Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [20]
And the prostitutes do what any good entrepreneur would do: they raise prices by about 30 percent and work as much overtime as they can handle.
Most interestingly, this surge in demand attracts a special kind of worker—a woman who steers clear of prostitution all year long but, during this busy season, drops her other work and starts turning tricks. Most of these part-time prostitutes have children and take care of their households; they aren’t drug addicts. But like prospectors at a gold rush or Realtors during a housing boom, they see the chance to cash in and jump at it.
As for the question posed in this chapter’s title—How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?—the answer should be obvious: they both take advantage of short-term job opportunities brought about by holiday spikes in demand.
We’ve already established that demand for prostitutes is far lower today than it was sixty years ago (if offset a bit by holiday surges), in large part because of the feminist revolution.
If you found that surprising, consider an even more unlikely victim of the feminist revolution: schoolchildren.
Teaching has traditionally been dominated by women. A hundred years ago, it was one of the few jobs available to women that didn’t involve cooking, cleaning, or other menial labor. (Nursing was another such profession, but teaching was far more prominent, with six teachers for every nurse.) At the time, nearly 6 percent of the female workforce were teachers, trailing only laborers (19 percent), servants (16 percent), and laundresses (6.5 percent). And by a large margin it was the job of choice among college graduates. As of 1940, an astonishing 55 percent of all college-educated female workers in their early thirties were employed as teachers.
Soon after, however, opportunities for smart women began to multiply. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were contributing factors, as was the societal shift in the perception of women’s roles. As more girls went off to college, more women emerged ready to join the workforce, especially in the desirable professions that had been largely off-limits: law, medicine, business, finance, and so on. (One of the unsung heroes of this revolution was the widespread use of baby formula, which allowed new mothers to get right back to work.)
These demanding, competitive professions offered high wages and attracted the best and brightest women available. No doubt many of these women would have become schoolteachers had they been born a generation earlier.
But they didn’t. As a consequence, the schoolteacher corps began to experience a brain drain. In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom. It hardly helped that teachers’ wages were falling significantly in relation to those of other jobs. “The quality of teachers has been declining for decades,” the chancellor of New York City’s public schools declared in 2000, “and no one wants to talk about it.”
This isn’t to say that there aren’t still a lot of great teachers. Of course there are. But overall teacher skill declined during these years, and with it the quality of classroom instruction. Between 1967 and 1980, U.S. test scores fell by about 1.25 grade-level equivalents. The education researcher John Bishop called this decline “historically unprecedented,” arguing that it put a serious drag on national productivity that would continue well into the twenty-first century.
But at least things worked out well for the women who went into other professions, right?
Well, sort of. As we wrote earlier, even the best-educated women earn less than their male counterparts. This is especially true in the high-flying financial and corporate sectors