My point is that as supply increases demand decreases, as demand decreases people compete for the same jobs at lower wages. There are correlations in real terms that you can see as the workforce became more liberal, it was harder and harder to own your own house. I am merely stating a fact as I see it, you are free to dispute it, but I would like to head off at the pass the notion that I have a problem with women in the workplace, I do not. At this point in time, my wife makes more money than I do.
Then why limit your initial comment to the effects of women joining the workforce?
I think you missed the whole point of what I was saying. I was saying that many jobs that now require college educations are not really benefitted much by them. Many people go into debt on a Liberal Arts education just so they can have the diploma, as it is the diploma that helps net them the job, not what they learned. Most of the skills they learned that will help them on most of the entry level jobs they will attain could be taught in a 1 year office skills program. The skills they need to advance from there could be learned on the job. I am not saying that employers don’t require it of you, only that the requirement is sort of arbitrary and pointless in many cases.
I am in college now and am almost 30, but I am studying something I am actually into, and not just some random liberal arts BS. Had I chosen to apply myself I could’ve been making six figures without a college degree, being that I was pulling 50-100 an hour doing IT work for the past half dozen years. I just didn’t hustle and learn the stuff well, I didn’t go for any certs and I didn’t work hard to get new clients. My not making a ton of money had little to do with college, but had everything to do with a lack of interest. I went out and partied and organized raves and such. I like being in school now.
It was in response to a comment about women in the workforce.
I agree with you, this is a bullshit urban legend plain and simple.
I didn’t graduate high school all that long ago (1999 to be exact), but a lot of girls I went to high school are now mothers (some with children as old as 6). The only thing all of them have in common is that they’re married to the guy who fathered their children (except for one, but she’s a rotten bitch who broke my friend’s heart).
But they’re all married and had a kid because they wanted to be married and have a kid. There was no doing it to avoid college and a lot of these girls had no plans to go to college anyway (and most of them are military wives, a situation where marrying young and young motherhood are common).
The Dear Abby story basically sounds like a put-on to explain away these girls pregnancies as a choice. “No mom and dad, I didn’t screw up my life and ruin my chance to go to Yale (another BS-o-meter moment). I wanted this baby!”
I think it does have something to do with the need for increased education. When competition increased, people sought ways to add value to themselves, so they went to school. Those who didn’t go to school did not add that value and thus fell behind those who did. So more people went to school watering down the value of that education. IE as supply goes up demand goes down. Now an entry level job requires a college education, but really, do you need a college education to be an administrative assistant?
That is certainly true, but I know very few people from any income that do not buy useless junk. I’ve known people from every income bracket, from people barely making the rent living in trailers, to people living in the projects in the ghetto, on up to multi-millionaires. The thing about Health insurance in this country is that it is largely the lower middle-class that gets shafted. There are health insurance schemes in many states for people below a certain marker, and people making above a certain marker can afford the insurance more easily. It is generally the people making between 25k-40k per year that have the hardest time acquiring it.
Yeah, that’s irritating as Grad School’s usually have a limited number of seats.
Yeah, one good way to appease the family values crowd would be to have a ‘raising a family’ class. I think it would be good for everyone to know how to do that, regardless of whether they ever have a family, so that at least they know what a family is going through when they have kids. Show them the real numbers, show them that disposable diapers cost $ 3000 a year, or you can use cloth diapers but you have to do laundry every day. Explain to them about having a child scream directly in their ear for two hours. Teach them about the balancing act that you play passing the child back and forth between the parents when both parents have stuff they need to do. Teach them that it’s probably more difficult than college, MORE responsibility than college, and unlike college you can’t just blow it off when the baby gives you an assignment. Right now I am going to school and raising a newborn. I breeze through my classes for the most part, I don’t study nearly as much as I should, but the difference for me is a B- vs an A in most cases. The baby is much more difficult and I readily admit that my wife does most of the work on that one because she stays home while I am at school, and well, I can’t lactate. I think politicizing the choices people ‘should’ make is a mistake. Give them a chance to weigh the options after presenting the info. My sister is one of those kids that wants a kid. She’s 21 and I keep telling her to travel a bit before she does, that way she’ll know how to travel and can keep doing it once she has the kid rather than getting locked into a routine where she won’t know how to do it.
I think all women should be able to support themselves independently, regardless of their desire to be a homemaker. Even if the relationship doesn’t fall apart (and the odds are pretty good that it will), if your husband dies, you need to be able to support yourself and your children. It also gives you a better sense of equality within the relationship (I know many SAH moms don’t feel unequal or powerless, but many do). It’s just good sense to develop independence. We don’t know what the future will bring and you need to prepare for the worst.
You are completely ignoring the fact of the gender-segregated workforce. Most men and women don’t work the same jobs. The vast majority of men work more with other men, women with women and so on. For the most part they aren’t competing against each other.
I have not found that to be true in my experience. I have always worked directly with women.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, however. You seem to attribute the rise in living costs to women entering the workforce,when it may very well be that higher costs has encouraged everyone to enter the workforce.
I’m betting that the rate of inflation does not track well with the expanding size in the labor pool, though I’m not an economist so I’m not 100% sure. Sharing a cite or two in support of this argument would be appreciated.
Heh, I’m not an economist either. I know correlation does not imply causation, but I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, I think the two ideas play into one another. Women largely entered the workforce during World War II, and that sort of made it a foregone conclusion. Then we had Women’s Lib in the 60s and 70s which led us to where we are today.
And clearly personal experience=data. I’m looking for an online cite now. My Sociology of Occupation text won’t help I suppose?
What’s a foregone conclusion? And how did “Women’s Lib” lead us to where we are today, in terms of our economy?
You throw these things out like your point is self-explanatory. It’s not.
If you go here: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/labor_force_employment_earnings/
to the labor department statistics and find table number 602. While yes, there are women in each occupational group, they make up only 30% of “Production, transportation, and material occupations”, most of them settling around:
Laundry and dry-cleaning workers
Pressers, textile, garment, and related materials
Sewing machine operators
Tailors, dressmakers, and sewers
and few of them represented as Machinists, Tool and Die makers, Cabinetmakers/Carpenters, Stationary Engineers/Boiler monitors. Other job groups show the same patterns: men and women tend to group to different jobs. Also note differences in female participation from Natural Resources/Construction/Maintenance and Sales/Office Occupations.
There have always been lots of girls getting pregnant right after high school. There are actually less of them now than ever before. The percent of women who have their first baby in their teen years has been slowly dropping for decades. There might be a slightly higher proportion of those who have babies not getting married before the baby was born, but that’s only because the proportion of women who don’t get married before their first baby is born has also been dropping for decades. But that’s true in every age group - teens, twenties, thirties, forties, or whatever.
Like most trends announced in advice columns, this one of “prom babies” almost certainly doesn’t exist. An advice column is not an accurate survey. Indeed, any “trend” mentioned in one is so likely to not be a real trend that it’s generally not even worth trying to find the statistics about it. In particular, the idea that there are increasing numbers of girls from middle- to upper-middle-class families where it’s expected that they will go to college who instead get pregnant just to spite their parents strikes me as absurdly unlikely.
I’m 20 years old and in college. A friend of mine (i believe he’s a 6th year in school, he works a lot, so he’s been around for a while) said that within the last month, one of his old friends, someone his age, had a kid. This was the first person his own age that he knew of having children.
A lot of people at my university came from the more affluent areas around the Bay. I told them how in high school, I knew 3 girls personally who were pregnant before graduation, one during freshman year. Oh the joys of a semi-rural town. They were shocked, like stuff like that never happens anymore just because it doesn’t happen to them. I knew these girls, they weren’t getting pushed into college. Of my group in my hometown, only 3 people were really pushed to go higher than community college; it just isn’t expected there, while getting a job and getting married within a year or so is unremarkable.
Jobs like what? Engineer? Accountant? What jobs are you thinking of that requires a college degree but doesn’t use it?
If nothing else, having a college degree demonstrates the discipline to complete a 4 year program. As an employer, I look at dozens of resumes. I don’t have time to schedule a battery of interviews with everyone who applies. A good resume only gets you in the front door. No one cares about “shoulda, coulda, woudlas”. Employers only care about what you actually did.
Because perhaps it is a “fact” that exists only in your mind?
I have to agree that the trend is AGAINST prom babies and teenage pregnancy. This is especially true in more affluent and urban areas where it’s pretty much understood your professional life starts after college, not high school. If you come from a more rural community where the trend is to graduate HS and either join the military or go right to work at the local farm/mill/factory/bar/WalMart then I can understand people settling down with families at a younger age.
Yep, me and the US Census Bureau. BTW, your snark is so appreciated. :rolleyes:
I do not have a cite, at least not one that I can link to. However, here is an example.
Before the early '70s, a lender contemplating a home loan was perfectly free to disregard the income of a married woman, and they pretty much all did. So couples buying homes had to rely on the income of the man, even if both of them worked full time.
At some point in the '70s litigation forced lenders to consider the incomes of both people. So, suddenly, couples with two incomes could qualify for a much higher home loan, hence more house.
Housing prices jumped accordingly, and if you look at real estate records in the mid-'70s in my locale you can actually see this. A HUUUGE jump.
Once the housing prices went up, people trying to get a mortgage were a lot more likely to NEED two incomes in order to qualify for even the most modest of houses. Two incomes, or one really good income.
As housing is one of the biggests costs of living, this makes quite an impact. You can say that women have broadened the work force and been punished economically for it, but this is supply and demand.
1920 called, it wants you to come back home. I see that you are young and a resident of utopia-land. I have no idea whatsoever in this world what you are talking about although I would expect an apology the first time you step foot off of your college campus a few years from now. As a 33 year old professional, this is one of the most most retarded and delusional things I have ever heard anyone on this board say although it might make certain worldviews easier. I have 10+ years of experience in IT which most people think of as male dominated but I would guess that over half of my hundreds of coworkers have been female with more than half of IT management being female including my boss, my bosses boss, and my bosses bosses boss in my current Fortune 500 company. My executive VP wife might hear the same thing from her male subordinates.
You sound like you just got teleported from the past. You ideas have zero basis in reality in this case. Please don’t take that as an insult. Just ask for a refund from whoever fed you a plate of this horseshit because it is the sorriest load of crap that have graced these boards in a while and it makes you look like a naive, crazy person.