A conversation with noted English journalist and author of
THE XX FACTOR: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created A Far Less Equal World,
Alison Wolf
(Crown, October 1, 2013)
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1) What was the most surprising thing you found while researching The XX Factor?
A) The importance of pizza! The arrival of home deliveries transformed women’s lives, and pizza came first. It was ready-cooked food that cut the time women spent on housework–washers, dryers and dishwashers had, amazingly, almost no effect at all on women’s time. Less housework plus easy-to-buy hot food at the end of a working day, transformed women’s ability to take demanding paid jobs. A lot of other things surprised me as well. For example, which women get married and when, the extraordinary number of female Chinese billionaires, and the fact that we are wrong about the common belief that women work more than men. But if I have to pick one, it has to be the pizza!
2) You mention in The XX Factor that while the gender gap is narrowing among a select group of highly educated women, the gulf is widening among women themselves. What, if anything, can be done to help bridge the gap between these XX women and the rest of the “sisterhood?”
A) If we had domestic robots, the intelligent, flexible science fiction sort, then life would be very different. But we don’t. Children have to be looked after, the old and the sick need care and nursing, and it is all seriously labor-intensive. The meals we eat out and order in don’t cook or serve themselves either. Women and men who are making successful professional careers can only put in the hours and enjoy the lives they do because they can afford to offload a lot onto other people who are paid much less. I personally find it hard to imagine a world in which all the nurseries and kindergartens are staffed by men, the care assistants and housekeepers are men, and women have taken over trucking. So I think the majority of women will indeed continue to do traditional female tasks, which often pay much less, while the educated top fifth lead very different lives. At least until we get the robots.
3) There have been many books published recently about women in the workplace, including Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. How does The XX Factor differ from those books?
A) First, I think I have lots of new things to say! But also, many books, including, of course, Lean In, are about how to beat the odds. They want to tell readers how it can be done. I think there are a lot of truly inspiring women in The XX Factor; but I’ve set out to describe and explain their success, not give direct advice. That said, if you understand our world better, you’ll be better suited to deal with it. There is also a lot written about the glass ceiling, the Mommy track, and books about what is wrong and how to fix it. My book is very different from those, too. It is not about specific workplace problems facing women, but takes a really broad sweep: Where are we going? Are women’s lives moving in the same direction everywhere, or is the U.S. following a different path? Why are things changing so much faster in the developing world than they did in the U.S. or in Europe? And The XX Factor also looks at women as a whole, not just at professionals. I don’t think you can understand the lives of today’s educated professional women without also understanding just how different they are from the majority of contemporary women. And how much they are like educated men.
4) What’s the single-most important take away that you’d like for readers to have after finishing your book?
A) I’d like them to look at the world a bit differently, and notice things they didn’t before. I hope that reading The XX Factor will refocus everyday life, so it’s clear how many surprising effects female employment has had, and keeps on having. For example, successful female bankers and lawyers wear expensive shoes with impractical very high heels. Elite campuses have a hook-up culture. When you have men and women of roughly the same intelligence going to school together, The Girl Scouts and other volunteer organizations are finding it hard to recruit leaders with less women available for volunteer activities. On almost all our streets and shopping centers, there has been a steady increase in the number of cheap-but-slightly-different restaurants cropping up. These are all things we have probably vaguely noticed. However, they not only make perfect sense but also fit together- or should once you’ve read the book! And I’m sure there is a lot more that I have missed and which XX Factor readers will spot.
5) How did your own professional experience influence your approach and inspiration for the book?
A) Oddly enough, I’ve never really thought about using my own life as an inspiration for a book. Instead, The XX Factor grew out of conversations with a friend who edits a magazine. He kept asking me questions about how successful women deal with modern life, and what the consequences would be. Questions like, why does anyone ever have children given the demands of modern careers? Are we really going to see a big rise in stay-at-home fathers? That got me thinking about all the things I didn’t know and what I wanted to be able to answer. Once I started my research, I did think hard about my own personal experiences and decisions. I now feel that in many ways I was very typical, but also very lucky in exactly when and where I was born. So in part, the book is my own story, and that of my contemporaries, but it’s also the story of the generations just behind me. And one reason I believe in my findings is the reaction of younger friends who read the manuscript and told me “I’m reading my generation’s story.”
6) How do you see the advancement of women changing in the next 10-20 years?
A) “Never predict, especially not the future” is always sound advice! But assuming that we don’t have a world-wide economic meltdown, it’s hard to see why current trends wouldn’t continue. In younger generations, women are even more well represented in elite schools and professions than they have ever been; the supply of cheap female labor providing domestic support won’t dry up that soon; men will still want ‘top class’ female partners (and vice versa); and lengthening careers mean that, even if you take a break, the childcare years are a small part of a working life. So more of the same—successful women being seen as a normality, but short of binding quotas, the gender divide will not be 50/50 at the top.
7) Based on your findings, what advice would you give young women who are looking to get into the workforce? What about women who are already embedded in the workforce?
A) Get a good education, from a school with a high reputation, is the conventional advice. It’s conventional, and it’s also right. But I’d also caution against too much of a good thing. One of the clouds on the horizon, for women, is the ever-lengthening period that people spend in formal education. Fine if we were immortal, but our biological clocks are ticking remorselessly. Second, if you have children, don’t drop out of the workforce completely if you can help it, but don’t panic if you do for a bit. There really is life after 40 or indeed 50, and increasingly so. Finally, in our brand new working world, families still make a huge difference—it’s not families or success, in fact quite the reverse. In a tough world, families help define and support you and provide the real safety nets, just as they always have done. And of course, that’s about giving as well as taking.
