Women, Work and the Nobel : Ideas: Some scholars are ‘appalled’ at economist Gary Becker’s winning the prestigious prize for theories they say reinforce discrimination.
Do you think women choose jobs that pay less than those of their male counterparts?
Or that their time is less valuable than their husband’s?
Or that they have fewer children so that they can spend more money on them?
Gary S. Becker thinks so.
And last week the Royal Swedish Academy awarded the University of Chicago economist $1.2 million and the Nobel Prize.
While Becker celebrates, many women scholars across the country are steamed. Some say “appalled.”
“If working women really understood what he was saying, it would make them furious,” said economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of “When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children.”
Becker’s critics say he uses esoteric theorems and equations to come up with traditional assumptions that perpetuate roles detrimental to dual-income families.
Consider the wage gap between men and women. Becker points out that if women carry more responsibilities at home, they may choose to work part-time and thus receive less training for promotions at work.
But Hewlett responds: “What he totally forgets about are the enormous constraints. Society has no supports for child care. Society still doesn’t have parenting leave. Obviously, women are not exercising free choice.”
Becker also has written that it is more efficient for working wives to do the lion’s share of housework because, in general, they are paid less in the workplace and their time has less “value.”
“It’s crazy,” said one university sociologist.
“A lot of people criticize me,” said Becker, 61. “They claim all sorts of things. Some of it’s misunderstanding and some of it is substituting what they’d like to see for a realistic analysis of the situation as it is.”
In his work, notably “A Treatise on the Family,” Becker writes that people make rational choices about abortion, marriage, divorce, the number of children they have and the division of household labor based on economic theories such as cost-benefit and incentives. Their behavior, he says, can be analyzed and predicted in terms of time and pleasure “costs” as well as money.
In his view, as a woman’s income rises, her ties to the home are loosened. More highly paid women choose to have fewer children because they prefer raising “quality children” rather than “quantity children.” These same women choose divorce because they can afford it.
“He argues that in many ways marriage can be viewed like two nations who trade,” said labor economist Myra Strober of Stanford University. “The marriage is stronger if the man and the woman each specialize--the woman with the mop and the broom and the man in the marketplace. “I don’t believe men and women are like trading partners. They live together. If they have similar work or interests, it may cement the marriage. And if they share household duties, it may make the marriage stronger,” Strober said.
“There are not too many women today who would seek a mate who simply could support them and they would keep the home fires burning.”
Becker is familiar with the criticism. Two women sociologists challenged him in a public panel at a recent meeting of the American Sociological Assn. (“He was quite reasonable and scholarly in the way in which he responded,” said Margaret Marini, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota.)
“Women do exercise free choice,” he insists. But he said his critics do not understand that he does consider factors such as the lack of child care, discrimination and biology in devising his models for rational choice.
“I’d be a fool if I tried to deny that,” he said. “And I’ve used it to explain why women don’t make as much as men.”
Becker said some of his critics would like to believe that discrimination is the only factor affecting lower salary and fewer job opportunities for women. “It’s a factor,” he said. “We don’t know all the others (and) some are possibly more important.”
Critics are also offended by the economic jargon Becker uses to discuss personal areas of family life. Children for instance, become consumer durables. Long-term marriages have marital-specific capital.
Moreover, they object to public policy implications of his ideas.
Said Stephanie Coontz, history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., “He provides policy makers with a simple formula: All we do is figure out the cost-benefit equation. If we increase the costs of illegitimacy, we can get rid of it.”
Becker said he is unaware to what extent his thinking has influenced public policy.
However, several states, California among them, have proposed incentive-based welfare reforms that tie welfare checks to children’s attendance at school or health check-ups, rather than the number of children in a home. “I’d like to believe I had a little bit of an influence on that,” he said.
“We should bear in mind the main aim of welfare is to help the children, not the parents,” he explained.
He disapproves of “no fault divorce” and has also recommended marriage contracts that spell out custody and child support arrangements in case the marriage fails.
Becker’s theories about family behavior are only one aspect of his work honored by the Swedish Academy. He has also applied economic theories to crime and discrimination.
In awarding him the prize, the academy noted Becker has stimulated other academics to break new ground in these areas.
These academics include feminists such as Martha Farnsworth Riche, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau. The demographer said Becker’s work inspired her to study why many divorced mothers tend not to remarry when it seems to contradict their best economic interest. She found that in the 1980s, women’s wages rose significantly while those for men decreased correspondingly. Moreover, two out of three divorces are instigated by wives.
“I concluded that in many ways, wives have fired husbands,” she said. “The economic motivation for marriage has gone, and at that point, what a spouse is confronted with is, ‘What am I getting out of this?’ ”
Despite Becker’s political conservatism, he does not believe the American family ought to return to the Waltons, as President George Bush has suggested. “The world is different,” he said, and families must adjust to it.
He predicted mothers will continue to enter the work force, but at a slower rate of increase. They will continue to have fewer children so that they will become “relatively well educated and well trained to compete better in a modern environment.” Divorce will remain high, and complicated step-families will become commonplace.
Meanwhile, he said working women are coming closer to equality.
“I never claim they don’t try to get more. They are getting more,” he said referring to increases in income. “Women are doing better. So they are making it subject to constraints.”
