Category Archives: marriage and relationships

Your mother was wrong: One-night stands CAN lead to marriage

Posted on August 24, 2010 | 1 Comment

Yes, that headline is a hussie-brazen attempt to boost my readership.

But it’s true.

As Salon reports today, University of Iowa sociologist Anthony Paik’s survey of 642 adults in Chicago [woot] finds that it isn’t so much whether you hold out or not that determines relationship quality, but how ready both of you are for a relationship after that awkward next morning.

(Oh yes, we all know that unique discomfort, or as my friend X used to say of that next morning, “I never went to bed with an ugly man, but I sure woke up with a few.” ba-dum)

Paik finds that after controlling for people who had zero interest in having a relationship (or about 90% of the men I met when I was in my 20s), there was no difference in the average relationship quality between those who waited until things were serious to have sex and those who hooked up for a quickie or who went the “friends with benefits” route.  According to a press release, “Couples who became sexually involved as friends or acquaintances and were open to a serious relationship ended up just as happy as those who dated and waited….We didn’t see much evidence that relationships were lower quality because they started off as hookups.”

It’s true that hook-up relationships were of lower quality at the outset, but Paik finds that’s because certain people are prone to finding relationships unrewarding, and those individuals are more likely to form hookups.

“People with higher numbers of past sexual partners were more likely to form hookups, and to report lower relationship quality. Through the acquisition of partners, Paik said, they begin to favor short-term relationships and find the long-term ones less rewarding.”  Hmmm, I know a few of those people.

So you can sleep around and still get married. Whew. I’m not sure we needed a sociologist to tell us this, but it will maybe tame some of the hand-wringing about hook-up culture.

The more pressing issue for many young people nearing 30 is not whether they should follow “The Rules” and not sleep with him on the first date, but how to “convert,” as they say in football. According to Hannah Seligson, in her book “A Little Bit Married,” a lot of young adults are in committed relationships. Those relationships just don’t ever get past the living-together stage.

Seligson interviews hundreds of young adults in serious relationships and zeroes in on the moment when one of the pair (usually the woman) wants to make it official but the other prefers things just as they are. These are not star-struck newlyunweds, but those who have been living together long enough to have attended the bar mitzvahs and Christmases with the “in-laws,” graduated from the futon to a real couch, or even relocated together for the other’s job.

She chronicles the perpetual imbalance that seems to divide guys from gals: the latter have no fear of commitment, while the former just can’t get the ball into the endzone. Why is that?

Along the way she makes an interesting point. Back in the Bette Draper era, women cooked and cleaned, threw the dinner party for the boss, kept the kids out of sight, and managed their husband’s life. If you put it that way, who wouldn‘t want a wife? Heck, I want a wife if that’s the deal.  But then everything changed, and the deal isn’t quite as sweet anymore. For men, then, the question becomes, why get married? Why get none of the benefits of a “wife” but all the drama? Ack, sure, there’s that thing called irrational love, but that wears off, they fear.

This, of course, makes women miserable. They move in together, according to Seligson, with a strategy. It’s less a test drive and more a step down the aisle.  They then proceed to hang on, and on, and on in the relationship that has no signs that the guy is ever going to rent that tux.  In the end, the book is a how-to for women stuck in limbo. Her advice is sound, and she never advocates for conniving, as some books revert to (aka The Rules). She levels with women. I like that about the book. Case in point: She points out that women tend to read into every little nuance way. too. much.  Or as she puts it, “premarital cohabitation may be riskier for women because they are entering into relationships that they perceive as being more committed than they actually are.”

One thing I wish more authors would do, Seligson included, is broaden the scope. Or perhaps I should say, I wish more publishers would widen the scope. I know firsthand what a struggle it is to get publishers to include a group doesn’t include a Bryn Mawr graduate. I’m guessing Seligson interviewed a lot of couples from a lot of different income levels, but in the end,  “A Little Bit Married” focuses almost exclusively on the more elite couples. Publishers are so allergic to stories about those in Red States or in the South or in the factories and farmsteads of flyover country that we rarely hear about their stories. But this group is also opting to live together, and their paths are often a harbinger to what’s happening up the income scale.

Young women of more means see marriage as a capstone to their successful life. Once they have the master’s degree, once they are established in their career, once they have the nice condo, then it’s time for marriage.  Young women of lesser means also see it as a capstone, but unfortunately for them, it’s a capstone they can less often attain. Those who are poor exalt marriage so much, in fact, that it is nearly unattainable in their eyes. My friend Maria Kefalas in her book “Promises I Can Keep” finds that low-income black women in Philadelphia, where she did her study, would love to be married “some day.” But they want it to be right. They want the white dress, the big wedding, the house and picket fence. But the odds of them getting that are mighty slim. So they stay single, waiting for that moment to arrive. The difference of course is that many lower-income women stay single but still have children. This trend of living together with children is beginning to seep up the chain to couples, black and white, in the lower middle classes now as well.

On the other hand, women in the Midwest’s farm belt tend to marry early because, as one young man we interviewed in “Not Quite Adults” said, it’s the ways it’s done around here. In essence, you’ve known your girlfriend since grade school so you might as well get married. Likewise, couples in the South marry early as well, largely because the South is more religious overall. But before everyone goes all wistful at these young lovebirds, remember that they also get divorced at much higher rates than those who delay. Half of those who marry before age 20 will not make it to their 15th wedding anniversary, nor will 35% of those who marry before age 25.

As for the elites, she’s correct in pointing out the gulf between men and women when it comes to marriage. I also think that gulf will likely narrow as women begin to outearn men in the workforce and move solidly up the career ladder. There’s still a hangover it seems, despite all of women’s progress, that they need to be taken care of in life. That sense has certainly diminished since Bette Draper’s day, but it’s not entirely gone. Why else would they press so for marriage? It’s not as if you can’t have kids and raise a family without the piece of paper–look at Sweden or Norway. There’s a lot of norms and traditions behind marriage, and I think we feed this line to young girls more than young boys.

But if you’ve passed the 30s mark, have a degree from an elite school, and are living with a man you love but who just can’t pull the trigger, this book will help you determine whether you can wait it out, take a stand, or, alas, leave. (You might also be heartened to know that college-educated couples are marrying at higher rates than their peers.)

I’d advocate for a fourth way– making peace with living together if it’s a stable, loving relationship. After all, marriage guarantees nothing.

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Posted in GenX, marriage and relationships, millennials

A Lost Generation on the horizon

Posted on August 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future, has the key to my heart. In his recent piece on reinventing our economy, he puts his money on manufacturing and goods-producing as a route to building a strong middle class.

Since 2000, we’ve lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs. Instead of making things here, we borrow $2 billion a day to cover our trade deficits.

I recently drove to Michigan City from Chicago, a route that takes me through Gary, Hammond, and other rusting cities and towns. It’s a depressing sight. The grocery stores, car dealerships, banks and churches are long closed, replaced by  Costco-sized “adult entertainment” warehouses, junkyards, and liquor stores. The $50 an hour job (with benefits) has been replaced by the $10 an hour job at the Majestic Star or Horseshoe casino. Sure, some of this transformation was inevitable. But some of it was hastened by government and Wall Street policies.

Borosage for one thinks this loss is not an inevitable product of globalization. He thinks our choice to let manufacturing go elsewhere is  a matter of ideology (free markets rule) and Panglossian policy (free markets will fix all). This market “fundamentalism” got us into a lot of hot water, and unfortunately, young adults are paying the price and feeling the brunt of it right now.

The recession is the last nail in a coffin of a long string of changes that have affected young adults just starting out in the workforce. For years these changes–declining wages as casinos replaced steel mills, declining opportunities as low-skilled jobs were outsourced overseas — were felt largely by those with the least education. But now, even college grads are out of work, and facing the prospect of lower wages over their life time.

We’re facing a lost generation if we don’t begin investing in our future in more than just platitudes. Young adult unemployment is at an all-time high, and without some policies to restore well-paid jobs here in the US, we’re going to see some of the so-called pathologies afflicting our poorest communities seeping up the line into more working-class and middle-class communities. In many respects, it’s already happening, and this latest deep recession is only speeding up the process.

As Ron Peck says in his March Atlantic Monthly article,

“If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.”

Take marriage, for example. Kathy Edin and Maria Kefalas in their book “Promises I Can Keep,” have documented what happens to marriage when men can no longer provide for a family, as many urban black men no longer can. In these cases, women have instituted a “pay to stay” rule, and many men cannot pay, so they don’t stay. This trend of growing single-mother families is creeping into higher-income and white society as well. As Edin told the Atlantic reporter:

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities, including white communities. And where it‘s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you‘re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don‘t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

W. Bradford Wilcox of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers agrees. “We could be headed in a direction where, …for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal… The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences.”

In Japan, which experienced its own lost decade in the 1990s as its economy collapsed and refused to revive, workers who began their careers amid that slump are and are now in their 30s , make up 60% of the cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities reported by employers, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development.

Borosage places his bets on green technology as the new way out of this decline. But, as he says, competition is already fierce, and we need some support for this fledgling savior, including “U.S. renewable energy standards that ensure a growing market for alternative energy, aggressive use of government procurement to help domestic producers, tax credits and other subsidies to help start-ups, expanded investment in science and technology and, finally, setting a price on carbon emissions.”

“This forward-looking manufacturing strategy is vital to rebuilding a broad middle class — as other nations have demonstrated. Germany, for example, maintains a large manufacturing trade surplus that is now fueling its recovery, even as its workers receive higher pay and better benefits and work far fewer hours than Americans.”

All I can say is, we’d better hurry up. We have an entire generation at stake.

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Posted in delayed adulthood, marriage and relationships, millennials

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“Shift” is a new site on young urban adults and the new America

Posted on August 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

I like this… a site by News 21 and Medill School of Journalism on life as a 20-something in the city.

Through quick posts and clips, it taps into a variety of issues this generation grapples with–in their own voice.

Other projects News 21 produces include “The New Voters: Identity & U.S. Politics” and “The Young & the Wireless: Net Gen Rising”

Thanks to Alan Reifman at the Emerging Adulthood blog for the info.

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Posted in debt, marriage and relationships, millennials, parents, politics

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Are we at a crossroads of “manhood”?

Posted on July 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

Aaron Traister, a community college grad in Philadelphia, is a stay-at-home dad. In a recent article in Salon, he writes about this “new normal” life that he is living. His wife is working because she can make more than he can, and he’s staying at home with the kids and pursuing a writing gig on the side. And, as he notes, this isn’t uber-Leftie Brooklyn. This is blue-collar Philly–where the cops and firemen live.

He ran into an elderly lady at the park one day who complimented him on his “good dad” skills, and, she said:

She liked seeing so many dads at the park now. She thought the economy might have something to do with the number of men she’d begun to notice like me, but she hoped that we were learning an important lesson about how rewarding our lives could be when we became more focused on our family and less focused on a paycheck.

They may not be less focused on the paycheck by choice, unfortunately. As Traister acknowledges, albeit with an optimists twist:

“We’ve read a lot of stories in the past few years about the crisis of men, like Hanna Rosin’s recent “End of Men” article in the Atlantic. And it’s true that the landscape of employment in this country has changed, probably forever. But I’m beginning to think that the recession isn’t repainting the American landscape so much as it is putting the finishing touches on a canvas that’s been in progress since before I was born.

Yes, that landscape for men–especially men like Traister without a four-year degree–has indeed changed. This group of men is struggling to get started in life. Their earnings are falling at a faster rate than most, mainly because the manufacturing jobs of the past have been replaced by lower-paying, less secure service sector jobs. In addition, for some reason–likely because men are less “good at” school–they are not attending college at the same rates as women. And their earnings are beginning to reflect it. Unions once ensured that a manual labor job at least paid a decent wage. But with unions emasculated, the remaining jobs, even in the small manufacturing sector, don’t pay as well anymore. And the service economy? Ha. It’s the lowest paying sector in town.

Men are facing a new, and much more “feminine” labor market on the horizon, and it seems they’ve been reluctant to adapt. Gone are the macho jobs, replaced by jobs such as home health aides, nurses, teachers, barbers, and food preparation. It’s a tough adjustment–a blow to one’s self-image, when that image is of firemen and tool and die makers. Cleaning a bed pan or making a meal is not a “man’s” job–and certainly not for the amount of money those jobs pay.

But then came the recession, and the last gasp for many men. Men have by far been hardest hit by this “mancession.”  However, the recession was simply a final nail in the coffin for a way of life that was on life support anyway. So how will they adapt? Will they, like Traister and his blue-collar neighbors, embrace new roles? Or will they simply disappear from the family landscape, like so many other impoverished men have done?

In a juxtaposition that could not have been better planned, another article, “A Generation X Bedtime Story,” by blogger Becky Boop,  on Salon’s sister site drives home the changing gender roles. In that article, a 30-something woman talks about how she and her friends were facing a mini crisis that their lives were lacking in meaning. Their work lives, that is.

The three women were all stars of their high school: international baccalaureate grads who went on to prestigious colleges and even more prestigious, high-powered careers. Yet something was missing. The corporate world was empty. So, somewhere in their 30s, they had a moment of realization and quit their high-salary jobs to become a teacher, a human service worker, and a stay-at-home mom. “Is this idealism in its new form?” she asks:

Not the college-aged anarchistic and rootless version, which is destined to burn bright before blowing out. What we find instead is a slower, more methodical, but eventually, more certain feeling that we must do more for our communities, our families and ourselves?

Good for them… but wow what a role reversal. Becky is choosing to give up a high-powered career for a writing and communications job in human services, while Traister is staying at home with the kids since his wife earns more. It wasn’t long ago that women were chafing at the emptiness of staying at home, so they threw off the aprons and flocked to college. Now they’re successful and looking to redefine success. Yay.  Meanwhile, their husbands are stay-at-home dads (yay again) because their wives can earn more than they can. All that in about 20 years. And people are still surprised when their kids’ path to adulthood looks so different from their own path. “When I was your age…”

So next time you ask yourself, what’s up with “kids” these days, think about the new landscape they’re navigating. Think about the new rules they’re negotiating. Changes as profound as these do not come without some uneasiness and some soul-searching. But they might be good in the long run.  One thing for sure, it will take an acceptance of men in new roles. If we don’t create acceptable new roles, another thing is for certain: we risk losing men to despair and feelings of inadequacy that have sent so many low-income men into lives of crime and disconnection.

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Posted in delayed adulthood, education, GenX, marriage and relationships, millennials, work and earnings

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Should we shift some resources from the elderly to the young?

Posted on July 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

In a fit of optimism last post, I put my faith in the current generation. I continue to be impressed by their optimism, idealism, and take-charge attitudes. There’s a group of young people out there who are running circles around the rest of us, doing things we only talked about at that age. A slice of this generation has a preternatural sense of balance in life that’s leading them to shuck convention and marry much later (and better), demand some work-life balance from employers, and reframe what it means to be an activist among other things. They’re doing it their way, and more power to ‘em.

In part, my optimism was also from the wave of  warm and fuzzy after the Fourth of July. Who can resist Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful” as the fireworks explode overhead and kids thrill to the fact that they’re up late, sitting on dad’s shoulders, peering over a sea of people.

Here in Chicago, our fireworks take place on the lakefront, where our city planners back in the 1880s made sure that the lakefront and its gorgeous parks were never ceded to the mercantile class to build high-rises that butt up against the lake, and thus ensuring that only the rich enjoy the pleasures of water. People of all stripes need a place to play, a place to cool off in the hot summer, a place to take their kids, said the urban planners. And as a result of this great urban vision, we enjoy miles of uninterrupted public space of blue water and green parks.  On the Fourth of July, those parks are filled with families and their bbqs. The result of that urban vision–a “we’re all in this together” vision–is enough to make me optimistic at least for a couple days.

But then the reality of where we stand comes hurtling back. While the ant’s view of the Fourth of July, with people coming together to hang out and put their worries aside for the day, gives me hope, the bird’s-eye view makes me worry.  It’s a case of micro optimism against macro realities. Like this macro reality from Isabel Sawhill on whether the American Dream of doing better than your parents has come to an end:

As a result of economic growth, each generation can usually count on having a higher income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the previous one. … But that kind of steady progress appears to have stalled. Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.

The main reason today’s families have modestly higher overall income than prior generations is simple: More members of the household are working. Women have joined the labor force in a big way, and their earnings have increased as well. But with so many families now having two earners, continued progress along this path will be difficult unless wages for both men and women rise more quickly.

This didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a long time coming as our economy shifted, global pressures kept wages low, unions were busted, and our supposed trickle down economics didn’t do much trickling. A story on Monday in the New York Times about Scott, a 24-year-old struggling to get started, managed to capture this big shift in just a few paragraphs.

Scott’s grandfather came out of WWII to a job as a stockbroker (no MBA required). He earned a modest living, and invested in some real estate on the side and made a tidy sum. The firm that hired him changed hands more than once, but he continued to work out of the same office in the town he lived with his wife. Steady job, steady wages, a few opportunities to invest (even though he grew up in modest circumstances), no college or credentials required– a simple chance to prove yourself and be rewarded. The American Dream.

When Scott’s father graduated from college in 1976, manufacturing was still breathing, and he went to work for a company that made sandpaper and other abrasives. He and his wife bought a white colonial a couple doors down from his parents. He eventually moved over to Stanley Works, and later Endeavor Tool Company as a general manager, where he still works today.  A college degree followed by a steady job in manufacturing, upward mobility with each move, a wife, a house, a family. Middle-class security.

And what about Scott? He has a college degree from Colgate, no debt, but no job either. There’s no manufacturing to fall back on, even if he wanted to. He’s living with his parents until he can get a foot on the ladder. Does he risk slipping on that ladder? Time will tell. He’s probably going to be ok, but only because his family is there to support him financially and psychologically. Yet with the erosion of the middle class, and the decimation of the working class, fewer and fewer families are poised to offer that support.

Inequality has been growing at alarming rates, and threatens to stanch any progress we make. The Millennials just now entering the workforce have an uphill climb. For every Scott, with his degree and economic safety net, there are three young people who are losing their shot at the middle class.

As Sawhill says, if you want to join the middle class today you have to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time, and marry before you have children. “If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class [$50,000 a year for a family of three] or above rise from 56 to 74 percent.”

Yet more than half the births to women under age 30 are to single mothers. That alone dramatically increases the chances of poverty. Some of those single births are to couples who are living together, so they’re only single technically. A very small slice is to women with higher education. College, after all, is the best contraception. Most of the births are to women with just a high school degree or some college.  And because the well-educated tend to marry each other, it exacerbates income disparities and life chances. “If we add to these family changes the fact that wages for low-skilled workers have stagnated or declined in recent decades,” says Sawhill, “we can explain most of the increase in poverty and much of the increase in the income gap as well.”

The other element on that list in getting to the middle class was working full-time. (one might add, at a decent wage). Young adults today often work part-time when they would prefer to work full-time.  Prior to the recession 30% of young adults age 20-24 were working part-time. With the recession that figure has no doubt climbed, since 15% of workers age 20-29 were forced by the recession to shift from a full-time job to part-time. Many feel lucky to have any job, given the sky-high unemployment rate for young adults. In June 2010, 17.8% of men age 20-24 were unemployed, and 11.5% of men age 25-34 were unemployed. For women–12.6% of those age 20-24 were unemployed, and 8.9% of those aged 25-34

So it feels like we have a long way to go to ensure that young adults have the same shot at success as we did and our parents did. While the elite young adults are more impressive than ever, a large slice of our future is struggling, and with them, we risk shrinking our middle class even further. Elites striving ahead at the top, and a big group struggling at the bottom, with no middle in between. Never good.

Sawhill says we should start redistributing the resources from the elderly–who thanks to solid policies and a strong lobby have a fairly comfy life. Medicare and Social Security are taking bigger and bigger portions of our domestic spending. As she says, “Such a shift would not only help create more opportunity, it would improve the productivity of the next generation, making its members better able to contribute to the costs of retirement – including their own.”

I have to agree, albeit reluctantly since I’m closer to recouping my Social Security than not, and I don’t have kids myself. I’ve contributed a lot to this social contract by paying taxes and not having kids. Yet it still makes sense to shift some of this support to the young, when they need it the most. Case in point: I was just home helping my aging parents recover from a health issue, and here’s what they get: free medical care (my parents are both vets too boot), prescriptions for about $10 a pop, a home health aide who comes in one or twice a week to see to their physical therapy, help bathe and dress, do some light housekeeping, and give massages. A nurse comes in once a week to make sure they’re taking their meds, takes their blood pressure and vitals, and follows up with them on other health-related needs. Meals on Wheels brings a free meal once a day. They could also get some transportation help if they needed it. Dad could get a motorized scooter to get around in if he wouldn’t be so stubborn.  They also spent a week in rehab at the local nursing home, gratis.

Now granted, they both paid their dues. My dad worked all his life and employed 10 or so men for more than 40 years. He also fought in WWII. My mom was a WAVE in WWII and a homemaker after that. They paid their taxes and contributed to their communities for their entire lives. So they deserve these perks.

But young adults could use some help as well. Some clearer paths from school to work, maybe some subsidized housing, cheaper child care, better health care, cheaper loans for college, more scholarships–we could stand to get a little creative in helping those young people who will be supporting us in our old age. If we don’t, we may never enjoy what my parents now enjoy in their old age: a solid safety net.

So just as Chicago’s city planners had the foresight to create a park for everyone to enjoy (and left an amazing legacy in the process), we too can leave a legacy and ensure that we and future generations continue to have a place in the sun, so to speak–a shot at security and a sense of comfort.

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Posted in work and earnings, poverty, millennials, GenX, marriage and relationships, parents, politics

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She’s the man

Posted on July 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

A new set of memoirs by young women quietly mark the moment when women truly have, as Virginia Woolf once  wrote, a room of their own.

As Salon says, in reviewing the memoirs:

This crop of books is laying out what it feels like to be a young, professional, economically and sexually independent woman, unencumbered by children or excessive domestic responsibility, who earns, plays and worries her own way through her 20s and 30s, a stage of life that until very recently would have been unimaginable or scandalously radical, but which we now – miraculously – find somewhat ho-hum.

Probably because it’s happening right under our feet, I don’t think we realize the enormity of this change. Women are on a tear.  Thanks to their own mothers and grandmothers who cut a rough trail through the wild, young women today are cruising on paved highways. Sure, there are still a few detours and bumps in the road, but women are making great time.

Here’s a few of their accomplishments (and put this in perspective of just 30 years ago):

  • They outnumber men in college and grad school
  • The economic gains to education are higher for women than men
  • They outnumber men in the workforce (by a hair)
  • In some major cities, they outearn men
  • In 162 countries, the greater the economic and political power of women, the greater the country’s economic success
  • In China, women own more than 40% of private business
  • They’re no longer dependent on men for their financial security. To wit: the age at first marriage in the US is rising quickly, and one in five women in their 40s are childless.

Salon notes the literary milestone these books represent. They have surpassed the cage-rattling manifestos of The Second Sex or the Feminine Mystique. They are not critiquing society and culture ala Joan Didion. Rather they are books that simply capture the daily lives of young women carving out their lives and figuring out who they are in this brave new (free) world. They face loneliness, happiness, discontent, thrills, freedoms, challenges, and constraints all in one swoop. The hurdles they face are normal, quotidian hurdles of a life beyond the equality battles. They are, in a word …. like men!

Like men, but better, according the latest issue of The Atlantic, whose July/August issue blares: The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control–Of Everything.

I’m not sure how to take that article. There’s a thread of misogyny running through it (and it’s written by a woman!). Its relentless tally of women’s accomplishments is always juxtaposed with men’s decline. It’s a zero-sum game, apparently.  “We’re the new ball and chain,” one man says morosely, at the end of a section on how women are often the main breadwinner in families.

For every accomplishment by women, the article implies, there’s a loss by men.

  • More men have only high school degrees than women.
  • Men drop out of high school at much higher rates than women.
  • Men lost 8 million jobs in the recession, far more than women.
  • The bastions of blue-collar men–manufacturing and construction–have been decimated.
  • Wages have stagnated since the 1970s for men with less than a BA.
  • One in five men of prime working age is not working, the highest rate ever recorded.
  • Men dominate only 15 of the job categories projected to grow in the future.
  • Men only earn 40% of the bachelor’s degrees; several colleges add “male” to the list of affirmative action preferences in admissions.
  • Fatherhood and “head of household” is taking a hit; 40% of children are born to unmarried parents, and many lower-income women institute a “pay to stay” rule in the house.

Susan Faludi’s Stiffed comes to mind.

I’m not sure we have to pose this as an us-against-them fight, which the Atlantic article does, at least implicitly. It’s certainly unsettling for men, who after all have been used to inheriting the keys to the kingdom. But is it as alarming, earth-shattering, morally dangerous as implied? I don’t think women are “taking over.” They just happen to be coming of age at a time when the world wants more skills that they’re good at–skills like communication, negotiation, nurturing, “social intelligence,” and smarts. More brain, less brawn. More “flat” organizations that rely on collaboration and less boss-man.  Women–and their biological and socialized selves–are at the right place at the right time.They have the skill set that is in demand.

Unfortunately, that skill set doesn’t demand the higher wages. And therein lies the real story.

In fact, the article fails to mention is a few realities that paint a slightly different picture. As most media seem to do, this article focuses on the elite. So while women with college degrees are faring pretty well, the picture looks quite different if you widen the scope to include everyone. For example, take wages.

The median (typical) annual earnings of employed, white male high school graduates (aged 25-34) in 1979 were $44,172. In 2007, it had dropped to $31,000 after adjusting for inflation.

The same group of women, meanwhile, saw an increase in their wages, from $14,599 to $20,000. Good news, right? Sure. But those wages are still $11,000 lower than men’s. So much for parity.  The same is true about blacks and Hispanics. Women, even after their wage gains, are still earning considerably less than their male counterparts.

Among college grads, wages are a little more equal, but women still earn less. The wages of white men with a college degree held steady at $50k in 1979 and 2007. White women’s wages rose, but only from $29k in 1979 to $39k in 2007.

The place where women outshine men is at the low end of the wage scale– those earning less than $9 an hour. Whoopie, right? About 15% of white women earned less than $9 an hour in 2007, compared to only 8% of white men. The shares are much higher for black and Hispanics. 31% of Hispanic women earn less than $9 an hour, while 23% of Hispanic men do.

Women are concentrated in low-wage work–those professions like home health aides, teachers, day care workers, and other “helping” professions. Men are reluctant to join them, and no wonder. The Atlantic article says that jobs in health care and the helping professions are the wave of the future, and women are poised to take those jobs, leaving men further behind. “Men have been remarkably unable to adapt,” the authors claim. But I’m not so sure it’s a case of inability to adapt. Many more women live in poverty today than men. I think men are just unwilling to work for those wages.

A key reason we see this surge in women into the workforce is because they are forced by declining male wages to make up the slack. But the jobs the majority of women are taking are low-paid.  These aren’t the elite women with master’s degrees. These are the working class women whose husbands have lost jobs, or they are the middle-class women who feel the need to move to better school districts in more expensive neighborhoods (and more expensive mortgages). They are taking the jobs that the new economy offers– low-paid work with crazy hours, no steady shifts, and few benefits.

That to me is not progress.

Because most journalists are part of the elite, they write about themselves–those people they see in the office everyday or on the train home. They write about their struggles with balancing the act of work and family, or the rise in young women heading into law firms, or the growing freedom of their own daughters. (to wit: the author of the Atlantic piece has an online debate with her own daughter, son, and husband about women’s rights here…seriously. Now that’s stretching to find your interview.)They also write about it because that’s who reads the books and papers. (As our editor said, “make this book about the elite kids because it’s elite parents who buy books.)

But the majority in this country does not have that lifestyle. The majority are working their fingers to the bone. They get up 4am to get far across town so they can be at the day care center when it opens for the elite to drop off their kids. They probably work til noon and then hightail it (often on unreliable public transportation) to a second job in a hospital, mopping up after someone who has just thrown up. They head home around 7, hoping that their 12-year-old has remembered to put a load of laundry on and popped the hot dogs in the microwave for dinner for the 8-year-old and 4-year-old. They walk in the door and manage the crisis that no doubt has occurred, pull together a quick dinner for dad, who is walking in the door from the second shift,  before checking on homework (if they don’t fall asleep in the chair first). They clean up the house, toss the bills in the pile, probably fend off a few calls from creditors, and then flop into bed somewhere after 11, and set the alarm for 4:00.

So hurrah for the women making progress in this world. But perhaps they should take a moment and remember their sisters on the other end of the privilege train. There’s a lot of work still to be done before we can claim victory of any sort. And we certainly don’t need to be diverting our attention to the false fear that women are taking over. It’s not women who are the threat. The bigger issue is the workforce and society they are supposedly taking over. It is not a sustainable option in a country that prides itself on a high standard of living.

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The baby “bucket list” (and my abysmal oxytocin levels)

Posted on June 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

There’s been some buzz in the air lately about babies and motherhood–ok, when isn’t there? But recent statistics find that about one in five women age 40-44  are childless (er, child-free). That’s twice as high as 30 years ago.  And that got the pundits (and the worry warts) buzzing.

And yes, you wouldn’t know it dodging the double-wide Bugaboo strollers in Park Slope in Brooklyn or Lincoln Park in Chicago, but only one-third of US households have children under age 18. Don’t panic–because I know you closet demographers were about to– we still have enough children to support us all in retirement. The “replacement rate” (a buzz-kill concept if I’ve ever seen one) is 2.1 babies per fertile woman, and we’re holding tight to that goal. Clearly, some women are overachievers

I myself long ago joined the legions of underachievers extraordinaire. I have no children.  I’ll go on record here saying that, while I like kids, I don’t like them that much. Sacrilege, I know. And believe me, I’ve felt the pressure. And suffered the questions. As is the standard “what do you do?” that men get, the go-to question for women at cocktail parties is, “do you have kids?” When I say no, the immediate assumption is, awww, you poor thing. You can’t have children. But then–putting my Iowa-nice aside–I tell them that no, it just didn’t float my boat at the time. (that’s about as non-nice as an Iowan can get.) That’s when it gets uncomfortable. Thank god for cocktails at that point, because believe me, the inquirer needs an “out.” Slurp.

It has often occurred to me that perhaps I’m not normal in this regard. That I can’t really gin up any kind of exuberance for babies is odd, I know. But then I read Kay Hymowitz over at City Journal, who wrote a fascinating romp through evolutionary biology and motherhood (she’s scary-smart if you ask me). She basically says it’s hard to argue with our history–women in nature are the nurturers. Have been, still are (to a point). But at the same time, we have a big brain that responds to new worlds and new opportunities, and thus women are struggling to juggle the evolutionary instinct with today’s expanded horizons. (And you thought juggling work and child care was hard). But amid this intriguing discussion, this popped out at me:

“Evolution selected women…who wanted to hold and nurse their infants. Since women with more oxytocin receptors [the nurturing hormone] were most successful at reproducing, they tended to pass down the genes that ensured the same hormonal sensitivity in their offspring. …

Aha! Eureka! As some of you dear readers know by now, my mother was not exactly a cuddle-bug. Love her, but really, not the hugging sort of gal. I actually do not remember a warm embrace from the woman.

Now mind you, it doesn’t really bother me. But it might just explain this enervated drive to become a nurturer. I think my mother was low on oxytocin. And she passed it along to me!

Besides the slightly disturbing realization that I fall into the “weak link” category on the evolutionary scale, this news is very helpful. I’ve stood countless times amid women oohing and ahhing over babies, crinkling their noses and doing that baby-talk thing. And all I can do is stand there awkwardly.  Now I know why! Oxytocin.

While my abysmal nurturing drive could be behind my decision not to have kids, other young people today have other reasons. Many are waiting until they accomplish things, get set in life, and do all that fun stuff you’re supposed to do as 20-somethings. They are, in essence, creating a bucket list for babies. You know what I’m talking about–that rather treacley movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman where they create the bucket list of things they want to do before they die. Same concept.

Here’s some of them that various 20-somethings posted on various sites (and I’m being highly selective here):

  • Take dance lessons with hubby
  • Travel to Germany
  • Stay in bed and watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy
  • Swim with dolphins
  • Take the GRE
  • Get my dental work done
  • Enjoy oxygen in an oxygen bar in Japan

Ya gotta love that list. Many others were more “responsible” with things like save money, get established, get married(!), …  But the point is, there’s a sense of “do it while you can” before we get tied down. I will hazard a guess here, but I don’t think it was always like that. Many a woman back in the day more or less had kids because it was time, and that’s what they were supposed to do. Not that much thought went into it, I’d venture.

Other young people are postponing children until they feel “adult.” Over at Special Snowflakes, she asks, “When will I feel adult enough to have kids? Ever? …In general, having children is not considered as important a part of adult life. It is no longer one of those critical milestones that is viewed as announcing, I’m an adult.” Her fans replied with their own take on this baby thing.

Emily said: I’m waiting until I feel like I’m an adult, which I don’t yet. I mean, I have a mortgage, a husband, a 401k and a career, but I won’t feel ready for a baby until I feel like I have totally lived my young adulthood to the fullest. Mostly, I want to travel more and feel established and successful in my career before I procreate.

Feeling adult. There was definitely a time, not that long ago, when we knew what the markers were of adulthood. And most of those markers were “things,” not feelings. Things like owning a home, having a degree in hand, paying bills, landing a good job. Those things still matter, but they’re not the sine qua non of “adulthood.” Today, it’s more a feeling– that you’ve put the “fun” behind you and are ready for the slog perhaps? I don’t know for sure, but it’s an interesting question.

When did you feel adult and what was it that made you feel adult?

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A generation gap in the workforce?

Posted on June 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

My last post might have been a little brusque in taking Judith Warner to task for promoting tired stereotypes of young adults and their supposedly spoiled habits. What can I say–slap-dash writing & research habits irritate me.  But the Times redeemed itself on Sunday when it ran two good articles on young adults and the transition to adulthood. The first offered a great rundown of some of the major trends driving this slowed-down path to adulthood (not to mention they featured the Network’s research–what’s not to like :) .

Here’s some interesting tidbits:

  • National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans agree that people should be finished with school, be working and living on their own by age 22. (good luck with that.)
  • Marriage is no longer a definer of “adulthood.”
  • For the first time, a majority of mothers (54%) have a college education, up from 41% in 1990. (FYI–that’s huge)
  • The median age for first marriage is now 27 for men and 26 for women, the highest on record.
  • Motherhood is delayed across all race-ethnicities.
  • 20% of women in their 40s don’t have children.

Those are some pretty fundamental changes–especially marriage and childbearing. When half the women in the US are married before 26 and half after, that’s a lot of women waiting until they’re nearing 30 or beyond. (At the peak of the Baby Boom, the median age to marry was age 20!) All of these changes have also happened very fast in the big scheme of things. No wonder we’re all a little whip-lashed and confused.

The second article–and one more to the point of spoiled young people–is a guest column by Michael Costonis and Rob Salkowitz in the Biz section.  Costonis is executive director of Accenture’s insurance practice in North America and Salkowitz is the author of “Young World Rising.” They argue that, instead of complaining about young adults, it’s time for businesses to recognize the world that young people grew up in (especially with technology) and start to incorporate their perspectives and talents into the workforce. As they say:

“It is easy for senior managers–often people in their 50s and 60s who built their careers in a pre-Internet world–to misunderstand what the millennials want.”

Indeed it is. But if companies want to thrive in this new world order, they will need to start figuring that out. For example, young people, according to the article (and Rick’s and my own findings), are more into collaborating on projects, and a top-down hierarchy of bosses and underlings is foreign to them. It’s not that they’re spoiled. It’s just that taking orders just because someone is older doesn’t make sense to them. Blame the internet.

When I was growing up, the “boss” handed down orders and you followed them. If you followed them well enough, you took a step up a rung on the ladder, and then another, and another. (Alas, if you were a woman, “another and another” topped out at about three steps.) Today, though, young people aren’t used to that kind of hierarchy.

Kids today came of age online, and online worlds have lowered the barriers to entry. If you can prove your chops, anyone can be an expert online. Age doesn’t matter. Expertise does. The anonymity of the web and its sheer reach allows anyone at any age or “status” to geek out and get good at something and then become the resident expert on the message boards or online chat rooms. There is no “sage on the stage” dictating and lecturing online as there is in a classroom, say, or in the conference room. You prove yourself in a big, messy, noisy (faceless) online world.

This generation has also been raised in very adult worlds. When I was a kid, I sat at the top of the stairs in my pajamas spying from afar on the adults at my parents’ parties. Today’s kids are invited in. They are comfortable with adults. There is less separation between the adult world and their own. That’s partly because of changes in parenting. Many parents today waited longer to have kids (and the next generation is waiting still longer). Older parents, by the ineluctable limits of math, have fewer children and can dote on their kids more.

In addition, parents have supervised their kids’ lives much more. With the hysteria in the 1980s about child snatchers and other predators, parents circled the wagons on their kids. Today, rather than arguing about a call amongst themselves on the impromptu baseball diamond in the backyard, kids are now enrolled in formal leagues run by adults and shuttled to and fro by harried parents. They are, in other words, immersed early on in adult worlds. They no longer see adults as Oz behind the curtain, to be feared and to be a little bit in awe of.

As Costonis and Salkowitz say, this all  “can be profoundly unsettling to mature workers comfortable with a more linear work style.”

Young adults, of course, can always learn something from those who have been on the job longer. And I suspect they would readily admit that. But they just want to be heard as well, not because they have an overload of self-esteem and entitlement, but simply because that’s the way their life has played out. They have been part of the conversation from the get-go. Why do the rules change now?

And besides, if a young worker knows better how to use twitter or Photoshop than an older worker, or knows how to coordinate a project with Google docs or Basecamp, why shouldn’t their opinion count? If they have a more egalitarian approach to assignments and workflow, isn’t that a good thing?

None of this is easy, though. When you’ve worked your life climbing up the ladder and securing your foothold by playing by the rules of the game, you don’t want to think that some young upstart can come in and get there by not struggling at all. It’s like the professor who hated, hated how his own professor made him struggle and jump through idiotic hoops–only to do the very same thing to his students. Why? Because I had to suffer through it, so they should too.

Hmm, maybe it’s time to change that thinking.

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Millennials seek job security–good luck with that

Posted on May 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Over at Alan Reifman’s blog on young adults, he raises an interesting possibility. Citing the Heartland Monitor Poll of Millennials, he wonders whether we might see a hunkering down mentality take hold, just like we saw in the 1950s.

The survey, he notes, finds that:

The ferocity of the recession has left this generation with a powerful craving for certainty. Millennials would much rather stockpile savings in a bank or pay down debt than invest in the stock market. What’s even more striking is that they clearly prefer stability with one employer to the opportunity to frequently change jobs.

Such a quest for stability, he says parallels what his colleague Jeff Arnett, a developmental psychologist, found that back in the 1950s:

Young people were eager to enter adulthood and “settle down.” Perhaps because they grew up during the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II, achieving the stability of marriage, home, and children seemed like a great accomplishment to them.

Not to mention a safety zone. Stability is nice after a war and a depression. Frankly, I doubt we’ll see a return to early marriage and children. The trend toward delaying marriage has some deep roots already. It also has a lot more going for it than marrying early (like more successful marriages). But the shift in job attitudes is quite remarkable.

Up until recently, Millennials and to some extent GenX were not, as a whole, looking for a permanent job. They value job security–don’t get me wrong. But they were just accustomed to not expecting to be with an employer for a long time. After all, the company man as a concept is pretty much dead in this more nimble, globalized economy.  It’s like New Yorkers in their teeny apartments. Sure they’d like more space, but it’s not gonna happen, so they just get comfortable with the fact. Millennialls had gotten comfortable with job hopping and the gig economy: subcontractors, freelancers, no health insurance, do-it-yourself career ladders.

But something about the recession has tested this comfort zone. Not surprising I suppose. As one young woman interviewed by the Heartland poll said, “My generation feels an incredible weight now that we understand how fleeting wealth is. Now we can’t take security for granted.”

Like a dieter deprived of ice cream, take away the security and all you want is security.

It’s going to be a tough road, though, finding that security. Jesse Rothstein, the chief economist at the Dept of Labor, expects this generation to feel the pain for at least 10 years, mainly because it’s going to take them quite awhile to land a job that offers a career pathway. They’re going to be slinging a lot of drinks and selling a lot of Gap jeans for awhile, in other words.

Men especially will have a hard time with it. Even before the recession, they were struggling to get a toehold in jobs offering a decent wage. Hourly median wages of men age 25-34 fell by about $3 an hour between 1979 and 2007. (Women’s wages grew by about $2.50 an hour). At the same time, a growing share of young men are now working in low-wage jobs–those jobs paying less than $9 an hour. (Again, women fared better–fewer are working in low-wage jobs than in 1979.)

I don’t know how you find job security in those numbers.  Women may end up leading the charge here– their earnings have been climbing along with their rising education levels. They now outnumber men on campuses. That prospect–of a female main breadwinner–is a major change on the family front, and certainly a BIG change from the 1950s scene that Arnett mentions. This generation might take it all in stride. But I’m gonna guess that big shifts like that don’t happen without a hiccup.

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“G’night JohnBoy”–Waltons 2010?

Posted on March 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

NPR did a segment yesterday on more multigenerational living, and the Times followed up today.

“About 6.6 million U.S. households in 2009 had at least three generations of family members, an increase of 30 percent since 2000, according to census figures. When “multigenerational” is more broadly defined to include at least two adult generations, a record 49 million, or one in six people, live in such households, according to a study being released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.”

The most common arrangement– parents and an adult child and grandchild.

I find the “grandchild” part of that interesting, but not surprising. While  boomerangers are the typical image we think of when we think of kids moving back home, the above arrangement (child and grandchild) is decidedly not that. “Adult child and grandchild” is  not the recent Smith or StateU graduate coming home to roost after college–although there’s probably quite a bit of that, too. See my post of a few weeks ago about past recessions and moving back home.

What we found in Slouching is that there’s a huge group of young adults living on their own but treading water, about to sink.  Often this group blasted out of the starting gates of adulthood at age 18, 19, 0r 20, skipped college, and went right into the workforce. Many of the women also had a child early–either planned or by accident. Sometimes these women marry, often they do not. If they do marry,  divorce after a couple years is not uncommon. Life as a young twenty-something in a low-wage job with a child is not for the faint of heart.

Because they sidestepped college and often tried community college but got discouraged by the hoops they had to jump through to get going (they often have to pay for a string of “catch up” classes for no credit because they’re behind academically), they end up in jobs in retail or as nursing home  aides, or errand runners, or any number of jobs in the service sector. It goes without saying that these jobs come with few benefits, crazy schedules that make day care nigh impossible to arrange, and low, low pay. $10 an hour is just skimming above poverty.

So it’s no wonder they move back home. This is not a small group of “poor” kids. This is a sizable group of working class, lower-middle-class, and even middle-class kids. Look around. I bet you know someone whose child is struggling in this unforgiving job market–even before the recession.

These young people were barely treading water before the recession. You can imagine what the recession did to them. Hours are cut back, or more likely eliminated. They are now competing for jobs with people who are more qualified.  Their bills are piling up–often college bills from those private for-profit schools that promised the moon. And they are probably struggling to pay the mortgage after the teaser adjustable interest rate “adjusted.” If they’re not yet in foreclosure, they’re on their way.

Mom and dad are a haven. But of course, mom and dad are struggling as well. And it’s not easy adjusting your lives at age 50 or so and making room for your adult children and their children. If Dad is home now because he’s been out of work for months (men are the most affected in this recession), he’s not likely  a happy camper, puttering around doing odd jobs. It’s an untenable situation, not a warm and fuzzy return to the Waltons.

If we’re not going to beef up the nation’s safety net (which is almost a certainty), then we have to do something to make this path to adulthood more sure-footed. Too many young people are not “college” material and yet they have too few options–either in high school or beyond–that allow them to see a clear path into a decent-paying job.  We need more voc tech training in high school without the stigma that is now attached to it. We need more career academies in high schools. We need more apprenticeships into the trades for both men and women. We need to give this very large group of young people a true shot at life. Families can only support you so far, and for so long. We need to enable true independence for all.

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