Working girls, broken society
While the benefits of career equality are axiomatic, its negative
repercussions are wilfully ignored. In a contentious essay that is
sparking fierce debate in Britain, a King's College professor argues
that we must confront the losses to society when women choose
work over family
Apr. 2, 2006. 08:10 AM
ALISON WOLF
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
In 1945, the British public sector abandoned the marriage bar, which had required
female teachers and civil servants to stay single or resign in favour of male
breadwinners.
In the 60 years since, women's lives have been transformed, and, with them, family
and community.
You might not think it — given the media focus on pay gaps and glass ceilings, and
the Women and Work Commission's recent finding that British women in full-time
work earn on average 17 per cent less than men — but for the first time, women, at
least in developed societies, have virtually no career or occupation barred to them.
The people most affected by this change, and the main subject of this essay, are
professional and elite women. Women used to enter the elite as daughters, mothers
and wives. Now they do so as individuals.
This marks a rupture in human history. It is one that has brought enormous benefits,
but its repercussions are not all positive, either for society as a whole, or for all
women.
Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve: the death of sisterhood,
or an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major
life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. the erosion of "female
altruism," the service ethos that has been profoundly important to modern industrial
societies, particularly in the education of their young and the care of their old and
sick. the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the
prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore — sometimes wilfully — the extent to
which educated women face disincentives to bear children.
In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns.
Today it makes little sense to discuss women in general. Instead, they divide into two
groups: A minority of well-educated women have careers; a majority do jobs, usually
part-time, to make some money.
For the former, there is very little, if any, disadvantage associated simply with being a
woman. If they are equally qualified and willing to put in the hours, they can do as
well as any man.
But for the majority of women, this sort of life remains a fantasy. Their families are
their top priority, they dip in and out of the labour market, and they are concentrated
in heavily feminized occupations, such as retailing, cleaning and clerical work. Their
average earnings — per hour and over a lifetime — are well below those of males.
Ambitious graduates generally belong in the first group, all other women in the
second.
This is a caricature — but not much of one. Academic experts on the female labour
market occupy very different points on the political spectrum, but they agree on the
polarization of women's experiences.
The feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting and feeding into a revolution in
women's lives, spoke the language of sisterhood — the assumption that there was a
shared female experience that cut across class, ethnic and generational lines. The
reality was that, at that very moment, sisterhood was dying.
Gender politics still encourages us to talk about women as a group with common
interests and demands. Yet this is far less true today than when, as Kipling observed,
the "Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady" really were sisters under the skin.
In The Gentleman's Daughter, her fine study of 18th-century elite women's lives,
Amanda Vickery quotes one of her feminine subjects, writing that "my time is always
imployed and if I do take a pen I always meet with some interrupsion."
Once childbearing began, this would have been true for all classes. Only in a tiny
number of very wealthy homes did servants free wives and mothers from the running
of a household, in which the vast bulk of food and clothing was prepared from
scratch.
Nursemaids were a supplement to the mother, not a replacement; before aspirin, let
alone antibiotics, women could expect to spend much of their time, wracked with
anxiety, tending the sick.
From the early 19th century, paid employment outside the home became increasingly
possible for educated women. Outside the middle classes, full-time work until
marriage was the norm; and poor married women and widows supplemented family
income out of necessity.
But what all women — educated and uneducated — assumed was that after marriage
and childbearing, their lives would centre on the home.
Today this pattern is transformed.
Mothers in general return to work sooner than their mothers or grandmothers did. But
as Heather Joshi, director of longitudinal studies at the University of London's
Institute of Education, has shown, there are new and widening differences between
the less and the more educated.
The best educated most often go back to work the moment maternity leave is over
(or before). Those with few or no qualifications, in contrast, are likely to be out of the
labour force for several years. They are concentrated in predominantly female
occupations and tend to work full-time before children but part-time afterwards.
About 13 per cent of women of working age can be classified as professionals,
managers or employers, and nearly 70 per cent of them are in full-time work. For
non-professional women in this age group, the figure is just 35 per cent.
In the recent past, a woman's earnings over a lifetime were a fraction of her
husband's, especially if there were children, but even if there were not. This has
ceased to be true for the educated but childless in the generation that is now middleaged.
The gender gap for women with children is shrinking rapidly too. Educated younger
women are projected to earn as much as men over a lifetime if they have no children,
and almost as much even if they do.
A female graduate born in 1970 who has two children can expect lifetime earnings
that are 88 per cent of her husband's, whereas for those with middle-level
qualifications the figure falls to 57 per cent, and for those with no formal qualifications
at all to only 34 per cent. This gap mostly reflects part-time work and career breaks.
Feminists dispute the reasons for the rapid growth of female part-time work. Many
believe it is the result of continuing barriers to female participation and gender
discrimination. However, Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics, who
has done most to document and analyze its rise, believes these patterns are preferred
by most women because they fit with their home commitments, and these are still
their primary concern.
Most working women continue to have jobs and not careers. At the lower end of the
socio-economic ladder, some women can even be "married" to the state and live on
benefits in a way no previous society could have imagined.
The revolution has taken place at the top. A majority of law students and almost twothirds of medical students are now female and, based on current trends, the majority
of doctors will be women by 2012.
Hakim has examined the proportion of women in "the most senior occupations which
play the major part in running a country:" occupations which correspond, roughly
speaking, to "class I" jobs in sociological analysis and exclude schoolteachers and
nurses. In spite of this, by the end of the 20th century, 43 per cent of such class I
jobholders were women.
Female representation is not, of course, so evident if one concentrates on the very
top jobs: managing directors of major companies, self-made billionaires or high court
judges. How could it be, when these people are mostly in their fifties and sixties and
part of an earlier, more "gendered" generation? The change, in so short a time, is
nonetheless extraordinary and cumulative. Some believe we have reached the highwater mark for female penetration of elite jobs. I cannot see why that should be the
case.
Upper-middle-class professional women may choose "mommy-track" jobs to allow
more time with their children. But a human resources manager who leaves work at
5:30 p.m. to relieve the nanny is just as representative of the death of sisterhood as
a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. female fund manager. Both have chosen careers around which to
fit family life, not family life punctuated by jobs.
The revolution in female opportunity has also had a huge effect on the public services
and voluntary work. It has reinforced other changes in our society — the decline in
religion, the glorifying of self-actualization — to transform our behaviour and values.
Welcome to the end of "female altruism."
The period from the mid-19th to mid-20th century was a golden age for the "caring"
sector in one respect. It had the pick of the country's most brilliant, energetic and
ambitious women, who worked in it as paid employees but also gave enormous
amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do neither.
Here too, the changes are most obvious among the elite. By the 17th and 18th
centuries, upper- and middle-class women were educated, cultured and well read.
They also had no career open to them other than marriage.
Paid employment for an impecunious female member of this class, in so far as it
existed at all, was restricted to the education of the young as a governess, or the care
of the old as a companion.
But in the 19th century, education was transformed, and with it, women's careers.
A network of schools for all classes developed, schools whose workforce was rapidly
feminized as the century progressed. In 1851, the British census counted 42,000
schoolmistresses, plus 21,000 governesses, but not a single female physician or
surgeon.
By the 1891 census, the "professional occupations" group contained a remarkable
313,000 women compared to 342,000 men. Among the women, 217,000 were
teachers and 53,000 were nurses.
From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, teaching could rely on attracting large
numbers of the country's most academically able women. Clever working-class girls
progressed from "pupil teachers" to schoolmistresses, while growing numbers of
middle-class girls also entered the profession.
Recently, schools have been the big losers. Among girls born in Britain in 1970, about
one in 10 of those scoring in the top academic decile chose teaching as a career. By
the early 1990s, American girls in this top 10 per cent were less than one-fifth as
likely to become teachers as their 1964 counterparts had been.
In health, the pattern is more complex. Many of the ambitious women who once
became ward sisters and hospital matrons now look elsewhere, but offsetting this is
the growing number of women doctors and specialists.
Does any of this matter? The first century of professional paid work for women saw
traditional female concerns move into the public sphere. If the able women of 70 or
100 years ago entered classrooms and hospital wards merely because nothing else
was available, they would have brought little commitment to their work, and greater
choice would clearly have benefited them and society alike.
But this is not how it was. These women mostly saw their jobs as a vocation. Many of
them lived in a world that took for granted such duty and service to others. They
shared an openly expressed idealism, and a belief that their jobs mattered —
especially to the future of other women.
The relative decline of these values and the number of such service-oriented women
is sometimes cited as a reason for the perceived deterioration in health and education
services, despite the far greater sums of money being spent on them..
The pioneering female professionals of the 19th and early 20th centuries were
imbued, in an unselfconscious way, with the language and values of religion. Duty to
God and duty to their fellow women and men were inextricably combined. If we do
not understand this, we will not grasp how different the world of our modern elite
women is from that of their grandmothers. Or, indeed, from their grandmothers'
grandmothers.
Most educated 18th-century women regarded the traditional "women's work" of caring
for home and children not with 1960s feminist disdain, but with the values identified
by Vickery's study of Georgian "gentle" women: love and duty, fortitude, propriety
and resignation. These women were not saints, but they saw the world differently.
The centrality of religious belief in both public pronouncements and private lives
marks out the different country of the past.
Few women were as eminent as Dorothea Beale, the great headmistress of
Cheltenham Ladies' College and founder of St Hilda's, Oxford, for whom "moral
training is the end, education the means," or Julie Velten Favre, who sent the first
generation of highly educated female professeures into the French lycées to "take
charge of souls." But these leading educators lived in a world where actively "doing
good" was both a major part of many women's lives and intrinsically linked with
religious faith and instruction.
In Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain, his recent study of the decline of
Christian charity, Frank Prochaska estimates that on the eve of World War I there
were close to 200,000 volunteer "district visitors" in Britain, linked to one or other of
the churches. They were overwhelmingly women and offered a range of services:
financial help, medicines and medical advice, recipes, clothing, links to potential
employers and, along with these, bibles, tracts, and pressure to attend church
services.
The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the development of myriad charities with
religious links, many of them aimed at women and almost all relying heavily on
female volunteers.
Today, the middle-class working-age female volunteer has all but vanished. Voluntary
organizations are increasingly run by professionals. Religion has become marginal to
the lives of most citizens. Theda Skocpol, in Diminished Democracy, notes how massmembership, cross-class organizations in the United States have been replaced by
professionally staffed advocacy groups concerned with influencing policymakers and
the direction of public funding.
Yet the virtual disappearance of home-based, educated women (at least below the
age of 60) has had an effect. A path once followed by able women across the
developed world led to university, teaching and then motherhood, homemaking and
voluntary work. Such women are now too busy. The average amount of time that
today's British citizen, male or female, devotes to volunteer activities is four minutes
a day.
The old unpaid female labour force is now otherwise engaged. Ask the Girl Guides if
you doubt this. Scouting and Guiding are themselves redolent of that vanished past.
Yet Robert Baden-Powell understood exactly what excites and interests children, and
the movement has them queuing, often vainly, at the door. What it lacks are adult
leaders.
There is a chasm between the moral purpose voiced by female pioneers and the iconic
female advertising slogan of today — "Because I'm worth it." We could, I suppose,
write off the beliefs of the former group as the opium of the educated female classes,
developed to reconcile them to unequal lives. But then we should see our own
obsession with female occupational success as an ideology too.
The labour market makes childbearing a
very expensive prospect for successful
professionals
As late as the 1940s and 1950s, education white papers were still imbued with the
language of morality and idealism. Today's are concerned almost entirely with the
economic benefits of schooling and the delivery of occupational skills. This mirrors the
priorities of mainstream feminism, which is equally focused on the workplace and
which evaluates female advance accordingly.
Geraldine Peacock, the head of Britain's Charity Commission, reflected current
attitudes when she remarked approvingly on the growing number of big charities
headed by women. It was a welcome sign of change, she said, given that until
recently "the sector still smacked of volunteerism" and so put off "women who wanted
to make a career."
Similarly, Natasha Walter, in Prospect ("Prejudice and evolution," June 2005),
marshalled the usual statistics (average salaries, number of female senior judges) to
argue that "full equality is still a distant promise." For Walter, it is so obvious that
equality should be measured in terms of whether men and women are equally
represented at all levels of every occupation that she sees no need to spell it out.
One could interpret today's feminist assumptions as reflecting the appetite of global
capitalism for all talent, female and male, at the expense of the family. Certainly our
current economic arrangements offer precious little support to family formation. On
the contrary, they erect major barriers in its way.
We all know by now that, in most developed countries, birth rates are well below
replacement level. Less recognized is the massive change in incentives to have
children.
In the past, adults had no tax-financed welfare state to depend on. Their families
were their social insurance policies: children paid.
Today, they expect the state to take care of their financial and health needs when ill
or retired, regardless of whether they have six children or none.
Moreover, our labour market, with its greater gender equality, makes childbearing a
very expensive prospect for successful professionals.
Rearing a healthy, balanced child requires intensive attention and large amounts of
time, and is not something that technical progress is going to alter.
The price of that time is especially steep for high-earning, busy elite parents — female
or male. If they give up or cut down on work, the opportunity cost in terms of income
forgone and careers stalled is far greater than for an unskilled 16-year-old dropout.
In addition, elite children are expensive. Children are dependent for longer, highquality childcare is costly, and formal education has become increasingly important as
the route to success. Parents know this, and it explains why the professional classes
devote so much money and attention to their children's schooling.
As the American economist Shirley Burggraf has pointed out in her book The Feminine
Economy and Economic Man, the financial disincentives to childbearing have become
so high for upper-middle income families that the puzzle is not why professional
women have so few children but why they have any at all. She observes, "no society
until recent times has expected love alone to support the family enterprise. To put it
another way, parental love has never cost so much."
Value-based volunteering is giving way to professionalized organizations with publicsector contracts, and personal fulfilment for both sexes is increasingly evaluated in
economic terms. Yet we still rely on traditional values and emotions to produce the
next generation. It is fortunate that children are so intrinsically rewarding or our birth
rate would be far lower still. The hard economics tells us that professional women will
have to give up most if they have children, and so will be least inclined to do so.
Highly educated women overwhelmingly stay in work and so pay little or no earnings
penalty when they hav
e children. But more and more of them in the developed world have no children at all.
"The rich get richer and the poor have children" still applies, but this time around it is
women specifically that we are talking about. About 30 per cent of graduate women
born in the early 1960s entered their forties childless. For graduate women born in
1970 (a substantially larger group), the expected figure is 40 per cent.
Unlike professional graduates, childbearing is a rational career choice for academically
failing girls and one that a good many duly select, especially in countries where they
are supported by the state. Among British women born in the late 1970s, almost half
of those with no academic qualifications at all had their first child by the age of 20,
compared to 1 per cent of those with degrees. Only 20 per cent of the first group,
compared to 85 per cent of the latter, were still childless by their late twenties.
There is no reason to believe that teenage and uneducated mothers are any less
loving and devoted than others. But there is plenty of evidence that their children are
likely to be relatively unproductive future citizens, less skilled in their turn, and more
likely to experience unemployment.
Birth rates have been low before. The average proportion of women bearing children,
and the average number of children per mother, is pretty much the same for those
born in 1910 and those born in 1970. In between, of course, there was a baby boom.
What is different this time, however, is the pattern of childbearing. Today there is a
very strong inverse relationship between education and childbearing. Last time around
there was not.
Authors on the left find it especially hard to recognize that the occupational
emancipation of women may create intransigent problems for the future of our
societies. Britain's Institute for Public Policy Research illustrates the problem. One of
its most recent reports, "Population Politics," recognizes the demographic crisis and
calls sensibly for clear population policies. But in doing so, it manages virtually to
ignore the well-established relations between education and childbearing.
Burggraf, in contrast, argues that the tension between the modern workplace and
family well-being is real and irresolvable as long as our societies place no financial
value on the activities that take place within the home.
In her view, feminists and economists share the blame. For the feminist, unpaid
home-based activity is labour performed under the lash of patriarchy. For the
economist, unpaid work does not contribute to GNP and so does not exist.
Politicians, journalists and businessmen often emphasize the negative economic
consequences of any barriers to female participation in the workforce, and of losing
half the country's best brains to the kitchen sink.
Of course they are right, and I am in no hurry to go back there myself.
But it is striking how little anyone mentions, let alone tries to quantify, the offsetting
losses when women choose work over family.
This is stupid.
Women today are no more homogeneous a group than men, and the service ethic
that traditionally supported civil society and public service has weakened. Families
remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation,
and yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from
marriage or childbearing.
The repercussions for our futures are enormous, and we should at least recognize this
fact. This has brought enormous benefits.