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When the new governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, was on the campaign trail last summer, the Washington Post expressed alarm about his 1989 master’s thesis that had noted, among other things, the impact of rising rates of labor-force participation among mothers on the well-being of children and the health of the family. Fearing that his research paper would distract from his disciplined focus on “jobs,” the Republican candidate moved quickly to distance himself from a controversy the newspaper seemed anxious to create. He told the media that the matter he had written about at Pat Robertson’s graduate school twenty years ago “was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views.” In fact, he pointed out that his wife and three grown daughters currently work outside the home and that he had hired five women in senior posts as Virginia’s attorney general.¹

That McDonnell went on to win the largest gubernatorial victory in the commonwealth in a generation may confirm that the heat of a campaign is not the place to shed light on problems that an academic paper identifies or quantifies. At the same time, McDonnell’s reluctance to concede that his thesis raised a legitimate question illustrates that few Americans today understand the disastrous consequences of the obsession of American public policy, since the 1970s, with moving more women into “jobs” via affirmative action. The consequences of this aspect of political economy go beyond the concern of McDonnell’s thesis, the well-being of children who lack the full-time care and attention of their mothers. Expressed in terms of modern functionalism, the latent functions of affirmative action for women include the debasement of the very home economy that makes marriage a bargain. By eroding the liberties that men and women formerly enjoyed as breadwinners and homemakers, affirmative action—like no-fault divorce—has weakened the economic basis of matrimony and impeded the formation of marriages as life-long partnerships.

Affirmative action for women in employment dates—like no-fault divorce—from circa 1970.² In his review of computer analyses of the 1970 U.S. Census, George Gilder noted that those who benefited the most from allegedly “sexist” employment patterns were breadwinner husbands (white or African-American) with big families to support and just a dozen or fewer years of education. In fact, theirs was the sole bloc to earn income far beyond its education or circumstances. The primary thrust of post-1970 feminism proved to snatch promotions, even jobs, from these breadwinners, to be allotted to educated (or at any rate extensively schooled) women.³ As sociologist Brad Wilcox points out: “Working-class and poor men have seen their real wages fall since the early 1970s, which makes them less attractive as husbands to their girlfriends and the mothers of their children.”⁴ Gilder claims that this impact stems from the officially “antibias” atmosphere that reflects not only employers’ employment attitudes and practices but also those of agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.⁵

U.S. Labor-Force Participation Rates
(Civilian Population, Ages 20 or More)

Source: Current Population Survey, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

This “antibias” groupthink may have been reinforced by the fact that the decision-makers responsible for affirmative action in the workplace were recruited from the socioeconomic class of educated women, rather than among the homemaker wives of affected breadwinners. This pattern may explain why wives—who have always robustly backed married white males who have been victimized by affirmative action—are more angered by “reverse” discrimination than are their disadvantaged husbands. Discrimination against husbands may injure not those men alone but also any wife who is not employed outside the household.⁶

Seen from this angle, affirmative action for women qualifies as a form of market manipulation through political means, manipulation of the sort that economists call rent-seeking. It begets higher-than-market level remuneration for employed women, many of whom are college-educated and married to high-status men, at the expense of their lower-status sisters who are dependent homemakers. While the former have seen their employment prospects and earnings dramatically increase, the latter have seen the employment prospects and relative earnings of their breadwinning husbands decline. Are these unintended outcomes, including social inequality that has financially crippled dependent homemaker wives, good for America? The irony is that while the Republican governor of Virginia might have made peace with the intended outcomes (or manifest functions, expressed in functionalist terms) of affirmative action, its latent functions represent a reversal of the expressed “work choice” preferences of American men and women.