June 04, 2013
From: Time (online)
The announcement
last week that women are now the primary breadwinners in 40% of
American households unleashed the usual reflexive responses. Attempting
what looked like self-parody, Fox News featured an all-male quartet
of pundits sputtering about the decline of women’s “natural” role. Some
saw welcome progress for women, while others viewed the 40% figure as
more evidence that the “End of Men” is nigh. Either way, it’s hardly
cause for celebration that two-thirds of the female (mainly poor)
primary earners are really the family’s only earner because they lack a partner or spouse to share the burden.
But amid all the tumult, few paused to consider why the 40% figure isn’t even higher.
Yes, women have made major gains in the workforce compared with their
participation in the labor market in the late 1960s, but much of that
growth took place in the 1970s and ’80s and has stalled in more recent
decades. In 1990, 74% of American women were in the workforce. Twenty years later, that number has increased by only a percentage point, to 75%. Other countries, meanwhile, have surged ahead of us.
According to a paper
published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, in rankings of
the percentage of women in the workforce, the U.S. actually fell from
sixth place to No. 17 out of 22 developed countries. The authors,
Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, estimate that almost a third of the
slowdown in women’s workforce participation can be explained by our
comparatively inadequate infrastructure for working parents. Meanwhile,
other developed countries, such as Portugal, Finland
and Luxembourg, started out at a lower baseline (an average of 67%) and
have seen their rates grow to 80% or higher. Something seems amiss when
even Switzerland, a country that didn’t grant women the vote until
1971, leaves the U.S. in the gender dustbin.
And yet it’s not so simple. First, it’s not just women who have stalled in the American job market. Men’s workforce participation
is also lagging, as a result of the economic downturn, an aging
population and a decades-long decline in traditionally male
manufacturing jobs.
Second, it turns out all those progressive countries with better
profamily policies don’t necessarily help women’s professional
advancement overall. As reported in an article in the Atlantic,
American women are twice as likely to work full time as European women
and also more likely to be senior managers or skilled professionals.
It’s possible that employers hesitate to promote women who step on and
off the career ladder. Or perhaps the family-friendly work options in
European countries make the prospect of “leaning in” paradoxically
unappealing.
Given a black-and-white choice between work and no work, the majority
of women clearly choose the former. But given the option of a more
viable work-life balance, with longer maternity leave, for example, or a
job that’s been refitted to part-time hours, there’s no reason to
believe some American women wouldn’t choose, like their European peers,
to grab that brass ring pretty fast. It’s clear we urgently need to
patch the holes in our frayed tapestry of family care. Yet even when we
do, economic projections and the experience of other developed countries
suggest that we’ll always have a percentage of women for whom the
work-life balance is weighted more heavily toward family than the corner
office.
It shouldn’t be such a surprise that women, like men, derive
different degrees of satisfaction and financial security from their
jobs. And yet we are all too quick to overinterpret every piece of news
about working women, declaring it a sign of success or failure. There
are more nuanced, real-life stories than the caricatures we hear, the
Sheryl Sandbergs and the Ann Romneys, who occupy opposite ends of the
work-home continuum. If we really want to understand the female labor
market in all its complexity, we need to hear more of them.
