Touting Meager Gains

A few weeks ago Barbara Kellerman wrote a Harvard Business Review piece imploring us to “stop touting gains [for women] so long as those gains remain meager.” As if on cue, The Atlantic ran a cover story by Hanna Rosin last week titled “The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control of Everything,” which suggests that women have indeed arrived — we are now a greater percentage of the workforce, a larger percentage of college graduates, and 40% of primary breadwinners.  Can we retire the women’s movement?

The biggest problem with The Atlantic piece is that is confuses diminished opportunities for boys and men with increased opportunity for girls and women.  Just because boys are suffering in a education system that doesn’t always meet their needs, and men have lost jobs in industries like manufacturing and construction, doesn’t mean that women’s ships are on the rise.

I’m not sure where Hanna Rosin is getting her information; she writes that “men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer.”  The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells a different story.  Their top 15 fastest growing occupations include biomedical engineers, network systems and data communications analysts, financial examiners, medical scientists, biochemists and biophysicists and computer software engineers — all professions still dominated by men.

So I thought, maybe she’s looking at the table of industries with the largest employment growth.  But that table has construction at the top, and also includes male dominated industries like computer engineering, law, and management consulting — some of which may have significant numbers of women in entry-level positions, but very few in top jobs.  Janitor doesn’t show up on either list.  So where is she finding this info?

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stats and other studies I link to here, the trajectory for women looks a lot less rosy.  While women are earning more college degrees than men, their majors are not in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields that offer the greatest earning potential.  Women do dominate some BLS high-growth industries, like healthcare, caregiving, food services, dental hygeine and skincare; however, these are not high-income fields.  While they can be incredibly rewarding, they offer little opportunity for promotion or advancement.  We are looking at a generation of women who are employed, but disproportionately poor, under-insured and insecure.

And, as Rosin mentions, 40% of these women are primary breadwinners.  That sounds positive, but under these employment circumstances, it’s no asset.  What is really means is that 40% of women have primary responsibility for their children’s childcare, food, housing, education, and health.  Because they are in industries with less opportunity, and because of the motherhood penalty, they are much less likely to be able to meet all of these obligations in a robust way.

Rosin largely talks to and reports on young women — those who are in college or graduate programs and have their whole lives ahead of them.  What she doesn’t say is that by the time most of these women are middle-aged, they will have fallen significantly behind their male counterparts.   They will be subject to the persistent 23% wage gap.  Eighty percent will be mothers and likely to face discrimination, even if they work as hard or harder than their childless peers.  Even as men are facing their own challenges, these trends don’t seem to be diminishing.

Only when STEM careers are more appealing and changes in the corporate world make high-level careers more feasible for women will we be able to champion women’s gains.  In the meantime, articles like Rosin’s are doing more to hurt than help.  By looking superficially at statistics and citing pop culture examples (think “cougars” and “omega males” in the media), Rosin does an enormous disservice to the real women who are struggling to get by every day.  I’d take empty rhetoric from Sarah Palin over this kind of misguided reporting any day.

Related links:

• Ann Friedman has a terrific response to the Rosin piece at The American Prospect.
• Liz O’Donnell also has a great post on the article at Hello Ladies.
• Gwen at Sociological Images has an interesting post on whether more women getting college degrees is really the same thing as achieving equality on campus.
• I’ve taken issue with Hanna Rosin and The Atlantic before: check out this response to her piece “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” and this follow-up.