by Hanna Rosin
“You should go to pharmacy school,” the woman said.
“Why, just because I memorized all the generics?” But pretty soon that hesitation turned into: “I need to get back to school. I just have to.” She got her college degree and then got accepted to the University of Wisconsin. In her last set of exams, she got all A’s and made the dean’s list.
This winter she chose to skip the pharmacy students’ annual charity ball rather than take Billy because “he’d be completely out of place. People are so much more educated, and he would feel like he couldn’t fit in. I would be embarrassed for him. I know who he is, and I love him for it. But he’d be uncomfortable.” Why does she stay with him? “Because we crack each other up,” she says. Her mom worries that she does it for the same reason she takes out those eight-hundred-page novels about India from the library: because she is attracted to suffering.
IN 2009, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to hover around 50 percent. About 80 percent of women aged twenty-five to fifty-four years old work for pay, and an even higher percentage of female college graduates do. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2011, women hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 61.3 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast as women come to dominate law and medical schools. In the UK, women are poised to outnumber their male counterparts by 2017, prompting a national debate about whether medicine is becoming “overfeminized.” In France, women make up 58 percent of doctors under age thirty-five, and in Spain, it’s 64 percent.
At some point in the last forty years, the job market became largely indifferent to size and strength, and from then on, in many pockets of the workforce, men no longer held the cards. Technology began to work against men, making certain brawn jobs obsolete and making what economists call “people skills” ever more valuable. The coveted and lasting professions were the ones that required a boutique skill or a nurturing touch—things a robot could not easily do. Traditionally feminine attributes, like empathy, patience, and communal problem-solving, began to replace the top-down autocratic model of leadership and success. For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men.
Upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, filling the ever-growing ranks of the creative class—publicity assistant, wine critic, trail mix creator, sustainability consultant, screenwriter. And that, in turn, creates an industry of jobs based on the things those women used to do for free—child care, food preparation, elder care. The booming health-care industry provides jobs all along that chain, from gastroenterologist to home health aide. Right in the middle falls pharmacist.
Of the many surprising professions that women have started to dominate over the last forty or so years—accounting, financial management, optometry, dermatology, medical genetics, forensic pathology, law, veterinary practice, among hundreds of others—pharmacy stands out as a unique example. Women made up about 8 percent of pharmacists in 1960, and they make up almost 60 percent today. In the earliest days pharmacists had the aura of shamans; they were men of great stature, magicians deft at mixing potions far too dangerous for women to touch. Think of Monsieur Homais, the pompous apothecary in Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary who, in the final sentence of the novel, wins the Legion of Honor, and think of what happens when Emma Bovary breaks into his lab and steals some arsenic. Now in Hannah’s class it’s mostly women who handle bags of bright red concoctions labeled “hazardous” and women who win all the prizes. Well over 60 percent of pharmacy graduates are women, and male pharmacists are retiring at a faster rate than women. This has caused a pharmacy magazine to ask in a recent editorial the obvious question: “Is Pharmacy Becoming a Woman’s Profession?”
Historically that phrase—“woman’s profession”—would be a big wet blanket to any respectable trade. Wages would drop, men would flee, and all the prestige would drain out of the job. This is what happened over the years to the job of secretary, for example, or teacher. Columbia University labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris has dubbed this the typewriter paradox: Women master a machine or a set of skills that opens up job opportunities for them, and then that job becomes immediately devalued. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin uses a different term for the entry of women into a trade: pollution. The flooding of women into a trade landed like the gentle falling of acid rain, or nuclear waste. Men feared it, and when they saw it coming they did anything they could to put up a protective shield. If that failed, they put on their gas masks and fled to a different office. In 1937, just as pictures of women in white lab coats started popping up in pharmacy magazines, the editor of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education wrote a satirical op-ed referring to President Roosevelt’s “girl control” measures and the “Committee on the Study of Menace of Women to Pharmacy.”
But these days the story ends differently. Pharmacy, as a profession subservient to doctors, was always nervous about prestige. So its leaders made sure to stay one step ahead of the game. They did everything they could to make sure they could not be easily replaced by pill-dispensing robots or factory workers in India. They began to call themselves “health professionals,” who were at the “forefront of patient care.” They instituted a mandatory six-year professional degree, which included training in advising patients and managing complicated medicine regimens. Hannah and all her classmates take a “communications” class where they are graded on their ability to show empathy and get through even to ornery patients. “We get graded on people skills,” Hannah says about her upcoming residency, and then “the drug knowledge is important, too.”
As a profession, pharmacy put itself on the right side of history. It sidestepped a future in manual labor and moved itself into the more feminine-friendly service and information economy, where higher degrees are always required and technology does not make your job obsolete; instead it frees you to shake hands and smile. Pharmacy followed the script for success in the modern economy. And in that script, the flood of women into the profession is no longer a sign of pollution, but the assurance of a bright, happy future.
Pharmacy—the woman’s profession—now has an average salary of somewhere around $110,000, a secure future, and the promise of a reasonably balanced life. In job lists it often appears on the “best” side of the ledger with statistician, accountant, paralegal—all jobs considered clean, safe, and growing, and all jobs where women are thriving. On the opposite side are roofer, welder, lumberjack, sheet metal worker, and roustabout, all jobs dominated by men. It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: In the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women are making the rules and men are playing catch-up.
The girls come to pharmacy school for the same reason girls went to clerical schools in the 1920s and 1930s: They want a respectable profession where they won’t get their hands dirty. (“I love science, but I faint at the sight of blood,” one of Hannah’s classmates told me.) They want some financial independence and a better life than their mothers had. At the University of Wisconsin, 35 percent of the students are the first ones to graduate college in their families. But unlike the dewy secretaries, they are not immediately disappointed upon graduation. Una Golden, the heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s The Job, the first in his trilogy about the new woman and office life, is delighted by secretary school but at the office finds only “loveless routine,” and young men who are “very slangy and pipe smelly” and press her to do endless tedious tasks.
But pharmacy school—like the many professional schools women are flooding—is no empty promise. A group of three roommates I’d met had all gotten one another jobs at the Walgreens, and spent fifteen minutes listing what they loved about i
t: the computer that scanned the medication instantly and gave you an “amazingly fast visual” of the drugs; their boss, a forty-year-old woman with two kids who works four days a week; the racks of neatly organized little white bottles “as clean as Justin Bieber’s teeth.” The day the third got her job offer—purely on the recommendation of her friends, and without an interview—they started what they secretly call the “109 Club,” named for the salary they expect to earn within a few years. The plan is that every October ninth they will meet at a certain bar on State Street, no matter what else is going on—exams, kids, emergencies, football games. And the husbands? “They’ll fall into line,” one said.
Early one morning I watched the three roommates leave their apartment for school dressed in ruffled blouses and three-inch heels under their lab coats. They were the cultural heiresses of Mary Tyler Moore and Murphy Brown and all the single career ladies in silk blouses who had made their way in a man’s world, rolling their eyes at their gruff, white-haired bosses, hoping that they’re “gonna make it after all!” as the theme music said. But several decades later they are no longer tentatively feeling their way through new terrain. Instead they are ruling a global economy turned upside down, where the women work the hardest and there is a casual assumption that they will get all the best jobs after graduation, where the men are somewhat pitied and misunderstood and in need of special assistance—where late one night, one of the roommates shared her fantasy future in which, in a perfect reversal of the happy housewife, “as soon as he hears me come in from work, he rushes to greet me with flowers and a freshly baked cookie!”
Economic upheaval like this seeps into the culture. It can warp dreams and aspirations and make young people believe that even their intimate lives will take place on fantastically strange new terrain. That morning, as the roommates were putting on makeup, someone’s computer was playing “Hey, Soul Sister,” a favorite song around campus because the girls tease the boys for coming to pharmacy school to get their MR degree and find a good woman to take care of them. In fact, in the time I spent with the students I came across several songs the women here sang in reverse—“I ain’t saying he’s a gold digger,” and “boys just wanna have fun,” while the girls just wanna fill out fifteen different job applications and fret about mortgages they don’t even have yet.
Jeanine Mount is the associate dean for academic affairs and only the second woman tenured at the school. She comes from a different generation and sacrificed a lot for her position. Her husband has a job in Silver Spring, Maryland; they’ve lived in different states and commuted for the twenty years of their marriage. These days she marvels at what she calls the “fluidity” of the female students, and “their amazingly wide constellation of choices.”
“All my top academic students, my really top performers, have heavily been women,” she says. “I don’t know why. They are not inherently more intelligent than the men. Maybe they bring a different kind of focus to their work.” The men, meanwhile, she calls a “lost generation.” They come because their fathers were pharmacists, or maybe they’re searching for a second career. But they don’t have the same “hunger.”
Recently she helped interview applicants to head the diversity program. She asked one applicant what diversity means, and the question elicited a standard response that alluded to gender and disability and sexual orientation. So she asked a follow-up: “If you look at pharmacy right now, isn’t the most underrepresented group men?” The applicant was unconvinced, and explained that men had been in a privileged position all their lives—a sure sign for Mount that the applicant had been locked in academic ideology too long and was missing the obvious facts on the ground.
“I thought, ‘This person just doesn’t get it,’” she said. “He just doesn’t get how bad it’s gotten.” Recently she printed out photos of the various student groups—school government, campus fraternities, national service organizations—for a newsletter she had to write. It was the first time she noticed that the entire leadership of nearly every group was made up of women. “I can think of one young man in leadership,” she said, and named him. “But come to think of it, he’s a little androgynous. And his fiancée has a really strong personality. In fact, a lot of guys here are in that situation . . . .”
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO Hannah’s boyfriend, Billy, started to notice he didn’t always have painting jobs lined up a month in advance, but this year was “the worst I’ve seen in eleven years,” he says. Sometimes his boss will send out two guys on a painting job meant for one so they can split the pay. A few months of this year Billy has had to apply for unemployment. Hannah suspects that the boys are happier during those months because they can set out for the lake earlier. His fishing buddies—an electrician and two plumbers—are also underworked this year. But everyone knows that they are happy only so long as the checks last. Unemployment pays less than half of what Billy usually makes, but more important, it runs out after two years. Hannah’s father, who is also an electrician, is reaching the deadline, and you can see it. His usual garrulousness has sharpened into a manic pitch, and he’s talking about schemes that Hannah knows will never happen. Recently he was rejected for a shift job in a local factory that makes plastic tarps for truck beds—a job she remembers him scoffing at when she was a kid.
Of the thirty professions projected to add the most jobs over the next decade, women dominate twenty, including nursing, accounting, home health assistance, child care, and food preparation. (They dominate twelve of the fifteen projected to add the absolute most jobs.) Many of the new jobs in the working class, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” Some of the jobs are not especially high-paying, but the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men. When we look back on this period, argues Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University, we will see it as a “turning point for women in the workforce.”
The list of working-class jobs predicted to grow is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt. Over the course of the past century, feminism has pushed women to do things once considered against their nature—first enter the workforce as singles, then continue to work while married, then work even with small children at home. Many professions have gone the way of the pharmacist, starting out as the province of men and now filled mostly with women. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time. The habits of Cardboard Man die hard. The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men, operating under the outdated pollution rules, still shy away from some careers as women begin to dominate them.
Most economists agree that wages for a full-time male worker have stagnated. In 2009, men brought home $48,000 on average, roughly the same as they did in 1969 after adjusting for inflation. In fact, as a recent report written by former White House economist Michael Greenstone discovered, the truth is even more dismal. Calling it stagnation fails to take into account the fact that fewer men are working full-time now or making any salary at all, and many more are incarcerated. If you add in those factors, the median income for men ages twenty-five to sixty-four has not only stagnated, but fallen sharply by almost $13,000 since 1969—a reduction of 28 percent.
The most obvious pattern in the economy over the last forty years is the polarization into low-skill and high-skill jobs, with the middle class getting squeezed out. But this polarization has affected men and women very differently, as MIT economist David Autor shows in a 2010 report. Men and women both dropped out of the middle class, but women moved dramatically i
nto high-skills professions, while men drifted in both directions. Two of the causes Autor names for the gender disparity are fairly easy to grasp and familiar: “automation of routine work” and “the international integration of labor markets.” But the last is more perplexing: The demand for college-educated labor—what he calls “literate, numerate, and analytically capable workers”—has been rising for decades. “The economy has been standing at the top of the highest mountain, using its biggest loudspeaker, shouting, ‘Get a college degree! If you get a degree we will give you a shitload of money,’” says Greenstone. “It’s been doing that for twenty-five years. And yet men are failing to get the message.” Why are men failing to get the message? It’s a “deeper mystery,” Autor writes.
It’s a mystery that Hannah’s mom, Dian, thinks she has figured out. She’s hired plenty of guys behind the bar who won’t go to college. She married one (Hannah’s father) and now she lives with another. “Lazy,” she calls them. “They don’t like to think too hard.” This experience has made her intent on pointing out to Hannah the practical problems with this upside-down life her daughter is getting herself into. “How’s he gonna hold up his half of the mortgage if you’re making, what, three times as much money as him?” she asks Hannah one afternoon. But Hannah is sticking to her vision. She wants a house by Lake Wisconsin with a path lined by ferns and hostas. She’ll pay the mortgage, he can cover utilities. Already she keeps a whiteboard where she writes down every week who is responsible for what bill and everything Billy owes her. “He has no opinion at all. He wants me to tell him what to do.”
But as women have known for a long time, that kind of domestic hierarchy starts to grate after a while, even on the most gentle of spouses. One night Hannah was watching a documentary about Cleopatra on the HISTORY channel. When she got up to check on a homework assignment, Billy changed it to Comedy Central to watch Tosh.0, a lad comedy show where Tosh does hilarious recaps of bad movies out on DVD, or uses giant swords to slice things open—his lunch sandwich, a coffeemaker, a watercooler. Billy is compact in size and also in his speech; he never uses words when silence is acceptable. And at the end of a long day, whether spent working or fishing, he likes what he likes.
