Acts Have Consequences by Linda Hirshman:

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Stay at home moms and working moms: I am worried about our daughters.

In "Get to Work," I speculated that, with the Census Bureau reporting a dropoff in the number of educated mothers working, "It is only a matter of time until people figure out that women aren't a good bet for education and opportunity. Conservatives are already asking why society should spend resources educating women with only a 50 percent return rate on their stated goals."

Mommybloggers responded with a storm of postings denying that they had any responsibility to other women in the society and asking why they should care about anyone other than their husbands and children. Other critics told me employers would never do anything that violated the Civil Rights Act and I should just hush my mouth lest I give them ideas.

Well, even if you care only about your own biological family, news bulletin -- girls are children too. And here, as surely as if I could see the future, just what I worried about has started to surface.

Employers are discriminating against Harvard girls. Probably inspired by the AAUW study I mentioned in my last blog post, The Harvard student newspaper, the famed Harvard Crimson, decided to ask its graduating seniors about their starting salaries. Guess what? The Harvard women are making 16.6% less than men do. Of the 16% wage gap, 8% is unaccounted for by choice of field, major and the like, which I talked about Monday. In the AAUW study, the gap is 5%, and the study's authors speculate that the 5% might be in part discrimination.

Torben Iversen, Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, who has written a lot about gender inequality, told the Crimson that "Employee training can be an expensive endeavor, and companies are fearful that female workers will take leaves of absence for maternity and child-rearing after the training process is over. That might make companies more wary of hiring women. “Controlling for career choices, I believe most of the gender difference in pay is due to statistical discrimination,” Iversen wrote the Crimson. So the decisions the stay at home moms take are going to make life harder for their daughters. Unless the daughters aspire only to be stay at home moms, in which case toss out your copy of the Feminine Mystique. It's all been a long delusion.

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman reports that girls are dry wells. In a column in The New York Times on Sunday ("Israel Discovers Oil"), renowned columnist Thomas Friedman was raving about the wonderful brain power that fuels the Israeli economy. Much better than oil wells, he crowed. Israeli venture capitalists report that "every Israeli Jewish mother wants her son to be a dropout and go create a start-up." Am I missing something here, or are all Israeli moms dreaming of daughters who stay at home and raise sons, too?

In the end, we all live in the larger society. If our individual acts make women look less desirable as employees, we should not be surprised that employers are making a bet that our daughters, ourselves. We should not even be surprised at the unconscious sexist stereotype Friedman so blithely reported. The only thing that should surprise us is that we are surprised that . . . acts have consequences.

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