The Price of Motherhood

My doorman George gave me this book called The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued by Ann Crittenden, and suggested I read it, as if to hint there was some secret sauce hidden within its pages. And so I read it, about a year ago, and now I'm writing about it (fair warning, my recall sucks and a year is quite a long time so bear with me on the details).

It's a popular trend these days, at least in liberal circles in the US, to talk about the system... that is, systemic issues that have adverse impacts on marginalized groups. But one topic I don't see come up too often — and honestly didn't know too much about myself — is divorce.

As it turns out, the laws and incentives going into marriage (at least in the US) are not quite reversible¹ in practice.

Getting married is no simple decision to make. Yes, you get some tax breaks, but the implications are broad, and sometimes, crippling. Should one partner sacrifice their career to support the other so as to maximize the overall success of the couple? Does the couple want to have children? Can they afford childcare? Are social services available? Can they get paternity/maternity benefits? If not, who should look after the kids?

Long story short, it is often the case that couples going into a marriage make decisions to optimize their standing given their context (where they are in their lives) and the social fabric of their environment (the policies, laws, government incentives etc. they must also consider). What they don't always do, is consider hidden risks. One such risk, for example, is if a mother cares for her child full time, she becomes excluded from social services and must fully rely on her spouse for support. Now what happens if they get a divorce? She has no support from social services, she may or may not get enough support from her spouse, her career is in the shitter, and she still has a kid to raise.

I expect you can see where this is going. People get married. They make decisions that appear optimal at the time. Shit happens. They get a divorce. But it turns out, the decisions they made were, in fact, not globally optimal² and cannot simply be undone. The risk they failed to consider initially must finally be confronted, and the question becomes how to divvy up that risk fairly?

The point of the book³ is that it is women (or more precisely mothers), who more often than not, are the ones who bear the brunt of that risk. As it turns out, 13 years after this book was publish, the 2023 Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Claudia Goldin for her work on the gender pay gap. Maybe economics is just a really slow field, or maybe, we still have not made much progress this century, and societal expectations on marriage and career choices can still have consequential impact on divorcees. And if I had to bet, though in all fairness I am no betting man, divorced mothers are still disproportionately left holding the short end of the stick.

We live in a complex world. And this is a complex topic. But if you have any interest in understanding how the the history, culture, and policies that shape a country can impact the choices people make when getting married, and how those decisions can have dire consequences later on in their lives (should they get divorced), or, just generally, if you want to get a better understanding of the imperfect world we live in so they you may try navigate it just a little more successfully than all the people who did not read this book, then I'd encourage you to give it a go.