Excluding women and younger workers here is not arbitrary either. The whole idea is to ask what it takes for a typical man to support a typical family – you can’t simply decide to measure something else.
Then the research has more limited generalizability properties, and I do think this is going to bias it to a no answer.
The correction for this changed the result by −2% (made 2023 look slightly worse). If you trust their calculation there (I didn’t check) it happens not to change the answer enough to matter.
EDIT: I think Whitakk is plausibly right here, doesn’t impact the OP since I excluded the adjustment (and any adjustments on top of it) either way, not going to go verify in detail. Makes it even more stark that all the adjustments are in the same direction.
I don’t think that’s right (the chart is really misleading—you have to look at bars 3 and 4 as a group, then 5 and 6 as a separate group, then 7 and 8 as a separate group).
Table 1 in the paper shows the “over-25-male” version: −9% before taxes (row 9), +4% after taxes (row 14)
Table 2 in the paper shows the same for all workers: +2% before taxes (row 9), +15% after taxes (row 14)
So, a +11pp impact (not −2 as the chart seems to show).
(Of course, if you’re giving credit for increased female earnings, you also probably have to count childcare on the cost side too. If I’m reading Table 3 correctly this won’t make a big difference in aggregate, because although the nursery-plus school category has had a high cost increase it’s still a very small share of the pie.)
Then the research has more limited generalizability properties, and I do think this is going to bias it to a no answer.
The correction for this changed the result by −2% (made 2023 look slightly worse). If you trust their calculation there (I didn’t check) it happens not to change the answer enough to matter.
EDIT: I think Whitakk is plausibly right here, doesn’t impact the OP since I excluded the adjustment (and any adjustments on top of it) either way, not going to go verify in detail. Makes it even more stark that all the adjustments are in the same direction.
I don’t think that’s right (the chart is really misleading—you have to look at bars 3 and 4 as a group, then 5 and 6 as a separate group, then 7 and 8 as a separate group).
Table 1 in the paper shows the “over-25-male” version: −9% before taxes (row 9), +4% after taxes (row 14)
Table 2 in the paper shows the same for all workers: +2% before taxes (row 9), +15% after taxes (row 14)
So, a +11pp impact (not −2 as the chart seems to show).
(Of course, if you’re giving credit for increased female earnings, you also probably have to count childcare on the cost side too. If I’m reading Table 3 correctly this won’t make a big difference in aggregate, because although the nursery-plus school category has had a high cost increase it’s still a very small share of the pie.)