Two small points on Long and Horowitz’s arguments about the sex-gap in wages. First, there is also such a thing as employee entrepreneurship: if a woman is being underpaid for what she does or is capable of doing relative to men (or anyone else), she is quite free—and in a free market would have all the incentives to encourage her to do so—to market herself elsewhere. I don’t just mean that she could look for another job; I mean she could market herself: approach other employers, even those not currently looking for new employees, and demonstrate her abilities, advertise what she can do, promote herself, and so on. In other words, she can exploit possible niches that others didn’t realize were there, market opportunities that sex-gaps in wages open up. That’s what entrepreneurs do, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t think of herself as an independent contractor offering, and entrepreneurially capitalizing on, her own services.

Second, there are lots of reasons why husbands and wives might have the particular signature of division of labor they do other than that men are lazy and women put up with it. People are quick to assume that the lazy man won’t shoulder his fair burden of housework and that the hapless longsuffering woman must simply endure it. That probably happens sometimes, but it most certainly is not the case in every situation. Perhaps in some cases the couples in question actually prefer the arrangement. I think that in our zeal to combat evils like sexism we sometimes forget to notice that many of the paths people take they themselves chose. Their decisions have various consequences, not always good; but just because the people making the decisions didn’t endorse or don’t want all of the consequences doesn’t mean that therefore someone else has wronged them—or indeed that any wrong happened at all.