I was also surprised when I first noticed that many great philosophers were bachelors. I wonder how much gain fully productivity gaib outsourcing childbirth and childcare would bring, if we aren't replaced by AI first.
I think you should apply the same skepticism to the MRKH paper that you do to the IVF paper! Three issues off the top of my head. First: per the abstract, MRKH women marry older men, maybe there is a mentoring effect where the older spouses help their younger wives move up professionally. Second, there could be pleiotropic effects from the MRKH syndrome-causing mutations, e.g. altered WNT signaling can drive both MRKH and hyperandrogenism. Third, the paper compares women who know from adolescence they can't have kids to all men. Maybe men who knew from adolescence that they couldn't father children would have the highest income of all, significantly higher than MRKH. You could tell a story like "when you know you won't have kids, you focus on building your legacy in other ways, such as starting a business/becoming an executive/whater". I'm not endorsing those hypotheses, I'm just saying that if one weren't already inclined to agree with the paper, it's easy enough to poke holes in it.
Anyway this is all silly because as you say, it's wildly obvious that children are a big driver of the gender wage gap! I'm not even a grandmother and it's obvious to me! The burden of proof is so incredibly strong on people who disagree with that statement, and even the best social science provides such weak evidence, that there's basically no point studying it!
Very interesting, thank you! I would just add that the MRKH results tell us about the state of the wage gap in Sweden, a country which is quite an outlier in terms of gender attitudes. So while the internal validity is great, I wouldn’t be quick to conclude that the same is true in the US or Japan or Italy
Yes that's true, thanks. I should probably add that Sweden has more wage compression than US and maybe at the right end rail in US you'd observe more of a difference.
Excellent article. One quibble: “did not have children—and, more curiously still, were often celibate” — is this really more curious, given the availability & effectiveness of contraception when most of those writers worked?
It would be interesting to see “men” in that graph split into men with children and men without children. Do you know if it’s still the case that men with children earn more, controlling for education, et cetera?
The third paragraph from the bottom has a sentence beginning with: "The collective uncoscious assifned..." which I think you'd want to correct. Thank you for writing.
I was also surprised when I first noticed that many great philosophers were bachelors. I wonder how much gain fully productivity gaib outsourcing childbirth and childcare would bring, if we aren't replaced by AI first.
you mean male or female philosophers?
If I remember correctly, I first realized it when I noticed only one "great British empricist" (George Berkeley) had children.
I think you should apply the same skepticism to the MRKH paper that you do to the IVF paper! Three issues off the top of my head. First: per the abstract, MRKH women marry older men, maybe there is a mentoring effect where the older spouses help their younger wives move up professionally. Second, there could be pleiotropic effects from the MRKH syndrome-causing mutations, e.g. altered WNT signaling can drive both MRKH and hyperandrogenism. Third, the paper compares women who know from adolescence they can't have kids to all men. Maybe men who knew from adolescence that they couldn't father children would have the highest income of all, significantly higher than MRKH. You could tell a story like "when you know you won't have kids, you focus on building your legacy in other ways, such as starting a business/becoming an executive/whater". I'm not endorsing those hypotheses, I'm just saying that if one weren't already inclined to agree with the paper, it's easy enough to poke holes in it.
Anyway this is all silly because as you say, it's wildly obvious that children are a big driver of the gender wage gap! I'm not even a grandmother and it's obvious to me! The burden of proof is so incredibly strong on people who disagree with that statement, and even the best social science provides such weak evidence, that there's basically no point studying it!
Very interesting, thank you! I would just add that the MRKH results tell us about the state of the wage gap in Sweden, a country which is quite an outlier in terms of gender attitudes. So while the internal validity is great, I wouldn’t be quick to conclude that the same is true in the US or Japan or Italy
Yes that's true, thanks. I should probably add that Sweden has more wage compression than US and maybe at the right end rail in US you'd observe more of a difference.
Excellent article. One quibble: “did not have children—and, more curiously still, were often celibate” — is this really more curious, given the availability & effectiveness of contraception when most of those writers worked?
Yeah you're right although I think what's interesting for example is that V Woolf was celibate within a marriage most likely
It would be interesting to see “men” in that graph split into men with children and men without children. Do you know if it’s still the case that men with children earn more, controlling for education, et cetera?
The third paragraph from the bottom has a sentence beginning with: "The collective uncoscious assifned..." which I think you'd want to correct. Thank you for writing.
thanks a lot for pointing it out