

Historically there has been some of both. Even in the west there have been substantial social factors that have delayed adoption and the labor force participation rate for women is much lower than that for men. Doubling is an exaggeration, at least if the long term stable point is nearly all of both genders working it clearly takes a lot longer than 100 years to get there. I'd argue that in more traditional cultures than the west the social factors that push women away from work are even more extreme. So it doesn't take a society outright banning it to prevent a lot of it. It takes social change to make it happen in many cases. I do agree the technological development is a precursor but that technology has been available for a long time now and shouldn't be the bottleneck in many cases.

No?

Thousands of HN users complain ad-nauseam, every week, that many types of jobs are of no value or even net negative.

e.g. health insurance billing departments

The economic advantage of countries with higher labour force participation of women is predicate on countries with lower labour force participation having babies and those babies becoming immigrants, otherwise they will continuously shrink which as Japan makes evident will make growth just about impossible.

I was looking for something to quibble with in a correlation vs. causation kind of way, but it's not (as the title would suggest) a measurement of past results, but a call to action with some conjecture about how it could affect growth in the future.

And less kids!

Why would that lead to fewer kids?

it's very tough to say why, but the countries being referenced by this article as having improved the gender gap certainly have lower rates of reproduction. Whose to say good, bad, or why, but the correlation is present.

What about policies that aid the labor force participation of people that already have kids? Subsidized abundant childcare, for example, both lowers the cost of being a parent and makes it easier for parents to go back to work. Like, I get that the _gap reduction_ is correlated with lower birth rates, but presumably we have finer-grained data than that?

I can tell you that better childcare correlates with higher economic output just by looking at my home - both of us work from home and the timing of our child's engagements pretty much dictates when we can schedule meetings.

it's hard to say if that's causative though, because there are so many other confounding factors. wealth also is correlated with fewer kids, and since more working produces more wealth that's also a factor, in addition to lots of other little things.

For one thing there's a much higher opportunity cost to having a child. Econ 101. Both in that workplace opportunities are greater while also there are now added domestic costs.

Yes, if twice as many people work then you make twice as many things.

I'd rather stay at home with the kids to be honest.

That's a choice, but not everyone has kids, and kids don't stay home forever (at least, not in all cultures).

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