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well something that women bring to the table is producing something of economic value as well and that's women's
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reproductive Capital that women actually are bringing to the table this ability to procreate and create other human
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beings and this is a tremendous source of value in society because the same way economists are fundamentally concerned
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with how do we make all this stuff that we consume well people all across the world want to have children and so being
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able to create children is a really important form of capital in society welcome to the ripple effect the podcast
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that takes you on a journey through the minds of work and faculty I'm your host
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Dan Loney and in each episode we'll be diving deep into the inspiration behind
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the groundbreaking research that Wharton professors have conducted and exploring
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how their findings resonate with the world today we'll be covering a diverse
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range of topics bringing you the latest insights and knowledge that you can apply to your life into work so get
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ready to dive into new ideas with the ripple effect [Music] so Corinne what was it that that had you
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thinking about studying gender bias in the workplace in the first place well I think that's that's a big
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question I think the main thing that I'm interested in studying is I'm interested
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in studying the economics of being a woman and what sort of makes that unique and challenging and also
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special and um and so you know I wanted to really study the issues that were facing women
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with the same seriousness that we apply to the rest of you know economic science and so yeah I think it
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wasn't so much starting with the perspective of gender bias but starting with the perspective of you know if
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economics is the science of maximizing subject to constraint subject to scarce resources what are those unique
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constraints that women are facing what is that maximization or optimization problem look like from a woman's
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perspective and how can we use the same tools that we use to study how firms make decisions
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um and how consumers make decisions to understand the sort of um unique spectrum of decisions that women need to
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make yeah and so research like this is I mean it's being talked about this issue
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is being talked about a lot uh in society in general so doing research on these areas becomes very important as we
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look to see where the development lies yeah I think that's exactly right and I
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think you know one of the things I hope to accomplish with my research is that when we talk about these issues I think
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as I said we can't talk about them in a separate domain from economics and I
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wanted to bring together the cutting-edge science of Economics with these issues that affect women's lives
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because you know a lot of what economists do is study how people make decisions and I think women are people
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and women make decisions you know economic decisions as well and decisions have big economic consequences and so I
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hope I'm giving some language um such as by introducing the term reproductive capital and giving some
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language to the economics of women's decisions um to bring them kind of out of this
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domain of kind of treating them as like a separate set of issues that we would address through a separate set of tools
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and kind of um bring them back into this domain of economic decision making and maximization and optimization
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so if you can can you explain what reproductive Capital really is yeah sure so this is a term that I came up with
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when I was in grad school and um you know we talk about human capital and so well we'll start from the beginning
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which is just you know the term Capital typically means you know material things
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of worth that can be used to create other things of value right so we talk about firms making a trade-off between
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capital and labor and so they're deciding how much do I want to use workers how much do I want to use
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machines okay well economists came up with this term human capital which is the fact that
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skills that human beings have can be used to create things of economic value as well and so it's not just you know
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that a machine can be a form of capital but actually that you can have human capital and that's going to produce
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value and so we talked about education as investing in human capital so then I realized that while something
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that women bring to the table is producing something of economic value as well and that's women's reproductive
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Capital that women actually are bringing to the table this ability to procreate and create other human beings
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which is pretty fantastic and this is a tremendous source of value in society because the same way economists are
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fundamentally concerned with how do we make all the stuff that we consume right how does all the the consumer goodies
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that we want how do those all get manufactured and what's the optimal way to do that how do we create Financial
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Services Etc well people all across the world want to have children and so being able to
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create children is a really important form of capital in society and so I wanted to acknowledge that and coin this
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term to demonstrate that this was the source of economic value and I wanted to deliberately create that parallelism
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with human capital because one of the things about reproductive Capital that I highlighted my research is that it's
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time limited it depreciates like all forms of capital depreciates but reproductive capitalism is very
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specific and unforgiving schedule which is that you know as women aged into their late 30s and 40s they go through
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um a reproductive decline eventually menopause and so that time Horizon of reproductive Capital creates a
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fundamental trade-off between investments in human capital which are going to be worthwhile because you can
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Market those skills and get some economic returns that way versus investing and using your reproductive
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capital and having a family and producing children and that's not something you're going to Market in
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general so it's not going to ever be assigned this dollars and cents value on
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the traditional Market but it actually is something that's tremendously economic value economically valuable and
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we see that through people's choices people's choices to invest their time
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and money in children we see that children are something that people value and therefore we as economists should be
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concerned with how do they get produced were you able to determine a a level a value
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that really Associates what that reproductive Capital can mean to a woman as they're not only trying to have a
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family but also trying to build out their career yeah so that was something that was
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really important he was kind of trying to look at this as an economic trade-off and I said you know what there's the
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personal value that you put on having children and you know it's going to be
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hard to quantify that but we know that that's there and that's something that
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is talked about a lot in the media and it also has been talked about a lot in the in the research literature right
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that you know women are kind of facing this trade-off with their biological clock and they you know value having
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kids and this is something that they don't want to have to give up on um but
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what they didn't see is really trying to put an economic value on it and so to do
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that I turn to a type of Market where reproductive Capital has value and that's the marriage market so I thought
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you know if I can show that this actually affects women's perceived value on the marriage Market I'm going to be
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able to put an economic value on this um resource of reproductive capital and so what I did is I actually used a study
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where I randomly assigned age and income to dating profiles and then I had men rate these women's dating profiles with
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randomly assigned age and income and what I found is that for each year that a woman ages after age 30 she has to
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earn an additional seven thousand dollars a year to get the same rating in this experiment
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and because the age and the income are randomly assigned I can attribute it to you know it really is just that age
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that's driving this whereas if I use data from the world or from you know a dating site where I saw who was
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interested in whom I wouldn't be able to separate out the fact that somebody
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who's older has a lot of other things going on in her life right somebody who's older might be more likely to be
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divorced they might have a different photo they might have a different career but here I was randomly assigning the
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age and so I'm holding that profile constant and one person is seeing her at
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35 and somebody else has seen her at 36 and that I'm able to Value what does
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that extra year mean and I found that it was worth the equivalent of seven thousand dollars of annual salary and
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that was showing that men really valued reproductive capital from their potential partners and then the way I
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was able to show that this is actually about fertility and reproduction of rather than other dimensions of age was
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that I found that there was not this preference for men who already had kids from a previous relationship
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and there wasn't this preference from men who didn't have good knowledge that
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there was a fertility decline between ages 30 and 40. so if they thought oh that's not something I have to worry
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about until like 45 or later they didn't have the same preference where they
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showed declining ratings over that 30 to 40 time span um and it also showed it was Stronger
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for people who wanted a more serious relationship who wanted to get married and who wanted to have kids whereas if
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you thought this was because you wanted somebody who was young and fun and cool to go drinking with you might think the
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people who are looking for a more casual relationship would actually have that stronger preference for younger age but
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it was actually the people who wanted to get married and wanted to have kids who
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showed this strong preference and so therefore I attribute this preference to the market value of fertility and it's
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not the traditional Market where we're able to put you know a price on it because it's going to be sold but it is
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a type of Market where you're making these trade-offs between all these different possible traits in your
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partner and one of the things that makes a woman more attractive on the marriage
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Market is bringing reproductive Capital to the table and so of course it has personal value whether or not you're
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able to have kids in this trade-off you might be making with your career but I wanted to show that there was a real
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economic cost to it as well so that for women if they were thinking about making
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an investment you know let's say their manager says I want to send you on this
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assignment to Asia and it's going to be really good for your career but you're
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going to have to work 80 hours a week and you know be totally 100 focused on you know launching this new team
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and that's going to cause you to say okay this is gonna delay my timeline for
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maybe getting married or having a family it's gonna increase my earnings it's
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gonna so it's gonna be good from a human capital right but there's going to be an
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appreciation in my reproductive Capital she's facing an economic trade-off there
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where you know there's value that she could be making and money she could be
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earning by making this investment but there's an economic loss for making it
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as well and so I wanted to put in those terms to show that this isn't just a
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personal decision this is an economic decision and surrealistically for a lot of women this is a a decision that they
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have to make in terms of their career slash in in correlation with their personal life uh in order to see what
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they value the most at that particular time yeah but I think you know it's not just
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about what they value it's about them sort of maximizing this economic equation where these are two things that
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are both valuable and you know she has to make a trade-off between them and so I think you're absolutely right that the
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issue here is that um both things are valuable and in some ways our society is not set up so that
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you can have it all at once right and so that's kind of exactly the policy recommendation that I would make is you
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know we can make this trade-off easier for women if we make it more possible to do both things at once and we make there
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be less of a trade-off between maximizing your human capital and maximizing your reproductive capital
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so with this information now how do you think that this impacts the the consideration of women when they're
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thinking about planning their careers or they're thinking about planning their
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lives what do you think the the the the the the the background is there well I think this is something that
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women think about and this is something that women sort of inherently know and it's kind of hard for people who are not
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women to maybe believe that because it's not something that they've been faced
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with all their lives but I have this paper about Israel making IVF free and what we see is that when ivf's made free
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you know from a naive perspective you might think okay that's going to impact
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the women who are like you know between 35 and you know early 40s who haven't
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had children yet and now they're going to be able to use IVF to have children
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but we actually see a tremendous impact on young women who are looking forward and planning their life and now they
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know that this technology is going to be available to them later in life and so they make the decision to delay marriage
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they make the decision to finish the degree they make the decision to break off the relationship that was only so so
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and maybe you know play the field a little bit more and wait for somebody else we see them increasing their
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representation and getting graduate degrees at Fields such as um being doctors and lawyers and
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um professors and things that require these long-term Investments and so we see young women
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making decisions in anticipation of how this reproductive time Horizon is changing based on the introduction of
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this new technology and so I think this is something that women know is a real constraint and they inherently plan
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around and they think about it and they talk about it um when they talk about it with their
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with their mentors and you know they map out their careers relative to this reproductive constraint and so as much
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as in some ways maybe my research is depressing and I'm showing oh now you have this other constraint to think
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about but it's also going to affect your appeal on the marriage market and it's
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kind of worth this much on the marriage Market I hope that it also makes women feel seen because they've been making
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this trade-off they've been facing this fundamental you know Catch 22 of like you can't do
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both you can't have it all and you know it can be crazy making to feel like okay
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I feel like there's this big issue that I'm dealing with and you know yet it's
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the responsibility is all on my shoulders and it's treated as something that's like because of me because I want
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a family because I you know value this now I'm the one who's kind of stuck in
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this bind and I wanted to tell and show women no this is a real economic constraint
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you're facing and you're facing it because you uniquely are in possession of
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something that's super economically valuable reproductive capital and you're
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trying to figure out how to maximize the value of this depreciating asset that you're holding and this other asset that
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requires your time to invest in it which is your human capital so how do you think then does this impact employers
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with their thought process about the structure of the company and what to expect moving forward and also because
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this is obviously part of a of a public policy debate going on in our country right now as well about what policy
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makers need to be thinking about around this yeah so I hope that um that firms and
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policy makers don't just invest in um fertility extending technology I think that that is
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kind of not solving the fundamental problem and so sometimes that's the solution we see firms reach for is that
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they say like okay we'll pay for our employees to freeze their eggs right but
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that's not solving this trade-off that's just kind of kicking the can down the
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road and it's kind of acknowledging if you're a firm that's doing that you're
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and you're not doing other things you're saying okay I'm not going to work to
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make this more sustainable for you to balance career and family I'm just going
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to ask you to wait and do it later after we've sort of gotten the value that we
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want to out of you right and so you know I think that it's great if firms want to
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pay for egg freezing but they can't stop there right I don't want to just move it
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further down the line because then women are going to be facing that trade-off that can't work forever so women are
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just going to face that trade-off when the time comes so I think what I would look for instead is
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that we truly place value as a society on reproductive capital and on caregiving
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and acknowledge that the time required for caregiving has not declined you know over the past 20 years
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and yet we have way more women in the labor force and we have way fewer households that are set up to have just
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one primary earner and one person who's able to do a lot of the home production
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and caregiving and focus exclusively on that and so all employees are kind of looking for
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more flexibility and more ability to kind of do this caregiving work and you know have their families and prioritize
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that in their lives because the structure of the American household has changed it's by and large two earners
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and we need to adjust to that so I think that's one thing that I would say is
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just um for firms to understand that that time spent on caregiving has not been declining and in fact it's been
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increasing so since the 1990s we've been spending more time with our kids because
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in this new economy and this is um was first documented in a paper by Raymond Ramey called the Rugrat race but in this
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new economy where our children's human capital is such a determination a determinant of their future success
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parents are investing a lot more time with their children and we understand a lot more that the time we put in results
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in the outcomes that they have and the achievements that they have later in life and so parents are doing a lot more
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intensive parenting and that's not something that you can solve with a machine so throughout
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um the 20th century we saw time at home be replaced by machines like dishwashers and washing machines
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and so for a little while it got easier to do the work at home because we had technology but technology can't replace
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our time spent with children and so what we've seen over the past 25 years is that time going up when we
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look at surveys like the American time use survey we see people spending more time on caregiving not less time on
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caregiving and so that's not going away and so it's something that firms
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fundamentally need to address and so that's my first big message to firms is
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think about caregiving as work that all of your employees have to do and figure out how that fits in with the work that
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they need to do for you and my second big message for firms which is I think part of that
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is rethinking flexibility to mean not just flexibility during the work day but flexibility across the life cycle so
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during the work day it's kind of part of that first big message is you know we've
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recognized like Zoom is a great technology that we can use to like you know not necessarily require people to
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be in the office when their kid is homesick right or you know breaking up their face time so that you know you
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don't need to stay at the office till 8 pm and Miss family dinner maybe you go
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home at five have did when your kids get out of daycare you have dinner with your
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family and then you log back on after they're asleep and you know get that last hour or so of work in so that's
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flexibility across the work day and I think that's something we need to invest
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in but the piece that I think is new with this understanding of reproductive capital and it's kind of specific
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schedule of decline which is that it really depreciates most rapidly during a woman's 30s which is the same time her
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human capital tends to increase in value and we see salaries going up the most is that we need flexibility across the
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life cycle so we need to say why is it that the typical career path is you get your MBA and then immediately you jump
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on the partner track at the consulting firm or at the investment bank or that high investment period And whatever firm
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you're in where you're expected to put in you know 75 hours a week when you're in your 30s and that's the
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time when reproductive capital is declining is there a way to build in flexibility across the life cycle so
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that women can make some of these Investments earlier or later and be able to have more time to actually maximize
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the value of their human capital and the reproductive capital and as we see people's working lives extend into their
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70s there's no reason why women shouldn't be able to make some of these big investments in their 40s and be able
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to have the type of high-powered careers um that we see women dropping out of because firms too often force them to
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choose Korean great to have you with us today thanks very much thank you so much Dan always
00:21:21
thank you for listening to the ripple effect we hope you found this episode informative and engaging don't forget to
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