The materially deleterious effect of women working on a society is illustrated in a paper entitled “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation and Government Size”
The increase in income per capita is accompanied, in virtually all
countries, by two changes in the structure of the economy, namely an
increase in the share of government spending in GDP and an increase in
female labour force participation. This paper suggests that these two
changes are causally related. We develop a growth model where the
structure of the economy is endogenous so that participation in market
activities and government size are causally related.Economic growth and
rising incomes are accompanied by a greater incentive for women to
engage in labour market activities as the opportunity cost of staying at
home increases. We hypothesize that government spending decreases the
cost of performing household chores such as, but not limited to, child
rearing and child care so that couples decide to engage further in the
labour market and chose a higher tax rate to finance more government
spending.Using a wide cross-section of data for developed and
developing countries, we show that higher participation by women in the
labour market are indeed positively associated with larger governments.
Furthermore, we investigate the causal link between the two variables
using as instrumental variables a unique and novel dataset on the
relative price of home appliances across OECD countries and over time.
We find strong evidence of a causal link between participation in the
labour market and government size: a 10 percent rise in participation in
the labour market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size.
This effect is robust to the country sample, time period, and a set of
controls in the spirit of Rodrik (1998).
This is also an implicit argument against female suffrage. However, the researchers’ hypothesis is incorrect, as government spending observably does not decrease the cost of child rearing and child care; one reason European families have so few children is that the cost of raising children is exorbitant despite the greater amount of spending by European governments. Free day care and year-long maternity leave doesn’t make up for the fact that food and gasoline cost considerably more than in the USA.
Voting is not freedom. The conflation of voting with freedom is one of the key deceptions upon which feminism rests. And like all ideologies based upon deception, the more powerful feminism becomes, the more likely it is that the polity in which it has become influential will collapse on the basis of the weight of its contradictions.