The American faith that "all men are created equal" inspired civil rights laws considering men and women interchangeable. Pushing this notion, the Obama and Biden administrations demanded openings for women in combat and military leadership roles.

Do women perform "just as well" if traditional assumptions of them as the weaker sex are abandoned? As female employment is a major factor depressing the birth rate, how much productivity does society lose if a woman raises children instead of doing paid work? How do we balance the value of women’s work versus their childbearing? Whatever working women produce could go to waste if they do not generate a large enough next generation.

The US does not publish statistics on how many hours women contribute to Total Paid Hours Worked or how much they increase Gross Domestic Product. This failure, noted by many, feeds the suspicion that although the government documents so many things, these facts remain absent for political reasons (e.g., so the interchangeability of men and women is not questioned?)

Are women following the equality belief and civil rights laws into the workplace?

The Department of Defense reports that women comprised ~2% of the military in 1975, and 17.7% in 2023. But enlisted females accounted for 3% of the ~7,000 combat deaths since the year 2000 (up from about a tenth of a percent of the 405,000 WWII service deaths). Serious injuries and disabilities parallel the 3% death statistic. So, today’s enlisted women still have duties less dangerous than their male counterparts. But the 3% also suggests women’s contribution today is about 30 times more dangerous than those performed by female warriors in the 1940s.

In line, of the 5,500 workers who die doing their job every year, women comprised about 9% of these deaths in 1995, 7% in 2007, and 9% in 2022. Using such deaths as an index of participation in the more dangerous jobs, women have a Full Time Equivalent/100,000/year [FTE] (a way to adjust for the fewer women working full-time or overtime) of about 0.3/100,000 chance of dying on the job each year; men about a 3.6/100,000 risk. The national average is 3.5 deaths for all jobs combined – almost precisely the risk that goes with firefighting (policing is the 25th most dangerous). Deaths for FTE on the job range from under 0.5 for working in health care, businesses, or office work, to the more dangerous as fishing (FTE of 100), logging 84, military ~65, roofers 45, working in a bar 12, and firefighters at 3.6 (close to the national average of 3.5). Men have maintained a death rate ~9X that of women since the 1970s, suggesting women have infrequently displaced men in the more hazardous jobs. Thus, teaching in K-12 grade schools was 77% female in 1900, and while it fluctuated a bit, in 1940 it was 77% female, and in 2022 also 77% female. Fishing, most apt to be deadly, is 250 times more dangerous than teaching.

About 700 women died “while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy” in 2023. This amounts to about 19 such deaths per 100,000 live births. About half of these deaths occurred before or during the day of delivery, and another 19% within 6 days postpartum, yielding an FTE of at least 13 from the pregnancy per se (about the risk of working in a bar?). Tendencies within the workforce are reflected in Table 1, which summarizes female transportation deaths from 1975 to 2023. The raw numbers are in parentheses (auto and truck deaths have declined, even though there are half again as many of both vehicles on the road).

In the US, driving a car is almost essential, so proportionately more women are driving than did in 1975. While the population has increased by a third [216 million in 1975 to 337 million in 2023], the number of vehicles has almost tripled, so as is evident in Table 1, car and truck travel is safer. The ratio of female deaths has stayed constant since the 1980s, suggesting that women’s entry into male jobs is in the professional and business – and much safer – employment areas. Making a living by driving a big rig requires great durability, adherence to schedule, and often strength. As lesbians’ Dykes on Bikes testify, motorcycling is masculine and risky. About 80% of motorcycle versus 20% of car mishaps result in injury, and a motorcycle accident is about 30X more likely to result in death. While comprising 3% of registered vehicles and accounting for but only 0.6% of traveled miles, motorcycles accounted for 15% of motor vehicle deaths in 2023.

Yet female deaths while motorcycling do not suggest they have increased their participation in this entertainment.

Notice that both the military (counter to explicit directives from Presidential Commanders in Chief, Obama and Biden) put women in less dangerous roles, and the civilian labor force’s acceptance of women also overwhelmingly put them into "safter" slots. Of course, women also self-selected where they landed in either sector. These outcomes support – although they do not prove – the traditional belief that women are the weaker sex.

Federal Government tried to get more girls into sports

Title IX of the Civil Rights Act incentivized getting girls into sports with money diverted from boys’ sports. While about a third of boys have engaged in HS sports for decades, about a quarter of girls have now joined them. Including cheerleading, girls went from about 7% of High School athletes in 1972 to 42% in the 2020s. The percentage of female coaches kept pace. Lesbianism is unusually dense among female coaches. As girls’ experience with homosexual coaches and teammates increased, their claims of personal homosexuality also increased. How much participating in sports has driven the 2X-3X faster growth of homosexuality among young women than young men over the past few decades is largely unexplored. My experience of being involved in a dozen custody disputes involving mothers who left a marriage for a lesbian suggests high school sports participation and even one homosexual act before the age of 18 are major influences in "becoming" homosexual.

Currently, the sport of “cheerleading accounts for 65% of all catastrophic injuries” in girls and, with 4 million participants, surpasses HS “football in concussion and catastrophic injury risk.” Sports participation appears to be associated with increased "female problems" among girls, and these, along with those suffering serious injuries likely result in some diminution of the fraction of girls able to bear children. [doi: 10.1177/23259671211067222].

Missing weeks of work for the last 10 years by sex suggests women are the "weaker sex"

As noted above, the US seemingly avoids collecting statistics that might enable answering whether females are less durable than male employees. Title after title, US government publications emphasize that ~46% of women and ~54% of men engage in paid labor. The Department of Labor publishes national estimates of week-long absences from paid work by sex for each week during the last 10 years. This statistic is not about missing a few days (which is also more common for women), but an entire week. So, the illness, injury, ennui, etc. that led to this absence must have been significant. Men are working perhaps twice as many hours and 9 times more frequently occupy jobs with risk of serious injury or death, yet:

For “all reasons” men missed more weeks 7 times; women missed more weeks 120 times.

For “medical/injury” men missed more weeks 17 times; women missed more 110 times.

These results reinforce the belief that men are more dependably apt to be there and "try to do it" – whatever the "it" might be. Missing a week means that whatever the task, others were required to fill in (and indicates that many more women missed a day or two). If the task was terribly important (e.g., thousands without power and the lines had to be fixed although the storm was still howling), a woman seems more frequently at risk of failing due to absence (due to being "weaker?"). In any case, on average, the value that women’s paid work adds to society is almost certainly not worth having too few children to maintain our demographic.

But more than work is influencing women to be childless or have fewer kids. Many new trends push women in the same direction: About a third of younger women claim homosexual interests. Involvement in homosexuality might, on its own, account for much of the decline in childbearing. But others – as cohabiting rather than marrying, indifference to religion, or the sense that caring for a pet is an acceptable, even preferable substitute for having a child – are among those trends.

Changes in laws and/or wholesale propaganda might have been a major factor in getting girls into sports, going more frequently to college, and increasing the fraction of women doing paid work from 33% in 1948 to 58% in 2023. Yet the same propaganda has not appreciably moved women away from the less dangerous jobs toward taking males’ riskier jobs. So, just massive propaganda asking/demanding women to have babies – when they have almost complete control of contraception, the morning-after pill, and the abortion pills – seems unlikely to encourage enough new babies to solve our demographic problem.

So, what strategies might work?

(to be continued)