The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [44]
Women’s attitudes toward work changed. In 1929 the labor supply of wives typically fell as their husbands’ wages grew—suggesting they worked only to supplement the family income. By the early 1960s, however, economist Jacob Mincer found that women were making the decision on whether to work based on their own wages, rather than those of their husbands.
Work even transformed women’s bodies. Men tend to like women with big hips and breasts for reproductive reasons. Female hourglass shapes are associated with the onset of fertility—girls have similar shapes to boys, but begin accumulating fat around breasts and bottoms at puberty, when their estrogen levels rise. But these aren’t the only determinants of success. As women’s opportunities in the job market improved, they embraced a different, slimmer archetype of beauty. The architecture designed for success in the mating game—big breasts and waspish waists—lost ground to a more slender body ideal that was better suited for a workplace still ruled by men who tended to see curvaceous women exclusively as mating opportunities.
Around 1900, the chests of models depicted in Vogue magazine were twice as big around as their waists. But as more women took professional jobs, busts in Vogue slimmed down until by 1925 they were only about 10 percent bigger. Women’s body shape became more curvaceous again in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps as a consequence of the relative scarcity of men during World War II, and the marriage surge after the end of the war that took many women out of work. But they would slim down again. As a wave of women joined the professional ranks over the next three decades, breast sizes declined progressively relative to waists until by the late 1980s, the breast-to-waist ratio in Vogue was back near its trough of 1925.
The dynamic fits patterns found in other cultures. One study across dozens of primitive societies found that plump women are less desirable in societies that value women’s labor, suggesting that body fat associated with higher energy storage and reproductive fitness also makes it more difficult to succeed at work.
Education, coupled with increasing demand for women in the labor force, ultimately changed women’s expectations for good. In 1960 there were 1.84 men for every woman graduating from a four-year college in the United States. By 2008, the graduation ratio had flipped to 1.34 women for each man. And most of these highly educated women worked. In 2000, women accounted for some 40 percent of first-year graduate students in business, and about half of those in medicine and the law. About 60 percent of American women of working age are in the formal workforce, either holding a job or looking for one. This is still about 11 percentage points below men’s labor participation. But it is 15 percentage points above women’s share forty years ago.
Differences remain in men’s and women’s positions in the workplace. In 2009, women’s median income had risen to about 80 percent of that of men. But the pay gap has remained stuck there for years. Women’s wages are still penalized because they take more time off and are more likely to work part-time than men, mainly because of motherhood. A study of MBA graduates from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that the gender wage gap rose from $15,000 a year on average, right after graduation, to $150,000 nine years out. It also found that nine years after graduation only 69 percent of female graduates were working full-time all year, compared with 93 percent of males. Yet, despite the persistent wage gap, for most women work has become the norm, irrespective of their earnings. It is what they do, just like men. This has changed American society in fundamental ways.
RENEGOTIATING THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN
One cannot overstate how completely the traditional marriage bargain was overturned by the new dynamic. The standard family deal, in which women exchanged the service of their uterus, child care, and household chores for their