From The Economist, December 30, 2009:
The rich world’s quiet revolution: women are gradually taking over the workplace
At a time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50 percent threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.
Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times.
From another article in the same issue:
The rich world has seen a growing demand for women’s labor. When brute strength mattered more than brains, men had an inherent advantage. Now that brainpower has triumphed the two sexes are more evenly matched. The feminization of the workforce has been driven by the relentless rise of the service sector (where women can compete as well as men) and the equally relentless decline of manufacturing (where they could not). The landmark book in the rise of feminism was arguably not Ms Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” but Daniel Bell’s “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”.
Or perhaps Rise of the Creative Class is a landmark book for demonstrating why women have increasingly found a fit in the wage-earning world.
Your thoughts?
(Thanks to colleague MW for drawing my attention to the article.)
January 6th, 2010 at 10:20 am
I wonder if this is at all connected to the increase in the average age of women when they have their first child, as well as a reduction in fertility rates (at least until last year in the UK), as well as more and more pressure put on fewer and fewer children (the fewer you have the more important it is for them to succeed), which may partly explain rocketing rates of mentall illness?
Women can compete in creative industries, but men can’t compete at having babies.
Without children the human race ends.
January 6th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
There’s along way to go in the investment business, for one. Of the “featured speakers and panelists” at next week’s “Inside ETFs Conference,” 81 are men and eight are women. That’s pretty representative of most such gatherings and of many firms.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:29 am
Have a look at “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker. There’s a chapter, I recall, on genetic differences between the sexes.
A lot of the differences simply can’t co-exist within current paradigms. Take political representation. Women (in the UK at least) are grossly under-represented in the House of Commons. And yet, take a look at working environment where ministers are working away from home for long periods in London, and work very long hours in a very aggressive environment. Given that women continue to be responsible for the vast majority of all types of care, are those conditions compatible?
Or even beyond that, maybe it’s just that fewer women even want to be in that kind of aggressive environment? Women may baulk at the suggestion that they are “softer” – and of course, there are men don’t thrive on aggression just as there are women who do – but Pinker’s point is that there are genetic differences as well as social ones that may explain differences in work such as this, and trying to reconcile those differences – such as positive discrimination – are futile.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Maybe it has something to do with women getting less pay for the same work?
January 7th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Interesting, Kenf — are you suggesting that some firms may consciously hire women because their salary demands are lower?
(or, put more positively, many women will trade some salary for flexibility — and offering such options as working from home occasionally, leaving at 3 and finishing up in the evening, doesn’t cost anything on the balance sheet).
January 7th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
When I was growing up in the late fifties, and early sixties, ONE man , with a high school education, working any job, nine to five could support a family, buy a house, buy a new car every other year, take his family on a two week vacation each summer to a far off destination, send his children to college, own a vacation house and retire comfortably. As feminism became widespread, it became necessary to have two incomes to accomplish what one had before. As feminism advanced, two people, with much more education, and substantially longer work hours were needed to acomplish what one man had accomplished before. Now it may simply be impossible for most people. Meanwhile, the new white collar serfdom is the perfect environment for exploiting single mothers, and unmarried women. Is that progress?
January 7th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
In addition to the direction question Wil raises, there is an indirect one here: do we live the same lifestyle as that 1950s family?
I don’t think so (see below) and if we did, could we afford to do the same things?
The typical 1950s house was perhaps 1200 square feet and the kids shared bedrooms. Families did not vacation in Europe or Mexico or at Disneyland. My parents’ family vacations consisted of fishing at a lake in Wisconsin or Colorado (a day’s drive from their respective homes in Chippewa Falls WI and Kansas City, respectively), staying at a rustic cabin. No one bought lunch everyday while at work, they packed a lunch. My parents as kids tended to wear hand-me-down clothes, or clothes that my grandmothers made. My grandfathers both had professional jobs, incidentally.
I think if families today were content in a 1200 square foot suburban townhouse home, made their own clothes or shopped second hand, vacationed by camping, did not eat out or eat packaged foods, did not patronize Starbucks, etc. you could live on one salary as Wil suggests.
Does anyone know of a research study to this effect?
Instead, we now have the experience economy as well as the consumer economy.
Both adults in a couple now work, but we’ve thought of thousands of new things we need to spend money on.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:50 am
That’s exactly it Wendy – an economy driven by consumption depends upon marketing to fetishise products and services to make us feel we “need” to go on holiday, eat at restaurants, buy new clothes etc. That in turns drives wage demands as well as the “need” for two adults to support the demands from our lifestyles.
It’s not so simple to just say “I don’t want to go on holiday” because if you’re in a relationship and family you’re constrained by their needs as well. As these pressures are social, it follows that they’re self-reinforcing. The end result – individual objections to consumerism are dismissed as “quaint” or “eccentric” and ignored, and we all keep going on hoilday, buying the newest fads and eating the latest foods – I wonder how many of us would say “I buy these things but don’t actually want to” if asked in a questionnaire?
And yet this drive for the wages to keep pace with consumption has real social and individual impacts: stress, relationship breakdown, compressed child-bearing, delayed child-bearing, perhaps even intolerance of slowness and delay (such as ‘road rage’ etc).
Yes of course women should have the same labour rights and expectations and demands as men. But men can’t bear children. The compromise is surely to want less and consume less; and for men to work less to allow their partners to work more where there are care commitments.
January 10th, 2010 at 3:49 am
Wendy, I am also from a midwestern background, so much of what you said is familiar. However, my hometown is a college town, so everyone went to Europe on sabbatical….Another problem with the current state of family life, and working women, is that many people these days live in a credit bubble, in a state that people used to call “living above their means”, or “living over their heads”. The family of the fifties, and sixties did not live on credit, they saved money. Then a second mortgage was almost as bad as bankruptcy…… Women should work , if they need to or want to ( who wants to work 9 to 5?), but during the mid-century men had a sense of pride in keeping their wives well dressed, with a nice car, and enough money to run the house. Peresonally, I think that a fifteen hundred square foot house that you can pay off is infinitely better than a million dollar condo that you can never pay off, even though both partners are working, and a vacation in a cabin is better than taking a credit card to experience Mexico. It could be a “values” issue.
January 11th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Start celebrating when women earn 50% of total salaries – I expect the champagne will remain on ice for a long time/ probably forever.
Sorry of this seems pessimistic!
January 11th, 2010 at 10:09 pm
I wonder if another trend will appear. With the feminization of work combined with male developmental issues (see notes below), will we see more females “coupling” and creating families of their own? If things are as dire as they look, and if females are still looking for someone to fill a “protector” role, is it possible that we will see more females becoming family partners? I am not trying to suggest that the feminization of the workplace will create ranks of raging L’s (word changed to avoid SPAM protection, no offense intended). But, if the qualities that were formally offered by men (protection, financial security, etc.) are no longer being offered by them, and the potential exists for women to have babies and careers without men, what will women do?
Notes:
Boys Adrift – Sax, Leonard – ISBN 9780465072095
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/01/08/f-vp-smol.html
January 17th, 2010 at 10:37 am
There’s a big difference between women being 50% of the workforce and women being equally represented in the workforce. My guess is that the majority of the women in the study are in lower level positions than the men. An example being that in one company I worked for was that the majority of the accounting department was female, but these were people inputting invoices, doing reconciliations and payroll. The counterpart was that the head of the department was male.
Without a better look at the statistics I’m not sure if this is something to celebrate.
January 18th, 2010 at 9:10 am
The significant participation of women in the workforce is brought about by several factors. First, the continuous depressing state of national economies worldwide has required the need of two income earners in each household. Single-headed households have difficulty in surviving increasing costs of living. It is now a necessity for women to take on productive work and be economically active because of the need to feed the family.
Second, women are increasingly gaining ground in education. Opportunities for them to find work have risen due to skills and knowledge earned through getting schooled.
Third, the rise in the service industry which prefers female labor. From manual skills to cerebral competence in this particular field of work, women has an inherent advantage over men due to their physiological dexterity and people skills they have honed as a result of their reproductive functions in the care economy which includes the household.
However, despite this development which can generally be viewed as positive, feminization of labor remains an unjust condition without the conscious intention and corresponding action not to relegate women’s work to the lowest in rank and pay. Decent work is a call for all working people to enjoy but affirmative action should still be ensued to rightly grant women’s work the dignity it deserves.
January 18th, 2010 at 10:45 am
[...] equality in the workplace, evidence suggests that the situation is more complex.Commentators on my recent post here at Creative Class raised several good points:Alan Says: Start celebrating when women earn 50% of total salaries – [...]
July 22nd, 2010 at 7:27 am
i think that as more woman are coming out of higher educatuion than men they will take over jobs etc from
men and eventually rule the world . there is a major role reversal hapening at the moment and will get worse where woman bring in the money while hubby does the domestic work at home . it also seems more and more men are becoming feminized , and its now the turn of the wife to lead and
may lead to more woman having affairs outside her marriage
as she may not respect her feminized domesticated hubby at home no more as has and is hapening.
September 20th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
I notice that women now seem more educated and more prepared to be leaders and high achievers. Every where I look women are studying hard and moving up in their careers.
Meanwhile alot of younger men seem ill suited for the modern workforce. It only makes sense that men are going to flock into the homes and become stay at home dads. Women are taking over!
And I must admit that it seems like a needed change.
August 11th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
I was having this conversation with a group of young blokes recently (aspiring CEO’s). They see the Chinese and Indian economies and their respective global influences as the challenge of the future. When I contested this view with the FACT that women taking over the work force will cause a greater change in the way things are done they laughed.
Given the way they communicate with and think of women I think they are in for a shock. Hitting on a bird in the pub is different then selling your idea to a female superior.