Great article with supportive data! I think one important piece to this is how God intended the role of men and women. God as the foundation creates sustainable and deeply centered marriages. Not necessarily happy marriages. That word happy is overrated in my opinion. You can't sustain happiness but you can sustain peace. Husband and wife both have such important, different jobs in the home. Women are led to believe submission is something degrading, when really it's something that can be beautiful when shared with a husband who as you said is present and committed. Whose every action and purpose is to lift his family. For a woman to be given that space of vulnerability is a treasure. Cultural christianity is replacing theological doctrine. I would say Road 3: Western Cultural Christianity. This road leads to greater influence of cohabitation and less influence over covenant marriage. Marriage is symbolic, not so much sacred. Personal happiness sometimes becomes the highest value.
This is excellent. It has always bothered me that we try to quantify absolutely everything in economic terms. Money cannot replace some things—least of all a warm, thriving, close-knit family.
You say that this would be a cultural value judgment on motherhood not being a lesser vocation, but your argument to defend the wage gap at least implicitly frames it as a superior vocation to being a single woman contributing to the workforce. I didn't see any proposed distinction to be made for the wages of men based on whether they were married or not, so it looks like the logic of this view could (and really should) be read as inherently valuing a single man's work more than a single woman's. If you truly wanted to be equitable, you should have proposed a wage difference between married and unmarried men for the same work. You did not. So your proposed view is less "pro woman" and more "pro what I think a woman should be doing".
It would be a lot easier to ignore this bias if you had included a third projection which proposed a hypothetical 5% wage reduction on the part of men compared to women, assumed a potential stay at home father structure, and demonstrated that fertility rates would still not rise even under a similar wage gap and gender switch in the home.
Great article with supportive data! I think one important piece to this is how God intended the role of men and women. God as the foundation creates sustainable and deeply centered marriages. Not necessarily happy marriages. That word happy is overrated in my opinion. You can't sustain happiness but you can sustain peace. Husband and wife both have such important, different jobs in the home. Women are led to believe submission is something degrading, when really it's something that can be beautiful when shared with a husband who as you said is present and committed. Whose every action and purpose is to lift his family. For a woman to be given that space of vulnerability is a treasure. Cultural christianity is replacing theological doctrine. I would say Road 3: Western Cultural Christianity. This road leads to greater influence of cohabitation and less influence over covenant marriage. Marriage is symbolic, not so much sacred. Personal happiness sometimes becomes the highest value.
This is excellent. It has always bothered me that we try to quantify absolutely everything in economic terms. Money cannot replace some things—least of all a warm, thriving, close-knit family.
This is a great article. Thank you for setting out our situation – and the choices we face – with such candour and clarity.
Thanks for reading!
Excellent.
Complimentary family approach -
You say that this would be a cultural value judgment on motherhood not being a lesser vocation, but your argument to defend the wage gap at least implicitly frames it as a superior vocation to being a single woman contributing to the workforce. I didn't see any proposed distinction to be made for the wages of men based on whether they were married or not, so it looks like the logic of this view could (and really should) be read as inherently valuing a single man's work more than a single woman's. If you truly wanted to be equitable, you should have proposed a wage difference between married and unmarried men for the same work. You did not. So your proposed view is less "pro woman" and more "pro what I think a woman should be doing".
It would be a lot easier to ignore this bias if you had included a third projection which proposed a hypothetical 5% wage reduction on the part of men compared to women, assumed a potential stay at home father structure, and demonstrated that fertility rates would still not rise even under a similar wage gap and gender switch in the home.