Sociology Educational Gender Parity And The Paralyzation Of The Womb
Path models with length of marriage up to age 39, educational attainment, log-transformed family income, religious attendance and gender attitudes as intermediate variables show that the IQ effect is mainly indirect. IQ leads to higher education and income. HIGH EDUCATION REDUCES FERTILITY IN THE FEMALE SAMPLES. Also high income reduces fertility independently except for black males. Another finding is a robust positive effect of IQ on liberal gender role attitudes in all demographic categories, which in turn reduce the number of children significantly for white females.The connection between the liberalization of gender roles and fertility is of great interest. The assumption that gender parity in all things is inconducive to sustainable propagation arrives at the footstep of the ideas in Steve Sailer's article "The Return of Patriarchy?". Nearly seven years ago, Sailer wrote:
As physicist turned evolutionary theorist Gregory M. Cochran keeps pointing out, there's no particular reason to assume that post-modern cultures will ever get back to replacement-level reproduction. That doesn't mean the human race will go extinct. As Jim Chapin of UPI has pointed out, post-modern cultures might well be eventually pushed aside by whichever groups of religious fundamentalists - Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Wahhabi Islamists - best succeed in motivating their followers to have lots of children. I'll be rooting for the first of those groups. But I would be plenty contented by knowledge that the whiterpeople who created the World Economic Forum's 2007 report on the Global Gender Gap (GGG) were motivating the women who putatively have it all to actually have it all, children included. Unfortunately, the women most deprived of what these whiterpeople consider fundamental hu(wo)man rights are the women who are reproducing most vigorously.
The WEF assigned a GGG ranking for 128 countries across the globe (pg 15), based on a host of gender-related measures, with a score of 1 representing perfect equality and a score of 0 representing perfect inequality. The correlation between a country's GGG score and its total fertility rate for women is an inverse.53 (p=0).
I bolded the sentence on the prohibitive effect of education on fertility from Mangan's excerpt for a reason. The WEF breaks its total index into four subindexes; economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. Subindex scores for each country are also made available.
Looking at each subindex independently reveals that the relationship between the GGG and fecundity is driven primarily by the gender gap in educational attainment. The inverse correlations of each with the total fertility rate, by country:
Economic participation and opportunity:.22 (p=.01)
EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT:.75 (P=.00)
Political empowerment:.22 (p=.01)
Health and survival:.01 (p=.89)
The acceptance of women in the workplace or the idea that women should be paid comparably for comparable work tracks weakly with fecundity. The relative number of women in elected offices is similarly only weakly related. Discrepancies in life expectancy or the gender ratio do not matter at all.
The strong bond with fecundity exists in education*. One-fifth of the educational attainment score comes from the gender literacy gap, the other four-fifths comes from the enrollment gap (in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools). The more time women spend in classrooms relative to the time their men spend there, the less likely they are to make babies. Buchanan has called oral contraceptives the suicide pills of the West. Well then, educational romanticism is its Depo-Provera.
We need accelerated educational paths (video recorded lectures, grade-level and course-level pre-testing, the removal of all electives from mandatory completion requirements, etc) so that a bright woman headed for graduate work does not have to be in her mid-twenties at the earliest before she finally starts working. At that point, even if it is in her future, she is unlikely to have yet attained financial security and must still put in long hours to establish herself in her field. It will not be until sometime in her mid-thirties that she'll be interested in starting a family, a point at which it will be difficult for her to do so for a number of reasons: She'll be well past her peak years of physical attractiveness, the chances of running into complications during pregnancy and the chances of having children with defects are increased, and the number of conceptions she'll be able to have are limited by the specter of menopause just over the horizon (meaning the question of family size--not including pets--will be winnowed down to whether it should remain at two or be expanded to three).
Also, fewer people in the US should go to college. Charles Murray makes the case in "Real Education" that only 10%-20% of the population enjoys the level of intelligence necessary to cope with genuine college-level material (and not all of these people will benefit or enjoy that material just because they are able to make sense of it). The other 30%-40% of each high school graduating class that heads off to a four year university is doing so not because the degree aspired for represents real productive value added to its holder, but because said degree has artificial societal value placed on it. The students are being rational in presuming that all else equal, a BA is going to increase their earning power. But at the societal level, it is irrational--or at least inefficient--to place so much value on a piece of paper that proxies for what a 30-minute IQ test and a few days on the job just as well reveals.
Because the college years are also a woman's most nubile ones, those who are smart enough to survive the contemporary college curriculum but who are unlikely to receive much real value in doing so (roughly the 100-115 IQ range) are the people who hurt society the most by squandering four or five years and, with opportunity costs considered, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in an utterly unrealistic setting that critically postpones their entry into the real world.
Data are here.
* The correlation might have been even stronger if the top 'equality' value did not max out at 1 for 15 countries. Since the index scores are based on female characteristics relative to male characteristics, it is not that these 15 countries experience perfect gender equality--it's that in all of them, women are outperforming men. A naif might presume that gender inequality, irrespective of which gender had the edge, would cause the WEF team alarm. That presumption, however, would be wrong. Just as whites cannot conceivably be the victims of racism, men cannot conceivably be the victims of sexism.
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