Are females the ‘richer sex’? If so, it’s just by default
There
was a slightly hysterical edge to recent coverage of a new book announcing that women are about to replace men as the higher-achieving, higherearning sex while men continue to spiral downward in an inexorable decline. Though, in fairness, some of the edge seemed to be generated by the author herself.
On the airwaves talking about her book The Richer Sex, author Liza Mundy warned that society is not ready for “the Big Flip” in male-female roles that lies “just around the corner.” She cautioned that in a single generation there had already been a “seismic economic, social and emotional change,” one that would ultimately transform male-female relationships. A revolution, in short.
Mundy, a Washington Post reporter, lays a solid foundation for her thesis when she describes the extraordinary advances made by American women since the 1960s. They now earn the majority of university degrees, including at advanced levels, as do Canadian women. In both countries, women have made such substantial inroads into formerly male-dominated fields as medicine and law that they are expected to form the majority of doctors and lawyers in the foreseeable future.
As a result, in part, of this change, nearly four in 10 married women who work outside the home in the U.S. are the top earners in their family. Married women bring in nearly half of all family income, on average, all income brackets taken into account. The same is roughly true in Canada, where 26 per cent of Canadian women said in a poll this month that they were the sole or primary wageearner. Another 60 per cent said their income was needed to keep their family afloat.
But if there has been a revolution – and the dismantling of the barriers that kept women uneducated, propertyless and poorly paid is certainly a societal transformation – it isn’t only about women choosing to get ahead.
The economy has played a key role in reconfiguring the North American household. In the U.S., Mundy points out, the economy is in the process of being hollowed out, with once-high-paying industrial jobs vanishing offshore. The men who were once able to support a family with nothing more than a high-school diploma are getting left in the dust of globalization and technological change.
This means women have had to step up and become the chief wage-earners, even if they’re still only earning 81 cents to the male dollar, and with, Mundy says, the glass ceiling “firmly in place.” In this scenario, we are a long way from the vision of an Armani-clad female lawyer that the phrase “the richer sex” conjures up. Especially considering that the financially independent women who make up the richer sex include those who are raising children alone. If they’re richer, it’s more by default than anything else.
What we are really looking at is how families in North America are scrambling to cope with the impact of a fastchanging world economy. Women are better placed because they were already working harder to get ahead in the job market. They knew they had to get a good education and delay marriage and parenthood until their careers were in hand.
Men, used to the male prerogative kicking in regardless of what education or training they got, should also be trying to adjust to new realities. But some of them aren’t. They’re the ones, according to a 2012 paper by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, who are getting left behind both in the job market and the marriage stakes: At the bottom 25th percentile of earnings, where wages have fallen 60 per cent since 1970, only half the men are married. Forty years ago, 86 per cent of them were.
If you’re the one getting left behind, it must feel like a brutal world. People would rather tie their fate to someone with good earning potential, and that includes men. For decades, women were warned not to appear too smart or accomplished for fear of damaging their marriage prospects. But it turns out men are not put off by educated women who work. Mundy cites a 2001 study by University of Texas at Austin psychologist David Buss. He found that over the last 50 years, men had switched from valuing domestic skills in a potential mate to looking for partners willing to “pull their own weight economically in marriage.”
Casting these broad societal changes in terms of women becoming wealthier than men seems unhelpful, especially to women. It was wrong of society to deny women education or the right to own property or to seek self-fulfillment. Let’s not declare them the victors in a contest they haven’t won and aren’t competing in.