Gender role changes: 'big flip' or big flop?

The recent Alberta election, featuring two women party leaders, may have warmed the hearts of feminists across Canada, but has the struggle for women's equality really been won?

Two new books, both garnering a lot of attention, take differing points of view.

According to Liza Mundy, reporter for the Washington Post, women are on the brink of success. In the United States and a number of other countries (including Canada) women are already better educated than men, and that gap is growing. It is estimated that by 2050, there will be 140 college-educated women for 100 college-educated men in the United States. Presently, in 40 per cent of American couples, women are making higher salaries than their partners.

Mundy sees a future where these trends will continue. She predicts that many men will raise the children and become economically dependent on their high-earning partners, and that these men will have to find their fulfilment in places other the labour force.

She says that women will either marry "down" or not marry at all. She calls this reversal in traditional male-female roles "the big flip."

In some sectors, particularly in the African-American and Hispanic communities, where the education gap between men and women is greatest, the big flip has been happening for years. But minority communities are not alone. In 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salary for women in their 20s is eight per cent higher than for men of the same age. (In New York, the wage gap is 17 per cent in favour of young women.)

Mundy is optimistic that men and women will be able to navigate all the adjustments that these changes imply. She maintains that most of us will actually be better off because our roles in life will no longer be dictated by gender. Some men like raising the kids (she produces a few). Some men are turned on by alpha females (she produces a few more).

Yes, studies show that couples in which women earn more than men are more likely to divorce, but that can be a positive thing, too. With their new prosperity women will no longer have to stay in unhappy marriages. And the next time, she advises such women, find a man with higher self-esteem, and preferably a man with a different set of skills than your own (less competition).

Altogether, her book is timely and full of optimistic predictions and anecdotes that some may find helpful, though they occasionally become repetitious. What she neglects is any significant exploration of the downside of what's happening.

What about all the young men who are dropping out of school and not getting their acts together until they are in their 30s, or not at all? What about the 40 per cent of American children who live in female-headed households (which are still, by the way, poorer than male-headed households). Will these groups rise on the tide of higher female earnings? Or will new and greater gaps in earnings develop between women and men, or between women who have great jobs and other women who earn the minimum wage or nothing at all?

And while the high earnings of the 20-something women are encouraging, most women still earn considerably less than men, despite their higher levels of education. The wage gap is currently 18 per cent in the U.S.

When it comes to equality, French historian Elisabeth Badinter is a pessimist, a prophet of doom. Yes, she agrees with Mundy that women must adhere to the labour force, and husbands should do their bit to share in the raising of the children, though she doubts French husbands ever will. Government policy, such as providing affordable day care can help, too.

But nothing will make much difference if mothers choose to adopt on-demand breast-feeding for the first three to seven years of a child's life. That is the recommendation of La Leche League, a powerful and conservative force for what Badinter labels "naturalist motherhood."

She also takes a crack at the environmentalist movement for boycotting paper diapers, and at proponents of having infants sleep in the conjugal bed, but prolonged breast-feeding is her chief target here.

She is certainly no fan of the kind of "attachment parenting" championed by the likes of U.S. medic Bill Sears, whose ideas were promoted on that controversial cover of Time magazine.

She maintains that some of the studies on the advantages of breastfeeding are questionable. She claims that the naturalist movement is stalling women's progress in the labour force, though she provides no evidence that that is actually happening.

She also sees "naturalist motherhood" as a cause in the decline in fertility in Europe and elsewhere. Young women, she says, are postponing having children, or deciding to have none at all, because the high expectations of natural motherhood make it more and more burdensome.

She sees France as an exception to all this because French women have never put motherhood at the centre of their lives-- implying that, not only have they had a different history, they also have better sense.

Though many of its arguments don't stand up to scrutiny, The Conflict is a provocative book written by a courageous woman.

 

Winnipeg writer Faith Johnston, like Elisabeth Badniter and Liza Mundy, still believes women can have it all.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 19, 2012 J10