Financial Times; Sep 26, 2003
The feminist business agenda By Christopher Caldwell
Some time in the past decade, we passed a tipping-point at which full economic equality for women, at least in the west, became inevitable. In its economic dimension, the feminist agenda has been wholly achieved. If we are blind to this, it is because the culture lags a few years behind the economy. Women now at the peak of their careers - those born right after the second world war - entered the workforce with pre-feminist expectations and qualifications. It is not to be expected that business mores will change on their account. But this pre-feminist culture is a vestige of the old economic order, not a stable feature of the new one.
Among the young, we already see a different picture. Primary and secondary schools are now female domains. The evidence is starkest in the US, which not only has the most advanced economy but is also the culture in which feminism is most securely entrenched. There, boys trail behind girls not just in language skills - where they traditionally underperform, at least until the teen years - but also in quantitative reasoning (a new development). Boys constitute what some call an "academic underclass" and consume 80 per cent of Ritalin, the anti-hyperactivity drug. This maladjustment is the norm elsewhere. Three years ago, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development panel assessed 265,000 school leavers in countries around the world and found girls had better reading skills in all of them.
So anaemic is male school performance that a Business Week cover story on "the New Gender Gap" alleged that certain Ivy League universities kept a rough gender balance only by practising "stealth affirmative action for boys". Even that does not work. Today, at American universities, 57 per cent of bachelors' degrees and 58 per cent of masters' degrees go to women, as do half of law degrees and a rapidly rising 44 per cent of medical degrees.
Certain cynics doubt that such achievements put women in a commanding position. They point to an after-graduation "income gap" that favours men over women, and posit that something happens to women after graduation - probably discrimination - that keeps women from gaining a better foothold in the workplace. But economists are less and less convinced that any significant gap exists. It is true western women earn about 80p for every pound a man does. But once one controls for age distribution and career disruptions, the two sexes approach parity. To the extent that exclusion of women rests on irrational discrimination, it costs companies money. Increased competition as a result of globalisation tends to reduce it. As early as 1993, the non-profit Russell Sage Foundation found that childless women aged 30 were earning 95 per cent of similarly situated men.
With that word "childless", we get to the rub. Women fault the modern workplace primarily for its failure to accommodate mothers. Those who have risen to high levels in business or the professions have often had to choose between motherhood and a career. A survey last year for the National Parenting Association, a US lobby group, found that 42 per cent of female corporate executives aged 41-55 were childless, as were 49 per cent of those earning more than $100,000 a year. These women are adults, of course, and have made their own choices. But they have made them in the context of narrow options and the corporate world has hardly met them halfway. Meanwhile, a certain strain of conservative political rhetoric has turned women's desire to "have it all" into a laughing-stock, as if there were something hysterical and denatured about the wish for both family and fulfilment in one's work.
Female executives have a well thought-out programme that would allow a more humane interplay between workplace and family: flexible hours, "alumni plans" (which grant women the use of office facilities while on leave) and eased vesting requirements for pension plans. They also urge an expansion of government programmes: in the US, an extension of the Family and Medical Leave Act; in the European Union granting maternity leave in the vein of Scandinavia's policy, allowing new mothers to take several years off work, rather than, say, Greece's policy of allowing only a few months.
Pessimists say the unwillingness of governments and companies to act proves that equality for women will always be stymied by a callous Old Boys' Club. But it proves nothing of the sort. The current generation of working women is a transitional one. At present, generous benefits focused on female top earners would merely leave society - including its non-executive, non-affluent women - with the bill for cosseting an executive women's subculture. People like to orate about the "huge costs" to business of losing talented women. But such costs are minimal now. As long as the majority of executives are men, granting such benefits would be an act of charity, an unrealistic and costly flouting of market logic.
Soon, however, the shoe will be on the other foot. In a decade or so in the US, a bit later in Europe, generous family benefits will be market logic. Half the 35-year-old lawyers will soon be women. How will any corporation maintain a stream of legal talent if it does not accommodate the wish of some to become mothers? How will any company that relies on an educated staff stay afloat without such a benefit package, when almost two-thirds of college-leavers are women?
Certain feminists fear a cultural shift: women may throw away their advances, abandoning the workplace to have children. That will not happen because it cannot. The commitment of women to the workplace will increase, as will the commitment of society to keep them there, because the marketable skills they have gained are a huge sunk cost. In the US, where aspiring doctors frequently achieve their degrees at the price of $100,000 in beginning-of-career debt, stopping work is not even an option. When women hold the majority of executive positions - as their educational attainments make it inevitable they soon will - society at large will satisfy their needs in its own self-interest. In 2020, women will not have to shout their demands. Any company that wishes to stay afloat will anticipate them.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard