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When we started sending women to work, we began doubling our workforce. This is great in theory but for employers only. More workers devalues the cost of any one particular worker because there are more alternatives. But then the question is what type of job is filled.

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When women were placed into the workforce, most of them took jobs that were not already filled. A good portion of these were administrative; not coincidentally, this category has swelled dramatically in the last fifty years.

One reason a category swells is because it can since there are not only people who take those jobs, but people who will depend upon them. Thus it seems cheap at first to hire more, and then more.

If you wonder how we got to the point where most jobs involved four hours of actual work per week, and 36 hours of attending meetings, filling out inconsequential paperwork, reading email, being on conference calls, etc. this is the source: the jobs themselves aren’t important.

When women entered the workforce, we needed to find a way to hire all these new people who would need the income. We diluted job roles in order to make room. This in turn made jobs boring, except for people who enjoy the social aspects of the job, which are all of the non-work parts of the job.

By insisting on this universal participation, we’ve changed jobs from having purpose to being a process of attendance and compliance. Even further, this has diluted productivity. We have made most jobs or most of jobs fully extraneous.

The result is that industry moves more slowly, and has a higher cost in those jobs which are not related at all to the production of widgets. This is the new norm, and most people are afraid to criticize it.