Chief
Business Correspondent, U.S. News and author of Rebounders: How Winners
Pivot From Setback to Success
The Phony 'Gender Wars'
Posted:
04/19/2012 11:52 am
As
if men and women don't already have enough to bicker about, the media is now
gleefully stoking a made-up battle over who matters more: men or women?
In
her new book The Richer Sex, for example, journalist Liza Mundy musters
reams of data to show that women are becoming a more powerful economic force
than men. Inside the covers, she points out that this trend could benefit men
as well as women. Yet the provocative title suggests a winner-take-all
competition between the two genders, an oversimplified meme that has set off plenty of hyperventilating in
the media.
Marriage
isn't cool any more, as sociologist Eric Klinenberg points out in his recent
book, Going Solo. More
women are forging careers and having children without a male partner, as if a
dab of sperm is all they really need from men. Later this year, we'll get to
debate anew whether we've really reached "the end of men," as Hanna
Rosin will argue in a forthcoming book derived from a controversial 2010 story in The Atlantic.
And of course Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will keep us on high gender alert
with their ongoing battle over
who's more hostile to women.
I'm
not going to summon more mind-numbing data to refute the idea of a gender war,
because on debates like this there's usually "expert" evidence
supporting both sides, which leads precisely nowhere. Practically everybody
ends up believing what they started out believing, because they find a factoid
or a pundit to validate their view.
Instead
of that, how about simply applying some common sense to the whole question. Are
gender wars really a common family problem? Do families break apart and
relationships falter because men are irrelevant and fail to recognize their own
obsolescence? Do men and women really tussle over who is the dominant economic
power?
Many
of us can point to a personal anecdote or two about dropout Dads, breadwinner
Moms or gender-bent household arrangements. But on the whole, what I seen
happening among men and women -- Moms and Dads -- is a pragmatic and sensible
effort to optimize opportunity, pool resources and achieve outcomes that are
best for everybody. If there's a war, it's rather civil.
Women,
for example, now earn the majority of bachelor's
and advanced degrees. Plus, they tend to work in growing fields such
as healthcare, whereas men are overrepresented in stagnant or shrinking fields
like construction, manufacturing and middle management. That's why women are a
growing economic force, as they have been for 20 years. But this is hardly a
socially destructive trend. Instead, it gives many families an additional
source of income and more options for getting ahead.
What
happens in most families is a kind of negotiation among partners and spouses,
who recognize the changing prospects of men and women in real time and make
rational adjustments. If a woman can earn more than her husband, she's likely
to work more than he does, while the man stays home and handles more of the
household chores. It doesn't always work smoothly, but it does give a family
more choices than they'd have in a rigid setup where only the man worked. In a
business, that would be considered efficient allocation of resources. In a
family, it's a gender revolution. Single women these days seem to represent an
even more emphatic rejection of the traditional role they once played. In the
new TV series Girls,
twentysomething women have depersonalized sex just like men, shucking the guilt
of their forbears to the foot of the bed. These, presumably, are same women who
will raise kids without even expecting a man to be involved, and perhaps make
it all the way to old age without ever having to rely on a man.
You
go girl! Just keep in mind that in real life, it can be kind of nice to have a
man around every now and then. Anybody who knows a single Mom, especially one
who works, knows that the power and the glory of depending on nobody evaporates
as soon as a kid gets sick, there's a call from the authorities or it suddenly
seems impossible to keep up with everything that goes wrong with kids. The same
goes for single Dads, who don't generate as many book titles but still
represent a meaningful sliver of our fragmenting society. Everybody needs help
and companionship. Sometimes, a lot.
The
bottom line is that people need people. There are fewer social rules than there
were a generation or two ago, which has given men and women both more freedom
to find flexible arrangements that work for them. What's really going on is a
lot of trial and error, as men and women experiment with new roles. Unlike a
war, however, this sometimes-messy experiment is heading toward a new equilibrium
that may just make everybody better off. But don't tell the pundits. It will
ruin their storyline.
