Female Supremacy Articles - Page 27
The Coming American Matriarchy
The fairer sex gets ready to take over
By Jonathan Rauch
National Journal
January 15, 2008
Suppose you could memorize only a single demographic number and you set
about choosing the one with the most far-reaching implications for
change in America. You could do worse than 1.5.
Of course, there are plenty of possibilities: the birth rate, the
teen-pregnancy or illegitimacy rate, the percentage of the population
that is white or foreign-born, the percentage of elderly. But unpack
1.5 and you have the makings of a social inversion: a turning upside
down of the male-dominated order that Americans have taken for granted
since—well, since forever.
The number 1.5 is, in this case, a ratio. According to projections by
the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017 half again as
many women as men will earn bachelor's degrees. In the early 1990s, six
women graduated from college for every five men who did so; today, the
ratio is about 4-to-3. A decade from now, it will be 3-to-2—and rising,
on current trends.
What does this mean? And what's going on? Neither question is easy to
answer. But start with the second.
A college degree used to be a rarity: a mark of privileged or
professional status. As recently as 1950, fewer than half of Americans
even finished high school, let alone went on to college.
Surprisingly, in the early decades of the last century, college
attendees were as likely to be female as male. As the economists
Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko note in a
fascinating 2006 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives,
things changed dramatically beginning in the 1930s. Men poured into
universities, first to escape Depression-era unemployment, later with
the help of the G.I. Bill, then to escape Vietnam. Above all, men were
responding rationally to a labor market that paid a rising premium for
advanced education. By 1957, three men took home a college diploma for
every two women who did.
That imbalance defined the world in which all but the youngest of
today's adults grew up. The education gap bolstered the presumption
that men would dominate the professions and other elite careers; that
men would boss women, instead of the other way around; that men, with
their college-turbocharged earning power, would be the primary
breadwinners; that, educationally speaking, men could expect to marry
down.
Chapter 3 of the 20th-century story is as welcome as it is well known.
Feminism, family planning (in the form of birth control, especially the
Pill), and a meritocratic labor market opened not just jobs but careers
to women, who streamed into the workforce and formed two-earner
families. Expecting to work -- and also, as divorce rates soared,
worrying about having to support themselves -- women also streamed to
college. By about 1980, the gender gap in college enrollment had
vanished. Young women had reached educational parity, with the promise
of social parity not far behind.
The puzzle is what happened next. In the 1990s, the pattern changed
again, but the surprise involved men. The wage premium for a college
degree continued to rise smartly. Women responded just as economic
theory predicts that rational actors would: Their college attendance
rates kept climbing because the more they learned, the more they
earned.
Men, however, ignored what the market was telling them: Their college
attendance and completion rates barely rose. Why? "That's the big
mystery," says Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings
Institution.
Whatever the reason, the result was a new educational gender gap, this
time favoring women. There is little sign that it will close:
Projections by the National Center for Education Statistics show a 22
percent increase in female college enrollment between 2005 and 2016,
compared with only a 10 percent increase for men.
In 2006, according to the Census Bureau, about 27 million American men
held a college degree; so did about 27 million American women. This is
a tipping point, however, not an equilibrium, because male college
graduates tend to be old, and female graduates tend to be young. Among
people age 65 and older, men are much more likely than women to be
college-educated. Middle-aged men and women are at parity. Among young
adults ages 25 to 34 years old, the college gap favors women almost as
lopsidedly as it favors men among their grandparents' generation.
In other words, today's young people already live in a world where,
among their peers, women are better educated than men. As the
grandparents die off, every year the country's college-educated
population will become more feminized. In a couple of decades,
America's educational elite will be as disproportionately female as it
once was male.
Perhaps men will wake up, smell the coffee, and rush off to college in
greater numbers. Or perhaps the labor market will undergo a sea change
and the premium on education will stop rising and start falling. As of
now, however, both of those reversals appear far-fetched. Men
might—certainly should, and hopefully will—raise their college
attendance rates, but the likely effect would be to narrow the gap with
women, not close it, much less flip it.
Meanwhile, millions of semiskilled workers in developing countries are
entering an increasingly globalized labor market, which all but
guarantees a rise in the relative premium commanded by a college
diploma.
So what we are talking about, in all likelihood, is an America where
women are better educated than men and where education matters more
than ever. Put those facts together, and you get some implications
worth pondering.
In 1978, when I was a freshman in college, I met a woman who told me
she was in law. "Oh," I said, "you're a secretary?" Her gentle but
mortifying reply: "No, I'm a lawyer." Few of today's young people can
even imagine making that kind of faux pas. According to census data, a
higher share of women than men already work in management and
professional jobs (37 percent versus 31 percent, in 2005).
Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer
with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber
men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that
the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)
Women's superior education will increase their earning power relative
to men's, and on average they will be marrying down, educationally
speaking. A third of today's college-bound 12-year-old girls can expect
to "settle" for a mate without a university diploma. But women will not
stop wanting to be hands-on moms.
For families, this will pose a dilemma. Women will have a comparative
advantage at both parenting and breadwinning. Many women will want to
take time off for child-rearing, but the cost of keeping a college-educated
mom at home while a high-school-educated dad works
will be high, often prohibitive.
Look, then, for rising pressure on government to provide new parental
subsidies and child care programs, and on employers to provide more
flextime and home-office options -- among various efforts to help women
do it all. Look, too, for a cascading series of psychological and
emotional adjustments as American society tilts, for the first time,
toward matriarchy. What happens to male self-esteem when men are No. 2
(and not necessarily trying harder)? When more men work for women than
the other way around?
Some of these adjustments will have international dimensions. Goldin,
Katz, and Kuziemko note, "Almost all countries in the OECD"—the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of
advanced industrial countries—"now have more women than men in college
and have had a growing gender gap among undergraduates that favors
women." Yet much of the developing world, especially the Muslim world,
remains predominantly patriarchal.
Many tradition-minded cultures in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of
Asia already regard the Western economic and social model as
emasculating. Radical Islam, in particular, abhors feminism. As the
United States and Europe continue to feminize, will the anti-modern
backlash, already deeply problematic in the Muslim world, intensify? As
sex roles and expectations diverge, might hostility and misunderstanding
mount between the West and the rest?
No, men are not about to disappear into underclass status. They will
not become mothers anytime soon, and they will not stop secreting
testosterone. Men's ambition will ensure ample male representation at
the very top of the social order, where CEOs, senators, Nobelists, and
software wunderkinds dwell. Women will not rule men.
But they will lead. Think about this: Not only do girls study harder
and get better grades than boys; high school girls now take more math
and science than do high school boys. If there is a "weaker sex," it
isn't female.
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'SEX' EDUCATION
GALS MANY DEGREES WISER THAN GUYS
By NEIL GRAVES
New York Post
January 11, 2008 -- Guys, don't waste your time trying to impress women in their upper 20s by showing them how brainy you are, because they're the ones with degrees, a new survey shows.
About 33 percent of women between the ages 25 and 29 earned a bachelor's degree or better in the 2006-07 school year, compared with 26 percent of their male counterparts, the US Census Bureau said yesterday in its latest educational numbers crunch.
The bureau said this was the first time that total had reached the one-third plateau for women.
"It's been trending up for the last six or seven years," said Sarah Crissey, an analyst at the bureau's Education Branch. "Last year, it was, like, 32 percent."
However, the sisterhood's older colleagues still trailed men.
Overall, among adults 25 and older, men remain slightly more likely than women to hold at least a bachelor's degree, at 30 percent compared with 28 percent, said the Educational Attainment in the United States report.
The survey also showed a huge difference in earnings between those with a master's degree or doctorate and high-school dropouts. In 2006, those with advanced degrees earned $82,320, compared with $20,873 for dropouts, although the bureau didn't say anything about how long the scholars had to carry their ton of student loans.
A wage earner with a bachelor's degree took home much more than someone with a high-school diploma: $56,788, compared with $31,071, in 2006, the survey showed.
Among other findings, 86 percent of all adults 25 and older said they completed at least high school and 29 percent reported having at least a bachelor's degree last year.
The foreign-born population with at least a bachelor's degree was 28 percent, compared with 34 percent of naturalized citizens.
Crissey said the study did not explore whether foreigners had come to the United States for the purpose of earning a degree or already had one when they arrived.
Fifty-two percent of ethnic Asians 25 and older had a bachelor's degree or better, compared with 32 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 19 percent of blacks, and 13 percent of Hispanics.
Among those with advanced degrees, Asians earned the most, at $88,408 a year, followed by non-Hispanic whites ($83,785), Hispanics ($70,432) and blacks ($64,834).
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Sexlessness and sedentary urination both sad signs of modern times,
By Ryann Connell
Mainichi Daily News
January 18, 2008
Experts say a growing tendency for Japanese men to sit down and pee could be a sign that the gender gap is closing and affecting couples' sex lives, according to Sunday Mainichi (1/27).
Shocking reports late last year showed almost half of Japanese men urinated while sitting down in their toilets at home, instead of standing to piddle as is customary among males.
A survey of Japanese men in their 30s to 50s by Matsushita Electric Works revealed that 49 percent sit down to wee, a staggering threefold increase on the 15 percent who reported the same proclivity when the company first conducted the poll back in 1999.
“A 2004 survey showed there was clearly a growing tendency for Japanese men to sit while urinating," a Matsushita Electric Works spokesman tells Sunday Mainichi. "In response to that, our company in 2006 came out with the industry's largest toilet seats to make it easier for men to sit down and relieve themselves in comfort."
Matsushita Electric Works says it believes the biggest factor behind men taking their weight off while whizzing is insistence from wives, who generally have to clean up if they spray. Experts, however, aren't as easily convinced.
"Speaking from a psychiatrist's point of view, being able to see oneself urinate the furthest possible distance brings joy to men in a feeling that stems back to the old days of hunting and gathering," shrink Katsumi Harima tells Sunday Mainichi. "Perhaps the trend we're seeing suggests the gender aspect of that role is no longer as strong as it once was."
Harima says the sitting tendency may also be the result of modern lifestyles that have been behind so many couples also becoming sexless.
Other experts point to the survey results that show the younger the man the more likely he is to sit down to pee, note that children nowadays are playing less outside and have fewer opportunities to go through the male rite of passage of showing buddies how far they can spray their urine, thus making them more willing to accept suggestions that they take a seat when they need to relieve themselves. Harima is not so sure.
"I'd say that space has more to do with it than anything else," he tells Sunday Mainichi. "There aren't too many homes out there that can afford the space to install a urinal."
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Madonna, a cheeky sex toy and a joke at Guy's expense
By RICHARD SIMPSON
Daily Mail
11th September 2007
When Guy Ritchie wed Madonna in 2000, he must have known what he was in for - she was never known for her restraint, afterall.
And seven years on, the singer's mischievous sense of humour towards him shows no sign of abating.
Celebrating his 39th birthday at London's fashionable Claridges restaurant, the singer chose to whip out from under the table a present which would have made most husbands turn puce.
Friends of the couple have said that in their marriage they have argued a number of times about who really wears the trousers.
For all his mockney posturings, Guy has always felt slightly inferior about his wife's massive earning power and domineering nature. Madonna on the other hand is said to enjoy occasionally bating him on that point. And this latest birthday gift - a strap-on - is, it seems, no exception.
What is for sure it that such a gift given to Guy by Madonna can only have been meant to make light of the rows over about who really takes charge in their marriage.
By the way Madonna is carrying the gift - unusually in a transparent bag - as the couple leave the Mayfair hotel and restaurant, one might assume that Guy had refused to be seen leaving with it.
And the singer clearly relished that point as she flashed a broad smile to photographers who she must have known laid in wait since they had followed her earlier from the family home.
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Putting a Guy in His Place
By GUY TREBAY
The New York Times
January 17, 2008
AMONG the many practical elements missing from Miuccia Prada’s latest collection of men’s wear for winter 2008 were coats, scarves, hats or much of anything else to keep out the cold. This was not the only thing to suggest Ms. Prada has some complex sexual issues to work through.
Speaking after Sunday’s show to Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for The International Herald Tribune, Ms. Prada quipped that the collection was revenge on men for the social and sartorial contortions they impose on women. She laughed when she said it, but she clearly wasn’t kidding around.
It is no stretch to suggest that the Prada collection read like the manifesto of a gender revanchist. The man in Ms. Prada’s current vision was domesticated and so passive as to be a neuter. One notes this not merely because the models looked abnormally robotic and were given nothing to wear outside the house.
Like a flipped version of the Unwomen in Margaret Atwood’s feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.
As usual with this designer, there were things to admire: a lean clerical silhouette, the severity of a nearly monochrome palette, the way color and its absence were used to mark out the torso in floating zones. But when designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate.
Still, points to the woman who is without question the most intellectually alert designer to show here for exploiting an idea while most of the competition is content to rummage through a grab bag of shopworn cultural references, slack attitudes and clichés.
There are, in other words, days in the life of a fashion observer when having a nail driven into one’s skull seems preferable to sitting through another evocation of the so-called rock ’n’ roll style. True, there was a time when rock stars dressed with offhand brio and loony extravagance and actually wore leather pants. But Jim Morrison, for the record, died in 1971. Except for style hounds like Rufus Wainwright and Amy Winehouse, most musicians these days dress for the stage in more or less the same crumpled Levi’s corduroy jeans they wear to compose their songs, sitting in a bedroom at a computer screen.
So it seems willfully dated when designers like Frida Giannini at Gucci haul out the paisley scarves, the velvets, the eyeliner, the grommet boots and wraparound Gypsy belts. Her collection was informed by a narrative she titled “Russian Rock.” It was styled after a singer from the group Gogol Bordello named Eugene Hutz.
If you happen to have visited Moscow lately, you are aware that Russian rockers are no more likely to dress this way than are their Western counterparts, at least not without a self-conscious wink. Subdued chic is Russia’s new order of the day, and this extends even to musicians. The coolest, and in some sense the most fashionable, person I saw on a recent visit was a musician walking in Red Square with his head shaved except for a cascade of dreadlocks and with a wide belt cinching blue workman coveralls.
A look like that might be pushing things at Gucci, a multinational whose challenge is to “model” markets — that is, standardize taste and expectation among luxury goods consumers in markets both established and new.
Yet it would be a lot more credible and refreshing than a Gucci collection that seemed like a momentary pause on a style loop that included, as it often does, other rock-inspired designers like Ennio Capasa at Costume National (Pete Doherty still holds sway at this label), or Roberto Cavalli, whose surprisingly subdued show of suits with peaked shoulders, nipped waists and wide-leg trousers also included his more signature ostentations, like outerwear made of snakeskin or patterned to look like leopard or giraffe or even (this closed the show) a PETA-defiant coat that resembled the pelt of King Kong.
“Designing a collection is like producing a record,” the rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z said at a private dinner Donatella Versace gave after her show. Wearing a Versace suit, with a tie held in place by an emerald Cartier tie bar (a gift from his girlfriend, Beyoncé Knowles), he scooped a bite of creamy lemon mousse from a tuile.
“It’s about telling your story, telling your truth,” said the musician who remains one of the most novelistic artists hip-hop has produced.
He was correct. Narrative drives fashion. Ms. Versace’s is a tale of survival, and in the years since she quit a formidable cocaine habit and dedicated herself to reviving the flagging label, she has moved the company’s story forward shrewdly and with intelligence. The hiring of Alexandre Plokhov, the award-winning designer of Cloak, to assist with Versace’s men’s wear business resulted in a collection that not only looked East for design cues but also seemed to take seriously the idea that the future may be chilling in all kinds of ways.
This was made clear not so much by the snug suits as by the somber long coats that looked suitable for a stroll through Gorky Park. Wearing one, a man might experience a feeling opposite that evoked by the Prada collection. He might feel empowered, as Ms. Versace claimed she is whenever she slips on a 31-carat diamond ring given to her by her late brother, Gianni. At any rate, he might feel fortified against the winds of winter and a rapidly cooling economy.
DESPITE an occasional obligatory reference to the failure of the subprime mortgage market, there was little about the shows here to suggest that anyone was suffering the financial jitters. Yet perhaps the sobriety of the Armani show, whose keyword was “regal,” was a cue.
Design surprises were few in an Armani collection built on caution and control. Those are values that made the designer one of Italy’s wealthiest citizens and his brand among the most recognizable in the world. Those are his creative defaults. Thus his show read as the sartorial equivalent of a stop-loss order. The message was risk-averse.
What every guy needs most in his wardrobe in economic times like these, Mr. Armani seemed to be saying, is a solid interview suit. The fellow wearing the clothes Raf Simons presented at Jil Sander, by contrast, had better have a private income, since it is far from likely that anyone wearing one of Mr. Simons’s ingenious suits or coats, needle-punched and printed in a marble pattern with inkjet technology, will ever find a job.
In general, it is considered unchic to bring up gainful employment when the subject is fashion; real-world concerns are not supposed to penetrate this sphere. And while it is exciting to track designers with the kind of scope Mr. Simons has shown in reinventing the Jil Sander brand, sometimes all that ingenuity becomes an end in itself, and the vision goes flat.
And sometimes it seems finely resolved, as in Tomas Maier’s show for Bottega Veneta, perhaps the week’s most satisfying, in which he recast ordinary work gear for the label’s clientele of putative gazillionaires. It is never clear to this observer who the client is for Mr. Maier’s phenomenally costly clothing, but he certainly makes one wish one could afford to join their ranks.
“We were looking at functionality,” the designer explained, as well as the connection between what a man does and what he wears. From the boxy trousers, the taut jackets, the heavy denims and the so-called chore coats, one deduces that Mr. Maier is dressing garage mechanics, albeit those who have hit it big in the lottery.
Mr. Maier’s was a beautiful show and as direct as Alexander McQueen’s was vagrant, and also lyrical. Inspired by a pilgrimage to India, Mr. McQueen said the show was originally intended to have an Argentine pampas theme. Then he decided to embark on a monthlong journey through Kerala and Rajasthan and the remote and lawless state of Bihar — where Mr. McQueen, a Buddhist, visited the place in which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment — ending up in the isolated mountain kingdom of Bhutan.
The enormous last-minute changes resulted in a collection that wed masterful tailoring to subtle effects created with safety pins and wirework embroidery and that also featured a coat that looked like yeti fur and another that was Mr. McQueen’s rendition of the Bhutanese national costume, the go.
“The design assistants were not too thrilled, I can tell you,” the designer remarked backstage last Saturday evening.
I was.
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It Is Now Not A Question Of Equality but Superiority
By Elizabeth Edwards – Editorial Director
Love Organix
If there is a superior gender, which would it be? This inquiry on the superiority of the respective genders, male and female, is one that is currently being deliberated more in the minds of individuals than in the public sphere.
Although it should be noted that the worth of the female had been historically diminish through erroneous postulates of her physical and emotional realities. An October 5, 2007 article in The New York Times titled ‘Evolution’s Secret Weapon: Grandma,” seems to implicate that anthropologists are now discovering the worth of the female, in past and the present societies, beyond her childbearing years. It suggests that we should value our grandmothers because of their usefulness to our social evolution through their wisdom and nurturing skills. But this statement is adhering to old assumptions which claimed that a woman was only valued for her childbearing ability, therefore, it is now ‘necessary’ for scientists to find a use for the female beyond her childbearing years. There is no wonder why it has taken women so long to catch up to their male counterparts in regards to the perception of equality. There was barely time to explore her superiority. A thought that is avant-garde even in today’s society.
What part did the woman play but that of a submissive being waiting to be impregnated as her role defines? In the race to a civil society, the belief that men are more pugnacious than women seems to find commonality among many evolutionary thinkers. For it was said that the competition that early men had to endure in their efforts to procreate, protect, and provide stability has given them the edge in the evolutionary race. However, in early human societies when the male supposedly goes off to hunt for food for his family, it is conceivable that in his absence the female would become the gatherer, providing whatever food source that was available for her family while her mate was still out trying his luck at hunting. This is a fact that seems to have escaped the attention of many scientists when they studied early societies.
Earlier on, scientists in their categorization of the female gender, classified white women by logging similarities between them and members of the so-called ‘lower races’; with colored women being deemed degenerates of their white counterparts. Before this, the only dialogue on women was concerning their bio-psychological differences to men in regards to sexuality and reproductive function. Further, in their analysis of the male-female differences, scientists once classified women as a distinct species, whose members are at risk of degeneracy when crossing boundaries contrary to their gender. Owing to these facts, the argument on who is superior to who ended, and men were ultimately declared the superior of the human species. Or so they thought……
To learn more about this innovative study on the possibly superiority of the female please see the book Are Women the Superior Gender? by our Editorial Director, Elizabeth Edwards coming soon.
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What modern women want: a beta male
Men are surrendering in the sex war, taking on the supporting role
From The Sunday Times
October 7, 2007
Last week I went to dinner with an eligible doctor. As we were finishing the main course, I struck up conversation with the owner (Marco) in Italian – I speak five languages. My date nearly choked on his linguini and spent the rest of the date mute. I had committed the worst dating faux pas: I had outshone my suitor.
Yet it would seem I am not the only woman who is wondering whether it is time to hang up her brain and turn into a Stepford Datee. In America research shows successful young women are hiding their accomplishments for fear that their academic achievements and financial kudos will scare off potential suitors.
And it is no different here. Researchers from Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities discovered that high-IQ women saw marriage prospects fall dramatically, but men with high IQs had little trouble finding a mate. They found that for each 16-point rise in a woman’s IQ, her marriage prospects declined by 40%, but the man’s chances of marriage increased by 35% with each rise.
The widespread view is that accomplished women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men start out by saying they want a strong, powerful woman and then end up running off with the secretary. I should know. A few years ago my Swiss banker found my conversation too arty and cast his attentions on a lovely Spanish girl who worked in his office.
Should women pander to male insecurities? Self-help guides exhort us to flatter the male ego; don’t talk too much and let him make all the jokes if you want him to like you. Well I would rather skewer my eyes out than change my personality.
So what is the answer? Someone has to surrender in the sex war. Should women soften their image if they want to marry an alpha? Since the beginning of time anthropologists have told us women are programmed to seek a mate who can provide for her.
We all witnessed the implosion of the 1980s power couple. As women flexed their shoulder pads all you got were stressed couples who were battling for the same role and trying to find a slot in their diaries for dinner.
But now there is a third way. The second-generation feminists – that is, women in their twenties and thirties – have found a new way to solve the alpha-beta paradox. The 21st century sisters have a terrifyingly clear agenda when it comes to finding a mate. They map out their life plans early: rise to the top of their chosen career, get the smart house, the cute kids and curl up in bed with a loving beta male. The alpha girl doesn’t need Mr Alpha to sweep her off her feet and buy her a condo in town; she has enough money to do that herself. She is successful, confident and she wants a caring man who can pick up some of the domestic slack.
Penelope, 34, a high-earning public relations executive, is married to an actor. They are both comfortable acknowledging that the wife is the chief breadwinner. So it makes sense that it is her career that gets fast-tracked. “John is really irreverent and playful and after I have had people kowtowing to me all day, it is nice to be brought down to earth with a joke.”
Does he mind playing the supporting role? “I love it that my wife is this go-getting career woman. I have never been into status anyway, so I don’t feel emasculated by the fact that she earns way more money than me.”
To better understand this role reversal, we have to look at the key social changes in the past 30 years. Since 1975 the number of women entering the workforce has increased by a third and in 2005 one-third of all managers were women. Women are better educated – there are more women with advanced degrees than before – and there are now more female trainee lawyers and doctors than male ones.
This creates a shift in the way women view marriage. With their increased earning power, women are less hung up on the Jane Austen model of finding a providing husband. “Women can choose a man who has charm and looks, instead of going for the grumpy, ugly alpha just because he is solvent,” says Penelope. So is this a liberating thing?
For young women this shift in economic power has given them new choices. But what about the men? While it is true that many older men seem stuck with the “man as success object, woman as sex object” idea and would never contemplate marrying a ball-breaking alpha earner, men in their twenties and thirties seem to be redefining masculinity.
Having grown up with successful women such as Margaret Thatcher and Madonna as role models, and with popular culture awash with fantasies of all-powerful women, from Lara Croft to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, men are not so uncomfortable with the woman in control. This value system recognises the trend of female supremacy, which while not as yet the norm seems to be pointing the way for future relationships.
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What if women ruled the world?
Former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers says it could happen
TODAY
Mon., Feb. 25, 2008
If women ruled the world, everything would change, according to former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Politics would be more collegial. Businesses would be more productive. And communities would be healthier. Empowering women would make the world a better place. Blending memoir, social history and a call to action, Myers challenges us to imagine a not-too-distant future in which increasing numbers of women reach the top ranks of politics, business, science and academia. Here's an excerpt from “Why Women Should Rule the World”:
Introduction
Women should rule the world.
That was it, the answer to my frustration and growing political alienation. It seemed so simple, so obvious. Women!
If we were in charge, things might actually change. Instead of posturing, we’d have cooperation. Instead of gridlock, we’d have progress. Instead of a shouting match, we’d have a conversation. A very long conversation. But a conversation nonetheless. Everyone would just hold hands and sing “Kumbaya”.
Or would they? What would it be like if women ruled the world, I began to wonder?
Would anything really change? Would the world be a better place? My hunch was that more women in public life would, in fact, make things better.
After all, more women already have.
It’s easy (and perhaps a bit facile) to argue that men haven’t done such a great job. The last century was the bloodiest in human history, and so far, this one has been a tale of war, terrorism, religious extremism, abject poverty, and disease. I’m not saying it’s all men’s fault. But let’s just say, they’ve been in charge, and it doesn’t seem we’re much closer to finding answers to these profound and vexing problems.
On the other hand, if there are societies where women have truly ruled, they are few and far between. For virtually all of history, woman has played a supporting role to man’s, well, leading man. A comprehensive review of encyclopedia entries published in the early 1900s included only 850 women, though it covered a span of nearly 2,000 years. And the queens, politicians, mothers, wives, mistresses, beauties, religious figures, and women of a tragic fate were notable mostly for their relationships with men.
I have always believed that women could rule the world. As far back as I can remember, it has seemed obvious to me that women were, in fact, every bit as qualified as men in most endeavors, and better than them at many. Of course, the corollary that men are better than women at some things also seemed obvious, at least after the sixth grade. Before that, I thought I could do anything any boy could do. I was a good student and a good athlete, and I didn’t have much trouble keeping up with boys in the classroom or on the playground. But then Doug, another sixth grader at Wiley Canyon Elementary School in California, challenged my friend Peggy and me to a game of two-on-one basketball, first side to ten would win. He beat us 10-0.
I realized then that athletic boys are better basketball players than most girls, even the ones like Peggy and me who spent a fair amount of time shooting hoops. While I confess this was a bit disappointing at the time, I certainly didn’t think that boys were better at everything, or even most things. That idea simply never occurred to me.
Maybe it’s because I grew up surrounded by strong women. My mother, a product of her generation, left college after two years to marry my father, a young Navy pilot.
Within a few years, she had three little girls and a husband who was often at sea. With Castro’s ascent in Cuba, then the war in Vietnam, my dad was gone for weeks or even months at a time, and my mom was left to manage alone. One of my earliest memories is of helping my mom pack a little plastic Christmas tree, some cookies, and a few wrapped packages into a big box to send my dad, who was on a ship somewhere in Southeast Asia. But she never complained (at least not when my sisters and I were listening), and she never seemed overwhelmed by all that she had to do. The Navy, like all branches of the military, would collapse without the community of able women (and now a lot of men) who manage things stateside, while their husbands (and now some wives) are away. My mother and her network of Navy wives helped each other tend to sick children, unstop kitchen sinks, and deal with worrisome news from the war raging half a world away.
After my father left the Navy, we moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles, and my mom eventually earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees, then went to work, first as a counselor at a local college, then as an executive at the phone company. She was good at what she did, rose quickly in her various jobs, and got a lot of satisfaction from her professional accomplishments. I didn’t always like it when my mom was gone, but I never doubted that what she was doing was important. At the time, most of the mothers in my neighborhood stayed home, so what my mom was doing was unusual. But my dad was supportive, and my sisters and I were more proud than displaced even when we had to eat dry macaroni and overcooked hot dogs every time it was my sister Betsy’s turn to make dinner. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go to college and have a career as well as a family of my own. Both my parents, but especially my mother, encouraged me and led me to believe that it was possible.
My father’s mother, Grandma Bernadette, also shaped my ideas about what women could accomplish, in ways I think she never would have imagined. Her husband — my grandfather — died of congestive heart failure (he had rheumatic fever as a child) when he was just thirty-seven, leaving her with five children: my dad, who was eleven, and his four sisters, ages twelve to two.
My grandfather had owned a gas station on Main Street in Racine, Wisconsin, while my grandmother was busy raising the children and playing the organ at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. She hadn’t been very involved in the business and it certainly wasn’t a business where one expected to find women in 1946. Because of his heart condition, my grandfather didn’t have any life insurance, but his business was insured. So when he died as my grandmother liked to tell it the insurance men came to her house, suggested she sell it and the gas station, and move with her children into the Catholic orphanage across town. She told them to get the hell off her porch and never come back. She kept the station and managed the day- to-day operations until she sold it more than thirty years later.
She raised five children, put them all through college, and still found time to play the organ at Mass every weekday and five times on Sunday. While she clearly missed things about being married and having a father for her children she never really dated or considered marrying again. She would sometimes say she never found the right fellow, but her daughters believe that she simply liked being the boss.
So my grandmother by fate, rather than design was a small business owner and single mom long before women routinely did either, let alone both. And I’ve often wondered: What would have happened to another family if the mother had died and left the father with five young children? How many men could have managed to run the business, raise the kids, and volunteer at church six days a week, all by themselves?
In addition to my mother and grandmother, I grew up surrounded by accomplished women. The principal of my elementary school. My guidance counselor in high school. My father’s sisters. My friends’ mothers, and my mother’s friends. It seemed to me that women were capable of doing just about anything. Not that they were always allowed to, of course. When I was in second grade (even before I learned that boys were better at basketball), our teacher asked us to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. The kid next to me, Robert, drew himself as a TV repairman. While his choice of career may not have thrilled his parents, it struck me hard. Wow, I thought. He can be anything. I have to be a teacher, or a nurse, or a nun. I drew myself as a teacher.
Happily, the years since I finished the second grade have seen an exponential increase in options. Girls can now aspire to be elementary school teachers or university presidents; nurses or doctors; nuns or in many denominations priests or ministers or rabbis. Girls and boys can be engineers, entrepreneurs, or astronauts. They can repair televisions or appear on them as actors or journalists. They can build homes or stay home with the kids.
And they can be press secretary to the president of the United States, as I was.
When I joined Bill Clinton’s start-up presidential campaign in 1991, I was confident that women would play an ever more important role, but I never gave a minute’s thought to what would happen if we won. When we did and I became the first woman to serve as White House press secretary it changed my life. But it didn’t change the world. And I came to believe that it would take more women, lots more women, to do that.
After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics: as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater through and through. And I enjoyed the give-and-take of the political debate. But over the years, something changed, and I found myself more and more frustrated by the bitterness that now gripped the capital. Increasingly, it seemed, both sides were more interested in winning the argument than solving the problem. And the result was gridlock, polarization, and cynicism.
Surely there was another way, a better way. And I started to think about how we might move from a culture of confrontation to one of consensus, from I-win-you-lose to win-win. Was anyone in Washington practicing what I was only preaching? Were there people talking and listening to each other? Were they working together? Were they treating each other with respect and trying to see the world through each other’s eyes? And I realized that, yes, there were some. And one of the places it seemed to be happening on a regular basis was among the women in the U.S. Senate.
Now, granted it’s still a relatively small group: sixteen women. And it’s easier to find comity among sixteen than among 100 or 535 or 300 million. But something seemed to be happening there. On paper, the women didn’t have that much in common. They were liberal and conservative. They came from small states and big ones, both coasts and the middle. Several were single; others were mothers and grandmothers. They had different interests, different agendas, and different strengths. And yet. They had managed to transcend the bitter partisanship that has infected much of Congress, and forged not just political alliances on issues where they agreed — but genuine friendships.
We relate on a personal level, because every one of us has had to overcome the obstacles of people underestimating us and people trivializing us,†said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas. We’re good friends.
The ideologically diverse group has never formed an official caucus, but in recent years, they’ve worked together on a variety of issues, including more access to individual retirement accounts for homemakers, more funds for home health care and breast cancer research, and a resolution condemning the ruling military junta in Burma for its brutal suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators. They have also reached out to other women leaders around the world. A few years ago, they met with women leaders from Northern Ireland, who were working to build a more civil society in that war-torn country; the Irish women came away inspired.
My experience has been that women tend to be better at working across the aisles and are more pragmatic and results oriented, said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine.
While sixteen women in the Senate does not an airtight argument make, it certainly reinforced my own prejudices. Women do seem more interested in consensus. They do seem less consumed by the constant who’s-up-and-who’s-down score-keeping aspect of the political game. They do seem more willing to listen to other people’s opinions. That’s not to say that all women fit this model; they don’t. But wouldn’t increasing the number of women in Congress change the culture? Wouldn’t it make the elusive search for common ground more fruitful? Wouldn’t it make the political process more productive?
Wouldn’t it? Yes, I thought; it would. In fact, if there were more women in positions of power, not just in Congress, but across the United States and around the world, lots of things would be better. Not perfect. But better. We’d have more representative government; a stronger economy; and a healthier and more sustainable planet. We’d be better able to resolve conflicts and keep the peace. We’d have stronger families.
And so I set out to write this book: Why Women Should Rule the World.
I knew my own story, as political operative and as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a friend. But I needed more. So I talked to friends and read articles, studies, and books. I interviewed prominent and successful women, from primatologist Jane Goodall and Senator Dianne Feinstein, to activist and skin care entrepreneur Anita Roddick and Nobel Prize laureate environmental activist Wangari Maathai. I explored the growing body of scientific literature on the topic.
When I actually sat down to explore the argument, however, I realized it was going to be harder than I thought. Women haven’t been able to carve out much space on the top floors of any endeavor, in any country or culture in the history of the world. Without a doubt, they’ve made tremendous progress in the past three decades, but the numbers are still small.
In the United States, millions more women than men vote, and we have a female Speaker of the House for the first time in history. Still, women make up only 16 percent of the U.S. Senate, 16 percent of the House, and not quite 24 percent of state legislators. Only eight of the nation’s fifty governors are women. And while a woman has finally made a serious run, no woman has ever been elected president. Around the world, there is an increasing if still small number of women serving as heads of state or heads of government; but the small numbers make it hard to predict just how things would change if in every region of the world, every level of government was half women.
Ditto business. Women make the vast majority of consumer decisions in this country by many accounts, more than 80 percent. But we still don’t have enough influence at the top of the corporations that make and sell those goods and services. True, women now fill about half of all managerial positions, but among Fortune 500 companies, women account for only 16 percent of corporate officers, 5 percent of top earners and an anemic 2 percent of CEOs. Is it really possible to know how the world would change if women had their names on half the doors to the executive suites?
The pattern repeats and repeats. Women make up half of law school graduates and roughly a third of all lawyers. But they account for only 15 percent of partners in law firms or federal judges, and 10 percent of law school deans or general counsels at Fortune 500 companies. Women make up nearly half of medical school graduates but only a quarter of doctors and 10 percent of the deans of medical schools. They are 20 percent of university presidents, but still woefully underrepresented in tenure-track teaching positions, especially in math, science, and engineering. How would a giant increase in the number of women at all levels change law, medicine, and academia?
These were among the questions that I wanted to explore.
