Eva de Francisco

We, economists, are well known for our faith in incentives and individual interest. That is why the idea of free markets is so powerful for us. If there is no hidden information between a buyer and a seller and no externalities or external effects affecting others beside them, their own self interests should end up in a price and a transaction beneficial to both, because otherwise that transaction would not happen, making both look for someone and somewhere else to trade with.
Most economists argue that most goods and services follow in this category, and that most people are capable of interpret information and make decisions in their self-interest. Thus, most markets are efficient, this is, they are the best way of allocate the scarce resources we have to the people that value those particular resources the most, and no planner or government can do any better.
With that mind set, when we see that women are paid less on average for doing the same jobs than men, most economists don’t see it necessarily as discrimination, and just see it as expected differences in productivity.
Society assumes that women will be the ones taking longer maternity leaves and running their households, taking their kids to the doctor when they need to, and on and on. And if that is the case, then, yes, that just makes us less productive in the market, no way around it.
When I was younger, I did job interviews without my wedding ring for a long time, and not because I was flirting with my prospective employers, but to signal that I was not married and thus was not planning to have kids. A few years later, I was denied job interviews because word had come to my prospective interviewer, another woman and an acquaintance of mine actually, that I had three kids. The fact that I didn’t take maternity leave in none of my pregnancies to signal in my resume that I was committed to my career, didn’t matter at all.
Averages are powerful, so if most women (any workplace minority here) don’t give priority to their careers, then most employers will assume you won’t either, and you will have to do a lot to convince them otherwise.
Yes, some employers are going to loose talent by acting this way or by having mediocre HR divisions, but the main losers are us, competent, “unusual” applicants, who will be passed up for jobs we could thrive on. But, how can we fight against the idea of the average when the average is usually a quick and good guess?
The book “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman is a great read to understand how we use shortcuts to make quick decisions, and what biases we all exhibit, although it is less clear how to “correct” or “account” for these biases. Personally, I think that the way we are going about this is all wrong, in the sense that we keep on using averages, now simply different ones, instead of letting people be whatever they want to be and freeing ourselves from this reductionist thought.
Now the same is true in multiple directions, this is, you can read stories in college campuses and elsewhere where any white man will be labeled as oppressor or intolerant and biased, no matter what, and a competent white applicant won’t be hired for a position for which he is best suited. Some years ago I read “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt about what is happening in the US educational system, where any disagreeing thought is dangerous, but unfortunately I see more and more examples of this fragile way of thinking today and I am scared.
Yes, this reduced identity culture scares me. It assumes that any one different than you lacks the empathy and will be incapable of understand you, personally and professionally, and thus won’t be able to evaluate your work fairly either.
It reminds me when I was a teenager and I started to go to a gynecologist in Spain. My gynecologist was a man, a very competent and professional physician, and my visits, just as any other visits, were not “chaperoned” by a female nurse, as it is customary in this country.
The assumption that you need to be a female to be an OBGYN because the male ones cannot be professional and keep their hands doing what they are supposed to do, even if in your vagina, is very sad and worrying. What are we going to tell our kids when they tell us they want to study something the current identity culture cannot reconcile with their too simplistic views of the word? If your white kid wants to study the Classics, is she racist? And how about if your kid is black, is she stupid and has she been brainwashed for wanting to study the ancient past? Will our children be able to pursue their passions without being judged for them and make a living?
But this new reduced identity culture, as I understand it, is not only about genetics, but more about upbringing and life experiences.
But still, people define themselves more and more as different intersections, ending up in a very small subset, in which they think they are understood and they can truly be themselves, full of “equals”. Personally, I find thinking that I can only be truly understood by immigrant-Latina-working-heterosexual-mothers is such a poor interpretation of my life, and it is contrary to having an enriching life experience. I prefer to think that I have a connection to immigrants, Spanish speaking people, working-aged population, parents with kids, US citizens, Europeans, and on and on.
I am worried about my children’s future. They are learning about the injustices of the past in school and I am proud of the grownups I see they want to become, but I am afraid that the way we are trying to solve past and present injustices will bring more injustices, but just against different kinds of people.