Transcription
You see the ONS data that came out a couple of weeks ago that said, for the first time ever since records began, 50.1 percent of women are childless by 30. So there are more women without children at 30 than there are women with children. The first time, well, so this is somebody clipped a part of one of my podcasts, I believe it was where I was talking about what what our society does to 19-year-old women or 18-year-old women—19-year-old women. We just lie to them all the time. You know, the first lie is: there's nothing more important than your career, more or less by definition. So that's the first lie. The second lie is: there will be nothing more important to you in your life than your career. So that's the second lie. And then the third lie is: there should be nothing more important in your life than their career. So that's the third lie. And then implicit in that is the idea that children are a burden and that the idea that women should have children is part of the oppressive patriarchy and should be resisted. And who are men to tell me what I can do with my body? And hey, fair enough, and etc., etc.
Now I've worked in female-dominated occupations my entire life. I worked, for example, I worked as a daycare uh worker way back when—that was like 19, probably 80 something like that—and there were no men doing that, but I really liked kids, and so that was fun. And I worked for social services in Alberta in the in the child care department, and uh then I've been working as a psychologist, either training or as a psychologist since then, and that's been a female-dominated enterprise, increasingly as the years went by, but even when I was first when I first entered it. So I I'm in the post-female in the workplace generation firmly; I never experienced the world except as that. And so I've watched women progress through their professional careers at every level of attainment, from the lowest to the highest, and observed what happened, and relatively I would say bias-free because I didn't know. And what I've seen is that as women progress towards their late 30s—no, late 20s—they there's a psychological transformation, and what happens is that they place less emphasis on their career and way more emphasis, particularly on having a child. And that really reaches a crisis point around 29 or 30 for the vast majority of women, and and their attitude flips, and I've seen it very dramatically with many women.
And I suppose the most signal single most uh convincing evidence of that: I worked with high-end lawyers in Toronto for about 10 years. I was part of an organization; we went to law firms, high-end law firms, and said, "Send us your most productive people, and we'll help them iron out whatever wrinkles there might still be in their life." And the advantage to them is that things will go better for them, and the advantage to you is they'll be even more productive. And there's a good management dictum, which is: pay the most attention to your most productive people because they're bringing in the bulk of your revenue disproportionately. And so I worked with men and women who were at the peak of their careers in a very difficult enterprise. And so these were women who were generally very attractive, well put together physically, pretty stable psychologically, extremely conscientious, very very smart, and high-achieving from like junior high all the way through high school, university, law school, onto uh the top firms, rocketing up through the ranks, full partnership by the time they were 29 or 30. And all the law firms, all the women bailed out—all of them. The law firms couldn't keep them. And I I was really and I talked to the women a lot about a lot about this because I was very interested in it because I knew the law firms were bending themselves over backwards and tying themselves into knots trying to retain these women because why wouldn't they? You know, just just being greedy capitalists is enough, you know. We don't want to lose their high-performing women because they're performing at the highest level. And they couldn't keep them. The women wanted to have nine-to-five jobs; they wanted to bind the job so they could have a life, and that was especially true once they got interested in having a child or had one. And what what they really came to was a very uh interesting realization. So because they were highly conscientious women, they sort of did their duty and and worked hard and diligently and didn't pop their head up to ask questions—they're in junior high, they got their best grades; they were in high school, they got the best grades, and so on all the way through right till they reach partnership. But that's sort of an apogee, right? You hit partnership in a senior law firm; it's like you're at you're at the top of your profession. Well, then what? So then they looked around and they thought, "Here I am with all these like hyper-competitive men perfectly willing to work 80 hours a week non-stop to stay at the top. What the hell are they doing?" Because that's the real question: what is it? What is it that characterizes this small percentage of hyper-competitive men? It's not—you can assume that that's how everyone should be, but first of all, that isn't how everyone is, or you can flip that and say, "Well, there's only a small minority of human beings that are willing to do this—to work flat out 80 hours a week." I mean, they're getting they're certainly being paid for it, let's make no mistake about that, but what about the rest of life? Well, that's what the women asked: "Why am I doing this?" And that's a great question. Well, for men, there's a different answer than for women; it's a really different answer. And it isn't like the men are exactly thinking this through; it's it's more like this is an integral part of male motivation: the more successful you are as a man, the more women like you. But the problem that you have now is that as women are getting better educated, with more employment, more state is more prestige, they compete themselves out of their ability to find an attractive mate as women raise up through the dominance hierarchy—and this is competence, competence hierarchy, sorry. Okay, who's going to tell women the equal access to opportunity that you have recently just acquired actually what that's doing is it's making it more difficult for you to find a mate that you're fundamentally attracted to. Yeah, well, it it it does a lot of things; I mean, it does provide women with a lot more uh opportunity on the economic front; it does decrease their dependency on their mate in relationship to economic security. And educating, educating women—countries that are willing to educate women, that's the best predictor of their future economic success. So if you look at developing countries and you want to find out what about a developing country is most likely to predict the fact that they will continue to thrive economically, it's their attitude towards the education of women. And but a couple more things: women's educational status predicts their children's educational status, but men's educational status doesn't. So that's also an important multi-generational effect. I released a video—I was going to conclude that other story—I released a video, or someone released a clip of me talking about some of the things we just talked about, and it went out on YouTube Shorts, and it's got like five million views in a month or something like that, and the comment section is unbelievably vitriolic because every single comment is vitriolic, and it's all from women. It's like, "Who is this old white bastard telling us what we should do with our bodies?" You know, when I wasn't being judgmental, I was just saying exactly what I said to you, which is: well, I've watched women over the entire course of my life with I would say an affectionate eye. You know, I love my sister, I love my wife, I have a daughter, I love my mother; I'm pretty happy about women, all things considered. I don't have an axe to grind in relationship to how they should conduct their lives; I don't even know how they should conduct their lives. I've watched what happens, and I've also watched what happens to women who hit 29 or 30 and then can't conceive, and that is not a fate I would wish on anyone; it's awful. And 30 percent of couples fall into that—30 percent of couples have difficulty conceiving; it's a lot—and the probability that you'll have difficulty conceiving increases with age. And so, you know, c'est la vie, and but it's very interesting to me to see how vitriolic those comments have been and how how uniform that is because usually on my YouTube channel in particular, ninety-five percent of the comments are positive, and this is completely the opposite of that. So and then so you brought this up at the beginning; you said 50 percent of women now at thirty, point fifty, point one childless by thirty. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that's uh that's not good; that's a sign of something profoundly wrong with the entire culture at an extremely deep level. I don't think that women need to take it as us trying to tell women what they should or shouldn't do, but I think that it would be very fair to say that you need to be an incredibly unique woman to make it to 50 without a family and look back and think, "Yeah, I did this right." That's not to say that those women aren't out there; they absolutely are. I know some of them. What's happening? People, if you enjoyed that, then press here for the full unedited episode, and don't forget to subscribe. Peace. You