Emily Oster peddles lies about having it all

She stifles data showing women actually want to care for their kids

From the series Emotional Kintsugi by Glen Martin Taylor

Read this post on my blog here.

Ever since I read Emily Oster's first book, I've tried to ignore her, but her bestselling books just kept coming. I found solace reading complaints about her sloppy analysis. And I took the MacArthur Foundation to be delivering a secret message when they gave her husband, Jesse Shapiro, a genius grant for describing misinformation in mainstream media.

But can’t hold back anymore.

Workplace advice that ignores reality

One of Oster's pet topics is that people should stop hiding kids at work. She says we should “just leave work” to pick up kids. She is "calling on companies to change." Meanwhile, back in reality, women don't get promoted when they leave work early.

That's the thing about women telling other women what to do: don't look at what the woman is doing now. Look at how that woman got to where she is. Oster is an economist who uses numbers to justify not taking care of her kids. And mainstream media is too scared to touch the research that says "unless you're living in poverty, you're hurting your kids by having two parents work."

So Oster cites the research that shows correlation between parents who stay home with kids and improved outcomes. Then she summarily dismisses it because she refuses to deal with the nuance of correlation vs causation. This is very convenient for Oster because she also says she doesn't care about the research because it's so uninteresting to take care of children. She only wants to be there for the parts that interest her.

Following in her parents' footsteps

This is not surprising because Oster's parents both worked in very big jobs. And, to give you an idea where family fits into their equation, their children have different last names. There is no family name. The parents are very important in Oster's family, so you can imagine that Oster grew up and thought: great! Finally it's my time to be important. And then she made a career out of justifying the idea that it's a waste of time to make the kids feel important.

Oster's message is: A child should compete for a parent's attention by being interesting. She does backflips to use research to justify it. If you take the route she took you'll get what her mom got: a child who grows up to think that taking care of children is not important.

You don't need research to know that if your parents think childcare is too boring to focus on, then the children internalize that they need to be interesting in order to be loved. And they spend their life on the interestingness treadmill trying to find love for themselves—unable to get off the treadmill to prioritize making children feel important just for who they are.

What the research actually shows

Here's what we know about middle-class families: when both parents work full-time, they hurt their kids. Please don't tell me parents are happier working. No piece of research says that matters. The point of family is not to make parents shine.

Don't talk about working part-time, working from home, parents working together. You're missing the point: if no one's full-time job is the kids and you are not living in poverty, then you are working because you want nice things or a vacation, but those are not as important as making kids your job.

This is the research. I'm sorry that you wish kids felt important even if you are not making them important. I'm sorry that someone just won the Nobel Prize for spending the last 30 years explaining why jobs worth doing are very full-time jobs.

The lies we tell ourselves

Today middle-class women don't admit to giving up raising their kids to someone else. And they don't admit to running a family full-time. Because there has been so much pressure on women to win against other women that there's nowhere left to go.

The only thing left to do is lie. To ourselves and to each other. This is where Emily Oster comes in. Emily tells us that it's fine to do a half-assed job at work (leave to go pick up your kids!) and it's fine to do a half-assed job at home (if it's boring, don't do it!)

But Oster has a full-time job as an economics professor and she just started a company. So she is not doing a good job taking care of her kids. Yes. I said someone is a bad mom. Because if we don't say who is a bad parent, then why would any woman stay home with children to parent them? The great thing about work is there are measures of success. We have the data to measure parenting success. But people are scared to stand up and say we should use the data.

What women are actually choosing

Yet even without that encouragement, women are leaving the workforce because they'd rather be home with their kids. The participation of women in the workforce has not increased in the last 30 years, and today 50% of highly educated women choose to not work full-time. (This data has been synthesized by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, whom Oster cites regularly.)

Jobs in corporate life are full-time. Most college-educated families have divided family labor rather than have two parents working full-time. They divide labor because that's what is most effective for families.

Pontificating about how policies need to help women work more is just Oster telling women to make the choices she made. But the economic research she cites is from Goldin, who specifically shows women leave the workplace regardless of the policies in place. Women leave because they want to.

We need to stop saying that some people are too good to stay home with children full-time. Too interesting, too educated, too rich, too white. Whatever it is, you are not too anything to make sure there's a parent staying home with your children. Don't have kids if you don't want to take care of them.