The Strong and The Weak
Thucydides | Economic Uncertainty Index | What do Republicans want women to do? | Seasonality
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
| Thucydides
Economic Uncertainty Index
The Economic Uncertainty Index is heading for the Pandemic heights. We’re only weeks into the new administration, and things are going haywire.
How can businesses plan? Paul Krugman wrote:
Imagine yourself as the CEO of a U.S. company considering a range of possible investments, whose likely profitability depends on future federal policy. For example, some factories will be worth building if America honors the free trade pact with Canada and Mexico Trump himself signed in 2020, a minor revision of a free trade pact that took effect in 1994.
But those factories won’t be worth building if Trump rips up that agreement and imposes high tariffs at both our northern and southern borders. Instead, you’ll want to make defensive investments, designed to limit the damage of being cut off from Mexican and Canadian customers and suppliers.
So which investments will you make? A likely answer is, “None of them.” The rational thing, surely, is to hold off on big spending until, one hopes, there’s more clarity about policy.
So, even before the impeding government shutdown (Federal funding ends March 14), the battle over the appropriations bill, the debt ceiling, etc., Trump’s tariffs are making American businesses rip up their 2025 plans and weep.
What do Republicans want women to do?
Republicans want women to return to their traditional roles in society. And at work?
In Republican Men and Women Are Changing Their Minds About How Women Should Behave, Michael Tesler, John Sides, Colette Marcellin pull together survey results from a variety of sources that show Republicans’ ideas of gender roles have changed dramatically in the past few years.
Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional' -- er, reactionary? -- 'gender roles is increasing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is happening primarily among Republicans. Perhaps more surprisingly, it is happening among Republican women as well as among Republican men.
The percentage of Republican men who endorse this idea has increased from 68 percent in 2011 to 79 percent in 2024. The increase among Republican women is even larger — from 41 percent to 67 percent. Democrats, especially Democratic men, have become less likely to agree with this.
The differences between Republican and Democratic men are large and growing larger.
The same is true about the perception of whether ‘society as a whole has grown too soft and feminine’, which has a 59% variance between R and D men.
In Pew Research Center surveys, the percentage of Republicans who agree that “society is too accepting of men who take on roles typically associated with women” has increased from 18 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2024.
Does this say anything about the workplace?
The Views of the Electorate Research Survey asks several questions that measure perceptions of discrimination against women. Respondents are asked to agree or disagree with statements like “Women often miss out on good jobs because of discrimination” and “Women who complain about harassment often cause more problems than they solve.”
A shame they had no charts, but presumably the results were boring (= unchanging).
Although there are predictable partisan differences in the responses to these questions, those differences did not increase very much from 2016 to 2024. If it were simply becoming more socially acceptable to express conservative views about gender, we would expect a variety of views to change. But the changes seem limited to questions about gender roles, not about gender discrimination.
It hasn’t trickled out to the workforce… yet.
There is not much evidence, for example, that an overwhelming number of women are becoming tradwives. In fact, labor force participation among prime-age women has never been higher. Rates of marriage and childbirth are also down among women overall, especially women with less formal education.
One could make the argument that stark economics dictate — for most — that women have to work for a living, no matter what their or society’s views on that are. So some of these working women might wish to stay at home with their kids (or other ‘traditional’ activities, like homesteading), but few are taking that step.
Conclusion, or just the start?
The authors conclude
It is possible, then, that any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends. If anything, the societal trends are in the opposite direction.
Although there is a lot of focus on the longstanding gender gap between men and women in voting, the two parties are actually divided less by gender than by their attitudes about gender.
The more important difference between Democrats and Republicans isn’t whether they are men or women. It’s how they think men and women should behave.
Left unsaid:
Does this mean that a workplace dominated by people who ascribe to more traditional roles for men and women would exert social pressure toward those who don’t?
Based on these survey results, as a liberally-minded Democrat, would you worry about joining a firm primarily managed by and populated by Republicans? Or vice versa?
As Trump’s administration moves along, will these beliefs become even more pronounced, with increasing impact of the workplace? An administration committed to ending DEI initiatives, and firing female generals in the Pentagon might inspire companies toward a more ‘traditional’ approach to leadership: more men, fewer women in the C-suite, on the board of directors, and fewer opportunities for advancement.
Seasonality
Austin Kleon wants to ‘live seasonally’!
Spring always comes. We know it does. “They can’t cancel the spring,” as David Hockney tells us, and soon, sooner than you know it, that new growth will come again. But oh, it is hard to wait.
