The End of Men and the Rise of Women (26 page)

A 1999 analysis of 150 studies on risk-taking behaviors showed a similar result. Studies taken before 1980 show a greater gap in the gender difference in risk taking. Men still measure higher on such tendencies, but the gap is higher for risks such as driving and drug and alcohol use. In risk taking on, say, standard decision making, the gap has narrowed considerably. The risk-taking gap narrows even more among the younger cohorts, showing that either girls are getting braver or boys are getting more cautious in a risk-averse, highly protective society.

Increasingly, researchers are finding that qualities we thought of as innate are in fact context-specific, especially for women. To measure rates of competitiveness, anthropologist Uri Gneezy at the University of California, San Diego, compared two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania, who have a patriarchal society, and the Khasi in India, a matrilineal society where families invest mainly in girls. In a ball competition, Maasai men opted to compete twice as much as the women, but in the Khasi, the results were nearly reversed and the women competed much more. At the very least, “it is not universally true that the average female in every society avoids
competition more often than the average male in that society because we have discovered at least one setting in which this is not true,” writes Gneezy.

Stereotypes are slow to change, but in Western countries the culture is moving into a phase of “new, more conscious acceptance of female aggression,” argues Maud Lavin in the 2010
Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women.
Much of the credit goes to Title IX and its encouragement of vast waves of high school and college girls to play sports. In 1971, about one in twenty-seven girls participated in sports; now that number is up to one in two. Early experience with sports competition allows girls to express behaviors once restricted to men, and also to find a way out of the usual female aggression bind. In sports, violence is not dangerous but orderly, neatly divided into halves and quarters, and part of a larger team goal.

In her essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” philosopher Iris Marion Young argues that the early-life failure of girls to use their bodies in lateral space or to throw their whole weight behind physical tasks limits their imagination and sense of potential for themselves. By contrast, the experience of physical competence “ripples through everyday life” and, multiplied by tens of thousands, “causes a behavioral transformation on a mass societal level,” writes Lavin. In her book, Lavin traces the evolution of girl sports movies from the prettified territory of gymnastics, cheerleading, and ice-skating to the more brutal soccer and boxing worlds depicted in
Bend It Like Beckham, Girlfight
, and
Million Dollar Baby
, which ends in the dismal euthanizing of the boxer played by Hilary Swank.

Slowly pop culture is tuning in to the new wave of female violence. In Roman Polanski’s
The Ghost Writer
, the traditional political wife is rewritten as a cold-blooded killer at the heart of an evil
conspiracy. In her video for the song “Telephone,” Lady Gaga, with her infallible radar for the cultural edge, rewrites
Thelma & Louise
as a story not about elusive female empowerment but about sheer, ruthless power. Instead of killing themselves, she and her girlfriend (played by Beyoncé) kill a bad boyfriend and random others in a homicidal spree and then escape in their yellow pickup truck, Gaga bragging, “We did it, Honey B.” Sometimes women take over the roles of men for sheer novelty value. The role of the career assassin Salt in the spy thriller of that name was written for a man but given to Angelina Jolie. Here she is entirely plausible as the reluctant professional killer without a personal life.
Hanna
, directed by Joe Wright, rewrites the male violence trope from its origins. Saoirse Ronan plays a girl raised in the wilderness by her father to be a hunter rather than a nurturer/gatherer. The movie is imbued with myth and fairy tale, and when Hanna ends up in a tutu one night at a concert with a boy, instead of giving her prince a kiss she wrestles him to the ground and nearly chokes him to death.

In teenage books and movies, the mean girl over the last decade has replaced the boy bully as the bane of high school existence. In her latest evolution she goes beyond psychological torture into more lethal territory. Katniss Everdeen from
The Hunger Games
, Lisbeth Salander in
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, and Maximum Ride from the popular James Patterson young adult series of the same name represent an entirely novel kind of girl heroine, damaged but highly effective killers exacting revenge on a demented patriarchy. The new version of boy hero meanwhile is a remarkable wimp, a small bundle of Woody Allen–style neuroses. In many of the popular books and movies for boys these days—
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
,
How to Train Your Dragon
,
Alvin Ho, Nerds
—the hero ekes out just enough courage to stumble into a (sort of) happy ending.

For some people the rise in female violence must come as a great disappointment. Many of us hold out the hope that there is a utopia in our future run by women, that power does not in fact corrupt equally. But that vision of a female utopia has always had an air of condescension behind it. The most distinctive trait of women is not necessarily that they are kinder or gentler or will do anything to protect their young. As Twenge discovered, it’s that they tend to respond to social cues and bend their personalities to fit in what the times allow.

Women have so far dominated the workforce partly with a traditionally feminine set of traits—social skills, caretaking, and cooperative behavior. But this constellation has only gotten them so far. Now they are realizing that to make it to the very top they will need to play a slightly different game. The greatest barrier to women reaching for the most powerful jobs these days is a set of unspoken assumptions: that women are not competitive, dominant, or hungry enough to make it. But they are breaking through even that last barrier, with the force of the Lady Gagas, Katniss Everdeens, and schoolgirls with cleats and bruises.

T
his is how problems are solved in the workplace of the future: Marissa Mayer, who is the highest-ranking woman at Google, had a bad feeling that one of her top directors, Katy, was going to quit. Katy was hardworking and well liked, but Mayer was picking up rumblings of burnout and resentment. Mayer did not like losing women executives—there were too few to begin with at Google. She figured it was obvious what was causing the strain. Katy was a “soccer mom” of three children, including a set of twins. As the leader of her Google team, she had to participate in a one
A.M.
call to Bangalore every night. Mayer assumed that with young children at home who did not necessarily sleep through the night, the one
A.M.
calls were putting Katy over the edge. So she decided to do an intervention.

Mayer called Katy in and explained what she calls her “finding your rhythm” philosophy, which is not an alternative form of birth control but Mayer’s home-brewed remedy for burnout. What causes burnout, Mayer believes, is not working too hard. People, she
believes, “can work arbitrarily hard for an arbitrary amount of time.” But they will become resentful if work makes them miss the things that are really important to them. The key to sustaining dedication and loyalty is having an employee identify what he or she absolutely cannot tolerate missing, and then having the employer accommodate that. She asked Katy to think about it and come back in a month.

Mayer, it turns out, was wrong about the one
A.M.
phone calls. Katy loved her job and she loved her team and she didn’t mind staying up late to help out. What was bothering Katy was something entirely different. Often, Katy confessed, she showed up late at her children’s events because a meeting went overly long, for no important reason other than meetings tend to go long. And she hated having her children watch her walk in late. For Mayer, this was a no-brainer. She instituted a Katy-tailored rule. If Katy had told her earlier that she had to leave at four to get to a soccer game, then Mayer would make sure Katy could leave at four. Even if there was only five minutes left to a meeting, even if Google cofounder Sergey Brin himself was midsentence and expecting an answer from Katy, Mayer would say “Katy’s gotta go,” and Katy would walk out the door and answer the questions later by e-mail after the kids were in bed.

I had always heard that Silicon Valley was the ultimate flexible workplace, so in 2011 I went to visit some of the biggest companies and also some start-ups. Successful women executives there told me stories that would make anyone struggling to manage a high-powered job and a life jealous. As a mother of three, Katie Stanton had found her job at the White House a nightmare. One night at eight
P.M.
, her boss called her at home to ask what she was doing out of the office. “Tucking my kids into bed,” she answered. “Why, is
there an emergency?” Soon after, she quit and moved back to California, where she went to work for Twitter. As head of international strategy, Stanton asked her new boss if she could leave at five every day—she lives an hour away—and pick up on e-mail again after eight. No problem. “I consider myself incredibly lucky,” says Stanton. “Because I can do this job really well and have a family. It’s great. This is the place for me and the perfect role for me.”

Life for the women I talked to was not exactly perfect; in fact, it sounded exhausting. Stanton works every night—every single weeknight—and never gets to the gym or goes out with her husband. These women work flexibly, but they work all the time. As Emily White, a Facebook executive, put it to me, “Forget the balance, this is the
merge
,” meaning that work and play and kids and sleep are all jumbled up in the same twenty-four-hour period. (White came up with this term after she finally managed a night out alone with her husband, and they spent half the dinner staring at their iPhones.) But the work culture was still a revelation. Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, a problem everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers.

The industry has by no means solved the ultimate problem, meaning that there are just as few female heads of companies as there are in any other elite sector. But it gives us a glimpse of the work culture of the future, where face time isn’t so relevant and people take it for granted that women—and men—can be really ambitious and manage a life, too. “Your reputation is based on what you’ve done,” said White. “It doesn’t really matter what’s in your pants.” In a chart comparing the “career cost of family” in various elite workplaces—meaning the price people pay for taking time
off—the economist Claudia Goldin floats the tech companies high above the rest, in their own happy cloud. Women and men there can take time off and not take a big salary hit. Other industries, by contrast, suffer from “inertia” or “resistance to change,” argues Goldin. She compares them to her husband, who “to this day likes to go into the Whole Foods and go down the same aisle, every time, while I like to wander into new places. These more novel industries step in and they suddenly figure out how to do things differently.”

All the problems that companies elsewhere agonize over, the Silicon Valley women seem to workshop informally and on the fly. Worried that the Katy rule stigmatizes mothers? Mayer had it apply to everyone. Now one of her young male executives leaves early every Tuesday for his hallowed potluck dinner with his old college dorm-mates. Life problems are not all that different from technological ones: With enough creative thinking, anything can be solved.

As the first female engineer hired at Google and now one of its top executives, Mayer has become part of the Google legend. She got her master’s degree from Stanford in computer science with a specialty in artificial intelligence, and she is so intense in even casual conversation that I found myself tracking whether she ever blinks. She is also tall and blond, with Holly Golightly good looks and a great sense of style, and she regularly appears in local society blogs at fancy parties on the arm of her cute entrepreneur husband. She is well aware that she is an unusual package, and has embraced the extra task of being a role model for aspiring girl geeks everywhere: “I do think it’s important for girls especially to know that there is not one way to break through. You can be into fashion and be a geek and a good coder,” she says, and then hastens to add, “just like you can be a jock and a good coder. You don’t have to give up what you love.”

But try to draw Mayer into the morass of issues around
discrimination and she will resist. “I’m not a girl at Google,” she likes to say. “I’m a geek at Google.” Why aren’t there more girl geek computer science majors like her? I asked. “I am much less worried about adjusting the percentage than about growing the overall pie,” she told me. “We are not producing enough men or women who know how to program.”