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

everyone at doctor's office was a woman.

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone at my doctor's office is female. I'm a librarian, so most of my coworkers are female. At my particular institution (in education), while the top positions are currently held mostly by men, all the departmental techie positions are held by women. Also, I'd venture to guess that our student population would change quite a bit - we currently have more than 50% female students, but many of them wouldn't see the point to pursuing education if they weren't planning to bring that education to the workforce. The results of this kind of change would be too far-reaching to imagine in realistic ways.

The results would also depend on why these women left. If they all decided to leave because they felt it would be more fun to be a stay at home mom, you might as well ask what if they turned off earth's gravity - it's a totally dumb question and the answer is meaningless in the real world.

If, on the other hand, they were all required to leave work somehow (government fiat?), there would be war. Civil war. Here.

And the women who went to war over this would sure as hell have some men on their side.