Wednesday, January 04, 2012

They Call It the Reverse Gender Gap

A very interesting article about the emerging "reverse gender gap":

As the year ends, much of the talk around women — at least in the United States — has moved from empowerment and global gender gaps to the trend of young single women out-earning men and the rise of female breadwinners.

There are so many views and theories out there, some of them driven by independent research and others by personal experience and still others by a chatty blend of both, that we are getting a sometimes confounding, always provocative and occasionally contradictory picture.

For starters, young women today — and not just in the United States — are moving quickly to close the pay gap, or in some cases have closed it already.

They are marrying later and later, or not marrying at all. They no longer need husbands to have children, or want no children (40 percent of births in the United States each year are now to single women).

Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female). And a study shows that in most U.S. cities, single, childless women under 30 are making an average of 8 percent more money than their male counterparts, with Atlanta and Miami in the lead at 20 percent.

Although that study of 2,000 communities was done only in the United States, it points to a global trend.

The emergence of this cohort of high-earning young women and the increasing number of female breadwinners are transforming gender relationships, upending patterns of matchmaking, marriage and motherhood, creating a new conflict between the sexes, redefining the word "breadwinner" and inspiring tracts on the leveling of men's roles.

It is being called the reverse gender gap.

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The Female Factor

They Call It the Reverse Gender Gap

By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA

Published: December 13, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/us/14iht-letter14.html

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