What if...

[rivka]

Elsewhere on the net, someone asks "just for fun" what the results would be if the 70% of women who hold full-time jobs all left the work force.

Many respondents inexplicably think it would be awesome. Just think of how their husbands' salaries would rise! Just think of the return to wholesome family values!! Women could spend more time caring for their families, and men could really be proper providers the way they used to be!

Here's a sample:

Mostly, I think that our country is so obsessed with "equality" and "opportunity" and "success," I think there would be a huge number of incentives to get them back into the workforce.

However, if it lasted? I think the country would have a NUMBER of positive benefits, especially as it relates to people learning fulfillment otherwise, the raising of children, the family circumstance, etc. A lot of things that have gone downhill in the past many years would reverse. And yet, I think that people are in a place where it would *mostly* not slip downhill in the ways the past was less desirable. And in time, after the initial uproar, I believe men would gain jobs. I think the economy would recover and life would go on, possibly better than ever.

And here's my attempt at a more realistic assessment:

The GDP would plummet. The US would drop many immigration barriers in a desperate attempt to prop up the economy and fill huge gaps in the workforce. Tax revenues plunge at the same time that there is a massive increase in the need for public assistance. Female-headed families become hungry and homeless in droves, and unfortunately there are very few social workers or professionally-run charities to assist them because the women who dominate those professions have all gone home.

Your husband will almost certainly get a big raise, but he'll also almost certainly be pressured to put in 80-hour weeks as his company tries to function with so many fewer workers. Don't expect to see him much. Don't expect his increased wage to improve your family's standard of living, either - in such a dramatic labor shortage, wages for jobs like supermarket checker and gas station attendant will have to go through the roof if those positions are to be filled, and so the prices of basic goods and services will skyrocket. Lots of US jobs will simply move overseas where there is plenty of cheap labor.

Hospitals are plunged into chaos with virtually no nurses; all elective procedures and routine care will need to be canceled while nursing training programs are hastily set up to train some of the new male immigrants in nursing. The death rate for hospital patients soars. Because things like mammograms, Pap smears, and colonoscopies are halted due to the need to prioritize on emergency medical services, the cancer rate climbs. If you have a relative in the hospital, be prepared to go and stay with that person yourself 24/7 to provide personal care, prepare and serve meals, administer meds according to the doctor's instructions, etc. If you need to go into the hospital and don't have someone able to sit with you, I hope you survive. There are no more midwives. Your options: unassisted childbirth at home or a virtually unattended (no L&D nurses) hospital birth in a criminally understaffed facility. Maternal and neonatal death rates soar.

At first it seems that elementary schools will have to close, but then they triple or quadruple class sizes so that male middle school and high school teachers can be spread out to cover all the grades. Parent volunteers fill in as best they can. Special needs students suffer the most; the vast majority of OTs, speech therapists, etc. are women, and those aren't jobs that can be taken over by volunteers.

By the time everything shakes out and we return to some degree of economic stability, 30% of American workers are permanent residents or new citizens born in a foreign country. The huge influx of immigrants is hard to assimilate; they're so critically needed that they must be welcomed, but U.S. culture returns to the atmosphere of New York City in 1900. Language barriers and lack of experience continue to depress the economy. There are nurses in the hospitals again, but they only speak rudimentary English and most of them are brand new. So the death rate doesn't exactly go back down again.

And, by the way: women who wanted to work and/or needed to work will not universally find joy in being a stay-at-home wife and mother. Especially not given the increased economic stress caused by soaring prices and the increased workload caused by the scarcity of service workers.

"Just for fun?" It would be a social and economic nightmare. An utter nightmare.

That was just off the top of my head, though. Any contributions to this little hypothetical?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

you forgot to start with "i'm sorry, are you just stupid?"

oh-- welfare departments, at least twenty years ago (when i was doing file room stuff in one in college) primarily staffed by women. i don't know if the county i worked in was exactly representative, but it was about 90% women.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

I think that was a deliberate omission; it's a lot easier to convince somebody before insulting them than the other way around.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

An enormous number of struggling working-class families become outright poor and poor families starve, as all the women doing minimum-wage cleaning and child care and LPN-level patient care leave work. It is impossible to find nursing-home care.

Wealthier families and large businesses have surreptitious, illegal female workers, just as they have illegal alien employees now. These employees are almost always exploited because they have no legal recourse, just as happens to illegal aliens now.

There's a rise in literary works written by upper-middle-class women, as these women retire from the workplace, continue to have a comfortable household income, and have the leisure to write. There may well be an accompanying baby boom at this income level.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Not to mention surreptitious and exploited homeworking at less rarified cultural levels ('Stitch, stitch, stitch').

I remember, when I was looking through interwar women's mags for an entirely different project, I discovered that the 1930s in particular seemed to develop a significant number of ads, and even articles, about how the little lady could earn the odd shilling or two towards the housekeeping by various means. (As well as how to save money by doing up your clothes to conform with current trends.)

Not to mention, I think there has been quite a bit of work on women and the informal, off the books, economy and casual work in the C19th.

Oh yes, and let us consider those 'wholesome family values' in the days when women had little or no economic alternative to getting married and staying married (domestic violence, marital rape, unspoken syphilis infection)... Or, let's just pretend it was all rosy and golden and like the Cratchits' Christmas, except, of course, within the text rather than the imagined remembrance of it, the Cratchit's Christmas is embedded in their desperate condition.

Yeah, history - one of those luxury subjects in the humanities that no-one needs to do.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Four contributions: the first needs more research, the second and third are provable, and the third anecdotal.

First, I'd need the demographics of (just as a off-the-top-of-my-head list) rape counselors, pregnancy counselors, and obstetricians. I'd want breakdown by gender and client evaluation.

In short, would the quality of care go down?

Second, I'd point out that this would pull some of the women that have been critical to the war in Afghanistan out. Some of the women in Afghanistan (possibly most of them, I'm not sure) will not talk to a male soldier. It's hard to win somebody's heart and mind if she won't listen to anything.

Third, there's the assumption that women are holding jobs that men are qualified for. A fair chunk of the jobs that went down are housing industry jobs. While some of that is real-estate sales, mortagages, and the like, most of it is construction, which is male-dominated work, and reasonably so; it's based on upper-body strength. So we have job openings that some portion of the unemployed can't apply for, because they don't have the requirements.

Fourth, my place of work would lose a lot of people; it's more women than men. I've never asked, but I suspect that a lot of them are taking lower pay for the satisfaction of making the world better. When a job becomes a single-breadwinner position, jobs like that become less preferable. I'm not sure everybody could be replaced, and if they were, it would probably be replacement by single males who would move out as they got married and wanted better pay.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

By the time everything shakes out and we return to some degree of economic stability, 30% of American workers are permanent residents or new citizens born in a foreign country. The huge influx of immigrants is hard to assimilate; they're so critically needed that they must be welcomed, but U.S. culture returns to the atmosphere of New York City in 1900. Language barriers and lack of experience continue to depress the economy. There are nurses in the hospitals again, but they only speak rudimentary English and most of them are brand new. So the death rate doesn't exactly go back down again.

Wow. You guys really have let your immigrant-coping skills go since the early 1900s. Not that there's anything wrong with that: every person who moves to the US is like two Canadians dying so I frown on any and all immigration to the US.

Your Monster Chiller Horror Theater scenario is where Canada is expected to be in about 20 years; at the moment about 40% of the country is either an immigrant or the kids of immigrants.

40% of the country is either an immigrant or the kids of immigrants.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Including me.

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

I think you left out "Real estate prices plunge like a rock, reversing the upswing they took in double-income days, and foreclosures go through the roof, to a degree which makes the current forclosures crisis look like a walk in the park".

[jinian.livejournal.com]

The police forces of the U.S. are abruptly cut by nearly 15%.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap. I forgot about that in my list.

Without female police officers, I have no idea whether there will be an effect on rape victims and traumatized children who have to deal with the police. My gut instinct says there will be a change for the worse, but I don't trust it.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Women can't leave their father's home unless they are married or otherwise supported, and can't leave their husbands either. (Would nuns still teach and nurse?) Local food might become a necessity, as women who were working in grocery stores, as truckers and dispatchers, on big farms with machinery, in food processing plants, in restaurants, etc are now stuck trying to raise chickens and tomatoes at home ... and all the other women are too, whether or not they have any interest or aptitude or enough space to do it in.

And speaking of enough space, forget about moving to the suburbs and commuting, because there aren't enough bus drivers.

Men whose career trajectory would have depended on financial support from their parents and then their wives (doctors, for example) would be out of luck. The shortage of doctors and other medical personnel would rapidly become horrifying, especially after the old white men in white coats die off (having been prevented from retiring).

[juthwara.livejournal.com]

There would be mass closings of libraries. 80 percent of librarians are women, and that just the degreed professionals - I'm sure the percentage of women among support staff is even higher.

Most elderly or disabled people in a care facility who don't have family to take them in would be on the streets because of the lack of caregivers. Anyone needing home nursing care without family to take care of them would probably starve for the same reason.

[saoba.livejournal.com]

Well, for starters- I had a doctor appointment on Monday for an annual physical.

Every single person I interacted with during that appointment was a woman.

Receptionist, physician's assistant, doctor, lab receptionist, lab technician, pharmacist- all women. Person who took my call later that day to schedule my mammogram -well, actually the entire staff at the mammo clinic- women. The doctor who will read those results-
odds are it will be a woman too given what I know of staffing for this hospital system.

And the kicker is- I didn't take any particular note of it because it simply isn't that big a deal. Just like until your entry made me think of it it didn't register on me that of 6 phone calls I made on Friday for household matters or upcoming travel I spoke to only one man.

Also- sons will have to go to work earlier in order to help support their families. Meanwhile, daughters will NOT be leaving for school or jobs and so will remain at home until marriage- which means Poppa can likely kiss the idea of retiring goodbye.

I'd expect the rates of both birth control usage and abortion to go through the roof no matter the legalities. Prostitution, too.

What planet do these people live on?

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

"What planet do these people live on?"

I suspect they want to live on Planet Television, circa 1950, and they haven't checked to see if that was the way life really should be, or an aberration born of post-WW2 economics.

For that matter, I imagine they don't know if that's the way life really was or not.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I think you've got the big picture covered. Looking around me and asking what would happen if 70% of the women I work with were to quit, I see a disaster for every NASA project. The most obvious one is that nobody would be keeping track of the "conjunction analysis" program which lets the various projects know if they're in danger of being hit by a piece of orbital debris. There would also be a sudden and acute shortage of orbit analysts in flight dynamics, a place with a decidedly female majority currently.

Several missions would lose their chief scientists, their observatory managers, their heads of systems engineering, and the core of their IT groups. Operations teams would lose Ops Directors, critical sub-system engineers, satellite controllers, and enterprise system managers.

The space communications network and the ground network of antennas would be desperately understaffed, with key scheduling and coordination positions left un-staffed with nobody able to take over on short notice.

It would be a disaster.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

What the flustering fuck?

I just . . . wow. I don't know how it's not a basic matter of numbers. We have 10% unemployment. 70% of half the population is 35% of the population. That leaves a total of 25% of all current jobs unstaffed. (Approximately.) Obviously some sectors -- like health and education -- will be hit much harder than others. But who thinks that we suddenly won't need all these goods and services if no women work?

I hope you share any responses you get to your post. But I suspect the people you're arguing with wouldn't recognize sanity and reason if it hit them over the head.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Well, there wouldn't need to be daycare centers anymore. And maybe you could get rid of schools - at least elementary schools - because stay-at-home moms could homeschool their children. You wouldn't need many nursing homes either, because, again, women would do that work as unpaid family labor. Most restaurants would close because women would have time to cook wholesome meals from scratch every night, and other convenience-oriented businesses could close as well.

No, seriously. That's what people said.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how women have been so trained to hate other women's decisions when they're different from their own. Anti-women sentiment has proven to be quite adaptable.

Your response is great. For myself, I would note that the feelings of complete fufillment ×must× be why so many women start home-based businesses, though it doesn't really fit in with your particular argument.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

That is the perfect icon for this!

The original poster is all shocked and offended now. "Why are people so maaaaad? I thought it would be such a nice, fun idea!"

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

My company would lose millions, since Wall Street would freak out when our very successful CEO suddenly left, taking the VPs of HR and Research and Development, and Chief Marketing Officer, along with many high-ranking executives in Manufacturing, Finance, and Information Systems.

you missed a few side effects

[laurent-atl.livejournal.com]

i wonder for instance what would happen with the wives and children of the roughly 2 million incarcerated men, as well as the millions of single parent families in which the parent happens to be female.

on the amusing side, if the waitresses all quit and were replaced by guys in the same outfit hooters would suddenly go from pathetic to hilarious.

Re: you missed a few side effects

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the lesbians and those of us who are single but without children. I guess we just become shut-ins until all the food goes bad and the cats eat us.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

All interesting, but but it feels fundamentally wrong. It doesn't matter what the economic effects -- pro or con -- are of this scenario; what matters is that it's morally and ethically wrong.

B

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there is that.

The original poster is now hurt and offended that people assumed that women would have to be forced out of the workforce. She knows it's what we all really want.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Aargh! You've certainly got a good start. I'd add child labour. The world in which my grandmother gave up paid work when she married (before she took it up again in the war) was the world in which my other grandmother worked full time from the age of 14. If that many individuals and families are broke because women can't work, and there are that many jobs, then families and employers will turn to the obvious labour source, teenage boys (who will of course get paid less than men for the same work). I've no idea when the US school minimum leaving age reached it's present level, but it was certainly only 15 post-war in the UK, and most children left school then. Even if it's illegal for boys to leave school to work, they'll do it because they need to eat, and companies will employ them just as they employ illegal immigrants, because the work is there and they are cheaper.

/via friends friends

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Mostly, I think that our country is so obsessed with "equality" and "opportunity" and "success,"

...this comment just stuns me.

Equality and opportunity in airquotes.

Yeah, dammit, we're so darn obsessed with that "equality" thing. Where on earth did we get that silly idea, anyway?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Those nasty feminists again!

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I spent this morning at a middle school of about 300 kids. There are four men on the staff, one of whom is the principal. Good luck!

This raises a better question.

[(Anonymous)]

What if the workforce was suddenly rendered equitable in terms of gender? What if professions that are predominantly female, with only a few males in them sitting in the highest positions, were suddenly to make their positions of authority reflect gender realities?

Hmm.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

Rates of suicide from post-partum depression and psychosis jump, due to reduced medical care and other support for new mothers.

Fathers of small children who are widowed and who have no other family will be forced out of the workplace and on to public assistance because of the inability to find any one to care for their children.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

lemme guess, our favorite message board?

Jeez...

[puzzlement.livejournal.com]

The age of marriage and first childbirth will dramatically drop as women attempt to cement their male family member's commitment to them. This probably, maybe particularly, includes a rise in out-of-stable-relationship conceptions. Many of the customs around forcing men to provide for children are revived: fathers of women pressuring men to marry her OR ELSE. Various customs of "fair" access to marriageable men, like having younger sisters not out until older sisters marry, will spring up in different places.

Unwed women suddenly have extremely difficult relationships with their brothers and brothers-in-law, who will be expected to provide for them when their fathers can't.

Since women can't (choose not to?) work at all, there aren't even the rudimentary charity jobs of, say, Regency England, in which a poorer, unsupported, woman might become a governess, lady's maid, servant or boarding house keeper etc, as an act of charity by the lady of the house.

A huge black market in household labour develops in which poorer women work for richer households anyway. The government interferes in this in an attempt to tax it without constantly implying that women might be working for money or anything disgusting like that. There are surprise government audits constantly in which you have to account for the women under your roof and your relationship to them, in case you are paying some of them to be there.

Assuming that the tech stays in place, the present slight preference of many Western parents for a baby girl abruptly reverses, and abortions of female fetuses rise steeply, as does demand for pre-implantation sex selection in favour of XY in both countries where it's legal and countries where it isn't (in Australia you can only have a clinic do sex selection if you are a carrier for a sex-linked genetic disease).

A great deal changes in same sex relationships, certainly woman-woman relationships are frightening to parents. Many lesbians are in the closet and have a primary social and probably sexual (unless gay) partner who is male.

The age-old practice of the occasional female-phenotype person hiding their past and transitioning to live as a man increases (whether or not that person actually has a male gender ID) in order to access careers in medicine, the military, science and similar. There are occasionally scandals, and perhaps DADT takes a new form.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

Macro economics 101 should be required for citizenship, methinks.

I also like how woman = mother = wife in the standard assumptions.

[tsukara.livejournal.com]

(Here from a retweet, me.) This response is very logical win, and the comments only continue that win. ♥

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

So many posts have already talked about important things at impact health, safety, education and corporations - but what about culture? Are authors considered part of the "work force" when they write novels, or just when they do nonfiction or journalism? Which 7 out of 10 actresses would we give up seeing on our tvs or in films? Will Taylor Swift or Bonnie Raitt stop making albums? Would Peggy Noonan or Maureen Dowd give up their columns? How could Keeping Up With the Kardasians stay on the air with most of the Kardasians "out of the workforce"?

At least Christine O'Donnell wouldn't be impacted personally - she isn't actually working at the moment anyway.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

"Which 7 out of 10 actresses would we give up seeing on our tvs or in films?"

Oh, it's simpler than that. They're going for ten out of ten. If I understand this correctly, roughly 70% of women are not stay-at-home women, and all of them would be expected to go off and be Suzy Homemaker.

I don't know how this would be managed, short of something involving mass mind control, but that's the base of the thought experiment...

[(Anonymous)]

A regular classroom teacher position cannot be filled by a "parent voluneer" either, just so you know. We are college educated professionals with a wealth of knowledge and skills, just like OT's and speech therapists. Many teachers have the same exact level of training as Ot's and speech therapists (Master's degrees). Please do not insult the profession by insinuating that parent volunteers could fill our shoes for even a day.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I thought the part about "parent volunteers fill in as best they can" conveyed that they can't replace a classroom teacher. In the scenario I describe (class sizes have doubled or tripled, so that you have, for example, 60 first graders all together), parent volunteers would certainly do what they could to improve the ratio by listening to children read, doing work with small groups, grading, etc. The fact that this wouldn't be an equivalent replacement for trained classroom teachers was more or less my point.

Oh: and just so you know, it's pretty rude to go into someone's LJ and call them out in an anonymous unsigned comment. If you're going to lecture me, sign your name/consistent handle or link to your online presence in some way.