The XX Factor
How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Noted British academic and journalist Alison Wolf offers a surprising and thoughtful study of the professional elite, and examines the causes—and limits—of women’s rise and the consequences of their difficult choices.
The gender gap is closing. Today, for the first time in history, tens of millions of women are spending more time at the boardroom table than the kitchen table. These professional women are highly ambitious and highly educated, enjoying the same lifestyle prerogatives as their male counterparts. They are working longer and marrying later—if they marry at all. They are heading Fortune 500 companies and appearing on the covers of Forbes and Businessweek. They represent a special type of working woman—the kind who doesn’t just punch a clock for a paycheck, but derives self-worth and pleasure from wielding professional power.
At the same time that the gender gap is narrowing, the gulf is widening among women themselves. While blockbuster books such as Lean In focus only on women in high pressure jobs, in reality there are four women in traditionally female roles for every Sheryl Sandberg. In this revealing and deeply intelligent book, Alison Wolf examines why more educated women work longer hours, why having children early is a good idea, and how feminism created a less equal world. Her ideas are sure to provoke and surprise, as she challenges much of what the liberal and conservative media consider to be women’s best interests.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this provocative and vital new book, British economist Wolf (Does Education Matter?) addresses the "widening gap" between highly educated professional women and less-educated working women. The consequences of this gap run deep. Education affects whether women have children, how many they have, and at what age they have them; how early they have sex; how likely they are to divorce; and, critically, how much money they earn. The book's first section addresses women in the workforce and covers higher education and money (including the return of the servant classes, without which "elite women's employment would splutter and stall"); the second addresses the domestic sphere, including sexual behavior ("With the Pill everything changed"). While the book focuses on British and American women's lives, Wolf's cross-cultural view traverses the globe (she discusses China, India, France, Sweden, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, to name a few, but not sub-Saharan Africa); nor are men absent from her analyses. Accessibly written and enlivened with anecdotes and interviews, Wolf's research is thoroughly documented and features uncommonly informative footnotes and helpful graphs. Her assessment of how things have changed since the time when "marriage was women's main objective and main career" and the ways in which "the modern workplace detaches our female elites from both history and the rest of female-kind" will yield productive controversy.
