A new model of gender equality

The first question that we might ask ourselves is, is the specialization that we see in the household—the fact that the women reduced the time that they spend in the labor market or reduce their investment in their careers—is it just like a rational thing to do? Is it just some specialization that is beneficial for the household broadly speaking? The problem with that line of reasoning is that if it were the case, then we should see a reverse specialization in couples where, to the contrary, it's the woman who has the high-flying career, it's the woman who commands a very high relative wage relative to her partner. And the problem is, when you look at these couples, you see the exact same gender specialization that you see in the couples where the woman has lower earnings or lower career profile than her partner. So what that tells us is that it's very hard to explain through traditional economic incentives and through traditional models of gender specialization the change in the allocation of tasks that we see between men and women at the moment kids arrive.

Clearly one might say, well, it's not economic incentives, but women are different than men. They might have different biology or different hormonal development that explains basically why they are more prone to taking care of kids, to spending time investing in their offspring. Problem with this? I'd say it's twofold. The first is that a lot of the cost in terms of time use of this gender specialization is on tasks that we have a hard time seeing any form of biological comparative advantage in—think cooking, think taking some time to drive the kids to soccer, taking some time to get the kids at school. We don't see why women and men would be innately differentially endowed for these different types of tasks.

The interesting story of our biology is that it is not predetermining us in a specific parental arrangement. And actually, when you look at anthropology, when you look at history, you see a great variety of arrangements of the way we take care of babies. If you look at hunter-gatherers, you see that the role of alloparents—any other person than the mother—is extremely involved in taking care of kids. When you look at our societies, you see something drastically different. You see that the role of alloparents in taking care of kids has drastically shrunk. And on top of that, within the household, it's mostly women who are investing into taking care of kids.

If we want to think about a model that works for everyone and that is more equal, do we need for it to come naturally out of the invisible hand of the market, or can public policies help? My hunch is the following: if we look at what's been happening over the past 20 years, it seems like we've reached a plateau. The child penalty is not bulging much, and there is no obvious force that tells us that this equilibrium is going to suddenly give way. Then that means maybe public policies can. Public policies can help reallocate tasks and time and affect the gender specialization itself through parental leave policies and access to child care. Second, public policies can change stereotypes, beliefs, and norms. It is possible that policies that essentially change the allocation of time also help changing the beliefs that couples form about who's good at taking care of kids.

Every policy is potentially normative. Remember during the Covid crisis, we got adverts that were telling us, stay home, save the NHS. Do you remember what was on those posters? We had a man who was playing with a kid or doing some work, and you had a woman who was actually hoovering the living room with her kids around or preparing some food. Public policies sometimes send very strong signals about underlying norms in society, reinforcing them. It can actually also change norms. Traditionally, policies that try to change the way people form beliefs are looked at with a bit of reluctance by economists who essentially find them paternalistic. At the same time, one needs to recognize that preferences and beliefs are often malleable. They are being formed. Understanding the formation of these beliefs is absolutely critical to understand to what extent they should be cherished or if we should think carefully about why they come to be in place.

When it comes to our own norms around what men and women should do, what's really striking is just how malleable they are, how much they change over time. Think about the fraction of people saying that a woman should not work when she has a kid. It's gone from basically 90% disagreeing to now less than 35% in less than half a century. So the way we think about what's acceptable, what the role of a man or a woman should be, is actually much more malleable than we think. Therefore, what we need to think carefully about is where beliefs come from, how they are formed, and what would be the best way to address them. Showing people that some beliefs are okay, while others are actually biased, showing them basically that their beliefs are formed based on what other people think, all of this is really important to have a much more transparent debate around gender inequality.

When we want to address such important issues of gender inequality, economics is extremely useful, but it's only one part of the puzzle. Economics is very good at data analysis and modeling. That's useful because it is a nice way to try to think about what can explain behavior and to try to predict what a different world would look like. But at the same time, if we don't pay attention to history and anthropology when it comes to these questions, we don't go very far. Anthropology and sociology tell us that if you want to understand the behavior of men and women, especially when kids arrive, you need to understand why they form particular beliefs about their roles, why they form particular beliefs about what a mother or father should be. There is a very fruitful dialogue to be had here, because economics can definitely understand that beliefs are not fixed, that they are formed, that they evolve. We can enrich our economics model with bits that contain this notion of preferences changing and being formed; that helps us imagine different worlds and understand basically what are the constraints that we're facing if we want to change the world that we're in.