The Gender Wage Gap for College-Educated Elites (Probably) Won't Be Solved

Life Involves Tradeoffs

Photo by Ken Lund

Several months ago, I read with great interest

Ruxandra Teslo

’s post, “Fertility on Demand.” It is an excellent post, and I commend it to the readers of this Substack. In it (the post links to a longer piece, accessible here), Teslo argues that we should invest heavily in fertility technology in order to allow women to have babies later, so that they can lean into their careers at a younger age. She concludes:

Technological advances that extend women’s fertility windows give women the option to invest in their careers in their thirties and have children later. A hundred years from now, women having children well into their forties may be as commonplace as married women and mothers in the workforce are today.

I am very much in favor of efforts to make the workforce more accommodating to mothers, fathers, and other caregivers. (This includes grandparents caring for grandchildren, who provide much of the safety net care for families impacted by addiction, crime, mental health issues, etc.)

While Teslo focuses largely on high-earning jobs, some of the most important work to be done in making work accommodating to families would target low-income earners. These families would benefit hugely from better employer-provided paid maternity leave, good family health insurance, and making it easier for low-income moms to return to work after being home with kids. As

Stephanie H. Murray

recently pointed out at Family Stuff, eliminating practices like "just in time” scheduling would help a lot too. There’s a lot of runway there, as compared to significant and welcome changes that have been already made for high-income workers.

Turning back to the focus of Teslo’s post: the wage gap for college-educated elite workers. Teslo provides a extensive and well-reasoned argument that women who have children younger are less likely to reach the top of the career ladder:

Taking time out of the workforce to bear and raise children while in their twenties and thirties means women have less time to accumulate the network, skills, and experience necessary to rise to the top of their fields. The later women wait to have their first child, the more they earn.

One possible solution, per Teslo? Develop new technology so that women can focus on their careers earlier and have babies later, once they have made partner, achieved tenure, or reached the “C-suite.”

Leah Libresco Sergeant has already written a a beautiful piece on how deliberately waiting to have children may mean less time with your children and grandchildren (even though, of course, we do not have control over the length of our lives or our descendants).

I want to focus on another reason why waiting to have kids in order to advance in your career doesn’t necessarily help balance both: the true hit to careers doesn’t come from pregnancy. It comes from everything that comes afterwards. The nine months of pregnancy, followed by childbirth, and some period of leave (highly-paid jobs tend to have generous paid leave policies) are only a blip on the radar compared to embarking on the 18-year long project of raising a child. Even if you use full-time daycare or pay for after-school childcare, you still have:

• dinner, bedtime

• breakfast, getting off to school

• kid sick days

• special holidays when your childcare is closed

• special events at school (e.g., read-to your kid day)

• taking kids to sports, music lessons, other extracurriculars

• weekends

• summer vacation

• etc.

These are not trivial to manage for parents with regular 9-5 jobs. They are tremendously difficult to swing for parents involved in the kind of 24-7 highly demanding careers that compromise the tippy-top of our pay scale (or “prestige scale,” since not all very prestigious jobs are highly paid).

While reading Teslo’s essay, I was reminded of a famous essay written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” In that essay, Slaughter describes why she stopped working an intense job at the State Department: her teenage son was “skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him.” She concluded: “juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Slaughter paints an uncomfortably accurate picture of what this kind of elite job requires. Her boss, then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, tries to make sure her employees have “morning and evening time” with their families by coming into work at 8am and leaving at 7pm. Let us imagine you are trying to work such a job while you have a toddler and an elementary school child. The toddler goes to bed at 8:30 pm and wakes up at 6:30 am. The older child goes to bed at 9pm and wakes up at 6am. You need 30 minutes door-to-door to get to work (in most urban locations this is an incredibly short commute).

Under this math, on days when all goes perfectly, you see your toddler for an hour at night and an hour in the morning. You see your older child for three hours per day. Unless, of course, you are traveling, experiencing a work crisis, or there’s traffic/the subway system has a delay. You don’t get a lot of sleep, because most of these jobs require you to log back in after bedtime. The hours in which you do see your children are also harried. Anyone with a toddler knows bedtime is fraught. Anyone with a school child knows that the mornings in which you are trying to get them off to school (hopefully wearing seasonally-appropriate clothes and both shoes; I could tell you stories) are a challenge in logistics and patience. Here’s a vivid picture of what such a day might look like.

In other words, children do not fit comfortably into the margins of a very busy career. Couples that try it often end up with one person dialing back at work to manage “the home front.” Slaughter notes that in her family that person was her husband. So, it doesn’t have to be mom that dials back - but often it is. ¹

Slaughter offers various suggestions about how to move the needle to enable women to more successfully combine high-powered careers and families. I wholeheartedly agree with all of them: (1) require less face time in the office; (2) recognize that parenting develops important skills that are transferable to office work, and (3) rethink women’s career “arcs” as more of a staircase in which she dials back and then back up at work depending on family demands.

Slaughter gives good advice. But I am more pessimistic than she about combining intense elite jobs and family. Slaughter suggests a woman looking to both reach career heights and be a hands-on parent will “want maximum flexibility and control over her time in the 10 years that her children are 8 to 18.” I don’t see raising kids as a ten year project; I’m not sure why Slaughter has left out the early kid years from her analysis. I think it’s an 18 year project for each kid. I have four kids, with a ten-year gap between my oldest and youngest. That means I’ll be raising kids for about 30 years when all is said and done. If I have more kids, the kid-raising-time-span expands. Regardless of when I have kids, there are decades in which I am not going to be able to easily have the kind of super high-powered job we are talking about, meaning the kind of career planning both Teslo and Slaughter envision is really, really difficult.

Likewise, I - and I think many women (and men!) - simply do not want the kind of ultra productive lifestyle Slaughter describes to make this combination possible. She describes the story of a woman who dials in “1:11” or “2:22” on a microwave to save time. I am sorry, but if this is what feminism is supposed to require of us, I decline. I fully believe that women are as intelligent and hardworking as men. I’m 100% for a woman president when the right candidate arrives. However, I want enough margin in my day to be able to drink a glass of wine and chat with my husband; I refuse to try to figure out how to shave a half second off programming the microwave. If having kids and a high-powered career forecloses that, I’m out. I’m grateful to generations of women who went before who fought for women to be taken seriously in the workforce, but I am also realistic about tradeoffs.

I think I’m not alone. For many women with kids, running life at 90 miles per hour is neither something they want or can manage for any length of time without burning out. As Claudia Goldin has both described empirically and modeled economically, in most families that have kids, one person will lean further in, and the other will take up more homemaking tasks. It doesn’t have to be a strict binary: maybe dad has the full-time (but not too intense) job and mom has a part-time job that requires a lot of brain power. Or maybe it’s dad at home. But for many families who could work elite jobs, having two people work very full-time and hiring round-the-clock nannies is undesirable. This means many women are not going to go for the ultra high-pay jobs, which are the source of much of our income disparity (CEOs usually make hundreds of times what the average worker does).

It’s for this reason that I see “solving the gender wage gap” as tilting at windmills. Of course we should want equal pay for equal work. But many women are not interested in the “equal work” part for very good, intelligent, and self-interested reasons. As a society we should respect that, and instead focus on making sure moms and women are not discriminated against in the workforce and have the flexibility to make combining work and family possible … even while being realistic that being a CEO of a Big Four Accounting Firm while also having seven kids is reserved for only the superwomen among us (and I, and many of my fellow moms both aren’t and don’t want to be superwomen).

To put it another way, eliminating the gender wage gap would require a massive elite-driven social engineering project. We’d have to pour vast resources into convincing more highly-educated dads with big income potential to stay home/manage the “homefront,” and more mothers to pursue ultra elite jobs in order to shift the equilibrium I just described above. In general, I am suspicious of such top-down social engineering projects: the available data we have shows that some moms want to work full-time, some part-time, and some not at all. True, policymakers could try to change those preferences. This is a topic for another post, but I am highly skeptical that this kind of social engineering is appropriate in a democracy, where politicians’ first preference should (I think) be to understand and take seriously citizen preferences, rather than decide they know better.

Since I’m riffing here, let me give my own advice on how one might handle the conundrum of work and parenthood faced by a recent graduate of an elite university. I’m not trying to talk anyone out of having kids and pursuing a super elite job. If you want to, go for it. I’m cheering you on! But if you’re thinking about pursuing a different path, here’s some thoughts. They’re probably worth what it cost you (this post is free).

1. If you are getting married to another Ivy League grad (likely, given our statistics on “assortative mating,”) know that working two full-time very demanding jobs with kids is very, very hard. If you are going to be on call 24-7 (which is why they are paying the big bucks) you will need full-time childcare, which probably means at least a nanny, and possibly a night-time nanny as well. Even if you are working a less demanding job, it’s still hard.

2. If one of you steps back from your career to take care of the kids, this is usually a source of some tension. Try to “fight right” about this. Have ongoing and open conversations. This isn’t a one time conversation; it’s a decades-long conversation. The person who has stepped back is still working hard, even if it’s unpaid. As a couple, try to make sure that person has regular breaks and is also able to do something intellectually challenging that isn’t the kids.

3. If you work before having kids, it’s can be helpful to earn as much and learn as much as possible pre-kid. Compound interest is rightly said to be the most powerful force in the universe. Do your best to pay off any loans, especially any high-interest loans. If you’re able to do that, put every dollar possible into your retirement fund, hopefully into a low-cost index fund. Being debt free and having started a retirement nest egg early is going to give you many, many more options later. Relatedly, avoid golden handcuffs. If you are buying a house, buy an affordable one. If you are buying a car, get it used. Plenty of time to upgrade later if the finances work out. The more you learn, the more likely you will be able to eke out some flexible or part-time work post kids, since you’ll be more attractive to employers. (A much fuller version of this argument is made here).

4. You are smart. It took brains and drive to graduate from a top school (I know some of your classmates were idiots, but let’s face it, they were probably smart idiots.) Ignore those on the right who say women shouldn’t pursue higher education if they want to be moms. Ignore those on the left who think being a stay-at-home mom is somehow betraying feminism. You can think for yourself about how to creatively combine work, family, and kids. Probably you won’t become super rich or a household name if you go that route - unlike some of your classmates. That’s ok. You can still do good work, whether it’s in your family or the wider world. You’re using your education and brains to build a meaningful and satisfying life, and that’s a good use of both.

1. Either way, families with one parent that has an incredibly intense job of the sort Teslo and Slaughter describes ends up making other tradeoffs. Consider military families: we are honest that the family of the deployed service member makes incredible sacrifices. Family members of CEOs or high-level politicians, etc. also make very serious tradeoffs. What they gain in money or prestige is often weighed against the cost of missing mom or dad while they’re working. I’m obviously not saying no one should do these jobs: we need people to do this important work! But it’s good to be honest.