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| The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating a New Society by Alison Wolf – review | The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating a New Society by Alison Wolf – review |
| (5 months later) | |
| Is there, Alison Wolf asks, such a thing as "a female paradise on Earth"? If there were, you'd expect it to be in the Scandinavian countries, with their Borgen and their Killing and their excellent state-supported childcare. And yet, Wolf has discovered, "the labour markets of egalitarian welfare-state Scandinavia" display yawning gaps between higher paid and lower paid women, not to mention "the highest levels of gender segregation anywhere in the developed world". And the reason is obvious, once you know how to look at labour-market data. | Is there, Alison Wolf asks, such a thing as "a female paradise on Earth"? If there were, you'd expect it to be in the Scandinavian countries, with their Borgen and their Killing and their excellent state-supported childcare. And yet, Wolf has discovered, "the labour markets of egalitarian welfare-state Scandinavia" display yawning gaps between higher paid and lower paid women, not to mention "the highest levels of gender segregation anywhere in the developed world". And the reason is obvious, once you know how to look at labour-market data. |
| In top jobs – law, finance, homicide detection – gender segregation, right across the rich world, has more or less disappeared; but in low-paid jobs, such as care work, it mostly hasn't. So the more women you have out there smashing the glass ceiling, the more nursery nurses, cleaners and care-home assistants those women need to – as Wolf puts it – free them up at home. "Scandinavian countries hold the record for gender segregation because they have gone the furthest in outsourcing traditional female activities and turning unpaid home-based 'caring' into formal employment." Yes, childminders are paid more in Denmark than they are in Britain. But it's not a Birgitte Nyborg lifestyle. | In top jobs – law, finance, homicide detection – gender segregation, right across the rich world, has more or less disappeared; but in low-paid jobs, such as care work, it mostly hasn't. So the more women you have out there smashing the glass ceiling, the more nursery nurses, cleaners and care-home assistants those women need to – as Wolf puts it – free them up at home. "Scandinavian countries hold the record for gender segregation because they have gone the furthest in outsourcing traditional female activities and turning unpaid home-based 'caring' into formal employment." Yes, childminders are paid more in Denmark than they are in Britain. But it's not a Birgitte Nyborg lifestyle. |
| Wolf, a British economist and social policy wonk, was the author of the 2011 Wolf Report on vocational education. But for readers interested in feminism, she's mostly known for "Working Girls", an essay published in 2006 in Prospect magazine. In it, she wrote: "For the first time, women, at least in developed societies, have virtually no career or occupation closed to them … This marks a rupture in human history." | Wolf, a British economist and social policy wonk, was the author of the 2011 Wolf Report on vocational education. But for readers interested in feminism, she's mostly known for "Working Girls", an essay published in 2006 in Prospect magazine. In it, she wrote: "For the first time, women, at least in developed societies, have virtually no career or occupation closed to them … This marks a rupture in human history." |
| This new freedom, however, applies only to "young, educated, full-time professionals" – for "the majority of women", nothing much has changed at all. This, Wolf wrote, opens a huge gulf in experience between the different classes, and has uncomfortable consequences. Now that clever women can get glamorous jobs as bankers, who fills the gaps left in teaching, nursing and voluntary work? And you can only keep up as a banker if you take as little time off as possible for having babies etc. What's this doing to birth rate and family dynamics among the new elite? | This new freedom, however, applies only to "young, educated, full-time professionals" – for "the majority of women", nothing much has changed at all. This, Wolf wrote, opens a huge gulf in experience between the different classes, and has uncomfortable consequences. Now that clever women can get glamorous jobs as bankers, who fills the gaps left in teaching, nursing and voluntary work? And you can only keep up as a banker if you take as little time off as possible for having babies etc. What's this doing to birth rate and family dynamics among the new elite? |
| Wolf's essay was a brilliant piece of popular social-science polemic, a stark and confident joining of unexpected dots, statistically sophisticated and with a copper-bottomed evidence base. This isn't to say its conclusions were beyond argument, as plenty of critics have shown. But it did, decisively, move on the terms of those arguments. "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." | Wolf's essay was a brilliant piece of popular social-science polemic, a stark and confident joining of unexpected dots, statistically sophisticated and with a copper-bottomed evidence base. This isn't to say its conclusions were beyond argument, as plenty of critics have shown. But it did, decisively, move on the terms of those arguments. "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." |
| Her book expands the 4,500 words of the Prospect essay into more than 400 pages. Around half develop the thesis with material that augments and/or complicates the original argument. The other half takes on other popular debates in gender and workplace economics. The erotic capital one, for example – do good-looking people get promoted faster? The time-use one – why do working women still seem to do much more housework than their men? And of course the one about prostitution. If it's as well paid as people say it is, why is it still the profession of last resort? | Her book expands the 4,500 words of the Prospect essay into more than 400 pages. Around half develop the thesis with material that augments and/or complicates the original argument. The other half takes on other popular debates in gender and workplace economics. The erotic capital one, for example – do good-looking people get promoted faster? The time-use one – why do working women still seem to do much more housework than their men? And of course the one about prostitution. If it's as well paid as people say it is, why is it still the profession of last resort? |
| The Skandi-not-Paradise finding is not the only surprise. The widespread belief that women work harder than men do, what with their jobs and then "the second shift" at home, is an illusion, says Wolf. Time-use analysis indicates that when you add waged work to housework, men and women do much the same (the difference being that men don't brag to their mates about doing housework). "Graduate professionals" of both sexes, "the ones with the longest average hours of employment", seem to spend more time with their children than the lower paid do, and to manage it by sleeping an hour less a night and watching much less television. Graduates also appear to expend less of their precious energies on sexual adventuring. Wolf's own analysis of the UK National Centre for Social Research's 30-year database on sexual attitudes and lifestyles suggests that, although boomer graduates once led the way on number of sexual partners, the non-graduates have caught up, and start their sexual activity younger. | The Skandi-not-Paradise finding is not the only surprise. The widespread belief that women work harder than men do, what with their jobs and then "the second shift" at home, is an illusion, says Wolf. Time-use analysis indicates that when you add waged work to housework, men and women do much the same (the difference being that men don't brag to their mates about doing housework). "Graduate professionals" of both sexes, "the ones with the longest average hours of employment", seem to spend more time with their children than the lower paid do, and to manage it by sleeping an hour less a night and watching much less television. Graduates also appear to expend less of their precious energies on sexual adventuring. Wolf's own analysis of the UK National Centre for Social Research's 30-year database on sexual attitudes and lifestyles suggests that, although boomer graduates once led the way on number of sexual partners, the non-graduates have caught up, and start their sexual activity younger. |
| Lots of this stuff is interesting, but the book is one of those examples of how more is not always better. Bulked out with so many added extras, the argument risks becoming a repetitive litany of rational-choice bromides. Social change, Wolf believes, is driven by "individual women doing their sums and sizing up their opportunities", a process that may be conscious or unconscious, and overall, most people choose the option they consider best for them. In the US, for example, more people work full-time because it offers health insurance. In the UK, high childcare costs discourage people in work from having as many kids as they'd like to, whereas welfare benefits incentivise non-workers to have children. On the back of the book the blurb promises to explain "(why) female lawyers wear vertiginous heels" and "what happens to those who are left behind", but actually it doesn't. The heels, as usual, are a source of admiring fascination. The "choices" of the poor are not. | Lots of this stuff is interesting, but the book is one of those examples of how more is not always better. Bulked out with so many added extras, the argument risks becoming a repetitive litany of rational-choice bromides. Social change, Wolf believes, is driven by "individual women doing their sums and sizing up their opportunities", a process that may be conscious or unconscious, and overall, most people choose the option they consider best for them. In the US, for example, more people work full-time because it offers health insurance. In the UK, high childcare costs discourage people in work from having as many kids as they'd like to, whereas welfare benefits incentivise non-workers to have children. On the back of the book the blurb promises to explain "(why) female lawyers wear vertiginous heels" and "what happens to those who are left behind", but actually it doesn't. The heels, as usual, are a source of admiring fascination. The "choices" of the poor are not. |
| The tone is also uneven, probably because Wolf isn't sure what sort of readership she's aiming at. The authority of the original essay is replaced by chat and anecdotes, a bit like Freakonomics but less flash. Sometimes Wolf does that pained potted-description thing academics do when they're trying to get down with the journalistic writers – Lawton Fitt, one of the first women ever to make partner at Goldman Sachs, is described as "small, slim, casual, beautifully cut hair", and interviewed "on her roof terrace overlooking Holland Park". Sometimes Wolf comes over all Mumsnet with awkward confidences about her own life-choices: the attic room "where I wrote this book" was "also and first … a bedroom for the nanny." (What does it say about so many things when people talk about the woman who looks after their children as "the"?) | The tone is also uneven, probably because Wolf isn't sure what sort of readership she's aiming at. The authority of the original essay is replaced by chat and anecdotes, a bit like Freakonomics but less flash. Sometimes Wolf does that pained potted-description thing academics do when they're trying to get down with the journalistic writers – Lawton Fitt, one of the first women ever to make partner at Goldman Sachs, is described as "small, slim, casual, beautifully cut hair", and interviewed "on her roof terrace overlooking Holland Park". Sometimes Wolf comes over all Mumsnet with awkward confidences about her own life-choices: the attic room "where I wrote this book" was "also and first … a bedroom for the nanny." (What does it say about so many things when people talk about the woman who looks after their children as "the"?) |
| Weirdly, the loss of objectivity does not seem to allow for more freedom in the argument, but the reverse, as the far-sighted stance of the social theorist shrinks down to the panicky, status-obsessed squeezed-upper-middle. For example, left feminists argue that the 1970s influx of professional women to the rich world's workplaces allowed the bosses, employing some rational-choice theory of their own, to drive down wages for everybody. I'd love to hear what Wolf thinks of this idea, but she's too busy fretting about keeping up with the Joneses: "As soon as a lot of couples have two – or one and a half – incomes, it becomes harder and harder for others to live on one. If richer couples bid up the price of houses, if other people's children take it for granted that a 'normal' childhood involves beach holidays and this year's electronic goods, if everyone else is out at work anyway and there's no one at home to talk to, why not do the same?" Pushy parents, meanwhile, are "right to worry. Formal education is becoming more and more important as a gateway to the sunny uplands of high-earning careers, and finely-tuned CVs are passports to the right schools, the right colleges, the right shortlist." An elite is, by definition, a minority. What's supposed to happen to everybody else? | Weirdly, the loss of objectivity does not seem to allow for more freedom in the argument, but the reverse, as the far-sighted stance of the social theorist shrinks down to the panicky, status-obsessed squeezed-upper-middle. For example, left feminists argue that the 1970s influx of professional women to the rich world's workplaces allowed the bosses, employing some rational-choice theory of their own, to drive down wages for everybody. I'd love to hear what Wolf thinks of this idea, but she's too busy fretting about keeping up with the Joneses: "As soon as a lot of couples have two – or one and a half – incomes, it becomes harder and harder for others to live on one. If richer couples bid up the price of houses, if other people's children take it for granted that a 'normal' childhood involves beach holidays and this year's electronic goods, if everyone else is out at work anyway and there's no one at home to talk to, why not do the same?" Pushy parents, meanwhile, are "right to worry. Formal education is becoming more and more important as a gateway to the sunny uplands of high-earning careers, and finely-tuned CVs are passports to the right schools, the right colleges, the right shortlist." An elite is, by definition, a minority. What's supposed to happen to everybody else? |
| The book's title, which is never explained in the text, is a mystery. On the cover of the advance proof it was "XX", like chromosomes. On the finished copy, each X is done in a different typeface, which makes it a bit more Simon Cowell. In last week's Saturday Times magazine, a journalist did a feature that referred to "this XX supergroup" with a sidebar by Wolf about "Eight Ways to Spot an XX woman" – from "They employ domestic staff," to "They have less sex". It was all a bit depressing really. | The book's title, which is never explained in the text, is a mystery. On the cover of the advance proof it was "XX", like chromosomes. On the finished copy, each X is done in a different typeface, which makes it a bit more Simon Cowell. In last week's Saturday Times magazine, a journalist did a feature that referred to "this XX supergroup" with a sidebar by Wolf about "Eight Ways to Spot an XX woman" – from "They employ domestic staff," to "They have less sex". It was all a bit depressing really. |
| And I still don't really know what's supposed to be "the XX factor" that makes for what the Times journalist called "alpha women". Does Wolf herself know, I wonder, or is it XX as in something she meant to fill in properly later, except that time ran out and she forgot? | And I still don't really know what's supposed to be "the XX factor" that makes for what the Times journalist called "alpha women". Does Wolf herself know, I wonder, or is it XX as in something she meant to fill in properly later, except that time ran out and she forgot? |
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