The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World - Hardcover

Wolf, Alison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307590402 ISBN 13: 9780307590404

Publisher: Crown Pub, 2013

Synopsis

Noted British academic and journalist Alison Wolf offers a surprising and thoughtful study of the professional elite, and  examines the causes—and limits—of women’s rise and the consequences of their difficult choices.

The gender gap is closing. Today, for the first time in history, tens of millions of women are spending more time at the boardroom table than the kitchen table. These professional women are highly ambitious and highly educated, enjoying the same lifestyle prerogatives as their male counterparts. They are working longer and marrying later—if they marry at all. They are heading Fortune 500 companies and appearing on the covers of Forbes and Businessweek. They represent a special type of working woman—the kind who doesn’t just punch a clock for a paycheck, but derives self-worth and pleasure from wielding professional power.

At the same time that the gender gap is narrowing, the gulf is widening among women themselves. While blockbuster books such as Lean In focus only on women in high pressure jobs, in reality there are four women in traditionally female roles for every Sheryl Sandberg. In this revealing and deeply intelligent book, Alison Wolf examines why more educated women work longer hours, why having children early is a good idea, and how feminism created a less equal world. Her ideas are sure to provoke and surprise, as she challenges much of what the liberal and conservative media consider to be women’s best interests.

About this title

About the Author

ALISON WOLF is an academic and writer living in London. She is currently the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College, London. She also advises the UK government on education policy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The XX Factor

How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World

By Alison Wolf

Random House LLC

Copyright © 2013 Alison Wolf
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-307-59040-4

CHAPTER 1

Goodbye to All That: The Fracturing of Sisterhood

Nancy Astor became a political superstar at the twentieth century's beginning.Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, was the UK's first female prime minister andan icon of the century's later decades. And as a new century got under way,Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic primaries and hisparty's presidential nomination.

Three women. Three careers. They frame this book, and frame a century in whicheducated women's lives were transformed. Astor, Thatcher and Clinton take usfrom an old world to a world that is still very new; and Clinton's defeat is ascentral to the story as Astor's or Thatcher's victory.

Nancy Astor was an American, born in Virginia in 1879 and married to one of theworld's richest men, Waldorf Astor. She was famous as the first woman to enterBritain's Parliament, a society hostess and an agitator for social reform. Shebecame an MP in 1919, just twelve years after Finland elected the world'sfirst-ever female legislators, and held a tough urban seat for twenty-five yearsthrough the Great Depression and eight general elections. She died with theVietnam War raging and Swinging London already a cliché. And yet none of thiswould have happened if her older sister had not been stunningly beautiful.

Nancy's father, Chillie Langhorne, was a Southerner. He made his money after theCivil War, as a contractor providing labor for the railroads, and his beautifulsecond daughter, Irene, became a "Belle of the Ball." For that reason, and thatreason alone, his family were launched into first New York and then Europeansociety.

White Sulphur Springs is a hot-water spa in the Blue Ridge Mountains ofVirginia, and was a center of the Southern marriage market before and after theCivil War. "To get to the Springs, to lead a masked ball ... to be a reigningBelle, was the only ideal in life worth pursuing for a southern debutante ...Your life could be transformed by one appearance at a ball," explains Irene'sgreat-nephew. Irene Langhorne's beauty made her not only the Belle of Virginiaballs, but one of America's "top four Belles"; she was selected to lead theGrand March at New York's Patriarchs' Ball, the "great annual event of theGilded Age." That meant, in 1893, instant stardom. And it was that stardom,based entirely on Irene's looks, that ushered her younger sisters, includingNancy, into New York and European top society, with a far larger and richerrange of potential husbands.

Yet by 1964, the year that Nancy died, a very different Member of Parliament wasjust eleven years short of capturing the leadership of Britain's ConservativeParty. Margaret Thatcher was a graduate research chemist turned lawyer. She hadalready been in Parliament for five years; she would become both the UK's firstfemale prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of thetwentieth century. Her father owned a small shop in a nondescript provincialtown. Her only sibling became a shy farmer's wife. And her life changed notbecause of a ball but through an academic scholarship to the Universityof Oxford.

And why is Hillary Clinton a third key figure? Why were the 2008 Democraticprimaries so important? Because of why a woman lost.

Hillary Clinton entered the primaries as the front-runner. She had strongsupport among the female working class and she and Obama were level-peggingamong the non-college young. But what mattered was the college vote, where womenare the clear majority. That vote turned out in force, unlike young non-collegevoters. As Elizabeth Cline, in The New Republic, noted, "girl-power momentum"told. But it wasn't behind Clinton. It was behind Obama.

Hillary Clinton's defeat by Barack Obama was a defining moment in the story oftoday's successful women. Not because a woman could well have taken the USpresidential nomination but, on the contrary, because what ultimately decidedthose primaries were the votes of a certain sort of woman. And those womendidn't think that the candidate's gender mattered.

For many of today's young women, being female is not the most important thingabout their lives. It does not define their fate in the way it did for allfemales in previous human history, including women born as recently as NancyAstor and her sisters. In those 2008 primaries, college-based voters, both womenand men, signed up to Obama's promise of change. Which is just another way ofsaying that contemporary college women do not think there is any strong reasonto vote for a woman candidate just because she is a woman.

For today's graduate women, education opens up the world, as it did for Mrs.Thatcher. These women are successful. They increasingly hold postgraduate aswell as full bachelor's degrees, they do professional and managerial jobs in aworld where women can hold almost any position and they earn at levels that wereinconceivable a short while ago.

These women are also a minority. At most, around a fifth of the adult femalepopulation falls clearly into this group, which combines higher education, goodincomes and prestigious occupations. But then, highly educated, high-earningprofessional men also number only about 15 to 20 percent of males in thedeveloped world, and far fewer in developing countries.

Feminists once talked of "the sisterhood," but educated successful women todayhave fewer interests in common with other women than ever before. As we willsee, they are increasingly distinctive in their patterns of dating, marriage,child-bearing and child-rearing. But above all, women have parted company fromeach other in their working lives. The highly educated professional minority nowhave careers that are increasingly like those of the successful men they workalongside. In this shared work environment, it is entirely normal thatprofessional women should be ambitious, and that men can and do work forwomen, and not just the other way round. And this drives wholesale socialchange.

Surplus sisters

The workplace is newly central to women's lives, but of course women have alwaysworked. They worked in fields, gardens and homes; they looked after children,nursed the sick at home, prepared food from scratch, sewed and mended clothes."They worked their fingers to the bone," as the saying went. It was not only thepoor who worked hard. Through most of history, middle-class and affluent womenalso worked long hours on domestic tasks and caring for their families.

Until recently, though, only poorer women worked for wages, and they, even afterthe Industrial Revolution, worked overwhelmingly in other people's houses. Theywere paid, in other words, to do the domestic jobs they would also carry out intheir own homes as daughters and, hopefully, as wives.

For all classes, marriage was women's desired near-universal goal. There's amoment in the first episode of the hit TV series Mad Men that encapsulates notjust the 1950s but all of previous history. Joan Holloway, the office manager ofa Madison Avenue advertising agency, features. She is "mid-twenties, incrediblyput together," says the script, and she has advice for a newsecretary—female, of course—who is commuting into the city.

In a couple of years, with the right moves, you'll be in the city with the restof us.

Of course, if you really make the right moves, you'll be out in the country andyou won't be going to work at all.

It is the 1950s version of long-standing advice. In 1800 or 1850, 1900 or 1950,working-class girls went to work in their early teens. They worked to earn,contributing to the family finances. If they stayed single, they kept working.But if they made a decent marriage, to a man with a stable, reasonably paid job,they stayed at home.

This pattern was later-arriving for middle-class girls, and hardly applied tothe rich, but only because, through most of history, these girls never took paidemployment at all. Right through to the mid-twentieth century, even in theindustrialized West, the most common single pattern for a woman—anywoman—was to work for pay until she married and then stop.

The history of the marriage bar tells us how unquestioned all this was. From thelate nineteenth century, educated middle-class girls started to enter paidemployment in large numbers, as teachers, nurses or civil servants. They toostopped work on marriage. Indeed, few could have continued even if they wished.In most countries the public sector, their main employer, had a statutorymarriage bar for women teachers and civil servants that lasted until startlinglyrecently. You stayed single or you yielded your job in favor of a malebreadwinner.

In the US, economic historian Claudia Goldin estimates that the marriage bar, atits height, affected three-quarters of local school boards and more than 50percent of all office workers. It was largely abandoned in the 1940s, butpersisted into the 1950s in some places. A marriage bar for teachers and thecivil service lasted until 1945 in the UK; until 1957 for civil servantsin the Netherlands, the 1960s in Australia, 1973 in Ireland. I remember, in myintolerant teens, disapproving rather of an aunt who had quit teaching when shegot married; I had no idea that, a few years earlier, she would have had nochoice. She herself saw her behavior as totally normal. Staying home was whatmarried women did.

And she definitely wanted to be married. Women did. We can barely imagine theterror that spinsterhood inspired in a world built around marriage. Being an"old maid" and being left "on the shelf" condemned you to a life with little orno respect and few opportunities. And this was true for every type of woman,middle and working class, educated and uneducated alike.

Wars were catastrophic, not just for the young men killed and maimed, but alsofor the women who would have married and now never could. In America, the CivilWar resulted in by far the largest number of American casualties ever, inabsolute let alone relative terms: well over half a million men perished, and inthe Confederate States this encompassed almost one in fiveof all white males aged thirteen to forty-three.

In 1920s England, France and Germany, it was the slaughter of the First WorldWar that hit societies on a massive scale. Suddenly there were far more youngwomen in the population than young men. Millions of women, across much ofEurope, had lost boyfriends, fiancés and husbands. Those in their twenties atthe end of the war were hardest-hit: 35 percent of these women failed to marry.

What had happened was devastating; but the newspapers of the time also makeclear how much people's responses were shaped by a common assumption. Womenexisted in order to be wives. If there were no husbands, they were now surplusto requirements.

In her moving book about this generation, Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson quotessome comments from the British press:

"Problem of the Surplus Woman—Two Million Who Can Never Become Wives"(Daily Express headline, 1921)

"Britain's problem of two million superfluous women" (Lord Northcliffe,proprietor of the Daily Mail)

"Two millions of surplus woman-folk" (The Times, 1921)

One of that First World War generation, her fiancé dead, remembered sitting inthe train at the end of the day, "looking at the white, indifferent, tired facesopposite me [as] the wheels sang 'surplus two million, surplus two million,' andI was one of them."

This was not just a problem for the educated. Nor was it just a problem for thepoor. The "surplus" women came from all classes; because for all women in allclasses, life as a married woman, raising children in a home of one's own, wasseen as the best and natural existence. Women were indeed "sisters under theirskin."

Only in the final third of the twentieth century did this global pattern vanish.And with it the commonality of human females' lives.

At first sight, this isn't obvious. Women still want to get married; and largenumbers do, albeit fewer and fewer, as we will see below. A world of marriedwomen at home has been replaced by a world in which most married women work.Everywhere, they get out of the house, away from the sink, finding sociabilityas well as financial independence in adult employment.

But adult female employment today isn't a common shared experience in the waythat tending home and family used to be. On the contrary, it sorts andseparates. Women differ profoundly in how they work, when they work and why. Anda good place to start exploring the change is Scandinavia.

Degrees of separation

Is there a female Paradise on earth? You might think so—a Nordic one,perched up above the fifty-fifth parallel, on the shoresof the Baltic Sea.

Scandinavians are seen by the world, and see themselves, as flag-bearers forsexual equality. They are peaceful, egalitarian and economically successful; andthey pioneered social programs designed to guarantee opportunities for women. Aswell as free nurseries and preschool provision, they offer extremely generouspaid maternity and parental leave. They have declared war on the "glassceilings" that may be blocking women's progress: most recently when Norwayrequired all large public companies to make sure their boards were at least 30percent female.

The Scandinavians set out to do well by women. Yet today they provide theclearest illustration of how yawning gaps open between different groups ofcontemporary working women. And the two things are linked.

We tend to think about discrimination and equal opportunities in numericalterms: the number of women on company boards or in the cabinet, whether thereare female airline pilots, or carpenters, or marines. Given its strongcommitment to opening up opportunities for women, you might reasonably expectthat in Scandinavia if anywhere men and women would be working alongside eachother, equally represented at every level of every occupation.

People certainly do expect exactly that. At a 2012 book launch in New York, forexample, I sat listening to East Coast Americans assuring each other that sexualstereotyping had vanished from Scandinavia; men took just as much time off whenchildren were born as women did; and Swedish men were just as likely to be home,or on nursery duty, as Swedish women. So yes, you'd probably expect it. Andyou'd be wrong.

In fact, the highest levels of gender segregation anywhere in the developedworld are found in the labor markets of egalitarian welfare-state Scandinavia.The International Labour Organization, a diligent observer of labor marketinequalities, has calculated that if you wanted to make all occupations "genderneutral" about a third of all Scandinavian workers would have tomove to a completely different occupation.

So is this rank hypocrisy at work? Not in the least. Scandinavian labor marketsare like those of the whole developed West. They have professional occupationswhere women are succeeding alongside men. And then they have lower-paidoccupations that are overwhelmingly female or overwhelmingly male. That isexactly what happens everywhere in the developed world; but in Scandinavia thedivide between the two is even larger and sharper than for the rest of us. Tounderstand why is also to explain how the modern workplace detaches our femaleelites from both history and the rest of female-kind.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The XX Factor by Alison Wolf. Copyright © 2013 Alison Wolf. Excerpted by permission of Random House LLC, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Pub
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307590402
• ISBN 13: 9780307590404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 393