{"id":523,"date":"2025-03-17T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/we-can-fix-it-but-do-we-want-to\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T18:31:33","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T18:31:33","slug":"we-can-fix-it-but-do-we-want-to","status":"publish","type":"essays","link":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/essays\/we-can-fix-it-but-do-we-want-to\/","title":{"rendered":"We Can Fix It. But Do We Want To?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

International Women\u2019s Day nearly escaped my awareness this year. As it turns out, I wasn\u2019t the only one not in the spirit: About a week earlier, the \u201cfor women, by women\u201d investing platform Ellevest announced it would be selling and transferring<\/span><\/a> its roboadvisory accounts to Betterment this April. Ellevest explained in the fine print that it had made a decision to focus on \u201cindividuals, families, or institutions with $500,000 or more,\u201d shedding 99% of its users<\/span><\/a> in the process. \u201cEnraged\u201d former customers<\/span><\/a> would be forgiven for asking whether this meant its original value proposition\u2014investing for women, by women\u2014was a cynical business strategy smothered with a veneer of trumped-up, marketable girl power all along. But regardless of the company\u2019s motivations, Ellevest\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em> reflected a legitimate fiscal reality: Statistically speaking, women\u2019s financial lives unfold differently than men\u2019s, both for boring, apolitical reasons like longer average life spans, and tricky, entrenched problems like lower average pay after childbirth. This is as true today as it was in 2014 when the platform launched. <\/p>\n

The closure feels ominous. We\u2019ve been wading through feminist low tide for the last several years\u2014not because a movement for women\u2019s progress is no longer necessary, but because it\u2019s less widely palatable now. The popularity of the sentiment that women\u2019s rights have \u201cgone too far<\/span><\/a>\u201d is unnerving, considering the version of liberal feminism that gained steam for years was about as market-friendly and Deloitte-approved as it comes, heavy on ubiquitous THE FUTURE IS FEMALE merchandise, light on meaningful reform. <\/p>\n

That is to say: Even I can admit some of the past hoopla around International Women\u2019s Day felt a little cloying. My brilliant colleague Macy rendered this in stark relief in this role-reversal comedy<\/span><\/a> wishing a \u201chappy International Men\u2019s Day\u201d to all the \u201cboy bosses\u201d and boasting about a donation in honor of the occasion to a \u201cmale cultural institution called FanDuel.\u201d The US government began recognizing March as Women\u2019s History Month in 1995, it should be noted, under President Bill Clinton, a man famously respectful of women, particularly young ones! (Was Bill Clinton a feminist? Is this Dove commercial my friend<\/em><\/span><\/a>?<\/em>) <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>We\u2019d much rather explain away wage or wealth differences as mere consequences of benign personal preference.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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The tension had been fomenting for a while, but it was most undeniable in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, when anxieties about \u201cmen falling behind\u201d escalated to a fever pitch in American media. Richard Reeves declared<\/span><\/a> in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> that what was actually<\/em> \u201con the ballot\u201d was \u201cAmerican Manhood,\u201d a telling sentiment when what was literally<\/em> on the ballot was a woman (albeit one who, unlike Clinton in 2016, called no attention to that fact). In that sense, this year\u2019s muted acknowledgment feels grimly appropriate. Suddenly, it\u2019s more acceptable to tap out of a sometimes-performative celebration that, in many ways, was \u201cmore noise than progress<\/span><\/a>,\u201d as none other than Ellevest founder Sallie Krawcheck said. <\/p>\n

The Financial Times<\/em> recently reported that 57% of men<\/span><\/a> under the age of 30 in the US \u201cthink feminism has gone so far that men are now suffering discrimination.\u201d More distressingly, 36% of women of the same age agreed. How irreparably far-reaching is the Andrew Tate misogyny-slop universe that even one in three young women believe they\u2019re benefiting from some unseen, unfair advantage? I fear we underestimate just how many people, women included, bristle at the idea that gendered economic disparity is still an issue that deserves attention. We\u2019d much rather explain away wage or wealth differences as mere consequences of benign personal preference. The median woman, you see, just chooses<\/em> to own 55 cents for every dollar the median man owns, because she prefers<\/em> low-wage work! <\/p>\n

Perhaps the rush of headlines declaring<\/span><\/a> that, \u201cYoung women are out-earning young men in several U.S. cities,\u201d as one 2022 report found, are to blame, calling attention to the 22 metro areas where women under 30 are at least at parity with their male counterparts. Excellent! Only 228 more to go. (The city that holds the top spot for the largest gender pay gap is where I went to college in the south; coming in second place is the small northern town where I was born. Chip, meet shoulder.) The fact that this reportage spawned even a minor amount of hand-wringing about a looming \u201creverse gender pay gap<\/span><\/a>\u201d reveals a deep well of cultural anxiety about women\u2019s material progress, even if we claim (or, once claimed) to believe it\u2019s a worthy goal. (To be fair to the piece in question, its author spent most of the word count gently reminding readers that a handful of outperforming, cosmopolitan childless women does not mean we live in a post-feminist utopia\u2014still, the subtext lurking behind the headline is loud.)<\/p>\n

Academics like the aforementioned Richard Reeves are dominant in this \u201cmen are not all right\u201d space, and what\u2019s most notable about these discussions is the speed with which the conclusion is drawn that obviously<\/em>, something must be done\u2014boys should be universally held back a year<\/span><\/a> in school because their brains supposedly develop more slowly, he suggests, and this will give them time to catch up to the girls. Or maybe the entire education system should be changed<\/span><\/a> to address boys\u2019 aggregate underperformance! Really, they\u2019re open to anything.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>Because education has become \u2018feminine\u2019 owing to the presence of women, it\u2019s increasingly perceived as a lower-value pursuit.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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The concern du jour is that women now outnumber men at the university level, apparently proof that young women are gaining ground, but at men\u2019s expense. Celeste Davis has convincingly argued<\/span><\/a> this state of affairs is not due to women being better at school, needing more education to compensate for the likelihood of lower pay, or because colleges are offering too many Women\u2019s Studies seminars on free bleeding, but because of what she calls \u201cmale flight\u201d\u2014the tendency for men to avoid predominantly female spaces. Quoting economist and former president of Northwestern University Morty Schapiro, who noticed this trend studying college enrollment, she writes, \u201cWhen the number of women hits 60%…the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining. There\u2019s a cliff you fall off once you become 60\/40 female\/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.\u201d <\/p>\n

In other words, because education has become \u201cfeminine\u201d owing to the presence of women, it\u2019s increasingly perceived as a lower-value pursuit. This mirrors the well-documented historical trend<\/span><\/a> in fields that become \u201cfeminized\u201d over time\u2014that is, controlling for education and skill, as the gender composition of a labor pool shifts to majority-female, the average pay lowers. \u201cSchool is now feminine. College is feminine,\u201d Davis writes. \u201cAnd rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.\u201d Fellas, is it gay to know stuff?<\/span><\/a> In this way, earning potential for women and men alike is sacrificed at the altar of masculinity. (Which is, I suppose, a step up from the original intent behind phrases like THE FUTURE IS FEMALE, which second-wave feminist Sally Gearhart meant literally<\/span><\/a>\u2014she once suggested men should be reduced to no more than 10% of the population. Let it be known these are not the gender relations I dream of.)<\/p>\n

The difference is that, in the face of these facts about men\u2019s educational outcomes, systemic solutions and major interventions for gender disparity are suddenly on the table. Even supposed biological differences like boys\u2019 \u201cslower brain development\u201d are no excuse for inaction. The wide-ranging, creative solutions open for serious consideration are astounding to behold, as most biological hurdles that primarily shortchange women (like requiring time off to physically carry and deliver a child, leading to lower pay over a lifetime) are treated as shrug-your-shoulders, immutable realities. But they\u2019re connected to consequences that are harder to shrug off: Women are approximately 65% more likely<\/span><\/a> to report leaving paid work to care for a family member, which might explain why they retire with roughly 63% as much<\/span><\/a> retirement income and are 56% more likely<\/span><\/a> to end up in poverty following divorce.<\/p>\n

I want to be clear: The problem is not that we\u2019d entertain adjusting the education system to make it work better for boys\u2014the problem is that we\u2019re seemingly uninterested in applying the same level of imagination and commitment to the working world on behalf of women. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>We\u2019re seemingly uninterested in applying the same level of imagination and commitment to the working world on behalf of women.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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Education aside, we\u2019re also generally more accepting of government-led intervention to rebuild sectors in which offshoring has disproportionately impacted men\u2019s jobs. Bringing manufacturing back to the United States\u2014an industry that\u2019s 70% male\u2014has been a popular talking point, if not an outright political priority, for almost as long as I\u2019ve been alive. Without manufacturing jobs, the thinking goes, millions of young men will be without meaningful employment, and this is a serious problem for society. (Kathryn Edwards, an economist who\u2019s joining me on the show next week, has noted the conspicuous lack<\/span><\/a> of serious consideration that these young men could be rerouted to professions in chronically understaffed fields like nursing, early childhood development, or teaching, which also happen to be majority women<\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In cases where the market allocates resources or jobs away from men, intervention is assumed necessary, legitimate, and important. But when a sector that\u2019s majority women experiences low pay or enters a state of outright market failure, you\u2019re more likely to hear that this is efficient, if unfortunate; the market is merely pricing the value of the work and allocating it accordingly. At issue here is not that the government is comfortable spending hundreds of billions of dollars in an attempt to reestablish US manufacturing, but that it\u2019s unwilling to recognize a similarly sized intervention might be just as necessary elsewhere. <\/p>\n

My fast-growing female prefrontal cortex\u2019s alarm system, trained on decades of feminine self-policing, has been ringing the entire time I\u2019ve been writing this, alerting me to the eyerolls and emails this essay will no doubt generate. Every time I write about women, I am rewarded with an onslaught of term papers arguing I have simply misunderstood; the data is wrong, or, no, wait, the data is correct, but it\u2019s because of this other factor that, sorry, we actually can\u2019t change. Won\u2019t I at least concede that women could study engineering instead? Won\u2019t I consider the natural<\/em> differences\u2014that women are the ones who have babies and enjoy being around children and choose lower-paying jobs? Suddenly, unlike with the speed of brain development or the predictable results of global free trade, a commitment to our \u201cnatural\u201d limitations or current market outcomes is cast as unavoidable; a desire to balance the scales to correct for suboptimal realities, na\u00efve. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
>
\n \u201c<\/span>But when a sector that\u2019s majority women experiences low pay or enters a state of outright market failure, you\u2019re more likely to hear that this is efficient, if unfortunate.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
\n

A phrase became popular during the Women\u2019s Rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s when it was used as the title of an essay<\/span><\/a>: The personal is political. It was intended to widen the scope of what we considered \u201cpolitical\u201d problems, that is, problems shaped by broader power structures. Most people at the time saw issues like marriage, children, and work as individual, personal problems to be sorted privately, and this phrase expanded the public\u2019s consciousness about what might be possible if we dreamed bigger. Today, you\u2019re more likely to hear the phrase interpreted in its inverse: to encourage the individual to embody political principles in their personal life. <\/p>\n

The \u201cmen are not all right\u201d discourse proved we know how to recognize the limits of personal choice. We know how to treat problems like crumbling job opportunities or gaps in educational outcomes with the appropriate level of concern and serious consideration for who\u2019s being left behind; to engage in thinking that treats gendered disparities as structural questions of political will, not issues of personal failure and alleged biological inadequacy. These conversations often\u2014rightly!\u2014sidestepped debates about whether it\u2019s culture or biology or free markets, and jumped straight to solutions, taking for granted that we owed men better outcomes.<\/p>\n

Surely we can look at women\u2019s current set of <\/em>outcomes\u201455 cents in median wealth, meaningful overrepresentation in low-wage work and poverty, more precarious retirements\u2014and extend the same level of resolve and legitimacy. I hear there\u2019s a new book<\/span><\/a> coming out in June that deals with exactly this.  <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An aside: We\u2019ve gotten a number of emails from former Ellevest users understandably expressing concern about their assets being transferred and asking questions about Betterment. We\u2019ve been big fans of Betterment\u2019s investing platform for years, so if you\u2019d like to stick with a roboadvisor, you\u2019re in good hands.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

International Women\u2019s Day nearly escaped my awareness this year. As it turns out, I wasn\u2019t the only one not in the spirit: About a week earlier, the \u201cfor women, by women\u201d investing platform Ellevest announced it would be selling and transferring its roboadvisory accounts to Betterment this April. Ellevest explained in the fine print that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2506,"template":"","meta":[],"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","essays","type-essays","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feminism"],"yoast_head":"\nWe Can Fix It. 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