> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 1:13 AM, Joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> And it's really, really important to remember that without women working,
> > everybody's lives pretty much would have been horrid in the last forty
> years
> > because of declining wages. We had to work.
> >
>
> This may prove to be a situation where everyone on the list who *actually*
> knows anything about economics yells at me, but:
>
> Didn't the near-doubling of the labor pool have a lot to do with those
> falling wages according to a basic supply and demand model?
>
> I mean, how could it not?
>
It probably had some sort of effect at the margin. But at the lower end of the spectrum women were always in the "have to work" category. It was the high-skill jobs that had the biggest influx of women, and the wages of high-skilled jobs did quite nicely. (The rise in inequality since the 70s has been more to stratification within wage and salary compensation than between wages and profits.) So it's meaningful to speak of external factors that forced (as well as those that allowed) women into the labor market.