The High Cost of Children For Educated Women/Prospect (U.K.) Magazine

[By Prof. Alison Wolfe, a professor in public sector management at KCL and author of "Does Education Matter?" (Penguin). Maggie]

". . .As the American economist Shirley Burggraf has pointed out in The Feminine Economy and Economic Man, the financial disincentives to childbearing have become so high for upper-middle income families that the puzzle is not why professional women have so few children but why they have any at all. She observes, "no society until recent times has expected love alone to support the family enterprise. To put it another way, parental love has never cost so much."

Value-based volunteering is giving way to professionalised organisations with public sector contracts, and personal fulfilment for both sexes is increasingly evaluated in economic terms. Yet we still rely on traditional values and emotions to produce the next generation. It is fortunate that children are so intrinsically rewarding or our birth rate would be far lower still.

The hard economics tells us that professional women will have to give up most if they have children, and so will be least inclined to do so. Highly educated women overwhelmingly stay in work and so pay little or no earnings penalty when they have children. But more and more of them in the developed world have no children at all. "The rich get richer and the poor have children" still applies; but this time around, it is women specifically that we are talking about. About 30 per cent of graduate women born in the early 1960s entered their forties childless. For graduate women born in 1970 (a substantially larger group) the expected figure is 40 per cent. . ."
posted by maggie at 12:22 PM VOTE

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