The End of Men and the Rise of Women (19 page)

The new setup was more practical for women. Owning and running a store was a monumental undertaking that virtually guaranteed working nights and weekends. But a salaried employee could dip in and out of work at various phases of life and work more flexibly. The workforce was headed in this more agile direction anyway. Workplaces were moving away from a priesthood model with a patriarch at the top who demanded lifetime loyalty. Instead workers were becoming more like free agents who could move between jobs with impunity. Women were just ahead of the curve.

But there was another reason why women were critical to the profession: The death of the corner store may have liberated the practice of pharmacy from Victorianism, but it saddled the profession with a new identity crisis, common to many professions. “Robots can count tablets more accurately and at less expense than humans, technicians can compound medications in pharmacies and huge, automated factories can do likewise. Persons without professional education at University are able to sell drugs and to serve as cashiers,” explained a manifesto by a leading pharmacist scholar, Albert Wertheimer.

“Problem solver,” “coordinator,” “hand-holding,” “empathetic, caring professional.” This new definition made it clear that in order to survive, the profession would have to feminize. The profession began to refer to itself as “social pharmacy” or “clinical pharmacy.” Schools began moving from a four-year bachelor program to a six-year professional degree called a “Pharm D,” as women were becoming the majority of graduates from pharmacy school, and their numbers have climbed steadily ever since.

This philosophy happened to dovetail with precisely what was prized in the new economy. Lately economists have tried to measure what are known as “soft skills” or “people skills” and their impact on labor market success. In a 2005 international study called “People People,” Bruce Weinberg, Lex Borghans, and Bas ter Weel did a complex analysis of how attributes such as the ability to work with people or patience and motivation became assets in the job market. The team separated jobs where interpersonal skills are important (nurses and salespeople, for example) from jobs where they are less important (machine operators and truck drivers). What they found was that starting in the 1970s, the growing demand for soft-skills jobs corresponds exactly with the rise in women’s wages.

Companies no longer wanted to present themselves as faceless arbiters of authority; in an increasingly democratic, multicultural age they wanted to be seen as approachable and consumer responsive. In choosing a logo or an ad campaign, a company did not want to project just the old checklist of attributes: strong and dominant in the market. Now they also wanted to be innovative, dynamic,
caring, says advertising expert David Redhill. As time went on, the imperative only got stronger. Now, in the era of self-expression and social media, stone-faced patriarchy is the kiss of death.

The irony is noted: Just as suburban developments are named after the things they destroyed, so it went with the large and ever dominant multinational corporations, who strove to convey the warmth of the mom-and-pop stores they had put out of business. Recent Target ads that ran on city buses showed a series of broadly smiling women of various ethnicities with the tagline,
ASK ME ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING: TARGET PHARMACISTS ARE YOUR FRIENDLY RESOURCE FOR ALL QUESTIONS FROM ASPIRIN TO ZINC. SWING BY FOR AN IN-STORE CONSULTATION (OR JUST TO SAY HI)
. Would anyone stop by a Target pharmacy “just to say hi”?

But with pharmacists the transition was not entirely disingenuous. In the mom-and-pop era there weren’t all that many drugs to distribute. But now there are thousands, and errors in mixing them could be dangerous. As doctors and drug manufacturers came to represent the face of cruel and indifferent corporate medicine, the pharmacist could step in and present herself as the first responder with a friendly face, a modern-day version of a small-town doctor, who knew her pills but also your children’s names.

Over time the feminization of pharmacy, and office work, acquired a life of its own. Women took over human resource departments and hired more women. Once they reached critical mass they began to normalize certain workplace demands—working four days a week, say, or leaving early. The more women worked, the more economic power they had, multiplying the effect even further. Soon marketing experts began warning companies that if they had no women in their executive ranks they would never be able to understand the consumer of the future and they would be doomed.

In the “People People” study, Weinberg paints a picture of this new innovative workplace as a haven for teamwork and reciprocal altruism. The modern era’s new workers, whom he refers to as “caring agents,” go far beyond giving and receiving instructions; they display a talent for successfully interpreting feelings and ideas. For many men, this new innovative workplace sounds like their girlfriends’ book group, or maybe hell.

The 1999 movie
Office Space
was maybe the first to capture how alien and dispiriting this new feminized office park can be for men, and how resistant they are to adapting. Disgusted by their jobs and their boss, Peter and his two friends embezzle money and start sleeping through their alarm clocks. At the movie’s end, a male coworker burns down the office park, and Peter abandons desk work for a job in construction. Earlier eras of male anxiety were driven by premature fears and delusions about the specter of female takeover. But this time the men had actual, data-driven reasons to worry. Women
were
actually coming to dominate the workforce, which threw the whole corresponding set of male roles into turmoil. A 2002 study of the pharmacy workforce described the emasculation in more dispassionate terms: “Wage rates for female pharmacists have grown to a point where it is more beneficial, from a financial standpoint, for a family to have the female work full-time and the male work part-time. Gender role reversal may be more common in families where one spouse is a pharmacist.”

What does “gender role reversal” look like for the next generation? After the morning rush of classes I had lunch with a group of women to talk about their lives. Most grew up in traditional working-class families around Wisconsin, yet their conceptions of their future home life were, as the dean of student affairs had described them, shockingly fluid. They did not assume that they would quit working
once they had children, or even work part-time. They did not even assume that they would be the main caretaker at all. Being the traditional “mother” was a gender neutral role that anyone could fulfill. “You can either stay home or give that role to your spouse, whoever wants it,” said Laura Burt, one of the younger students I spoke with.

Their expected salaries still made them giddy, except when their greater earning power seemed like a burden. One girl showed me an IM she’d just sent to her friend, who’d inquired about her dating life. “They’re either intimidated by you (and your salary),” she wrote, “or they can’t afford you.” Five of the women had long-term boyfriends or husbands, who worked, respectively, as a cop, logger, head of a construction crew, electrician, and caterer. Katie Scarpace, a pretty, freckled girl whose boyfriend was the police officer, told me, “He jokes that he’ll retire when he’s thirty and I start working. He calls me his sugar mama.”

Sarah VandenHeuvel is a charismatic character with long dark hair and pointy-toe heels under her lab coat. She had just gotten married the summer before and described her husband, Andrew, to me as “not what anyone would picture as an alpha male.” Later in the day, Andrew stopped by to pick her up. He had the air of a Judd Apatow sidekick, tall and lanky with shaggy hair, only he didn’t seem to resent the overbearing wife. He liked living in a small town, but when Sarah announced she was moving to Madison, he’d said, “I’ll go with you.” Now he works as an IT guy at the help desk of a large company, a job he describes as “grunt work” but likes. His philosophy of work? “Get a good job, go to work, do the best you can, and don’t overdo it.” I asked how he saw his career unfolding, and he said, “Me? I mean, I would still like to work in the future, I think. But with IT I hope I can do freelance work and work at home. It depends what kind of job I get. I think if my job pulls in only the
same amount of money we’d have to use to pay for day care, then it wouldn’t be worth it. My mom was always there, and that would be nice, to have a parent at home . . . . My friends joke, ‘Oh, you’ll have to stay home and take care of the kids while Sarah makes all the money,’ and I’m like, ‘Uh. Yeah. That’s the plan.’”

In the first semester of pharmacy school, one of Sarah’s professors read her workplace statistics showing that, historically, women pharmacists are more likely to work part-time and, on the whole, work fewer hours than men. “I felt so irritated,” she says. “Here I saw women excelling and taking all the leadership roles, and they were talking about it in that same old way, as if women would come in, have babies, and then ruin the profession.” In fact, full-time women pharmacists do work, on average, 2.4 hours fewer than men, and more women work part-time.

But Sarah is absolutely right. The old scolding approach to women working fewer hours a week does not make sense anymore. The numbers her professor cited are merely evidence of a profession agile enough to bend to the needs of its best-trained professionals, and prepared for a future where both men and women might be interested in more flexible work at different points in their careers.

W
HAT WILL IT TAKE
to succeed in the economy of the future? Education will remain essential; the premium a college degree will set on income is likely to remain at an all-time high. Technology will continue to affect jobs—and increasingly high-skills jobs—in unpredictable ways. (Law firms, for example, now use computers to scan documents for discovery, replacing a key source of low-level legal work.) But the sure bets for the future are still jobs that cannot be done by a computer or someone overseas. They are the jobs that
require human contact, interpersonal skills, and creativity, and these are all areas where women excel.

Flexibility will increasingly become a magnet for talent. Consider the medical profession, which women are starting to dominate. Goldin has done a close breakdown of medical professions to see why women choose certain ones. It turns out the choice of pediatrics over brain surgery, for example, has less to do with love of children or disgust at slicing open brains than control over time. Gastroenterology is a perfect example. For years this specialty had among the lowest percentage of women. Just 5 percent of gastroenterologists ages fifty-five to sixty-four are women, but among the younger doctors—under thirty-five—it’s 30 percent. What happened? Have women developed a sudden love of rectal exams? The answer is controlled, regular hours. The expanded use of routine and scheduled colonoscopies has made it easier for women choosing the field to know they will be able to live manageable lives.

Veterinarians are another example. The profession has lately been effectively taken over by women. Is this because women love animals more than men do? Not really. A vet used to live a life much like that of a corner pharmacist—an entrepreneur with unpredictable hours and night duties. Now, regional vet hospitals have taken over those duties, making ordinary vet work more like salaried office work. Women succeed in jobs where they pay a low “career cost,” as Goldin calls it, meaning a penalty for taking time off or otherwise deviating from the standard career path. But this doesn’t mean women are compromising their careers. Women are taking advantage of new technologies and innovative workplace restructuring. Their rise is associated, in other words, with the forward-looking workplace of the future.

What were once considered exclusively women’s concerns are
now becoming the habits of the rising workforce. Surveys of Generation Y reveal them to have almost exactly the same workplace expectations and desires as a forty-year-old working mother: They want flexibility, the option to work remotely, to dip in and out of full-time, and to find their work meaningful, according to a 2009 article in the
Harvard Business Review
. “Why would I want to spend twelve hours a day at an office?” asked one young business major, who was male. “I want a life.” And companies eager to attract and retain talented workers and managers are responding. The consulting firm Deloitte, for instance, started what’s now considered the model program, called Mass Career Customization, which allows employees to adjust their hours depending on their life stage. The program, Deloitte explains, solves “a complex issue—one that can no longer be classified as a women’s issue.” Women have written the blueprint for the workplace of the future. The only question left is, will the men really adapt?