These trends, like so many, have their roots in the movement toward individualism and the self. Many young women said their mothers explicitly told them to act as individuals. “My mother has always encouraged me to be independent and never depend on anyone but myself,” wrote Melinda, 22. “She wants me to be able to stand on my own two feet and not depend on a man when I’m married.” Elizabeth, 20, says that her mother “continually told me never to surrender my power as she did, to find a way to do right by my children, but to do right by myself also.” Tiffany, 18, says that her mother was married and had a child by 19, a life Tiffany has no desire to replicate: “I want to be able to live my life and become a pediatrician. I don’t want to depend on my husband or anyone else. I want to be able to show people, and myself, that I can achieve the goals I have set for myself.”
The feminist message for women is inextricably linked to the individualist message, and whether girls heard the call of independence from their family or only from the outside culture, they listened. Gender equality is so taken for granted now that these trends are unlikely to reverse; girls growing up right now will become the most liberated generation of women in history—until their own daughters outstrip them.
Kristin’s study did find one small sign of backlash. Slightly more 2010–12 students than 1990–91 students agreed that “it is usually best for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the family and the woman takes care of the home and family” and “the husband should make all of the important decisions in the family” (though agreement is still down since the late 1970s). The small decline in progressive attitudes toward wives’ roles since the 1990s might be due to these students’ views of marriage: with nearly half of babies born to unmarried mothers, young people may be more likely to see marriage as increasingly distant, traditional, and idealized. The idea that marriage leads to unequal gender roles might be one of the reasons why more couples live together instead of getting married.
Changes in Personality
Beliefs about women and their roles are very different from what they used to be. But does this mean that women are actually different now, with different personalities and different behaviors? Specifically, are GenX and GenMe women more likely to have personality traits that were once associated more with men? Could expectations have changed while women remained just as unassertive and passive as they were before?
As you might remember from the introduction, this was the question that drove my first study of generational differences. After noticing that college women in the early 1990s were scoring very differently from 1970s women, I decided to do a systematic study of the question. I gathered 103 samples of 28,920 college students on two questionnaires that measured stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. The “masculine” scale items included words such as competitive, independent, never give up easily, self-reliant, forceful, and ambitious. Sure enough, college women endorsed these traits at a higher rate with every passing year. More than 50% of 1990s women scored as masculine on the scale, compared to only 20% of early 1970s women. The average 1990s college woman reported more masculine traits than 80% of Boomer college women in the early 1970s. The change was so large that by the early 1990s men’s and women’s scores on the scale of so-called masculine traits were indistinguishable. The generational change in personality had turned the very definition of the scale on its head: clearly these traits were no longer masculine, but simply human.
Perhaps because the masculine scale isn’t so masculine anymore, these questionnaires were not used much in the 2000s and 2010s, so I wasn’t able to update these statistics to more recent, GenMe years. But the nationally representative sample of 11 million college students was helpful, as it includes self-ratings on attributes with a lot of overlap with the masculine scale, such as leadership ability, drive to achieve, intellectual self-confidence, and creativity. They show an intriguing change: in some cases, women are now outscoring men in their self-ratings of once-masculine traits. In 1989, 72% of college men described themselves as above average in their drive to achieve, compared to 69% of college women. By 2012, 77% of college women said they had a high drive to achieve, compared to 75% of college men. College men used to rate themselves as much more creative than college women—58% of men versus 47% of women in 1993—but by 2012 they rated themselves about the same (54% versus 53%).
Much of this change is probably due to upbringing. GenMe girls have seen their mothers work outside the home more than any previous generation. Studies have found that girls with working mothers are more likely to embrace traditionally masculine traits such as ambition and independence. Seeing Mom go off to work provides a daily role model for girls, showing them that women have roles outside the home. Many GenMe women—and men—take it for granted that mothers will work at least part of the time.
It’s now cool for girls to play sports . . . although this ad suggests you still need to worry about how you smell while doing it.
In addition, nearly ten times as many high school girls participate in interscholastic sports now than in 1972. Before the passage of Title IX, girls’ athletics was almost a joke, with little funding and even less enthusiasm. Many girls today don’t even realize that it was once unusual for females to play sports, since girls and boys now participate in sports at a nearly equal rate. It’s likely that sports participation has affected girls’ personalities, as research shows that girls who participate in sports are more likely to develop traits such as independence and competitiveness.
Many young women told me that their fathers encouraged them to play sports and didn’t treat them differently from their brothers. “My father never drew a line between what girls should do and what boys should do,” said Amanda, 25. “My sister and I played soccer and got filthy playing outside tending to goats and chickens and catching snakes.” I also had a father who made few distinctions between the sexes. To this day I can throw a softball from third to first because my dad showed me how—no “throwing like a girl” for me. When my mother and I watched beauty pageants, my dad would walk through the room and mutter disapprovingly, “Meat market.” I clearly saw that my dad cared a lot more about my ability to throw a ball than my ability to look good doing it—quite a change from the dads in the 1950s, many of whom would never have allowed a girl to play softball.
Women are increasingly invested in work and education as integral parts of their identities. Keith Campbell and I examined 446 studies of 312,940 individuals with data on the link between self-esteem and socioeconomic status, which includes job status, income, and education. For men, the correlation between self-esteem and socioeconomic status has decreased; men now show a weaker link between their self-esteem and their job status or education than previous generations did. For women, the opposite is true; the correlation between women’s socioeconomic status and self-esteem has grown stronger with each generation. Women’s self-esteem is now more strongly linked to their work and education than men’s is. Work, income, and education, once relatively unimportant to a woman’s identity, are now even more important to women than to men.
Yet when women get home, they often face a sink full of dirty dishes. How does that make young women feel? The title of the recent edited volume The Bitch in the House pretty much sums it up. In one of the essays, E. S. Maduro, 24, describes her feelings of anger at her live-in boyfriend when she comes home to a messy apartment: “Does it just not occur to him that I worked all day and might like to come home to a place where I don’t immediately have to start cleaning in order to feel some sense of peace with where I am? I will cook and clean, and all the while think about how I am falling into the same trap of housework that my own mother fell into.”
Her mother, however, saw things differently: “The fact that I did all the shopping and cooking and cleaning at home was just part of the territory; all the women I knew did this, and I never thought to question or resent it. You seem to feel in your essay that I have some anger about all I did, particularly the do
mestic roles that fell to me. But I do not now, and don’t believe I ever did, feel angry about these roles and tasks.”
But GenX and GenMe women do. I find the peacefulness in the mother’s letter typical of her generation, and atypical of GenX and GenMe—we just have no tolerance for such blatant inequality. (To put it more succinctly, we don’t put up with that shit.) GenMe women spend less time on housework than their mothers did, but expect to split things 50-50 with their male partners, and when this doesn’t happen, watch out. Or we do the work to avoid the fight, since we’ve fought about it so many times before, but are still steaming inside.
The Generation Me Man
Where are the men in all of this? On the questions measuring attitudes toward women, men’s opinions have shifted right along with women’s, though they still espouse more conservative views than women (which might explain why conflict between the sexes has persisted). Men have also increased in assertiveness and stereotypically masculine traits just as women have, suggesting that both men and women have caught the train toward greater individualism. But have men taken on more stereotypically feminine traits, as women have embraced masculine traits? Maybe, but maybe not. College men’s scores on measures of nurturance and caring from the 1970s to the 1990s show mixed results; men’s scores on nurturance increased on one scale but not on another. Even on the scale that showed change, the trend was not nearly as strong as the shift toward more assertive and independent traits for women. In the large college survey, women used to rate themselves as much more cooperative—a “feminine” trait—than men (in 1990, 76% of women and 70% of men said they were above average). But by 2012, an equal percentage of men and women said they were above average in cooperativeness (69%). Another so-called feminine trait, understanding others, still has more women (69%) saying they are above average than men (63%).
So women have become more stereotypically masculine, but men show only a weak trend toward more stereotypically feminine nurturance. It does seem that young men are now more comfortable with the more appearance-based feminine things. Suddenly, just because you know how to dress well doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gay. But a man who has primary responsibility for his children is still rare.
However, today’s married fathers are clearly more involved than those of previous generations. It’s no longer considered strange for men to change diapers, but does that mean that men are actually changing the diapers? Well, sometimes—and definitely a lot more than the men of previous generations. Married fathers spent three times as much time interacting with their kids, and twice as much time on housework, in 2011 as they did in 1965. One problem: fewer dads are married, so the involvement of dads may not have changed that much after all on average. Those who are around are more involved, but fewer are around.
In addition, the emphasis on individualism means that work remains on its exalted throne. It’s still uncommon for the man to be the one to stay home with the kids, even if he makes less money than his wife. A lot of men say they would find it isolating to be at home; others say they would lose prestige in their careers if they took too much time off. There’s still a stigma against stay-at-home dads, though this is fading some with time. With more women earning college and graduate degrees, in more and more couples in the future the woman will earn more than the man. GenMe might well make stay-at-home dads cool.
Especially in the time before parenthood, young men are a fairly liberated bunch. Even those who are conservative in their politics don’t usually expect their wives to always stay home or to do all of the housework. Although men don’t usually think much about women’s earning power, this may change as housing gets even more expensive. One friend of mine, an investment banker, told me that he thought New York men were looking for successful women who made a lot of money—having two good incomes was the only way to afford a decent apartment! In a mid-2000s poll, 79% of young men said they’d feel comfortable dating a woman who earned significantly more than they did.
Well, But: The Big Caveat
The arrival of a child can rock the most deeply held notions of sexual equality. As Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels point out in The Mommy Myth, “A dad who knows the name of his kids’ pediatrician and reads them stories at night is still regarded as a saint; a mother who doesn’t is a sinner.” GenMe dads are more involved than ever, which is fantastic; it’s just that “more than ever” often still means “not much.” In spite of the tremendous progress in diaper changing, bath giving, and baby cuddling among men, in the vast majority of cases it’s still Mom who knows where Madison’s shoes are and when Jacob takes his nap.
GenMe women are expected to lead a contradictory existence. They are told (and believe) that they can do anything, but once they become mothers, “anything” becomes “that you can do from home” or “that is strictly nine to five” (ha!). Even “anything that pays enough so you can afford a British nanny” isn’t good enough—do you really want “someone else raising your children”? Writer Peggy Orenstein said that after going around the country lecturing on self-esteem, she realized, “There was this big gap in messages between what we were telling teenage girls and what we were telling women when they came to be around 30. For girls and teens, we say, ‘You Can Do Anything,’ and then for women, we turn around and say, ‘You Can’t Have it All.’ ” As a culture, we still carry an incredible amount of ambivalence toward working mothers that working fathers are still able to neatly sidestep. As Sheryl Sandberg pointed out in Lean In, these attitudes have persisted into the 2010s.
Obviously, working mothers are much more accepted now than in previous decades. But an incredible amount of resistance remains to day care and nannies, which are—like it or not—the logical outcome of women’s fully participating in the working world. Many people still strongly believe that day care is harmful. At a recent party, I met a charming, incredibly bright 3-year-old who could rattle off the names of dinosaurs whose pronunciation stumped most of the adults in attendance. After the child left with her mother, one woman asked if the mother stayed home. She was surprised to learn that the child was in full-time day care—the implication being that a child who went to day care couldn’t possibly be that smart.
In fact, children who attend day-care centers are actually smarter; a comprehensive study shows that they score higher on measures of cognitive development and academic achievement than children exclusively in their mother’s care. This study was conducted by a government agency (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health) and involved more than 1,000 children at ten locations around the country who were followed since 1991. The results are particularly strong for children who went to day care between the ages of 2 and 5, but even children who went to day care when they were younger than 2 showed a trend toward improved intellectual development. The results were the strongest for kids whose mothers had less education, but the trend toward day care’s improving cognitive development remained even when mothers’ education was controlled. None of the results showed lowered cognitive development from day care.
But you would never know this from watching the news; this study was not covered in any major media outlet that I could find. Instead, newspapers and television endlessly cover all of the bad stuff that can happen when mommies work. At the same time, standards for mothering have reached unrealistic heights. The popularity of attachment parenting—cosleeping, baby wearing, and breast-feeding for at least a year—comes, ironically, at a time when more and more women are working and thus less able to do these things. In Perfect Madness, Judith Warner criticizes the American standard of übermothering in which women’s lives are completely consumed by their children’s activities, leaving no time for anything else. Perhaps, she muses, this is what happens when women quit corporate jobs to stay home—they become just as competitive at home as they were in the boardroom. Douglas and Michaels label this new standard of intensive mothering “the New Momism.” “It is no longer okay,”
they point out, “to let (or make) your kids walk to school, tell them to stop bugging you and go outside and play, or God forbid, serve them something like Tang . . . for breakfast.”
It’s enough to make one long for the days of yesteryear, when the goal of most mothers was to get the kids out of their hair so they could go play cards and gossip with their friends. Although these women were unquestionably good mothers as a group, that generation did not adhere to the belief that kids should be monitored—and preferably taught something—every minute, as society now believes. Several studies have found that despite more mothers being in the workforce, mothers in 2011 actually spent more time one-on-one with their kids than mothers did in 1965 and 1975, and they spent twice as much time teaching and playing with them. Given modern work schedules, this seems like an impossible time equation until you realize the differences in standards for motherhood between the two eras. Favorite phrase of Cold War–era mothers: “They’re around here somewhere.” These days, mothers are supposed to know exactly where their kids are every second—and be a teacher, a doctor, a chauffeur, and a developmental psychologist. Mothers are expected to be interacting with their kids every minute that the kids aren’t watching Baby Einstein tapes.
If you have enough money and enough fame, all of this is easy, and the societal message is that it should be easy for you too. As Douglas and Michaels hilariously document in their chapter “Attack of the Celebrity Moms,” women’s magazines now devote endless pages to profiling the mothering of the rich and famous. We learn that Kirstie Alley pays for all of her houses with cash; that celebrity moms all say that having a baby is much more important than being famous; and that it’s hard to be a working mother even when you have two nannies and a housekeeper (boo-hoo). The website theglow.com, which premiered in 2011, features profiles of rich and famous moms who do everything “effortlessly” amid their “enviable décor.” One People magazine cover story titled “The Sexy New Moms” stated, “Postpartum depression isn’t an option for such celebrity moms as Whitney Houston, Madonna, and supermodel Niki Taylor.” Douglas and Michaels wryly comment, “Unlike you, being subjected to sleep deprivation and raging hormones was a choice for these women, and they just said no.”
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