They Say It’s a Woman’s World Now. The Workplace Tells a Different Story.
To try to make sense of feminist workplace progress in 2024 can sometimes feel like watching a cat batting a ball of yarn: The more it gets picked apart, the more tangled it becomes.
We spent last year hearing the chipper news that our economy was being painted dream house pink — “Barbie” barreling past $1 billion at the box office, Taylor Swift’s tour amassing more money than a small country’s G.D.P. But the supposed power that women were flexing to drive America’s spending only highlighted the fact that actual financial power still sits with men: Skyrocketing inflation, for example, hit women harder because their wages are less likely to keep pace. I’m reminded of what female colleagues told me recently when I came out of a salary negotiation meeting with my hands shaking: You do know, right, that some of the men on your team would fight back harder, and they’d consider it fun?
Picture a woman entering the work force now. In her teenage years alone, she’ll have witnessed a dizzying array of new freedoms won and old ones smashed to pieces. With #MeToo, millions exposed sexual wrongdoings snaking through the workplace; in April came a reminder of that truth-telling’s limits, when Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was overturned. A wave of women’s corporate leadership was cited as evidence of the rise of the “girlboss,” but many of those women leaders were rapidly felled by accusations of abuse or undue aggression, as magazines declared “ding dong, the girlboss is dead!” Meanwhile, a half-century of constitutionally protected abortion rights was shredded in 2022, with Dobbs v. Jackson.
The rate of backward and forward motion on gender equality can make America’s workplaces seem as if they’re stuck in a time machine whose operator is under the influence. (He’s probably getting a raise anyway.) On the question of what ails our workplaces where gender equality is concerned, a crop of new books offers diagnoses.
In FAIR SHAKE: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy (Simon & Schuster, 351 pp., $29.99), a trio of legal scholars deliver a compelling assessment of what has thwarted women’s efforts to attain workplace equality: It’s the economy, stupid (what James Carville memorably said while strategizing the campaign of a presidential candidate whose tenure would end in sexual scandal). The authors, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone and Nancy Levit, convincingly argue that nearly a half-century of corporate and economic policies set on making the rich richer has also prevented women from accessing the same financial gains as men. “The new ‘winner take all’ (WTA) approach to business — rooted in the Reagan-era tax breaks and deregulation of the 1980s that gained ground in the 1990s — is to blame for undermining women’s prospects for achieving equality in our lifetimes,” the authors write.
