“Simple, love. They come when Mummy and Daddy stay at home all the time.”
If a report by Kings College London is to be believed, this reply will be resonating through the country in a few years, with low birth rates a distant memory.
The report says that, to quote the newspaper headline, Companies Should Let Employees Work from Home to Fix Britain’s Declining Birth Rates. Now, there’s a hell of a great idea, I thought.
This adds a whole new meaning to the concept of lying down on the job. Instead of involving themselves in the drudgery of daily toil, couples could stay at home and go at it hammer and tongs. That way they’ll produce many more babies who’ll then grow up and work from home too – nudge, nudge.
Sorted, as they say in these parts. Except that a question arises of how Mummy and Daddy will be able to pay the bills or, to extrapolate, to keep the economy going. But hey, one problem at a time, all right?
That’s the drawback of long headlines: they put the whole story in a nutshell, discouraging further reading. This is a case in point – I let my scabrous imagination run away with me. However, having then read the article to the end, I found out that replacing work with hanky-panky isn’t quite what the report meant.
Or is it? The paper says that, when both ‘partners’ (dread word) work from home at least once a week, lifetime fertility rises by an average of 0.32 children per woman. Yes, but why?
The report cites no physiological reasons. Instead it mentions the greater ease of family planning and a reduced need for childcare as contributing factors, leaving unmentioned the obvious explanation that first popped into my dirty mind.
For, as often as not, working from home (WFH) is a way of not working from home (NWFH). Anyone who has ever been involved in any commercial activity will know that people who work together with their colleagues are more productive than loners who claim to be working from home.
Claiming exemption from coming to work is almost the same as pulling a sickie, a sort of malingering. Granted, there are exceptions, but I don’t believe they can be numerous enough to make a statistical difference to birth rates. After all, we are talking huge numbers here.
To cite one example close to my heart, an advertising creative team working on a new campaign may indeed be more productive staying at home in peace and quiet, away from phone calls, irate clients and – especially in Britain – useless meetings. Even there, having made that WFH phone call myself many times, my partner (as the term is properly used) and I usually idled away half a day chatting about this and that.
Communications being what they are today, WFH is technically easier than it was in my day. But things remain the same psychologically: the dynamics of a buzzing office get more out of employees than lazing at home ever will.
“For societies faced with undesirably low birth rates,” says the paper, “WFH can thus yield societal benefits that go beyond any direct benefits to employees and employers.” Yes, such direct benefits as getting the work done and keeping the country afloat.
That said, birth rates in Britain aren’t just low but catastrophic. At 1.4 children per woman (compared to 2.93 in 1964), they are way below “the ‘replacement-level’ rate needed to maintain a stable population of 2.1”.
Of course, as any Green or Labour politician will tell you, with a Tory one pretending to demur, there are other ways of keeping the population stable or even growing. But uncontrolled Muslim immigration is a subject for another day.
A UN report identifies the same problem and offers a full raft of reasons for it. Some of them are objective: rising living costs, less job security and a lack of affordable housing. But then there are also subjective reasons, a matter of personal choice: women focusing on careers too much to be sidetracked by children, men reluctant to be burdened with family responsibilities.
Such fracturing off various factors seems unnecessarily pedantic to me. For all of them are but subsets of an overarching problem: the chickens hatched by our deracinated modernity have come home to roost. All over the developed world we are paying the price for conducting social experiments on humans.
Englishmen (and definitely Americans) my age remember the time when a man making a normal middle-class salary could provide for his family well enough for his wife and three or four children to live in comfort. The wife typically didn’t have a full-time job – because she neither wanted nor, more to the point, needed one.
Those women who couldn’t keep their natural talents bottled up did pursue careers, but they were in the minority. Most stayed at home to run their households and raise their children.
Their role was as vital as that of their men, but it was different because, well, men and women are different. The issue of which ‘gender’ was entitled to which primary sex characteristics never came up, and neither did many malcontents question the natural biological and social differences between men and women.
Then the 1960s barged in, sweeping all before them and leaving a social and cultural wasteland in their wake. The biological differences between the sexes were still acknowledged, just, but no other.
Militant feminism became the order of the day, and the woman’s traditional role of wife and mother was declared obsolete, onerous and oppressive. Women now had to fulfil themselves not by raising families but by competing with men in the workplace – this, while still juggling their jobs with domestic obligations.
I’ll illustrate the situation on the example of the only industry of which I have inside knowledge: advertising. When women were told to cast aside the yoke of womanhood, they began to flood into agencies, bloating their staff by at least 40 per cent.
There was precious little those companies could do about keeping the deluge at bay. For governments proved their progressive nature by introducing various laws mandating equal opportunity and prohibiting discrimination based on sex (or ability, as one is tempted to add).
Yet advertising agencies are commercial concerns accountable to their shareholders. They had to make profits, a task made difficult by newly bulging payrolls. Hence the managers did the only thing they could do under the circumstances: they lopped 40 per cent off the men’s salaries and used the money to pay the women.
That’s what happened in every industry and in every country. The ideologically inspired urge of a woman to have a full-time job was boosted by the economic necessity to do so. A normal middle-class salary was no longer sufficient for a man to provide for his family.
This is in no way trying to denigrate women’s competence. They are often as good as men are at many occupations and better at some. For example, the biological imperative to run large households often makes women excellent administrators at all levels, from running advertising accounts to, as Margaret Thatcher proved, running countries.
If women desperately want to work and have the necessary abilities, then by all means, no barriers should be erected in their way. But, call me a misogynist and report me to the Equalities Commission, most women seek full-time employment not because they need to express their talents but because they have to financially – and feel they have to ideologically.
It doesn’t take an academic sociologist, nor an extensive study, to realise what sort of effect that situation will have on birth rates. We can see what’s happening before our very eyes.
This whole drive to WFH, especially for women, is a tacit admission of a terrible mistake made over the previous three generations. Alas, we are going to be furnished with yet another proof that any large-scale experiments on human beings always produce disastrous effects, those that can’t be corrected by palliatives.
That is to say they can’t be corrected at all. Enforced, ideologically inspired social meddling is usually irreversible if allowed to fester long enough. That’s why sage men throughout the ages highlighted prudence as the greatest political virtue. But those men are no longer with us, and neither is their prudence and sagacity.
Hence the massive drive to tear the social fabric to tatters, followed by half-hearted attempts to patch up the more gaping holes. Good luck with that.