by Hanna Rosin
What does “gender role reversal” look like for the next generation? After the morning rush of classes I had lunch with a group of women to talk about their lives. Most grew up in traditional working-class families around Wisconsin, yet their conceptions of their future home life were, as the dean of student affairs had described them, shockingly fluid. They did not assume that they would quit working once they had children, or even work part-time. They did not even assume that they would be the main caretaker at all. Being the traditional “mother” was a gender neutral role that anyone could fulfill. “You can either stay home or give that role to your spouse, whoever wants it,” said Laura Burt, one of the younger students I spoke with.
Their expected salaries still made them giddy, except when their greater earning power seemed like a burden. One girl showed me an IM she’d just sent to her friend, who’d inquired about her dating life. “They’re either intimidated by you (and your salary),” she wrote, “or they can’t afford you.” Five of the women had long-term boyfriends or husbands, who worked, respectively, as a cop, logger, head of a construction crew, electrician, and caterer. Katie Scarpace, a pretty, freckled girl whose boyfriend was the police officer, told me, “He jokes that he’ll retire when he’s thirty and I start working. He calls me his sugar mama.”
Sarah VandenHeuvel is a charismatic character with long dark hair and pointy-toe heels under her lab coat. She had just gotten married the summer before and described her husband, Andrew, to me as “not what anyone would picture as an alpha male.” Later in the day, Andrew stopped by to pick her up. He had the air of a Judd Apatow sidekick, tall and lanky with shaggy hair, only he didn’t seem to resent the overbearing wife. He liked living in a small town, but when Sarah announced she was moving to Madison, he’d said, “I’ll go with you.” Now he works as an IT guy at the help desk of a large company, a job he describes as “grunt work” but likes. His philosophy of work? “Get a good job, go to work, do the best you can, and don’t overdo it.” I asked how he saw his career unfolding, and he said, “Me? I mean, I would still like to work in the future, I think. But with IT I hope I can do freelance work and work at home. It depends what kind of job I get. I think if my job pulls in only the same amount of money we’d have to use to pay for day care, then it wouldn’t be worth it. My mom was always there, and that would be nice, to have a parent at home . . . . My friends joke, ‘Oh, you’ll have to stay home and take care of the kids while Sarah makes all the money,’ and I’m like, ‘Uh. Yeah. That’s the plan.’”
In the first semester of pharmacy school, one of Sarah’s professors read her workplace statistics showing that, historically, women pharmacists are more likely to work part-time and, on the whole, work fewer hours than men. “I felt so irritated,” she says. “Here I saw women excelling and taking all the leadership roles, and they were talking about it in that same old way, as if women would come in, have babies, and then ruin the profession.” In fact, full-time women pharmacists do work, on average, 2.4 hours fewer than men, and more women work part-time.
But Sarah is absolutely right. The old scolding approach to women working fewer hours a week does not make sense anymore. The numbers her professor cited are merely evidence of a profession agile enough to bend to the needs of its best-trained professionals, and prepared for a future where both men and women might be interested in more flexible work at different points in their careers.
WHAT WILL IT TAKE to succeed in the economy of the future? Education will remain essential; the premium a college degree will set on income is likely to remain at an all-time high. Technology will continue to affect jobs—and increasingly high-skills jobs—in unpredictable ways. (Law firms, for example, now use computers to scan documents for discovery, replacing a key source of low-level legal work.) But the sure bets for the future are still jobs that cannot be done by a computer or someone overseas. They are the jobs that require human contact, interpersonal skills, and creativity, and these are all areas where women excel.
Flexibility will increasingly become a magnet for talent. Consider the medical profession, which women are starting to dominate. Goldin has done a close breakdown of medical professions to see why women choose certain ones. It turns out the choice of pediatrics over brain surgery, for example, has less to do with love of children or disgust at slicing open brains than control over time. Gastroenterology is a perfect example. For years this specialty had among the lowest percentage of women. Just 5 percent of gastroenterologists ages fifty-five to sixty-four are women, but among the younger doctors—under thirty-five—it’s 30 percent. What happened? Have women developed a sudden love of rectal exams? The answer is controlled, regular hours. The expanded use of routine and scheduled colonoscopies has made it easier for women choosing the field to know they will be able to live manageable lives.
Veterinarians are another example. The profession has lately been effectively taken over by women. Is this because women love animals more than men do? Not really. A vet used to live a life much like that of a corner pharmacist—an entrepreneur with unpredictable hours and night duties. Now, regional vet hospitals have taken over those duties, making ordinary vet work more like salaried office work. Women succeed in jobs where they pay a low “career cost,” as Goldin calls it, meaning a penalty for taking time off or otherwise deviating from the standard career path. But this doesn’t mean women are compromising their careers. Women are taking advantage of new technologies and innovative workplace restructuring. Their rise is associated, in other words, with the forward-looking workplace of the future.
What were once considered exclusively women’s concerns are now becoming the habits of the rising workforce. Surveys of Generation Y reveal them to have almost exactly the same workplace expectations and desires as a forty-year-old working mother: They want flexibility, the option to work remotely, to dip in and out of full-time, and to find their work meaningful, according to a 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review. “Why would I want to spend twelve hours a day at an office?” asked one young business major, who was male. “I want a life.” And companies eager to attract and retain talented workers and managers are responding. The consulting firm Deloitte, for instance, started what’s now considered the model program, called Mass Career Customization, which allows employees to adjust their hours depending on their life stage. The program, Deloitte explains, solves “a complex issue—one that can no longer be classified as a women’s issue.” Women have written the blueprint for the workplace of the future. The only question left is, will the men really adapt?
AT AROUND EIGHT THIRTY in the evening—twelve hours after he left—Billy gets home from a day of fishing. Hannah and I have been sitting on the couch, talking about her upcoming year of residency and whether she wants to work at an independently owned pharmacy or a chain, when he walks out of the kitchen and shows us his prize catch, a thirty-one-inch northern pike. “Are you dripping?” Hannah asks. “He dripped.”
Billy is tired and does not feel like cutting up the fish right now, but Hannah says he has to because it would be “wasteful” not to, and anyway if he leaves it in his truck bed overnight it might stink. Downstairs in the basement, on one of the tables by the sink, Billy gets to work. He has a bucket for the bones and blood and two knives, one to cut through bones and the other for flesh. He’s not quite sure how to go at it, though, because he’s never caught a northern pike before. “Don’t you have a book for that?” Hannah asks, but he ignores her and keeps hacking.
Hannah wants to get away from the whole operation (“It stinks”), but I am curious, since I don’t get to see a fish-gutting every day. We watch as he slices open the body cavity to reveal various parts that she guesses could be liver or spleen. “I should get my bio textbook,” Hannah offers, and recalls that in school, they used to dissect fish to learn about the central nervous system. She winces when Billy mispronounces “vertebrae” as “vertebrate.” “I should go get my biology textbook to see what all this stuff is,” she offers
again. The fish guts are dominated by tiny yellowish eggs. “They look like grits,” he says. “They look like quinoa,” she says at the exact same moment.
Earlier that day, Hannah’s mother, Dian, had volunteered to me what she called her “defining moment,” or the moment she cracked in her marriage. She had been working at the Caddy Shack chopping up vegetables for coleslaw and potato salad. Her husband at the time—Hannah’s father—came into the bar. He was going up north on a hunting and fishing trip and he needed some paper plates. Dian asked him if he could get her a bucket of ice from the ice chest, and he answered, “I didn’t come here to do your work. I came here to do mine.” This was when she was working twelve-hour days, barely seeing her daughter. This was after he had failed to keep up steady work and had used up Hannah’s college fund for his truck-pulling hobby. “Something in me snapped,” Dian recalled. She had a knife in her hand—chop chop chop—and her thoughts spat out in that staccato rhythm: “Work like a man. Think like a man. Act like a man.”
The next week she walked out on her husband and on Hannah, who was a young teenager at the time. She had an affair. She made the bar a great success, and over the years, Hannah forgave her, even admired her. She became “much more than just a bar owner,” Hannah says. She funds a few of the local sports teams. She runs the town’s annual Fourth of July parade. She’s like the unofficial town mayor, and part of its mythology. A gold shoe hangs in the bar from the time a strange and regal woman, blind drunk and curiously dressed up, walked out of a white limousine into the bar. White limousines were as rare around here as palm trees, and a white limousine housing a woman in a long dress seemed like a mirage. They called the woman Cinderella because she was too far gone to give her name. Dian sat with her at the bar and gave her some concoction she had brewed in the back. She stayed with Cinderella until she was coherent. As a thank-you, the woman left her golden shoe, now a reminder of the time Dian played the role of someone like Monsieur Homais, the town leader and mythical healer.
When Billy comes up from the basement, he puts on Comedy Central to see if Tosh is on. He is, but it’s an episode they’ve already seen. Hannah agrees that it’s kind of funny. He switches channels, and lands on Jackass 3D. Hannah rolls her eyes because, she says, those jackasses do the same exact thing, year after year. “What’s wrong with that?” says Billy.
DEGREES OF DIFFERENCE
THE EDUCATION GAP
In 2009, Gail Heriot, a professor from the University of California, San Diego, came across a chart about college admissions labeled “Girls Need Not Apply.” The chart, which had originally appeared in U.S. News & World Report, revealed not the old familiar forms of discrimination—women excluded from Ivy League eating clubs or secret societies—but a new variety women had not really encountered before. The chart revealed how much more readily several well-known private colleges all over the country, including Vassar and the University of Richmond, accepted men than women. From the chart it looked as if a vastly greater percentage of female than male applicants was being turned away from these schools, meaning that it was much harder for the average woman to get in than it was for the average man. The implication was that bright female applicants might be turned away in favor of less qualified men. In other words, if Heriot was reading the chart correctly, American private colleges had quietly begun to practice affirmative action . . . for men.
The quotes that follow in the accompanying story seemed to confirm Heriot’s suspicion. Men should be given some extra allowance because they “have perspectives to offer that a woman doesn’t have,” one student suggested. A college counselor advised that they should “emphasize their maleness.” If they happened to have a gender-ambiguous name like Alex or Madison, they should not hesitate to send in a picture or brag about sports in order to “catch an admission officer’s eye.”
Different perspectives to offer. A distinct admissions advantage. Send in a picture. These are the kinds of euphemisms admissions officers have historically offered up to minorities and women. How could it be that affirmative action, an institution set up to break white men’s exclusive hold on power, was now the crutch they needed to get by? And at the University of Richmond, no less? And how had it come to pass that women now found themselves in the same spot as the angry white males of the 1990s, frustrated at getting shut out despite their qualifications?
At the time she saw the article, Heriot was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the apparent gender gap in admissions seemed to her like an appropriate phenomenon for the group to look into. There might be some perfectly innocuous explanation for the discrepancies. Maybe some colleges were getting unusually large numbers of female applicants, or unusually strong male applicants. For years, however, researchers had suspected that private colleges were giving men special treatment. After all, state schools, which by law are not allowed to consider gender in making admissions decisions, were now edging toward 60 percent female. How could it be that so many private colleges kept their classes even?
No one could know for sure what was going on, because private colleges kept their admissions policies a secret. But a systematic analysis that gathered information about SAT scores and GPAs and other relevant credentials, and then compared those to admission rates, would help get to the truth. Heriot wrote up a proposal for the commission’s approval, suggesting it might be an “open secret” among private colleges that they let in men over more highly qualified women, and her proposal was accepted.
For private universities, sex discrimination in admissions is perfectly legal; unlike public universities they are not bound by Title IX. But Heriot thought this issue was serious enough that it might be covered by a more general statute against discrimination. And because she seems inclined against affirmative action anyway, she wanted to force the education establishment into a confession so that they could begin to figure out why men weren’t succeeding, rather than to continue just shuffling them among institutions.
The commissioners picked nineteen colleges randomly with the aim of covering the basic categories—big, small, religiously affiliated, selective, less selective, and historically African-American. They restricted themselves to the mid-Atlantic states, where they figured they had more clearly defined subpoena power. Over the course of a year, the commissioners collected data from most of the schools, although all were reluctant to provide it, Heriot told me. The most elite schools in the bunch, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University, agreed to participate only on condition that they crunch the data on their own, using the group’s research protocols.
During that year, I checked in on the commissioners’ work periodically. If they were to discover a pattern, I figured it would represent a pretty bracing conceptual shift: Here, in the institution considered the single most important engine of class mobility over the course of the century, men were being treated as the official underdogs. And in the nation’s esteemed private universities, which had until recently been the training grounds for the future male elite.
Around April 2011 I checked for the latest update only to discover that news about the commission’s work had petered out. I tracked down Heriot to find out what had happened, and I happened to get her at a moment when she was annoyed enough to talk. “It is suspicious, isn’t it,” was the first thing she said. Apparently, a month earlier, without warning, the commissioners had voted to shut down the investigation. The public reason they gave was “inadequate” data—a very thin reason, Heriot pointed out, because the mound of raw data they had just begun to analyze would have been vastly more revealing than anything else that existed. And already Heriot had seen enough of the data to suspect that “there was evidence of purposeful discrimination, meaning that when admissions officers are making decisions they are taking into account who is male and who is female.”
Politics appeared to be behind the abrupt shutdown of the investigation, although not in the way you might reflexively imagine. Between the investigation’s start and abr
upt end, two of the commissioners who had been appointed during the Bush administration were replaced by two Obama appointees, tipping the group Democratic. Wouldn’t progressive Democrats interested in civil rights jump at the chance to prove that a bunch of entitled private institutions were practicing wholesale discrimination against hardworking young women? But acknowledging the larger dynamic that would give rise to such discrimination was a whole other kind of threat. It meant letting go of our attachment to the idea that in certain elite sectors of society, young women were still struggling. It meant admitting that in these realms it was in fact men who needed the help.
This reversal of the power dynamic on American college campuses was staring everyone in the face, but it was too unsettling to the commissioners on the left and probably to those on the right as well. (What Republican would want to acknowledge such vulnerability in men?) But the commissioners were only doing what the rest of the nation has done when faced with these college gender statistics, which is to pretend that they are not meaningful or extraordinary. In fact, women’s dominance on college campuses is possibly the strangest and most profound change of the century, even more so because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.