Work and Life - Helen Wilkinson

This convergence -- which I call the "ladette" phenomenon -- isn't all welcome news, of course. For one thing, more and more women are suffering from illnesses that were once viewed as predominantly male, such as heart disease and alcoholism. On the other hand, it truly has been liberating. Some people look at women's adoption of male attributes and say that convergence is all about sameness. I disagree. To me, it means much greater diversity than we have now. I would hope that, with women's entry into the labor force, we are liberated from the straitjacket that says that we must behave in a certain way. We all have the opportunity to become ourselves. There's no longer one gender model; there are many. I feel at ease with women who are stay-at-home moms because that's what they want to do. They aren't framed by a culture that says, "This is what you should do. This is what being a woman is all about." Staying at home is fine. It's democracy. It's a choice.

Certainly, we're in a peculiar transitional state where we still need a traditional feminist discourse. We still need that pressure, because inequality persists. But traditional feminism has proven to be an inadequate response today, for several reasons. First, when feminist analysis observes that men are still on top, it doesn't recognize the reality below the top. Sure, men are running government, and they hold all of the big CEO jobs. But where the majority of men are living their lives, something very different is occurring. Men at the bottom don't have any sense of power anymore. Just as my generation of women has grown up with the notion of equal treatment, men have grown up with images of coal-mine closures. They face the beginning of a history of female success and male underachievement. If feminism doesn't address what's happening to men today, it's not going to move forward.

Second, feminism has had difficulty wrestling with the notion of flexibility in the workforce. Its standard response has been that phenomena such as part-time work, job sharing, and outsourcing really represent a leveling down rather than a leveling up, forcing everyone into low-paid, insecure work. Certainly, that's true on one level: The shifts in the workplace do mean an erosion of standards, and have meant less power for both genders at the low end of the income scale. But the shift at the high end has been even more profound. The fastest-growing part of the economy is based in high-skill jobs, and women are getting more of those jobs. Self-employment and entrepreneurship among women are booming.

The key fault line in society a generation ago was gender. The old order depended on a deal between men and women: He was the breadwinner, and she was homemaker. Today, those roles are more fluid. There may be gender convergence, but there's more economic inequality between income groups. So the key division of the future is going to be between those with skills and those without, and will be defined less and less by gender. Any feminism that doesn't try to address that dynamic isn't going to speak to women. We need to facilitate a new debate that's much deeper than traditional feminism.

What are the issues confronting men today?

With the convergence of men's and women's lives, what unites men is their utter confusion. The feminization of society has made women feel useful. But men, faced with the same phenomenon, no longer know how they differ from women and what their places are. Their journey is one that requires relinquishing their status in the public sphere, and trying to move into the home sphere. Men feel that it's about their livelihoods, their families, their very sense of identity. There's a great uneasiness with gender, despite the rhetoric of our generation.

People ask, "Why can't men move into the home sphere as women have moved into the work sphere?" The answer is simple: As a society, we derive status and self-esteem from our paid roles at work -- a sphere that we've traditionally viewed as masculine. We haven't valued our private relationships or our home lives -- the sphere that's been feminine. So we're asking men to do jobs that, culturally, we haven't really valued. Women have colluded in this by saying that the way we derive value is through paid work.

I should say that this phenomenon isn't completely new. My father lost his job when manufacturing was decimated in North Wales, so I saw firsthand the impact of unemployment on male identity. I saw depression unrolling before me. I lived bits of "The Full Monty" when I was 18. But I also saw how flexible the male identity was when my dad wound up working in the service sector. He worked in traditionally female jobs -- in a bakery and in the catering business -- before starting his own garage business. For a time, my mom was the breadwinner.