When the Tide Goes Out, Family Equality Suffers

In 1994, the veteran investor Warren Buffett was asked during a shareholder meeting about the reinsurance market in Bermuda. His response? “You don’t find out who’s been swimming naked until the tide goes out.” In other words, it’s only when conditions deteriorate that weaknesses previously hidden from view become obvious.

I’ve found myself thinking about that metaphor periodically over the years in relation to things that have nothing to do with Buffett.

When Covid shut down schools and childcare facilities, we found out who was swimming naked. We discovered how much our societies still relied on women to embody the social security networks upon which we all relied. 

In Japan, meanwhile, research showed that following the country’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami, women in evacuation centres were often expected to cook and care for others while men cleared debris. The men’s work was paid while the women’s wasn’t, revealing the persistence of gender norms despite ostensible progress towards equality.

This week I thought about the phrase again when I came across a study showing what happens to couples’ decisions about having children when one of them suddenly loses their job.

The study, done by researchers in Norway and Germany, looked at couples affected by factory closures in Norway between 2005 and 2017. These closures are useful to researchers because they provide something close to a natural experiment. People in these scenarios are losing their jobs for reasons that are likely to have little or nothing to do with their individual abilities, ambitions or decisions making it easier to isolate the effect of the job loss itself. 

The researchers found that when a woman in a heterosexual couple lost her job, the couple’s probability of having a first child fell by 1.82 percentage points, but when a man lost his job, there was no comparable effect on the likelihood of having a first child.

Among couples who already had one child, though, the pattern flipped: a man losing his job reduced the probability that the couple would have a second child by 2.01 percentage points. A woman losing hers had no significant effect.

So what’s going on? 

The obvious explanation is economic: children are very expensive and losing a salary makes a household poorer and therefore more reluctant to take on the expense of an additional mouth to feed. But that doesn’t explain why the results depend on whose job disappears.

What also makes these results striking is that the study was done in Norway, a country with relatively high female employment, comparatively egalitarian gender attitudes, extensive parental leave and a generous welfare state. If traditional ideas about men, women, work and family were going to have faded anywhere, you might expect Norway to be fairly far along.

Yet even here, when the tide went out, traditional norms became visible.

The researchers suggest that, before children, a woman’s employment may function as a prerequisite for motherhood. Knowing that having a child is likely to disrupt her relationship with paid work, a woman who loses her job may want to re-establish herself professionally before becoming pregnant.

After the first child, the calculation appears to change. Now the man’s employment becomes more consequential: his job loss makes a second child less likely, consistent with the persistence of the male-breadwinner norm once a family has been established.

None of this necessarily means that couples are consciously deciding that fathers should provide and mothers should care. But it does suggest that economic shocks can act as litmus tests — that they can expose the hidden assumptions on which apparently egalitarian households are built.