Clad in a striking red jacket, the woman tapped away busily on her laptop. But as the train clattered towards East Croydon, she suddenly stopped typing.
"Sorry," she blurted out to me. "I know it's terribly un-English to talk to strangers on a train but you can't say women have a stronger pull to their children than men; my husband used to be a blacksmith but now looks after our children full-time and they have a massively connected bond. That yearning is not just felt by women."
Her passion was contagious. Soon several others joined the fray, determined to tell me - and each other - their contrasting points of view.
Boris Johnson marvelled at the "Olympic effect" and how it had made Brits talk to each other on public transport; well, in this case, it wasn't Mo Farah's heart-stopping race that got my fellow passengers going but the knotty issue of the new roles men and women play in a world where traditional notions of gender are being challenged every day.
The woman in the red jacket was an academic and her family's breadwinner, while her husband stayed at home. A young woman with long red hair said she'd just returned to work after her first maternity leave and was worried she was seen as less of a player. Another passenger said his wife had just given up work to stay at home full time "and I've never seen her happier".
This mesh of perspectives was offered up because I had been talking on the train - obviously louder than I'd intended - about two new books that claim Britain and America are in the grip of a power flip between the genders.
The books, The End of Men and the Rise of Women, by Hanna Rosin, and The Richer Sex, by Liza Mundy, claim the future is female: men, not women, are losing out and being left behind. Women, rather than men, will rule the world.
The guts of the argument is that girls do better than boys at every level of education and study in ever greater numbers at university (about 58 per cent of UK students are female), and women increasingly enter the professions in greater numbers than men (60 per cent of newly qualified solicitors are women, 56 per cent of new doctors are female).
We are now entering an era, the authors say, where women, not men, will be the top earners in their households. That economic shift, says Mundy, will lead to a fundamental change in the way men and women "date, mate, marry, plan, cook, clean, entertain, talk, retire, have sex, raise children and feel happy (or fail to do so)".
As I heard on the train, life is not quite that easy to predict. But there is no doubt that a new generation of young women have their own ideas about how to resolve the eternal dilemma of work-life balance.
The trigger is the great financial crisis and its effect on traditional employment patterns.
Rosin, an editor on The Atlantic magazine, argues that women are "plastic" and can adapt easily to change. Men are "cardboard" - stiff, resistant to new ways of doing things, particularly if that means taking on more of the domestic roles traditionally played by women.
The "mancession" in America (so-called because male sectors such as car manufacture and steel production have been worst hit) has forced millions of men onto the employment scrapheap while women have forged ahead, their superior qualifications landing them jobs in expanding sectors such as education, healthcare and customer services.
The same is true in Britain. Julia Margo, a British authority on the advantage of female skill sets, says: "In order to do well in the modern economy, emotional intelligence and communication skills are more important than brawn. And from the very beginning of school it is clear that girls concentrate, apply themselves and work harder than boys do. By the time they leave education they are far more employable."
This can involve some bleak moral compromises on the way. In a hair-raising chapter on the "hook-up" culture of casual sex at university, Rosin writes that "for an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman" hook-ups are a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development or education. She can "find her way to professional success and then get married".
Single-minded self-improvement is not restricted by class. Rosin describes a mother of three who works on a till to feed her family and studies at a community college at night to improve her prospects. She is so exhausted that she falls asleep in the lift to her classroom.
Nor is it by any means restricted to America. Research on young British women by the Centre for Talent Innovation in New York finds their levels of ambition are "off the scale".
Kathryn Parsons, 31, co-founder and director of Decoded, a tech firm, is part of this toiling sisterhood. "For the next three years I am married to my career. I am putting my life on hold to build the business. I am madly passionate about what I do, I need to be focused but I love it, my work is my life."
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Claire Danes stars as Carrie Mathison in the show 'Homeland',
where she plays an educated, driven investigator
with a challenging personal life. |
A new survey for Marie Claire magazine (conducted with Everywoman, a female business network) questioned 1,000 British working women in their twenties and thirties. The findings reveal a breed of driven women, 75 per cent of whom rank work as the "most important thing in their lives" - ahead of friends, family and relationships. Their heroines are such television workaholics as Carrie Mathison in Homeland and Sarah Lund in The Killing.
Among some women entering the workforce, the extreme work ethic has a surprisingly traditional cause: the prospect of motherhood. They are in a hurry because they are aware that time is short. Trish Halpin, Marie Claire's editor-in-chief, who commissioned the survey, says: "Their ambition is being driven by the pressure they feel to pay off student debts, save enough to buy a home and climb the career ladder before they have a baby."
Gemma Godfrey, a former quantum physicist and now head of investment strategy at Brooks Macdonald, a wealth management group, agrees with that diagnosis of the reasons why some women overtake their male peers in their twenties.
"Women have to plan their career goals over a shorter time horizon than men," she says. "Time pressure is driving them forward. They want to reach a senior position by the time they wish to start a family so they are able to return to a 'dream job' rather than a slug to the top."
Things may not go according to plan, however. The emotional armour required to climb the greasy pole and deal with the casual attitude to sex in the workplace - Rosin describes a terrifying American dating scene, where super-tough, sexually experienced career women trade pornographic insults with their male peers - is hard to shed when the Amazon warriors finally decide the time has come to get hitched.
The tough-minded ambition and the dearth of male graduates compared with women make finding a spouse with similar academic qualifications difficult. Recent studies have shown increasing numbers of professional women are "marrying down" - choosing men who will support their careers; 36 per cent of the women in the Marie Claire survey "see it as a benefit to have a stay-at-home husband who would look after the kids".
Mundy cites research by Aviva Insurance and Oxford University that found in 25 per cent of British couples women are the main breadwinner. The Office for National Statistics says only 30 per cent of families have two working parents.
In the Marie Claire survey, 40 per cent of those in a relationship say they earn more than their other half and 90 per cent claim to be more ambitious than their man (though 16 per cent say they lie about how successful they are so as not to put men off). Certainly the number of breadwinner wives is on the rise; but to see them as the norm of the future seems premature for a trend that is in its infancy.
"We're still the transition generation," says Margo, who works full-time while her husband stays at home with their two children. "We're doing it, but we are pioneers, we didn't grow up with this kind of model. Lots of couples I know have been forced into this arrangement because the men were bankers or estate agents and have lost their jobs while their wives are still working."
Some women, of course, opt out of motherhood. Recent research into Generation X by the Centre for Talent Innovation in New York found that 40 per cent of educated women born between 1965 and 1975 were childless and expected to remain that way. Many cited career ambition: they wanted "to do one thing well" rather than be pulled in several directions at once.
The ambitious younger generation should note that among those successful women who do have children, the dilemmas of motherhood are not necessarily resolved by wealth, success and a man at home.
Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton Investment Management and chairwoman of the 30 per cent Club (which campaigns to get more women on FTSE boards), has nine children and a Buddhist house husband (he'd need to be). But many female high-flyers now trade traditional status - the corner office, legions quivering at their command, salary - for time autonomy, being in charge of their own schedules so they can fit their work around their children.
The new buzz phrase for this is "work-life merge". Its natural home is Silicon Valley, where Katie Stanton, head of international strategy for Twitter, tells Rosin: "I consider myself incredibly lucky because I can do this job really well and have a family. It's great."
The rest of us might not think so. "Great" in Silicon Valley means leaving at 5pm to get the kids fed and into bed, but then logging back on every night, often until past midnight. Stanton can't remember the last time she went out for dinner.
"These women work flexibly but they work all the time," writes Rosin. "The merge means that work and play and kids and sleep are all jumbled up in the same 24-hour period."
At a recent women's leadership summit organised by a tech behemoth, one of their senior women buttonholed me after my talk. She wanted to ask about work-life balance. Then, with tears in her eyes, she told me it was her son's fifth birthday - but he was in California; her guilt and grief were etched all over her face. Later I saw her crying as she talked into her mobile.
ONE glitch in the plan for female world domination is the shortage of women coming into the high-tech industries of the future.
At present the digital future is geeky and male; currently in Britain 92 per cent of teenage girls rule themselves out of a career in the booming technology/engineering sectors by not taking all three sciences at GCSE. If women are really going to rule, that has to change.
One young female tech entrepreneur tells me: "The vast majority of the young entrepreneurs I meet are male. Indeed, too much of the technological future at the moment is being written by men. We need more women to learn to write computer code and be a part of it, as everything in the future is about technology. I wouldn't say this is a female space, though I would like it to be and women, when they learn to code, are really good."
But the real trouble with the thesis about women taking over the world because they are doing better in education and in the first 10 years of their careers is it ignores much evidence to the contrary.
Last year Lord Davies published a government-commissioned report into why there are not more women at the top of Britain's companies. In it is a memorable diagram, a pyramid that shows equal numbers of male and female graduate entrants to the workplace at the bottom, but where the female half of the pyramid empties towards the top. While women may be entering the workplace as a mighty, enthusiastic, hardworking wave, as they hit middle management - and their mid-thirties - they drop out in droves.
Last week, I spoke to one of the rare female mountaineers who have made it to the summit: a female chief financial officer of a global corporation, who is about to quit. What did she make of the End of Men thesis?
She laughed. "Not much sign of that up here - it would be more accurate to talk about the End of Women. There were three of us at this level two years ago; when I go, there will be one - she's the last woman standing."
So why is she leaving? "I came from a modest background, I've earned enough to pay off my mortgage, money alone isn't a motivator for me and I feel burnt out."
Part of that exhaustion is fuelled by guilt. "I've worked really hard, I've got a six-year-old daughter whom I rarely see. I know she is happy and I have a wonderful supportive husband and a live-in nanny but I have been getting increasingly stressed and I just have got to the point where I think life is more important than work."
Knowing she was a role model and a trailblazer made her stick at the job but she says: "I know Sheryl Sandberg [chief operating officer of Facebook] said that women should just suck it up and keep going like the men do, but it is incredibly difficult to manage a high-powered job and balance that with any kind of family life. I came back to work when my daughter was five months old. I've never taken her to ballet, or seen her recitals. I never pick her up from school. I don't know any of the other mothers.
"That's been okay - I made the choices I made and there is no reason why women shouldn't make them, too. But I have reached a point where the status and the money are just not worth it. The men run on huge egos, they are competitive, they want to win, they are much more driven by that, but also much better at taking time for themselves to recuperate.
"They are just wired differently. If I have an hour off, I want to spend it with my daughter; if the men do, they go to the gym. I haven't had a moment for myself for the last four years - I don't even go shopping, I do everything online. It is so stressful it's just not worth it, I just don't want to miss out on my daughter growing up. I'm choosing not to have it all."
Taken from The Times (U.K.)
If I were queen for a day, cuddles would be mandatory. I would counter the epidemic of human encounterlessness with cuddle centres for those who never get a proper hug. - Amanda Palmer (Punk-cabaret performer Amanda Palmer rose to prominence with her band The Dresden Dolls.) ~ her explanation and readers' comments HERE.
