This is a slightly out of date book, “Creating a Life, Professional Women and the Quest for Children” but it seems to have bounced back up again into the blogs recently.

Here’s Bryan Caplan on it, an older piece from Prospect about it and the Falkenblog. I tend to side with economic arguments rather than the feminist ones, but then I pretty much always do side with the economic arguments.

Essentially, I don’t think it’s any surprise at all that women who have great success in a career or professional life tend to have fewer (or no) children than those who have directed their attentions somewhat less to said careers. It seems blindingly obvious that one cannot do everything in this life and that concentration on one matter or another is going to mean that other opportunities slip one by. We do live in a society where to get to the top you have to work both very hard and very long hours: whether we’d like it to be this way or not is another matter, as is what we might do if we want to change it. But given that this is so I simply cannot summon up even any wonder, let alone surprise, at the idea that those who have taken one path have by doing so given up other options.

After all, we do know that this whole scenario is (one of) the causes of the gender pay gap. Those women who do have children tend to drop out of the workforce for a few years, often only coming back part time until the children are older. While there are those that complain, it’s not difficult to understand that this makes scaling the very peaks of a professional career somewhat difficult. I simply can’t raise that wonder at the idea that those who do scale those dizzy heights are the ones who have not so dropped out.

Two sides of the same coin really.