An Unexpected Reason for Our Sliding Backwards…

And one I never thought of, explained in an article called “Nepotism’s Impact On the Job Market” in the current Harvard Magazine—rather ironic since this over-rated university must be responsible for a great deal of nepotism, both as part of the reason they accept certain applicants for college and part of the reason their graduates tend to find top-paying jobs.

According to this article by Max J. Krupnick, “Before turning 30, nearly one-third of Americans will work at the same firm as a parent. In those jobs, these young adults earn almost 20 percent more than they otherwise would. ” And due to “gender sorting,” nepotism benefits many more young men than women (or dark-skinned or poor people) because their white fathers work in higher-paying professions.

Another surprising fact: “Nepotistic hiring is primarily a blue-collar phenomenon” and is driven by employees, not executives; this is not explained. So the young women who follow their mothers into jobs are both fewer in number and less likely to make the wages young men do, since the gender gap in pay, even after all these years, still hovers around 17 percent less for women than for men across the economy.

It’s not a surprise to find that many young people are employed at firms where the parent of their same gender work, but since women are earning at a lower rate, I’d be surprised to find that as many young women follow their mothers into the job market as men follow their fathers.

Nepotism also ensures that these hires are less likely to leave because they “may not be qualified to land a promotion at another firm so stick with their parent’s company,” not to the overall benefit of the firm or the society.

There are many interesting offshoots of these facts. In well-heeled families where the adults are unlikely to work at a paying job, there is no model for their children to follow, and so the disastrous outcomes for young men, particularly those who have no focus in life other than to have a good time—which doesn’t work well in the long run for the individual or the society—and since most inherited money has now come down to the fourth generation (with some exceptions, the big fortunes were made before income taxes were instated), it will run out before these inheritors die. They will not be prepared in late middle age to earn a living. Having never worked for a wage, they have no access to social security, and that pittance goes rightly to those who have put in decades working.

This odd oncoming impoverishment only affects a tiny percent of the population, but the disastrous effect on young women spreads future. Unwilling to labor at their mothers’ low-paying jobs, perhaps they try to follow their fathers; the article doesn’t address this, but because nepotism has historically benefited men—as part of our society which generally benefits men—it seems unlikely that young women will find much encouragement to follow their fathers professionally.

This odd, unsettling article also helped to explain to me the girl chatter I was listening to this afternoon, the same kind of girl chatter my high school friends and I engaged in decades ago: boys, boys, boys—although now both chatterers and the objects of their attention are in their mid-twenties.

I imagined the women’s movement would have had more effect.

But if women are still on the lower end of the pay scale and even unqualified young men are likely to find a well-paying career, it seems obvious that they will be the focus of young women, even if they are less qualified than their adorers. If marriage is the outcome, these young women may find themselves later in life supporting their husbands.

In the end, of course, work and money do not alone make a satisfactory life or one useful in any way. But we are as far from recognizing that fact as we are from recognizing the enormous value of the unpaid work of women. We are the ones who keep the whole circus going, laboring at the lower end of the job market, cooking, cleaning and raising children.

We used to talk about a living wage for women who keep the whole circus going, but that conversation died out a while ago with no perceptible effect.

[To see my other reasons, please see the recent post, Are We Sliding Backwards?]

In Women Harvard