"The World of Womenomics has arrived," announce Claire Shipman and Katy Kay in a breathless piece over at the Huffington Post. Shipman and Kay insist that as the recession tips the gender composition of the workforce in favor of women, companies will be forced to accommodate womanly demands. What follows is some extremely promiscuous usage of the first-person plural:

"Could it be that it's okay—finally—to state the obvious? We're not men. We not only don't work the same way—we don't want the same things or relish the climb up the corporate ladder with such testosterone-driven zeal."

Really? Must an article on gender and the recession immediately go all Mars/Venus on the subject? Since the start of the credit crisis we've seen this kind of pseudo-feminist drivel all over the place. The crash itself was supposedly "testosterone-driven." Women, on the other hand, "might have been able to temper the excesses that led to the current financial crisis." Women could have prevented the whole thing, apparently, by playing prudent schoolmarm to their cowboy colleagues. It's not a particularly inspired vision of the future of women in business.

I don't question the descriptive aspects of most of these pieces; women may well be more willing to trade salary for time, as Shipman and Kay claim, and they may also be more risk-averse in the boardroom. But assuming that such claims accurately track the state of the world, are we really so thrilled that they do? One reason recent job losses skew so heavily male is that women are concentrated in less volatile sectors, such as government, education, and health care. A general pattern of risk avoidance among half the population doesn't seem worth celebrating.

Tags: economics

In his review of the new Warren Buffet biography, Michael Lewis has a great description of how writer Alice Schroeder won over the billionaire by turning his need to be mothered by lovely brainiacs against him:

Over his long and admirable career, the famous billionaire has been shockingly honest about who he is and what he does. Now along comes this first-time author who insists on seeing his pleasant honesty and raising it, painfully. Even worse: she's a woman! Buffett has a long and happy history of admitting attractive, intelligent women into his life, which Schroeder describes without mentioning how neatly she fits into the pattern. These women have invariably felt the need to shelter and to protect their man, and to subordinate their own needs to his—until now. Buffett should have known better: you should never completely trust a writer. Especially if she is any good.

Tags: warren buffett alice schroeder michael lewis

New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews wrote a doozy of a story in a recent issue of the paper’s magazine, about how he went from a beaming homeowner and newlywed to an anxious debtor who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on his mortgage. He described the trials and headaches of borrowing and, throughout the story, a basic disbelief that he, a reporter who covers economics, could have been caught up in the same overzealous swindling and poor decision-making that he wrote about for the Times.

His story may have been cause for a lot of rubbernecking and tsk-ing among readers, but Dana Goldstein and Megan McArdle have perhaps hit on the real reason why Andrews had such a hard time: chicks.

Over at TAPPED, Goldstein writes:

The precipitating cause of Andrews' financial problems were a divorce and a rather hasty second marriage, to a woman named Patty. Andrews and Patty dated bi-coastally for one year before Patty and her 10-year old daughter moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The couple merged their households and bought a half-million-dollar suburban home immediately, despite the fact that Andrews was paying his first wife $4,000 each month in alimony and child support. That left him with just $2,777 in take-home pay—and with a new wife who hadn't held a full-time job since the early 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, at first, Patty was unable to secure a middle-income job. When she finally did, she was fired less than a year later. Patty's ex, meanwhile, was in arrears on his $700/month in child support. That meant Andrews was attempting to support two women and four children, essentially maintaining two totally separate households.

Megan's interpretation is that Andrews "couldn't afford to get married. At all." In fact, what Andrews couldn't afford was to marry women unprepared to participate in the work force.

Goldstein and McArdle make fabulous, if slightly divergent points. And this is as good a cautionary tale as any—but is it for men or for women? Goldsten calls this “A Good Argument Against Opting Out”—meaning women opting out of the workplace—but I tend to think the real “told you so” goes for the brothers.

Sure, I believe women should seek meaningful breadwinning opportunities, even if they don’t necessarily have to work. But shouldn’t men like Andrews steer clear of the trophy wives? I recall an article from the Wall Street Journal just after the fall 2008 collapse of the housing market about men who were having to give up their mistresses. (And who could forget the DABA women?) I don’t mean to call Andrews’ former and current wives gold-diggers, but maybe recession stories like his will cause an unintended and welcome consequence—the demise of arm candy.

Andrews' story also seems to have a second dose of spinach for its readers, male or female. Recall that even on his own, Andrews made a comfortable $120,000 annual salary, more money than the majority of American families could dream of, which placed him squarely in the upper middle class. So shouldn't his true-life fable teach us to live within our means?

Tags: family, finance, foreclosure, mortgages, new york times, stay-home moms, working families

The Washington Post yesterday had a profile of a now-retired regulator, Brooksley Born, 68, that's a must-read. If the world's smartest men had listened to her—instead of dismissing her as a woman in over her head—we might be living in a very different world, and the international financial crisis could have been avoided. While head of the obscure Commodities Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990s, Born foresaw that the unregulated, metastasizing growth of financial derivatives was a disaster in the making—this New York Times article has some great details. But she was put down by Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers, and lost the fight. As the Post profile shows, Born has been a quiet fighter her whole life. Number one in her class at Stanford Law, she was refused a Supreme Court clerkship because, Potter Stewart told her, he just couldn't see having a woman clerk. So she found a clerkship elsewhere, managed to make partner at a prestigious Washington law firm while working part-time so she could be with her kids, and generally making her determined way past the endless barriers to her advancement. Her confrontations with Greenspan are stunning, not the least for exposing the shocking stupidity of some of the supposedly world's-best financial minds. Born, now busily content in retirement, is a model for a life well-lived. May she enter the history books.

Tags: Brooksley Born, economy

Another day, another article about how men were more likely to be laid off than women and will, if we get the promised recovery, will be less likely to be rehired, making women an even more dominant economic force by default. The tendency is to spin this story as a battle between the sexes—women winning at men's expense? OMG feminism!—but in the real world, this is a story less of women's empowerment and more one of further destruction of the American dream.

You know how occasionally a company will lay off all its best-paid employees and replace them with new hires that they can pay way less? That's what's going on, but on a global scale—if men are being replaced by women in such great numbers, it's because women come 25 percent cheaper. That's a win for feminism in the same way Sarah Palin is a win for feminism, which is to say not at all. When average working people are seeing their actual income and wealth go down, this isn't a win for women. Or to put it in more specific terms, it's not some feminist victory for you to come home to find your husband laid off with no future job prospects and your much-lower salary being the now sole source of income.

And that's the great unspoken story in these kinds of articles. Women may have 89 percent of all bank accounts, but they're smaller banks accounts. They may now have 51 percent of all personal wealth, but that's because personal wealth holdings have shrunk dramatically.

The "battle of the sexes" frame is the easiest one to grab, because there really was a lot of male anger and fear of loss and emasculation when women stampeded into the workforce decades ago. That's because their actual dominance was actually threatened by women's economic independence. But you can't simply reverse the genders while keeping the same framework and call it a day. There's no real chance that these economic trends mean women are somehow gaining dominance over men. It's probably not even going to do much for women's equality at home. You can't really achieve equality by dragging men down instead of lifting women up. All that does is create more stress and resentment.

Tags: feminism, mancession, pay gap