Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [11]
Or consider the 1972 U.S. law known as Title IX. While broadly designed to prohibit sex discrimination in educational settings, Title IX also required high schools and colleges to bring their women’s sports programs up to the level of their men’s programs. Millions of young women subsequently joined these new programs, and as the economist Betsey Stevenson discovered, girls who play high-school sports are more likely to attend college and land a solid job, especially in some of the high-skill fields traditionally dominated by men. That’s the good news.
But Title IX also brought some bad news for women. When the law was passed, more than 90 percent of college women’s sports teams had female head coaches. Title IX boosted the appeal of such jobs: salaries rose and there was more exposure and excitement. Like the lowly peasant food that is “discovered” by the culinary elite and promptly migrates from roadside shacks into high-end restaurants, these jobs were soon snapped up by a new set of customers: men. These days, barely 40 percent of college women’s sports teams are coached by women. Among the most visible coaching jobs in women’s sports are those in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), founded thirteen years ago as a corollary to the men’s NBA. As of this writing, the WNBA has 13 teams and just 6 of them—again, fewer than 50 percent—are coached by women. This is actually an improvement from the league’s tenth anniversary season, when only 3 of the 14 coaches were women.
For all the progress women have made in the twenty-first-century labor market, the typical female would come out well ahead if she had simply had the foresight to be born male.
There is one labor market women have always dominated: prostitution.
Its business model is built upon a simple premise. Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand.
Today prostitution is generally illegal in the United States, albeit with a few exceptions and many inconsistencies in enforcement. In the early years of the nation, prostitution was frowned upon but not criminalized. It was during the Progressive Era, roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s, that this leniency ended. There was a public outcry against “white slavery,” in which thousands of women were imprisoned against their will to work as prostitutes.
The white slavery problem turned out to be a wild exaggeration. The reality was perhaps scarier: rather than being forced into prostitution, women were choosing it for themselves. In the early 1910s, the Department of Justice conducted a census of 310 cities in 26 states to tally the number of prostitutes in the United States: “We arrive at the conservative figure of approximately 200,000 women in the regular army of vice.”
At the time, the American population included 22 million women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. If the DOJ numbers are to be believed, 1 of every 110 women in that age range was a prostitute. But most prostitutes, about 85 percent, were in their twenties. In that age range, 1 of every 50 American women was a prostitute.
The market was particularly strong in Chicago, which had more than a thousand known brothels. The mayor assembled a blue-ribbon Vice Commission, comprising religious leaders as well as civic, educational, legal, and medical authorities. Once they got their hands dirty, these good people realized they were up against an enemy even more venal than sex: economics.
“Is it any wonder,” the commission declared, “that a tempted girl who receives only $6 per week working with her hands sells her body for $25 per week when she learns that there is demand for it and men are willing to pay