Sometimes it's a struggle to wrap my brain around where someone is coming from. I think to myself that surely people can't be this ignorant, that there must be more substance to their argument than what I'm seeing. Sadly, I've come to the conclusion that Rebecca Cohen really doesn't understand how things work in the real world. As I've often seen with feminists of her stripe, it is her ignorance that shapes her critiques. Because she does not understand why a thing is, she takes hold of her favorite argument, that it is due to patriarchy and discrimination against women. The answer that she seeks comes not from gender studies, but from economics.
Scarcity is one of the most foundational ideas in economics. In fact, I believe that you could argue that without scarcity, economics is meaningless. Understanding that means are scarce leads to many other insights into how prices form and how people prioritize some actions over others. Opportunity cost is a reflection of the fact that human beings are scarce. We can't be in two places at the same time or perform multiple actions that our bodies cannot support. It is impossible to go watch a movie and go to work (well, unless you are a projectionist). You can't play a video game while writing a blog post.
What opportunity cost means is that you must weigh the benefits and drawbacks of the choices you make, on some level. That's not to say that each morning you wake up, you debate the benefits of going to work over going to a movie, but that by committing to working each day, you have consciously foregone other possible uses of your time in favor of the choice that, to you, appears to give you the most benefit.
Consider the first panel, the women who "works outside the home" because (she?) "can't pay for basic household expenses on one income alone." I'm taking a stab in the dark here, but the off-camera implications I'm seeing is that this woman has a spouse or domestic partner of some kind who works, but does not make enough money all by himself/herself to support them both in their chosen lifestyle. The implication is that many women are forced into working to survive.
The irony here is kind of delicious. Let's assume that our working woman is married to a male. Why should we presume that she should stay home while he should work? Why don't they both get to stay home? Rebecca Cohen assumes that the man is going to sacrifice his time and energy to provide for his household, and worries that the woman needing to work is not her choice. They both have an opportunity cost for doing this, getting less time for leisure activities, or whatever other pursuits they might otherwise go after. If Cohen were truly committed to the argument she is making here, she should be saying that no one should have to work for anything
The fact is that human beings going back through time have always traded their labor for other scarce means. They do this because the alternative to working is dying, and most people would prefer to endure the discomfort of labor to spare themselves the discomfort of a long, painful death. In modern times and in wealthier nations, immediate death is rarely the alternative to working, but you will have to give up many comforts, probably the respect of others, and your options will otherwise be very limited. Most people still choose to structure their lives and households around exchanging labor for other scarce means. How much of their labor, and what they choose to do with their free time, influences what kind of lifestyle they will lead.
There is no reason that a married couple cannot survive on a single income. Simply foregoing some comforts, like cell phones, internet access, and subscription entertainment can cut hundreds of dollars out of a monthly budget. Likewise, cooking all of your own meals with inexpensive groceries can save huge amounts over dining out. Some areas of the country have high rent and high cost of living, while others are much lower. Where you live, what size house or apartment you have, what you eat, and what services you buy are all choices that you make.
Likewise, if you make good choices in workplace and apply yourself diligently to your work and to self-improvement, it is very possible to rise quickly to a point where a single income, spent carefully, can provide everything that a couple needs to survive and thrive. Rebecca, though, does not think that this is fair. She thinks that a life without all of these little luxuries is simply impossible to live. Fair enough, if her partner does not make enough money that she can have all of these things, she is free to get a job and trade her labor for the option to eat out every night and subscribe to every entertainment service she wants. She has decided that the opportunity cost from working, that is to say, staying home with a dearth of luxuries, does not outweigh the benefits. There is no timeless male conspiracy here, only the simple fact of scarcity of means, and a preference for one thing above another.
We can say the same for each of the other panels. "Quality child care" was once routinely provided by elderly family members who could no longer work and who lived with their children, but Americans have chosen to follow the model of the nuclear family, valuing privacy and space over the efficiency of built-in babysitters. This is not something to be nostalgic for, but merely a fact of revealed preferences. Given all available alternatives, and confronted with the cost of child care, some mothers choose to stay home.
The "hostile work place" is probably a reference to the fact that many jobs demand high reliability from workers, and having a child can mean taking more time off or having to come in to work late to deal with minor emergencies. Such incidents can directly impact a business' ability to function well. Even if profitability isn't directly undermined, often work must be postponed, or handed off to others, increasing their workloads. A workplace which tries to minimize these effects is not targeting mothers specifically, but workers who are producing less than others. Usually, there is a certain amount of tolerance and understanding shown from managers and coworkers, but some workplaces, often due to the nature of the work, are more exacting and demanding than others.
The bottom left panel demonstrates the concept of opportunity cost yet again. The vast majority of the continental US is within 50 miles of an abortion clinic. There is a streak through the midwest, some of the least populated parts of the country, where it is 200 miles or more, and spotty areas throughout the country where it is 100 miles or more. People in rural areas generally must accept a narrower array of goods and services than more populated areas, and are used to traveling longer distances to get what they need. Framing this is a feminism issue is absurd, akin to arguing that it is a crime against humanity that there aren't world-class brain surgeons on every street corner.
Medicaid does not cover abortions except in cases where the health of the mother is threatened, and the majority of all remaining abortions are paid for out of pocket. The average cost of an abortion is less than $500 when paid in cash. We're not talking about major barriers here. Obviously, Cohen thinks that there is no justice for women unless abortions are free and available on every street corner, but that is because she doesn't understand that resources are scarce.
If the final panel seems a bit out of place, that is because it is straight-up virtue signalling. Cohen has to show that she is an inclusive feminist by coming up with a grievance for transwomen. Transgendered women who have fully transitioned cannot have children without careful planning and investment. This generally either means artificial insemination of a genotypic female or adoption.
The funny thing about this is that it could just as easily apply to any couple who has undergone financial hardship. Waiting to have children can be a very good choice if you are smart enough and careful enough not to have an accidental pregnancy. The fact is that some couples who aren't in a good financial position to handle a child end up with one anyway. Also, some couples who can't have children are too poor to afford the alternatives.
Remove that aspect and we are left with the discrimination complaint. From the evidence I have seen, it is clear that transgender women tend to earn less per year after transitioning. The first question that comes to my mind is whether that might indicate a real drop in productivity. Would time spent in recovery from a serious surgery have something to do with it?
Are we talking about people experiencing an immediate salary cut at their current job? Not likely. So what are the circumstances of their leaving the job they held before? I can think of a myriad of ways in which an employee's gender transition might cause problems for an employer that have nothing to do with direct discrimination.
I'm not trying to hand-wave away the real problems these people face, but statistics regarding transgender pay are still sparse, and no one has yet attempted to disaggregate these numbers and tease out the particular circumstances that leads to higher unemployment and lower wages. In a future post, I'll talk more about why I think that the difference in wages for transgender individuals represents a different problem than the so-called gender wage gap, which has been shown to be largely non-existent by the simple controlling and disaggregating of factors.
Feminists such as Rebecca Cohen lack the knowledge outside their specialization to understand when a problem stops being one of discrimination and starts being one of practical limits of the real world. What's more, when directly confronted with this evidence, such people will inevitably claim bias on your part, even going so far as to call the evidence itself tainted by patriarchy. When asked to specifically debunk what you have presented, the feminist claims that it is not her job to educate you and returns to name-calling and insinuation. It would be funny, if it weren't so frustrating.
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