by Gail Collins
It was a much-discussed issue for young women and their parents. “The girls are so stressed,” said Alison Foster, who talked to students of both sexes at the private Manhattan high school where she worked. “Here we’ve taught girls to do well in school and be as good as boys, which they’ve done. Now the girls are better than the boys, and they can’t get into college the way boys can. So we’ve screwed them again.”
Instead of celebrating girls’ achievements, the nation started to worry. Newsweek, in a cover story on “The Boy Crisis,” reported with alarm that there were only “44 percent of male undergraduates on college campuses: thirty years ago the number was 58 percent.” In Milton, Massachusetts, where there were twice as many girls as boys on the high school honor roll, 17-year-old Doug Anglin filed a civil rights complaint in 2006, claiming the school discriminated against male students.
If society were a person, it would complain that it just couldn’t win. There were only two sexes; one was going to have to be in the minority when it came to academic achievement. But while women’s failure to realize their potential had been regarded as a regretful shortcoming, the failure of boys seemed to be seen as a threat to civilization itself. Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s secretary of education, said the dominance of young women in higher education had “profound implications for the economy, society, families, and democracy.” Experts worried that all those tests they had imposed on schoolchildren in an effort to chart achievement had somehow encouraged the teachers to run their classes in a less boy-friendly way. “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” which the Ms. Foundation initiated to give girls a sense of possibility, evolved into “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.”
Yet anyone fearing that women were taking over the world needn’t have fretted. Their overrepresentation at the top ended with the classroom. Only 17 percent of the partners in major law firms were women in 2005—a figure that wasn’t much better than the 13 percent of a decade before. While women held nearly half of lower-level managerial jobs in American businesses, they represented only a handful of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. More than three-quarters of the American workers making $100,000 to $200,000 a year were male. By the time CBS made Katie Couric the evening news anchor in 2006, most of the people working in TV news were women, including 58 percent of the reporters, 66 percent of the news producers, and 56 percent of the news writers. However, almost 80 percent of the news directors and 68 percent of the assistant news directors were men.
“I THINK IT’S THE MONEY.”
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the overall average hourly pay for female workers had risen above eighty cents for every dollar a man made. But the divide between male and female college graduates was, if anything, getting wider. Part of the difference was due to the fact that professional women tended to work in areas where the pay was lower. For instance, the vast majority of the nation’s teachers were still women, including nearly 80 percent of those in elementary and middle schools. The number of male teachers was actually at a forty-year low, at 25 percent. Everyone agreed that the reason was the pay. “If you started paying $100,000 a year, you’d see a lot more men jumping into the field,” said Bryan Nelson, the founder of MenTeach, an organization dedicated to encouraging men to go into education.
In an ideal world, the revolution in the national attitude toward a woman’s place would have led to a revolution in the pay and prestige accorded to the careers that had traditionally been regarded as women’s work, and teachers would have been paid as much as stockbrokers. But that—obviously—had not happened.
It was not as if Americans didn’t appreciate how critical good teachers were to the nation’s prosperity. Young college graduates in particular saw teaching as a way to “give back” and signed up in droves for Teach for America, a kind of peace corps for urban schoolteachers. In 2007 more than 8 percent of the seniors at Princeton and Wellesley applied to join, along with 11 percent of the graduates at Amherst and Spelman.
Teach for America had been conceived by Wendy Kopp while she was a student at Princeton. She made it the subject of her senior thesis in 1989, and when her professor called the idea “deranged,” Kopp begged to disagree. She raised $2.5 million and founded the program the next year. “Teach for America is very hot now,” said Serena Savarirayan, a 2001 graduate of Northwestern who originally taught fifth grade in the struggling city of Paterson, New Jersey. But the young recruits did not generally intend to make education their careers. Most saw it as a detour—two years of making a contribution before they returned to their path of upward mobility.
Savarirayan herself thought she would apply to law school, but she fell in love with teaching—with the work, with the kids, and with the intellectual challenge that came with trying to figure out how to help poor and minority students succeed. She moved on to North Star Academy in Newark, a charter school that emphasized rigorous programs, with an eleven-month school year and longer-than-usual school days. She looked ahead to her limitless future and saw it was going to be in education. Her friends and family initially responded with the same stunned puzzlement that might have greeted a young woman in 1960 who announced that instead of majoring in education, she wanted to pursue corporate finance. Savarirayan was undaunted and unsurprised by the lack of enthusiasm for her career choice. “I think it’s the money,” she said.
“I COULD NOT LET IT SLIDE.”
Many economists believed that another part of the wage gap was due to continued discrimination. Certainly some of the women thought so. A new round of class-action lawsuits had begun making their way through the courts, one from women at Wal-Mart, where almost 75 percent of the store department heads were women but only 20 percent of the store managers. In 2007 the Supreme Court was asked to consider the case of Lilly Ledbetter, an Alabama woman who was getting ready to retire as a supervisor in a Goodyear Tire assembly plant when she discovered that she was making a lot less money than the men who held down the same job. Like Lorena Weeks, Ledbetter was a Southerner who had no illusions about what the world would demand of her. “My husband and I grew up in rural Alabama,” she said. “If you lived in the country in those years, you worked.”
When she went to Goodyear in 1979, Ledbetter was not the first woman the company had hired to work in management on the tire-production floor. But she was the only one who stuck it out. “I realized going in that these people had never adjusted to being around a woman, so I tolerated a lot of discriminatory things,” she said. One plant manager told her that Goodyear “did not need women, that [women] didn’t help it.” Ledbetter worked the night shift, which involved a great deal of overtime, and she was often at the plant twelve hours or more. Her husband would drive her to work and back to reduce the stress.
As in most places, Goodyear’s salaried employees were not encouraged to share information about what they were making. So Ledbetter didn’t know that as time went on, her salary dropped farther and farther behind those of her male coworkers. Then, as she was approaching retirement, she received an anonymous letter detailing who got what. Ledbetter was being paid 71 percent of what other men with her seniority were getting, and only 87 percent of what the least senior man on the job received. “I was just emotionally let down when I saw the difference in pay and knowing the effect it had on my retirement,” she said. “I could not let it slide. I went to the EEOC my next day off.”
Goodyear, Ledbetter recalled, “offered me ten thousand dollars” to settle the charges. In response, she calculated the difference between what she had made over the course of her career and what she would have gotten if she’d made as much as the lowest-paid man. She asked for that sum: $60,000. Goodyear returned with a final offer of $15,000, and Ledbetter went to court. The jury awarded her back pay and more than $3 million in damages, which the judge reduced to $360,000 because federal law limited the amount a worker could get for pay discrimination. Lilly, who had been wounded by Goodyear’s argument that her low pay was due to bad performance
, felt vindicated. But the company appealed, arguing that federal law required her to file a complaint within 180 days of the time the discrimination occurred.
That was the case that went to the Supreme Court, with the EEOC arguing that few employees would know within six months that their salary was different from their peers’. The clock on the 180-day rule should restart each time a discriminatory paycheck is issued, the commission argued. But the Supreme Court sided with Goodyear, 5 to 4. Justice Samuel Alito, who had just taken Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat, acknowledged that 180 days was a very short time for workers to figure out they were being discriminated against and file a suit. But that deadline, he theorized, might encourage employees and employer to work out their differences “through voluntary conciliation and cooperation.” Ledbetter lost her entire financial award, and she said later that Goodyear sent her a bill for some of the court costs.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was so angry about the decision that she took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench. “In our view, the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” she said. Ginsburg was a quiet, low-key justice, not normally given to dramatic gestures. But she had spent much of her professional life fighting for women’s rights, and she clearly felt that the new majority created since the departure of her good friend Justice O’Connor intended to undo many of the things that had been accomplished. One of Ginsburg’s former law clerks suggested that in talking about Lilly Ledbetter, Ginsburg was also talking about herself. “It’s as if after sixteen years on the Court, she’s finally voicing some complaints of her own,” said Professor Goodwin Liu of the University of California.
When Patricia Lorance had run into a similar problem about time deadlines in her fight to keep her seniority, Congress had amended the Civil Rights Act in response. Ginsburg very pointedly invited lawmakers to do that again, and in 2009, Congress complied with legislation that restarted the 180-day clock every time a discriminatory paycheck was issued. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became the first bill signed into law by President Barack Obama. “I’m so excited I can hardly stand it,” Lilly said.
In the decade since she had left her job, the battle had become a new career for her, as well as a distraction from worries about her husband, a loyal cheerleader for her cause who died shortly before her big legislative victory. At 70, she looked much younger, with plenty of fight still in her. “I tell you, working hard will keep you young,” she said. As she toured the country giving talks, Ledbetter was approached by women who wanted to share their own stories about pay discrimination. “I had no idea this was such a national problem,” she said. “This is not only a person like myself, this is professional people as well. I’ve heard it from physicians, teachers, nurses, every job you can imagine.”
“MY WAY OF SIMPLIFYING MY LIFE.”
Even if discrimination and choice of profession were both factors, the biggest reason women’s wages were lower was almost certainly their tendency to drop out of the workforce or to scale back to part-time employment when they had children. Young, childless women averaged salaries that were very close to those of young men. A study by Andrew Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, found that young women in big cities—who tended to stay single and defer having children longer than rural or suburban women—made more than their male counterparts. But once babies arrived, the mothers often fell behind. Banks, law firms, and other demanding employers who expected round-the-clock dedication from their professional employees reported that women were dropping out in droves once they began to have families.
Since World War II, the nation had organized itself economically around the idea that women would be in the workplace. By the new millennium, 47 percent of the nation’s workforce was female, and the United States depended more on their contribution to the labor market than did most developed countries. In 2009, as the recession stripped away jobs in male-dominated industries like construction, the New York Times reported that “women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.” But the country had never institutionalized any solution to the child-care quandary. The much-predicted boom in company-run day-care centers never materialized. (Google, the cutting-edge firm that won Fortune’s “Best Company to Work For” award two years running, provided in-house day care for its employees. But in 2008 it charged them $1,425 a month for infant care and by 2008 was taking surveys to determine whether the price could be raised to nearly $2,500.) Congress never returned to the idea of making early education the same kind of entitlement that kindergarten and elementary school were. Even child care for the poorest women, which the government was supposed to be supporting, never approached the level of demand. And it was pretty clear that a country that had not yet come to grips with a national health-care plan was not going to create a massive new federal program for working mothers.
AFTER ALISON FOSTER’S MARRIAGE BROKE UP, she returned to the United States and went to Columbia University for graduate work in counseling psychology, “partly to figure out my own life—why I didn’t see this coming.” She got a job at a prestigious private school in the city, where her sons could go tuition-free. In the summers, she taught ceramics at a good summer camp, and the boys went there, too. “I figured I could pay for these luxuries I don’t have money for,” she said. And besides, “having my children in the same school with me was my way of simplifying my life.” In a sense, she had re-created those early months in which she brought her baby to work at the wallpaper studio.
“ANY WAY YOU MEASURE IT…”
In 2008 Lisa Belkin, a columnist for the New York Times on work issues, wrote a magazine article about husbands and wives who shared housework equally. The most interesting thing about them, she wrote, “is that they are so very interesting.” Couples who really split chores were rare, even in homes where both adults worked full-time.
Social scientists had begun studying who did the housework, and “any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men,” Belkin wrote. Perhaps that optimistic study from the 1980s that found husbands had hit the 30 percent point had been true. But if so, that had been just about the end of the progress. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” said Sampson Lee Blair, who had been studying the issue at the University at Buffalo. When child care was added to the mix, things became even more lopsided. In families where both parents worked, she said, women spent an average of eleven hours a week on child care, and men three.
Belkin introduced her readers to a few couples who were seriously trying to divide household chores evenly, and it seemed like a tortuous process—full of lists and negotiations and struggles on the part of the woman to jettison her higher standards for cleanliness, social niceties such as thank-you notes, and the way the children looked when they were dressed for school. The only households that seemed to arrive at equitable divisions of labor more naturally, Belkin wrote, were lesbian couples. (Gay men with children had not yet been studied enough to provide a comparison.)
The problem, it seemed, was buried deep in the issue of gender. Husbands who did more around the house than their fathers had done felt they were contributing a great deal, even if it amounted to less than half the time their wives were putting in. Couples struggling to change seemed to do best if they lived in neighborhoods where sharing the housework was more common. As one expert explained, the most important factor in predicting how much a husband would do was how equal a couple’s friends’ relationships were.
VICKI COHN POLLARD’S DAUGHTER, Tanya, was horrified when she read the essay her mother wrote about the days of communal life in Baltimore and her theory that “the more responsibility any one person bears for raising a child, the more anger that person will have for the child.” And Vicki, who had moved to Maine and become an accomplished acupuncturist, had reservations, too. “If I were to do it
over again, I would be more present for her. I think she feels like it hurt her. I think it, too. But who knows? She’s a pretty amazing little being.”
Tanya got her PhD from Yale and became a college professor, specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. When she married and had children, she certainly had no plans for communal child rearing. “It’s not just that I’m domestic. I’m also private, I guess. I like my own space,” she said. But she hardly returned to the stay-at-home pattern of the ’50s. When her first daughter, Isabella, was a baby, Tanya and her husband, Will, who is also an academic, shared the responsibilities. “I’d teach two days a week and he’d teach two days a week,” she said. “There were a couple of times when Will had to be at Columbia when I was at meetings, and sometimes I’d miss the meeting and sometimes he would. A couple of times I brought Isabella to campus and had a student of mine wheel her around.”
Their neighborhood, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is an epicenter of the evolved American couple. All of Tanya’s female friends share the parenting and housekeeping duties with their husbands. They talk in scandalized whispers about the employer who tried to make a man come in to work on a weekend when his baby was a newborn. “Everybody takes it for granted it’s the husband’s job as much as the wife’s to be around,” said Tanya. When Tanya and Will had a second daughter in 2007, instead of presents her friends took turns cooking for them, “which basically means that we got a hot meal brought to us once a week.” While Tanya’s friends don’t often take care of her children, she feels secure in the knowledge that “there are a lot of people who I feel I can call on for things like that, which is really, really nice.” In some ways, Tanya mused, it wasn’t far from that old Baltimore neighborhood after all. “It’s funny—my mother regarded it as radical, but I think it’s old-fashioned.”
