That would be
Hanna Rosin's response at
Salon to Stephanie Coontz's
op-ed in the New York Times. Rosin argues that Coontz is wrong in her criticisms.
But Rosin herself is wrong in quite a few places in her response.
For instance here:
I hesitate to get drawn into data wars (if you have an appetite for them you should visit the blog of University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen). I’ve learned over the course of my research that data can support many different stories. For example, one figure in my book, and in Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex, that’s been much fought over is how many wives earn more money than their husbands.
We all agree that the number of female breadwinners leapt from only 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 30 percent in 2010. Coontz, however, discounts this gain by arguing that when we look at all married couples, not just dual-earner couples, the numbers look much weaker because some wives don’t work at all. This is a fair point. But if we are going to add on extra data samples, then I offer another, more relevant one: the growing number of single mothers. Trends in the United States do not point toward an explosion of full-time stay-at-home mothers but of single mothers who are, by default, for better or worse, often the main breadwinners of their families. We recently passed the threshold, for example, at which more than half of all births to mothers under 30 were to single mothers. I’m not sure this counts as feminist progress, but it does count as a profound shift in the traditional power dynamics of the American family.
In my book I call it “ambiguous independence.” The women are struggling financially but also learning by necessity to support themselves and their children. And because they are less economically dependent on men, these women are also less likely to stay in abusive relationships, as Coontz herself mentions.
Mostly the same data CANNOT support many different stories. When people argues that it does, most of those stories are fables and not based on the data. Now, different sets of data may well result in different conclusions. One's task, then, is not to engage in data relativism but to figure out which data set is the best, which study the most careful and which conclusions therefore the most reliable.
In that quote Rosin begins with the question: How many wives earn more than their husbands? But she then argues that data on women without husbands is relevant for this argument. It's not. It may well be relevant for arguments about women's independence, but it's completely and totally irrelevant as an answer to the original question.
That's not picky, by the way. If we move the ground under the questions we never get anywhere.
For
another example of exactly that:
Coontz takes on another data set that I discuss in my book: that young, childless women in their 20s have a higher median income than the equivalent men in the vast majority of metropolitan areas. These findings by market researcher James Chung were first reported in a Time magazine story in 2010. Coontz cites a new analysis of similar data showing that this particular demographic includes a disproportionate number of low-earning Latino men, which explains why women in this age group earn more.
For one thing, it’s hard to say if this new data set she points to is a statistical anomaly. Unlike Chung’s, the new numbers only cover a single year. But even if her data is accurate, and young Latino men are weighting the data, should we not care about that? It seems like just a fine-tuning of my thesis, that certain men are struggling in this economy. And even by Coontz’s reading, these young, childless Latino women are out-earning the Latino men, and these young white women and men earn the same—which alone is a remarkable shift. The explanation for that is simple: At that age, many more women have college degrees, and there are generally better jobs available for college graduates.
Coontz mentions a new analysis that will be unveiled later this month proving a wage gap in various professions for that same young, childless set. But how is that new? We know there is a wage gap. We know that Suzy likely earns less money than Bill who sits in the cubicle next to her, for many complicated reasons that I discuss in the book. The new development is this: For many jobs there are a lot more young Suzies in those cubicles these days than young Bills. That’s why these young women as a group have a higher median income.
The ground is shifting! Try to keep your balance!
What's happening here is a skip from one argument: young single women earn more than young single men in large metropolitan areas, to a completely different one: young single women in metropolitan areas are more likely to hold jobs which require education than young single men.
The latter argument could well be true. But, and this is a huge, giant BUT: The users of the original Chung study have adopted it as a signpost that we are approaching the era of the Reverse Gender Gap, the monstrous regimen of the petticoats and so on. The study was rarely used to talk about education, probably because Chung did not control for education.
This means that his comparisons were flawed from the beginning. They did not compare men's and women's wages for that age group AND for a given level of education. They omitted the education variable altogether. The consequence was that Chung compared single oranges to single apples. Of course the married apples and oranges never showed any kind of female earnings advantage but the reverse.
Do I sound a bit obsessed about that particular study and its uses? I am, because not controlling for education in income comparisons makes the conclusions of the study useless. Rosin tries to salvage her message by moving from the likely finding that female workers on every education level earn, on average, less than otherwise identical but male workers to the also-likely finding that metropolitan areas tend to have a higher percentage of educated young single women than educated young single men.
Note, also, that a proper treatment of the gender gap in wages compares the "net gap" which is arrived at after controlling for all those other variables (education, work experience, hours worked per week, general occupation, geographical area, marital status, number of minor children etc) that also affect earnings. The Chung study fails to control for education, and thus tells us nothing about the actual
gender differences in the earnings of young metropolitan singles.
What's left of Rosin's argument? That women are more likely to get educated than men. But Coontz points out that women have
good reasons to be more motivated that way:
Even women’s greater educational achievement stems partly from
continuing gender inequities. Women get a smaller payoff than men for
earning a high school degree, but a bigger payoff for completing
college. This is not because of their higher grade point averages, the
economist Christopher Dougherty concludes, but because women seem to
need more education simply to counteract the impact of traditional job
discrimination and traditional female career choices.
Just think about the kinds of jobs available for a high-school graduate with no further qualifications. The traditionally male jobs of that type pay considerably better than the traditionally female jobs.
That's no excuse against tackling the problem of getting boys more focused on education, of course. But neither does it presage a world where all the power lies in female hands. Probably not even half of all power, even in the United States, given that women are still found over-represented in those academic fields which pay less well.
Or as Rosin
puts it:
Coontz makes the broader point that women—and even college-educated
women—are continuing to segregate themselves into less prestigious,
lower-paid professions. She points out that women are even more
concentrated now than they were before in the fields of legal
secretaries or “managers of medicine and health occupations.” We can
call this by its old disparaging name: “gender segregation.” But we can
also see it through a new paradigm—as Coontz so successfully encouraged
us to do when looking at marriage—as women making intelligent decisions
about what jobs are available in this economy. (You can see this
decision-making at work in community colleges, the training camps for
the current workforce, where the gap between men and women is the
greatest.)
As I write in the book, of the top 15 jobs projected to grow in the
next several years, 12 of the categories are dominated by women. Maybe
women are choosing health occupations because the health care field is
booming, not because they are blindly walking into a female ghetto.
Gender segregation*, whether by choice or by steering, is actually a large chunk of the reason why women earn less than men, on average. I don't care what Rosin might call this pattern but it is not something new and exciting. Indeed, it's a pretty depressing pattern because the traditionally female occupations are poorly paying ones. It may well be the case that they offer more opportunities for "balancing" family and work than the traditionally male occupations (as well as less harassment).
But choosing them for that reason is not necessarily as laudable as, say, creating a labor market with proper parental leave, annual vacations and more humane working hours.
I wrote about those fifteen jobs which are growing most rapidly
before, but here's a reminder:
Finally, let's have a look at those 15 fastest growing professions which are dominated by women. It's not clear which list Rosin's book used as there are several ways of defining "fastest growing" (percentage increases or absolute numbers etc). The one Rosin probably used is Table 2 in this article (scroll down), although it lists twenty occupations, not fifteen.
It's worth noting the text under that table:
The education categories and wages of the occupations with the largest numbers of new jobs are considerably different than those of the fastest growing occupations. Only three of these occupations are in the associate’s degree or higher category. Fourteen of the 20 occupations with the largest numbers of new jobs paid less than the national median wage of $33,840 in May 2010.
Out of the top five listed (all female dominated, by the way), only the first occupation mentioned, registered nurses, has a highish median annual salary: 64, 690 dollars. The next four: retail salespersons, home health aides, personal care aides and office clerks, general, have median annual salaries of $20,670, $20,560, $19,640 and $26,610, respectively. In other words, dominating twelve out of the top fifteen categories doesn't actually make women the winners in some giant employment race.
Sad to say, those are not the types of jobs which will result in women becoming the major breadwinners in married-couple families, in general.
Far down in her column, Rosin seems to write about
her reasons for writing about "the end of men:"
Now, of course, I live on this
planet and, more specifically, I live in Washington, D.C. I can see that
neither the corner suites of corporate America nor the halls of
Congress echo with the clacking of heels. After doing dozens of radio
shows and interviews to discuss my book, I have grown accustomed to
being asked about why, if women are so hot and men are so not, there
aren’t more women at the top. But I’m still searching for a way to
answer without irritating the host (or op-ed contributor) who insists
that it can’t be the end of men until we’ve had our first female
president and Coke and Pepsi are both run by women.
But here’s the thing: The upheaval in gender dynamics I’ve spent
three years reporting and writing about all points in one direction.
Yes, there are zigs and zags. Yes, different sectors of the economy and
society are moving at different rates. Yes, in the last decade progress
has slowed down (it has slowed down for men, too). Yes, a female MBA earns less than a male MBA out of school
(although the difference, before children, is now negligible). Yes, the
richest of the rich are still almost exclusively male, or their wives.
And yes, we have not yet remotely figured out how to make most American
workplaces family-friendly.
But zoom the graph back a few decades and you can see how far we’ve
come—and that the lines all point one way: Men’s wages have been
stagnating, and by some measures declining, as women’s economic fortunes
continue to rise. The wage gap has been slowly closing for women, but
the education gap has not been closing for men. We can focus only and
eternally on the fact that those lines have not yet crossed or even
converged in many professions. But isn’t that vantage point a bit
narrow? Why does we’re-not-there-yet mean we’re not headed there?
Headed where? To a matriarchy? That's my problem with Rosin's arguments. To talk about "the end of men" when it is women, in fact, who are shrinking as a percentage of population in China and India seems utterly disgusting to me. To imply that advances towards greater gender equality are a sign of the death of men or at least all male power seems equally weird to me. If we take her stance here seriously, then
any improvement in women's relative position could be a sign of some sort of mass annihilation of men. Women still earn less than men, on average, but the gender gap has shrunk some in the last thirty years: Sign of the end of men! And so on.
I don't like games and gambles with serious matters. That's because I'm a humorless feminazi who believes in a fair world where people are not put into little boxes by gender (or by race or sexual preference etc.) when they try to decide which talents to nurture and which working lives to choose.
Rosin appears to see the situation as a competition, a "winning-gender-takes-all" game. But if that's the interpretation one chooses, then the data suggests that it's still not women who are winning. Things are considerably better for women than they were, of course (though I wonder if anyone wrote about the end of women when women were one third of college graduates, in those halcyon days of yore), but no, men are not ending. At all.
Let's put all this into a proper perspective in terms of time and place: After thousands of years of pretty much male domination we suddenly worry about tipping into a matriarchy? Because sixty percent of new college graduates are women? That to me seems to be the one type of data which might (weakly) support Rosin's theory. But then how does she explain Saudi Arabia or Iran (the latter until the government enforced gender quotas)? Those countries have similar female domination in higher education.
Mentioning Iran and Saudi Arabia brings me to the proper place of Rosin's arguments: The global one. No end of men in that wider view. Male domination seems to be doing very well in many, many countries on this earth. Come to think of it, it's doing pretty well even in the US government.
I'm not particularly ecstatic when writing these criticisms about "The End of Men" and related topics. But I feel I must, because of those data problems and also because these calls sound like "the-sky-is-falling" to me or at least extremely premature. The latter means that there will be those who argue that we've come to as close to gender equality as we can, without ending all those men.
At the same time, I sorta agree with Rosin's basic conclusions
here:
The place I would
like to arrive after the “end of men” is not Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s
Herland,
a mystical biological matriarchy in which the men are literally
obsolete. It’s a place where my son’s girlfriend earns more money than
he does and no one cares or interviews him about it for a story. It’s a
place where he decides he wants to work four days a week and spend the
fifth picking up the kids from school, or doing his sculpting, and no
one thinks there is anything wrong with him. It’s also a place where, if
he decides he wants to work all five days, and his wife decides she
doesn’t, they can both make that work. It’s a place where the single
standard for power and success is not hours logged and paychecks earned.
It’s a place where we use our imagination to give men and women, both, a
little more room to breathe.
I just don't think rigid definitions of masculinity can be changed by writing books about the "end of men." Rather the reverse, to be honest.
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*This deserves a proper long and dry post, this topic. I shall get to it one day.
