Pro-progress will win when it wins women

On how culture shapes what is considered meaningful, why this impacts women disproportionately and why pro-abundance movements need to pay attention to this

When I started my undergraduate studies in 2016 in the UK, the gender wage gap was a prominent topic among the civically-minded and well-intentioned. It was uncommon to go to an event organized by a women-focused society (think Oxford Women in Business) and not have it mentioned at least once.

While the causes of it were seldom discussed in quantitative terms, there was a general unspoken consensus among the highly educated audience that outright discrimination was the major factor causing pay disparities between men and women. Believing otherwise would have put you in the same category as people considered “definitely not respectable” and even downright weird or creepy by the student body. I am thinking here of public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, who in 2019 was disinvited from a post in the Divinity School at Cambridge University due to student backlash.

Fast-forward to 2023, when economist Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for her work showing that motherhood is one of the most important factors behind the gender wage gap¹. In her book “Career and Family”, she argues that while well-intentioned, measures like diversity trainings, will do little to actually help women in the workplace in a substantive way. According to her, this is mostly because outright discrimination, which these trainings are targeted towards, accounts for relatively little of the gender wage gap. I spend much more time now with economists and other people with domain expertise, so I might be overestimating how much this type of knowledge has diffused towards the general educated public. But it does feel like the conversation is changing and we are beginning to have an understanding of what actually causes the gender wage gaps in a manner that is more grounded in empirical reality.

Among the researchers and public commentators that are trying to shed light and improve the public conversation around these facts is

Alice Evans

, a gender sociologist at King’s College London. On her personal blog, she had an interesting post this week, discussing an underrated source of the gender wage gap: the difference in how much men and women value "meaning” at work. On average, women value meaning, or doing what is considered socially valuable, more than men. Consequently, they are willing to accept what are usually lower salaries in order to pursue such professions.

Both genders express a preference for interesting work that provides autonomy. The gender difference is larger when it comes to flexible working hours. Bigger still is the gender difference in whether the job is helpful to others or useful to society. The share of women who say they value jobs which help others say is 8.2 percentage points higher than that of men.

Alice suggests that a way to diminish the gender wage gap is to change the “vibes” of certain highly-paid jobs, especially those in STEM, whose contribution to society is severely underrated and whose advantages are framed purely in terms of financial benefits. In other words, she proposes a change in culture.

Alice is right on an important point: while women’s preference for so-called meaningful jobs might be hard to change, women do not make judgements on what careers are valuable in a void. On the contrary, especially at young ages, when big decisions like this are made, they are highly sensitive to what the culture at large portrays as “good.” For men this is less of an issue. Given that they value financial benefits more, they will still end up in careers that pay more (say in tech), regardless of how pro-social they are perceived to be. This means that at least to some extent, what careers women choose to pursue can serve as a barometer of what society considers pro-social, meaningful and of positive impact to the world. And looking at it through this lens does not paint a positive image about what society values for those of us who are broadly aligned with a pro-market, pro-progress movement.

Pro-progress will win when it wins women

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In an earlier post, I argued that elite culture has shifted towards a general skepticism of markets, technology and safetyism:

Nature, a top scientific journal, published an editorial last year arguing degrowth is desirable. Last month, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) blocked a partnership between an emerging start-up and the pharmaceutical heavyweight Sanofi on what appear to be tenuous grounds (…) You might think of these occurrences as disparate, yet I perceive a common undercurrent: They signify a shift in elite thought towards excessive caution (safetyism), skepticism of technology, and zero-sum thinking. This shift poses what I believe to be the defining ideological challenge of our time.

My observation aligns with Alice’s suggestion that women might be underestimating the social benefits of more lucrative careers like those in STEM because of a culture that vilifies the products of market forces.

17-year-old college applicants might underestimate the power of STEM. While Amnesty International obviously appeals to progressives, it’s possibly worth celebrating massive advances in biochemistry, pharmacology and public health (…) That said, many sectors’ social impact may be under-appreciated. If your elderly loved ones survived COVID, it’s possibly due to vaccines. Biochemists saved millions of lives. Yet in the U.S., Big Pharma is widely vilified. This demonisation may have turned progressive young women away from pharmaceuticals, too disgusted and ashamed to tell friends that they’re working ‘for the enemy’.

I like that Alice chose the vaccine example, because it perfectly illustrates how we consistently underestimate the social benefits of market-driven scientific innovation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was governments that mostly fumbled the response, while we were largely saved by companies who produced efficacious vaccines in record times, most notably those exploiting mRNA technology (again invented to a large extent by a woman.) These start-ups, largely unknown to the public before the pandemic, were largely the product of investment from another sector that usually carries a negative connotation: venture capital. In the UK, it was a (woman) biotechnology venture capitalist, Kate Bingham, who chaired the government's successful Vaccine Taskforce, steering procurement of vaccines.

Kate Bingham, a biotech venture capitalist and the chair of the Vaccine Taskforce

Yet the common wisdom that most young people passively internalize is that for-profit work is generally icky, that corporations are greedy and that non-profit work and governmental intervention is what will change society for the better. When I graduated university, career choices were explicitly framed as a choice between selling out and having a positive impact. And anecdotally, I also noticed something that supports the data from the studies brought by Alice: faced with this choice, women were disproportionately more likely to choose positions they perceived to be societally beneficial.

Sometimes there can be a trade-off between societal impact and pay. One could argue that too many bright students pursue jobs in domains like finance or corporate law, which could be done by less smart people to little loss to society². But the pro-social alternative to these jobs is not necessarily to be found among the lowest paid non-profit positions, either. In particular, decently lucrative STEM positions are consistently underrated in terms of social impact. And the companies producing drugs or semiconductors need people working in areas like business development and law, too. So the option to impact technological progress is not limited to only those that have STEM degrees.

I still think we need competent people to work in government or non-profits, but it is much better if they have internalized the importance and efficiency of markets, so that they can work from these positions at aiding, as opposed to hindering, a well-functioning economy. What I have noticed happens is the opposite: those attracted to these jobs are usually the most anti-market people.

Incidentally, Kate Bingham herself had something to say about the general attitude towards life science companies prevalent in the British government, that supports my observations:

The government must do better. It needs to take a positive, proactive approach to the life sciences industry. The government lacks the knowledge, and interest to detect the differences between money-grabbing opportunism and valuable corporate behaviour.

To the extent that this wisdom about the noxious nature of corporations persists, women will be disproportionately more likely to ditch high-paying and ultimately socially beneficial careers for well-intentioned positions that in the end might not achieve that much. It is ironic that so-called progressives like Bernie Sanders, who would pay lip service to the idea of gender wage equality, are among the people who contribute the most to this culture that ultimately holds women back.

Bernie Sanders promoting the idea that pharma companies are simply “evil”

Even if getting more women in lucrative careers is not among your top priorities, if you are broadly aligned with the “Progress Studies” movement or take a pro-market view, you should still care about whether women view these topics positively. Since people often unconsciously adopt societal values, it's crucial to consider how culture broadly depicts different pursuits, as these portrayals significantly shape public perceptions of what's valuable or worthwhile. One suggestion I would have for those that want to promote a more pro-abundance outlook is to move away from the Gooncave-y aesthetic that has come to define a lot of male-dominated spaces, including a lot of those that define themselves as pro-tech.

The truth that I have observed time and time again is that women will be willing to engage in causes they believe in a rather selfless way. Most events that promote a pro-abundance, pro-progress outlook that I have attended have been organized by women who believe in the righteousness of the cause and are willing to engage in work that advances it with, all else equal, much less need for external applause and validation than corresponding men. The earnest and enthusiastic involvement of women is a huge boon for any type of ideological movement and one can ignore it at their own peril.

In other words, idealism is a double-edged sword. It can be harnessed to great societal benefit if the overarching cultural narratives about what actions are beneficial are correct. Or it can be wasted on well-intentioned but ultimately unimpactful or even negative pursuits.

1. This has recently been contested by studies using IVF as a “pseudo-experiment” to study the gender wage gap. I disagree with the methodology of these papers, as I will explain in upcoming posts.

2. Indeed, a recent study on 640,000 U.S. workers shows that economic downturns push more college graduates into entrepreneurship. These "forced entrepreneurs" often create more successful, innovative, and venture-backed firms than voluntary entrepreneurs, particularly because high-earning individuals are more affected by labor shocks and tend to start more successful businesses, revealing untapped entrepreneurial potential among top earners and the role of recessions in unlocking it.