The End of Men and the Rise of Women (16 page)

Shannon, for one, has tried at least to tackle the first step: banish
denial that the world is just going to revert to the way it was. One day Shannon does not wait for Troy’s smoke signal but marches into the bedroom at ten
A.M.
and pulls him out of bed. “Come on,” she yells, “move it,” and lights the first cigarette of the day for him, to speed up the process. Downstairs, she puts Brandon in the backseat of the car, gets in the passenger seat, and without telling Troy exactly where they are going, directs him to the old plant. They have driven by the place hundreds of times but never stopped to really look and listen. At first Troy stops at every stop sign along the circular roads connecting the various buildings, but then he realizes no one is here, and so he zooms through the stop signs like he’s playing Need for Speed, his favorite arcade game.

From inside, the place looks like an abandoned village, with solid brick buildings connected by a small winding road. Plants these days are generic white boxes that could just as easily hold a Walmart as a Kia plant, but this factory has the feeling of a pioneer village from an earlier century. Right near the entrance to the complex is the Russell Afternoon Center for Creative Learning, which features a big painting of a circle of children holding hands, the universal symbol of peace and hope for the future. Brandon wants to stop at the playground, but the slides are covered in rust and the swings have long been pulled off.

Shannon makes Troy pull onto a patch of gravel overlooking a wide field, and they get out of the car. There are giant furnaces and generators around, but they are all idle. The loudest noise is the birds, some of whom have made nests among the signs and discarded shovels. Troy lights a cigarette and doesn’t say a word for a while. In the field is a truck trailer sunk into the earth. On its side is an enormous painting of a football player in full uniform running with the ball tucked in his hands, next to the words
RUSSELL. THE
EXPERIENCE SHOWS
. The player is seconds from a touchdown, with no one on his tail. But over the years the tires have rooted themselves in the mud, and the picture has faded into a dull lavender, like an old snapshot from a small town boy’s high school glory years. Troy notices the picture at the same time Brandon does. It’s depressing, really, this big trailer stuck in the dirt, this mockery of imminent victory. But Troy doesn’t register that emotion. In a quick movement he adopts the stance of the player, yells
“Hike!”
in a loud voice that makes Shannon jump, throws his pack of cigarettes at her, and then tackles her onto the grass, where both of them fall, for the moment, laughing.

H
annah Cooper’s house contains only one visible clue that Billy, her boyfriend of eleven years, lives here, too: a quartet of walleyes, once wild spawn of a Wisconsin lake and now mounted over the dining room table with their mouths shellacked into a permanent gape. (“I said okay, we can put them up, but only on one wall.”) Otherwise, Billy’s things are hidden away in rooms where Hannah is pretty sure visitors won’t see them. His beer posters and fishing equipment are laid out on the pool table in an unheated room off the garage. His hunting jackets and guns are in the basement, sharing space with several pairs of snowboarding boots (“Boy toys,” she says coolly). At the foot of the basement stairs sit two dozen or so buckets of paint in standard colors—white, basic white, eggshell—which he needs for his day job as a housepainter, and special rollers idle over the basement sink.

The rest of the house is a testimony to Hannah’s persistent attempts to swim upstream, away from her roots. A plush red sectional couch dominates the living room—she saved up the $3,000 it
cost after seeing it in an interior design magazine because it looked to her “like New York.” Most days after school she sits on it and studies for her pharmacy school exams, playing the Classical Masterpieces music channel on the TV. “I read somewhere that classical music activates parts of your brain you don’t really use.” When Billy comes home she retreats to her study, which she asked him to paint a particular shade of sage. There, Hannah has built a fortress of self-improvement: neat stacks of her school textbooks and scientific papers and books from the library she wants to read (
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
) and books she thinks she ought to have read (Jane Austen, George Orwell) and books for future projects (about gardening and organic food). Above her desk in a gilded frame hangs her acceptance letter to pharmacy school, a reminder of the singular achievement that changed her life. Near it hangs her life motto, printed in a romantic font on a small piece of paper: “I Believe that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are but we are responsible for whom we become.”

I met Hannah in the winter of 2011 when I visited the University of Wisconsin pharmacy school in Madison, one of the nation’s top ten pharmacy schools, with a freshman class that is 62 percent women. Pharmacy is one of the many middle-class professions that have lately come to be dominated by women, and I wanted to see what this new generation of hungry female professionals was like. Hannah stood out at the pharmacotherapy lab I sat in on, where all the instructors and a majority of the students were women. The instructor was verbally testing the students on various chemotherapy drugs, and Hannah, with less arrogance than a sense of duty, immediately pointed out a mistake on one of the already approved answers—a mistake, the instructor pointed out, which would have led to a fatal dosage.

Like many of the women I met in the course of researching this
book, Hannah did not see herself as a feminist trailblazer or a woman at the forefront of anything. She just saw herself as someone who noticed a bridge one day and crossed over it. More than anything, women like Hannah remind me of immigrants like my parents: They seem propelled by a demonic, mysterious force to keep moving forward even though they are nervous about what is ahead, and by moving forward together they permanently transformed the country. Hannah seemed determined and unstoppable and tried not to think too much about what would happen as all the women she knew kept swimming upstream and the men got caught in the eddies; when the men became the equivalent of the family left behind in the Old Country, beloved maybe, but inert and frustratingly stuck in the past.

Hannah now wears her hair in a wavy red bob. Her old eyebrow piercing is barely visible and her lower back tattoo is well hidden under the “business attire” the school requires the students to wear under their lab coats. But even without the lab coat, Hannah is barely recognizable to her old friends. One evening when I came back to visit, we ate dinner at the Caddy Shack, a bar Hannah’s mother owns in a nearby town. The bartender is an old schoolmate of Billy’s, and it took him a minute to figure out she was Billy’s girlfriend and to remember that she was in pharmacy school. “I know a girl who went there,” he offered. “And now she’s making in the six figures.” Hannah just smiled, clearly not wanting to discuss money in a crowded bar. “Me, I prefer the homegrown kind of medication,” he added. “Ginger brandy.”

Hannah and Billy met in high school and partied their way through their twenties, smoking pot, going to raves, working minimum-wage jobs. Since then, both have mellowed, but in different directions. Billy learned how to paint houses from an
ex-girlfriend’s father over a decade ago, and he is still doing that, although much less frequently now that jobs are drying up. After work, or if there is no work, he fishes with his buddies.
“Every single day,”
says Hannah. “He just doesn’t want anything more.” If his life is a straight line with dips representing spells of unemployment over the last couple of years, Hannah’s is a steady climb up. Hannah is calm and reserved and something of a homebody, but she has an internal drive that’s exhausting.

It started to take off for her one day when she was working as a technician at a pharmacy company, hourly work that requires minimal training and is basically a fancy title for “packer.” Hannah was shelving the drugs when an older woman who was a pharmacist came in to ask her a question.

“Where’s the Trileptal?” the woman asked.

“Oh, it’s under the oxcarbazepines,” Hannah answered, using the generic term for the type of drug. “And she just turned around and looked at me, astonished.”

“You should go to pharmacy school,” the woman said.

“Why, just because I memorized all the generics?” But pretty soon that hesitation turned into: “I need to get back to school.
I just have to
.” She got her college degree and then got accepted to the University of Wisconsin. In her last set of exams, she got all A’s and made the dean’s list.

This winter she chose to skip the pharmacy students’ annual charity ball rather than take Billy because “he’d be completely out of place. People are so much more educated, and he would feel like he couldn’t fit in. I would be embarrassed for him. I know who he is, and I love him for it. But he’d be uncomfortable.” Why does she stay with him? “Because we crack each other up,” she says. Her mom
worries that she does it for the same reason she takes out those eight-hundred-page novels about India from the library: because she is attracted to suffering.

I
N 2009
, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to hover around 50 percent. About 80 percent of women aged twenty-five to fifty-four years old work for pay, and an even higher percentage of female college graduates do. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2011, women hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 61.3 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast as women come to dominate law and medical schools. In the UK, women are poised to outnumber their male counterparts by 2017, prompting a national debate about whether medicine is becoming “overfeminized.” In France, women make up 58 percent of doctors under age thirty-five, and in Spain, it’s 64 percent.

At some point in the last forty years, the job market became largely indifferent to size and strength, and from then on, in many pockets of the workforce, men no longer held the cards. Technology began to work against men, making certain brawn jobs obsolete and making what economists call “people skills” ever more valuable. The coveted and lasting professions were the ones that required a boutique skill or a nurturing touch—things a robot could not easily do. Traditionally feminine attributes, like empathy, patience, and communal problem-solving, began to replace the top-down autocratic model
of leadership and success. For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men.

Upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, filling the ever-growing ranks of the creative class—publicity assistant, wine critic, trail mix creator, sustainability consultant, screenwriter. And that, in turn, creates an industry of jobs based on the things those women used to do for free—child care, food preparation, elder care. The booming health-care industry provides jobs all along that chain, from gastroenterologist to home health aide. Right in the middle falls pharmacist.

Of the many surprising professions that women have started to dominate over the last forty or so years—accounting, financial management, optometry, dermatology, medical genetics, forensic pathology, law, veterinary practice, among hundreds of others—pharmacy stands out as a unique example. Women made up about 8 percent of pharmacists in 1960, and they make up almost 60 percent today. In the earliest days pharmacists had the aura of shamans; they were men of great stature, magicians deft at mixing potions far too dangerous for women to touch. Think of Monsieur Homais, the pompous apothecary in Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel
Madame Bovary
who, in the final sentence of the novel, wins the Legion of Honor, and think of what happens when Emma Bovary breaks into his lab and steals some arsenic. Now in Hannah’s class it’s mostly women who handle bags of bright red concoctions labeled “hazardous” and women who win all the prizes. Well over 60 percent of pharmacy graduates are women, and male pharmacists are retiring at a faster rate than women. This has caused a pharmacy magazine to ask in a recent editorial the obvious question: “Is Pharmacy Becoming a Woman’s Profession?”