The two don’t seem to work well together:

The reason “gender equality” stalled is because it is an economic impossibility.  The reason the average hours worked is so much higher than in the more “sexist” 1960s is because primarily there are more women in the workforce.  While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor.  Unlike immigrants, they don’t bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.

One-third of working class women have always worked.  The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well.  And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don’t work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.

And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.

Vox, as usual, hits a home run with this one. I cannot add much to the excellent economic and logical analysis that he has written here. All I can do is contribute my own observations based on what I’ve seen over the years.

Vox is absolutely right that adding women to the workforce will depress the wage rate for labour while working fewer hours. It’s something I observe all the time in my own workplace. I’m privileged to work with very smart and very capable women (there aren’t many of them, but they do exist). The fact is, however, that they do not work anything like the hours that the men do. Even my former protege would happily go home whenever I told her to take off- I would routinely tell her to get lost, since I could close the books myself and there was no point in having her staying for no good reason, and she would never protest. Contrast this with one of my male colleagues, who when he joined the team insisted on staying in every bit as late as I did to close the books, and even now stays after I do to ensure that everything is closed properly. The reality is that having women in the workplace both reduces the wages of everyone, by pushing down the price of labour through an increase in supply, and actualy reduces the demand for labour overall and over time by removing the fecundity necessary to keep a domestic labour force expanding.

As for this absurd belief that women are somehow paid less than men, analysis after analysis has shown that the wage gap is now a complete myth. Once you adjust for the fact that women take maternity leave, work fewer hours, and work less strenuous jobs than men do, they basically earn the same wages as men. The wage gap isn’t 23 cents per hour- it’s more like 4-7 cents per hour, at most. And these days, that wage gap is beginning to work in reverse, as men retire earlier or are laid off faster; women are now out-earning men in a variety of fields at an earlier age.

Vox also observes that feminism, and the insistence on wage equality with absolutely no sound logical basis whatsoever for the same, has resulted in a completely predictable unsustainable future for entitlement systems like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Both of these gigantic vote-buying schemes were setup on extremely dubious actuarial grounds. President Roosevelt (the really crazy one) created Social Security purely to stop “any damn politician” from repealing his “achievements” as the father of the modern nanny state. President Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid as a vote-buying exercise during his “War on Poverty”. And those systems are now more bankrupt than ever, in part because they were predicated on the (absurd) belief that population growth would hold steady, life expectancies for men and women would stay roughly the same, and taxes could increase at will to cover any shortfall.

Just a few (huge) problems with this logic: all of it is predicated on the idea that men do not respond to incentives. Sadly for government bureaucrats, we do. When confronted with the reality that women earn more than we do for working fewer hours and having less overall ability (I will readily admit that I’m generalising here- like I said, I’ve worked with a handful of truly exceptional women in my time), and given the massive and increasing taxes that we all face as part of our daily realities in the working world, men will increasingly choose to opt out of the system and reduce their workloads. Hell, I’m looking at my pay cheque and seeing its value dwindling rapidly, no matter how hard I work or how many hours I put in- I don’t get paid one dime in overtime, so it doesn’t matter whether I work 40 hours or 70 hours a week, and you can be sure that I will be taking that into account over the next year as I decide how best to use my time.

Vox’s advice to women has always been: get married young, seek to build civilisation instead of destroying it. He is on Team Civilisation, like me. My advice to young women is similar. While I applaud hard work and initiative, the reality is that if you are an attractive and intelligent young woman today, you are going to be far better off raising a family and building a future for your people than by working 50 hours a week as a corporate drone, or working for the government (as many women do, because it offers greater job security). And, girls, look on the bright side- if you are indeed attractive, intelligent, and interesting to talk to- again, like my former trainee grad- you hold serious value in the sexual market place. Use that value to find yourself a good man, and bear him good children.