Who’s Responsible for all the Childless Cat Ladies?
Feminism set women up for failure. So who’s on the hook to take care of women when they can no longer take care of themselves?
In January 2017, I was one of 470,000 protestors who marched on Washington in the inaugural women’s march. At the time I was deeply committed to the feminist cause. I legitimately believed my rights as a woman were under threat and the patriarchy was to blame.
A lot has changed since then. I left Washington, DC and traveled the country. I started to see the country as it is, not as The New York Times depicted it to be. I began to ask questions that feminism could not answer.
Last November, I voted for the same man I protested during the women’s march of 2017.
Once I started seeing America with my own eyes my feminist view of the world unraveled. Feminists demanded bodily autonomy over their reproductive organs but denied it to their fellow Americans who questioned the efficacy of a new vaccine. Feminists demanded social equality with men, arguing that dressing like a woman was the same as being a woman. In doing so, they’ve denounced the foundational science underpinning biology, conferring men access to what have always been protected women’s spaces.
But the most egregious offense of feminism is the invention of the patriarchy itself. Once I started working for myself and became responsible for my own well-being the feminist narrative completely collapsed. I realized it wasn’t the patriarchy that had been paying me unfairly and suppressing my career advancement – it was other women. My acceptance of their victimhood narrative was what was keeping me stuck, not a cabal of evil misogynistic men.
Feminists told women like me that we should have careers, earning our own keep by working for large corporations outside the home. A good, ambitious woman was one who climbed the corporate ladder alongside her male peers.
I learned to fear motherhood. I saw it as a punishment rather than a privilege. Anyone who didn’t follow a proper career path was stigmatized. Mothers were separate and unequal to career women like me.
I now know this was all a lie. Mothers might not be acknowledged but they work hard and are successful in their own right. And raising a family is the only legacy that’s worth leaving behind.
By pushing a career-first narrative, feminists have robbed women of the one thing that actually matters: their biological clock. You have your whole life to earn a promotion but there’s an expiration date on your womb.
All the progress feminists have made over the last few decades is about to come undone. Because women are so focused on their careers and individual rights, women aren’t reproducing anymore. According to a study conducted by Pew Research, 47% of Americans under the age of 50 believe they are unlikely to have children. U.S. Census data projects America will peak around 2080 – demographically speaking – before beginning to decline.
While this might not seem like a big deal today, it will radically transform the global economy tomorrow. Fewer children born today means fewer adults to work tomorrow. Fewer adults in the future means fewer employees to support the economy and fewer taxpayers to support the existing social welfare programs aging adults rely on.
There simply won’t be enough people to keep America going, much less meet the needs of an aging population. Rather than relying on family, aging Americans now rely on the government and private savings to support them once they can no longer work. But that’s increasingly not enough. Almost half of Baby Boomers don’t have anything saved for retirement. Meanwhile, more than 40% of Gen Xers don’t have anything saved either.
Thanks to feminism, today’s young people are delaying starting families and won’t have any safety net to retire into. The oldest Millennials will begin retiring in the late 2040s. When they do, they won’t be receiving Social Security and because they aren’t having children today, they won’t have any family to help take care of them later on either.
As we start thinking about how society and the economy is going to evolve in the coming years, the issue of demographic decline raises important social questions we need to begin considering. Who’s responsible for paying for childless adults in the future? Specifically, who should pay for childless cat ladies that deliberately put their careers ahead of starting a family? Are they entitled to the fruits of the next generation’s labor when they did nothing to contribute to it?
The cultural narrative shaping America’s demography has largely been focused on careers at the expense of families. Because of feminism’s push for progress, women have been caught in the crosshairs. While there have been short-term gains for women, without producing children, these gains mean nothing in the long run. If you follow this to its logical end, if enough feminists stop reproducing there won’t be a new generation for feminists to pass their hard-earned freedoms onto.
This essay will dive into the inevitable social questions that will arise because of the trade-off between careers and families. The goal isn’t to shame women for not having children, it’s merely to call attention to the elephant in the room. Someone is going to have to pay the consequences for the decisions women are making today. The question is whose responsibility is it?
This essay dives into:
⚡ How the strong independent woman girlboss narrative has left an entire generation of women economically vulnerable
⚡Why women should care about the consequences of demographic decline
⚡Why young women who pursue a career-first, family later strategy are being set up for failure
⚡ How technological job disruptions will impact women and what that means for the future of career feminism
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Women will be most affected by technological job disruptions. They will become increasingly dependent on external support systems as a result.
One of the most common tropes in the feminist project is the idea of a wage gap. According to the American Association of University Women:
Women working full time in the U.S. are still paid just 84 cents to every dollar earned by men — and the consequences of this gap affect women throughout their lives. The pay gap even follows women into retirement: As a result of lower lifetime earnings, they receive less in Social Security and pensions.1 In terms of overall retirement income, women have only 70% of what men do.
While women may be paid less than men in aggregate, it’s not because they are women. Compared to men, women tend to choose easier careers that pay less. You’re more likely to find women pursuing careers in marketing, advertising, or nursing rather than construction, sales, or investment banking.
Selection bias favors men that’s why when you compare men and women without controlling for career field, men appear to earn more. Generally speaking, men are willing to work harder and put in more time building higher-value careers than women.
Put another way, most men aren’t pursuing careers like this:
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This creates a concentration of labor putting downward pressure on wages. More women are vying for bullshit office jobs than men. Supply and demand tells us as supply increases the price comes down. It’s no wonder women are struggling to get ahead financially. By self-segregating into highly concentrated career fields that already don’t pay well, they’ve collectively diminished their own value.
Now, thanks to new technology, this raises an entirely new problem. While feminists are harping on a non-existent wage gap, they’re ignoring the looming threat of the destruction of female-dominated job categories in the first place.
The vast majority of white collar jobs aren’t providing real value in the economy. They’re made up jobs with made up work. By now companies have begun preparing for integration with AI and automation. They’re reducing the amount of unproductive labor they have on their payrolls. Spotify’s CEO spelled it out clearly in a 2023 memo:
When we look back on 2022 and 2023, it has truly been impressive what we have accomplished. But, at the same time, the reality is much of this output was linked to having more resources. By most metrics, we were more productive but less efficient. We need to be both. While we have done some work to mitigate this challenge and become more efficient in 2023, we still have a ways to go before we are both productive and efficient. Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact. More people need to be focused on delivering for our key stakeholders — creators and consumers. In two words, we have to become relentlessly resourceful. (Tomorrow Today)
Now thanks to China’s arrival into the AI market, the AI arms race has heated up. President Trump recently announced a massive funding effort to build data centers in the United States. Companies like OpenAI are responding to the threat of global competition by shortening their timelines to get new products to market as quickly as possible.
By the end of this year AI chatbots will be replaced by highly specialized AI agents. Once this happens, the pace of technological job disruptions will rapidly increase. As has happened throughout history, workers will be displaced by new technology, but unlike the past, there won’t be anywhere in the economy for them to seek refuge in.
Many of the white collar careers women selectively enter into can be outsourced to AI agents. Women will be on the front lines of the destabilizing effects of job displacement.
Take marketing as an example. According to data from LinkedIn, 60% of marketing roles in North America are occupied by women. Marketers perform tasks like:
Market research
Content creation
Develop promotional strategies
Manage brand image
Execute and analyze marketing campaigns
All of these tasks can be done with minimal human touchpoints. Once AI agents come online and are properly trained, you won’t need to pay people to develop and run marketing campaigns anymore, much less analyzing their effectiveness.
The current assumption is that workers will simply shift to a different part of the economy. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if the demand for marketers drops so precipitously that workers don’t have the time or resources to cover their immediate needs, much less retrain for a new career?
While women could move into blue collar jobs like construction or – dare I say it – take on more domestic responsibilities in the home, it’s unlikely their egos will let them do so. While these jobs have demand, there isn’t any social capital associated with them. Absent social capital, there won’t be an incentive for career-oriented women to pursue the most in-demand jobs available to them.
So what will they do? They will increasingly come to rely on government-funded assistance programs to meet their day-to-day needs.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported in a 2020 policy brief that women in 42 states received more unemployment benefits than men.2 If COVID-19 is any indicator, this suggests that women will lean on government assistance when AI takes their jobs.
This won’t just drain welfare programs, it will necessitate a complete redistribution of wages across the economy. Women who are stranded in their careers will fall back on the victimhood narrative perpetuated by feminism. They’ll demand an equitable redistribution of wages that they did nothing to earn.
The question is who is going to pony up and pay it?
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Women aren’t suppressed by the patriarchy, they’re handicapped by their own choices. Now that they’re choosing not to have children, who is responsible for taking care of them later on in life?
On a macro level, the whole feminist project has economically handicapped women. While careers were supposed to liberate women, they’ve instead become shackled by debt. While feminists have told women that submitting to a husband is an abomination, today’s women happily submit to banks and corporate employers instead.
As I established in the previous section, women self-select into careers that produce lower wages than their male peers. Much of this is due to preference. And this preference comes at a cost.
To get a white collar job you need a college degree. Increasingly, that choice is disproportionately saddling women with debt that limits their ability to save for their future. On college campuses today, 58% of students are women. At the same time, women hold 64% of all student loan debt.
Women have entered the workforce at a significant disadvantage. They are financing college degrees that are worthless to pursue low-paying careers that won’t exist in a couple of years.
Young people deserve some grace. Teenagers who are preparing for college don’t know any better. They’re looking to the adults in their lives to shepherd them into adulthood. Yet the adults continue to fail them. Despite all of the economic data that suggests otherwise, young women are still expected to pursue careers instead of starting families.
But at some point those teenagers will become adults and they will have to be held accountable for their actions.
Because of the allure of the social capital of careers and the economic handicap of pursuing an education, young people have put off starting families. The average Millennial woman has given birth to two children while current trends for Gen Z suggest they will have less than that. A growing number of young people simply don’t want children as a matter of choice. The latest polling data suggests one-third of Gen Zers and Millennials don’t want children at all.
While choosing whether or not to start a family may seem like a preference today, it will have severe economic consequences in the future.
Women aren’t getting the most out of their careers. And because they took on debt to pursue those careers, whatever discretionary income they have, they’re not putting it towards retirement savings. Women are already more dependent than men on welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security.3 But because of technological job disruptions heading our way, women’s dependence on unearned external support will likely increase in the years to come.
This raises a whole host of social questions that need to be answered sooner rather than later.
Women are taking more from the benefits pool than they are putting into it. Men are aware of this that’s why they’re dropping out of the workforce in record numbers. A man doesn’t want to work to support a petty wife who’s going to divorce him and take half of everything he owns. And because many men work high-paying jobs, they’re also paying more in taxes. Men working long hours maintaining oil rigs or repaving roads, don’t want to subsidize women who chose to spend their careers taking poolside Zoom calls.
At the same time, feminists are trying to rewrite biological truths. But there’s one truth they can’t ignore. Women are the only ones who can give birth. If we want to keep modern civilization going, women have to step up to the plate to produce the next generation.
Feminists have told women that motherhood is something to be ashamed of. The quickest way to end your career is to have children. This, compounded by the economic predicament women have put themselves in, has changed the value proposition of reproduction. Rather than being seen as a responsibility, it is viewed as a choice. Women who don’t want to have children have the ability to choose not to.
It’s clear most women don’t have the means or desire to improve their financial situation on their own. But at the same time, they don’t want the responsibilities of motherhood either. They want someone else – a parent, a significant other, a sugar daddy, or a viral TikTok video – to underwrite their life for them.
Even with radical changes to the social safety net, because men are tired of funding the infantilism of feminist women, there won’t be enough to go around when it comes time for Millennial and Gen Z women to retire. Someone is going to have to take care of all the childless cat ladies feminists have created. The question is who?
Final takeaway.
The technological revolution that’s underway isn’t isolated to the economy or jobs. It’s going to fundamentally change society and the social contract that maintains order.
A social contract is a set of rules that governs how resources are distributed. Sometimes the social contract is codified into law, other times it’s upheld by other members of society.
That’s why ongoing political debates around race, gender, and sexual orientation have become significant political flashpoints in recent years. It’s not so much about conferring individuals specific rights, it’s about equity over the distribution of resources.
The resource question is a fundamental question that matters. It’s why countries go to war and how civilizations end.
As AI begins displacing workers, short-term resource scarcity is going to put an acute strain on workers. Under the current paradigm, workers will rely on government benefits until they find a new job. But as work becomes increasingly scarce in some career fields and as government resources dry up, there won’t be anything left to meet the needs of the population.
While this will lead to short-term stress, it’s going to create a long-term structural problem. Whether it’s taking on debt to finance a college degree or putting off starting a family, young people today are making choices that will hurt them tomorrow.
Those who don’t have the resources to save for end-of-life care and those who aren’t producing children will be left socially stranded. If they don’t have the means to pay for elder care and they don’t have a child who’s willing to change their adult diapers for free, who is going to take care of these people in the future?
Right now, there are a lot of unknowns. Some new social contract will emerge, whether it’s universal basic income or something else. But we don’t know what that looks like yet. And whatever new social contract emerges, we probably won’t reach a consensus on how to implement it.
Despite all of the obstacles currently facing young people, some will re-skill and decide to start families. These people aren’t going to voluntarily surrender their hard-earned gains to childless cat ladies. And they especially won’t do so after decades of abuse at the hands of feminists.
Even if you could solve the resource problem, there isn’t going to be political will to do so equitably.
I don’t know what the answer to this looks like just yet. And we probably won’t have an answer until some of these structural changes begin to manifest.
What I do know, is that the feminist narrative isn’t serving us anymore. While being a victim might be the easiest option at the moment, it isn’t necessarily the right option.
The choices we make today will have repercussions that will carry into the future.
If we’re not willing to take responsibility for the consequences of our choices today, then who will?
What’s your take?
Who should bear responsibility for childless cat ladies — or childless young adults in general — when they get older. Share your thoughts to weigh in on the conversation.
Women actually receive more from Social Security despite paying less into the system. According to the Social Security Administration, women have longer life expectancies than men. They will not only draw more out of the pot over the course of their life, they will also be eligible to receive their husband’s benefits too once he dies: https://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/factsheets/women-alt.pdf
https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UI-QF-2020-12-2.pdf