Archive: 2013

New controversy about free condoms inspires this month’s column, a critique about student health and public health by Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D., senior sociologist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press).

Back in the 1800s, the U.S. labor movement aimed at reducing impossibly long working hours—and succeeded with the Adamson Act in 1916, which gave us the 40-hour work week. A century later, that’s all changed. Research released this month in the journal Gender & Society confirms that “overwork”— working more than 50 hours per week—has become part of the job for many Americans, though with different effects for men and women. Over the past thirty years, hours at work—especially in higher income jobs—have increased, and over one-third of men and nearly one-fifth of women in professions work more than a 50-hour week.

A new Gender & Society study reveals how overwork contributes to the “stalled gender revolution” and helps to explain why there isn’t more equality in the workplace, despite the popular belief that equality between men and women is a social good. The new study gives hints, too, about the challenges women face in order to “lean in” and get ahead.

Who is affected by overwork? In “Overwork and the Persistence of Gender Segregation in Occupations,” Indiana University sociologist Youngjoo Cha reports that overwork affects men and women differently—especially in fields where there are a lot more men than women to begin with. Dr. Cha finds that the impact of overwork on men and women is especially pronounced in occupations where the majority of employees are men, known as “male dominated occupations.” She found that:

• In male-dominated occupations, overwork was more likely than in balanced fields or female-dominated fields.
• Mothers were 52 percent more likely than other women to leave their jobs if they were working a 50-hour week or more, but only in occupations dominated by men.
• Higher education levels make it more likely that women stay in their jobs—but not enough to overcome the discouraging effect of being an overworking mother.
• Mothers in male-dominated occupations were more discouraged despite the fact that the women who survived in those more masculine fields may on average be more committed to work than overworking women in other jobs.
• Meanwhile, men (whether fathers or not) and women without children were not more likely to leave their jobs in overworking fields.
• When mothers left their jobs, some moved to less male-dominated professions; others entirely left the labor force.

The problem, according to Cha, is simple. Overworking mothers continue to have a larger share of caregiving responsibilities, compared to other workers. Cha explains that “Overwork disadvantages women with children in particular. In overworking workplaces, you have to be there or be on call all the time. That expectation can be met by people who have few caregiving or community responsibilities and who are not primary caregivers at home.” While men and women have adjusted their ability to share domestic caregiving in recent years, these more extreme situations of overwork demonstrate the limits of the flexibility that men and women often aim for—but can’t always achieve.

Why does overwork affect mothers only in male-dominated professions? Cha’s finding that overwork discourages women in male-dominated occupations begs the question, why? “If it were a case of women’s reticence to work additional hours,” Cha explains, “we would expect overworking women to be discouraged regardless of whether mainly men or women were at work.” But her results do not show that. Instead, the results suggest that something about jobs that are mainly populated by men discourages women. What’s that something? Cha observes that male-dominated professions are more likely to maintain strong and inflexible expectations of overwork.

Does this tell us anything about what dual earner couples can expect? Workplaces dominated by men tend to operate on outdated assumptions about “separate spheres” marriage — that is, families that have a homemaking woman and a breadwinning man. Yet today both partners are employed in nearly eighty percent of American couples.

Is this a case of opting out? Cha considered whether she had found evidence of “opting out”—the claim that women, when they can, leave work when they become mothers. “In my study, not all women with children leave the labor force. When they work long hours, it is the combination of being a mother, working long hours, and being in a male dominated profession that is discouraging.” Where overwork only in a male-dominated occupation influenced married women’s choices, Cha also found that husbands’ income didn’t change the basic findings.

In her article, Cha argues for promoting workplace policies that minimize the expectation for overwork, such as setting the maximum allowable work hours, prohibiting compulsory overtime, expanding the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime provisions, and granting employees the right to work part-time hours without losing benefits. She advocates labor policies that can reduce work-family conflicts and benefit women, men, families, and firms.

As University of Massachusetts sociologist Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society, comments, “‘Leaning in’ might not be the same for everyone. Cha’s study shows us that despite our best efforts, work and home still seem to generate unequal opportunities and benefits. The loss affects everyone: We’ll stop losing highly qualified women in their careers of choice when we reduce barriers like the culture of overwork and unequal sharing of care-work at home.”

The study is based on analysis of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a national longitudinal household survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The data covers years from 1996 through 2007. The sample was limited to full-time workers ages 18-64 who were in a job at the beginning of each of the survey periods.

–Virginia Rutter

You heard about the letter: Princeton alumna Susan Patton worries that Princeton women might not find husbands as smart as they are if they don’t find ’em while still at college. Behind her anxiety is the view that: one, marriage is a partnership (between two different sexes) of intellectual equals—and, two, college sorts people into roughly equal intellectual groups.

I’ve been listening to lots of fun commentary about the Patton letter when I am not pondering other news about troubles in elite education. A week before the Patton letter, Carolyn Hoxby and Christopher Avery (Stanford and Harvard; they must be smart!) presented new information about how elite colleges are failing to recruit students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Hoxby and Avery report that among the high achieving high school students, only 34 percent of those from low-income families end up at the fancy colleges that their extremely high grades and high test scores would qualify them for. This is less than half the rate for “achievers” from high-income families, where 78 percent go to top-tier schools. The smart students in the bottom income quarter go, instead, to local universities or community colleges. These economically disadvantaged kids, Hoxby and Avery believe, are not aware of the elite educational options, and don’t appear to have information about how much aid is available from the most elite schools.

So for women who recognize that rushing into marriage really is not a smart thing to do, but are worried that they can’t find smart partners if they aren’t at Princeton or the like, they can relax, slow it down, and realize that there are a lot of smart potential partners who are not at elite schools. Not even counting all those smart men who don’t even start (or start but don’t finish) college, given the growing gender gap in higher education. It turns out that there are lots of smarties who aren’t at elite and selective colleges.

But, Patton might still be worried. Part of me thinks that she might be saying “smart” kids but meaning kids from a “higher social class.”

Patton’s letter reminds me that the heteronormative dream (Girls! Find your ideal boy!)  is still profoundly concerned about matching on social class as much as it is about finding an intellectual (or some other human quality) peer. But what do I know? My boyfriend went to Princeton.

-Virginia Rutter

The folding of Gender Across Borders one year ago brought home the challenges of online feminism. Like, the fact that it’s (more often than not) unpaid. Piled on top of paid jobs and activism, plus (for me at least) raising children and working on longer writing projects. (Or at least talking about them.)

Fortunately some folks who are a heck of a lot smarter than I am have been thinking about the need for sustainability in the online feminist ecosystem. And while they don’t have all the answers, they’ve started a public conversation to generate exchange, debate, and new directions.

Tonight at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, I heard Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti (along with some amazing bloggers from Feministing, Crunk Feminist Collective, SPARK Movement, F-Bomb, Feminist Teacher, and Feminist.com) present a report, #FemFuture: Online Revolution, about where online feminism needs to go. Their inspiring and thought-provoking report can be found here. It reminded me of the HUGE amount of amazing feminist work happening online… and I also learned about amazing folks and projects that I’d missed (such as the successful crowdfunding undertaken by queer Nigerian Afrofeminist blogger/online activist Spectra for social media and communications training for African women’s and LGBT organizations).

Martin and Valenti propose a range of strategies under the category of “more”… more collaboration, reciprocity, infrastructure, coordination, strategic thinking, and sustainable business models (both non-profit and for-profit). Because, as they put it, “An unfunded movement further privileges the privileged.”

They have some (preliminary) ideas about how to strategize long-term, though mainly they’ve started a conversation for feminists who are online. And ones who aren’t, too. The conversation turned global with the presence of organizations like WEDO and Digital Democracy, my new favorite org that’s empowering marginalized communities to use technology to fight for human rights in a handful locations, including Haiti. DD’s insight? Think mobile.

Your insights?

Earlier this month I wrote about gender, debt, and college drop out rates–men’s and women’s different debt tolerance (women have more) is related to their early job market prospects (men have more) and helps explain why men drop out of college more.

Now, here’s a new piece of the gender gap in education puzzle. According to a new briefing report presented to the Council on Contemporary Families, “the most important predictor of boys’ achievement is the extent to which the school culture expects, values, and rewards academic effort.” Sociologists Claudia Buchmann (Ohio State) and Thomas DiPrete (Columbia University) present their in-depth findings on the much-debated reasons why women outstrip men in education—also the subject of their new book—in “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools.” The full CCF briefing report is available here.

When did the gender gap begin? Some of the gender gap in schooling is new and some is not. For about 100 years, the authors explain, girls have been making better grades than boys. But only since the 1970s have women been catching up to—and surpassing—men in terms of graduation rates from college and graduate school. The authors report, “Back in 1960, more than twice as many men as women between the ages of 26-28 were college graduates. Between 1970 and 2010, men’s rate of B.A. completion grew by just 7 percent, rising from 20 to 27 percent in those 40 years. In contrast, women’s rates almost tripled, rising from 14 percent to 36 percent.”

Is the gender gap translating into wages? “The rise of women in the educational realm has not wiped out the gender wage gap — women with a college degree continue to earn less on average than men with a college degree.”  But because more women are getting college degrees, growing numbers of women are earning more than their less-educated men age-mates, and the gender wage gap has narrowed considerably.” But, report the authors, if men were keeping up with women in terms of education, men would on average be earning four percent more than they do now, and their unemployment rate would be one-half percentage point lower.

What should schools do? The authors debunk the notion that boys’ under-performance in school is caused by a “feminized” learning environment that needs to be made more boy-friendly. Making curriculum, teachers, or classroom more “masculine” is not the answer, they show. In fact, boys do better in school in classrooms that have more girls and that emphasize extracurricular activities such as music and art as well as holding both girls and boys to high academic standards. But boys do need to learn how much today’s economy rewards academic achievement rather than traditionally masculine blue-collar work.

Please read here to read more about the gender gap in educational achievement and the sources of it.

–Virginia Rutter

This month’s column features one of our past guest authors: Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D. is a senior sociologist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-author of Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies (Cambridge University Press).

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In the past two months, two of my friends–both seemingly healthy women–became unlikely victims of cardiovascular disease. One, a woman who by any textbook definition would be considered at low risk for heart problems, nonetheless suffered a heart attack. Thankfully, she is recovering. The other, a longtime friend and a mentor of mine, tragically passed away after suffering a stroke. These experiences left me wondering how we can accelerate efforts to reduce cardiovascular disease risk and mortality in women.

As a women’s health researcher, I am concerned about how long it is taking to bring attention and resources to this problem. After all, it has been decades since we’ve learned that cardiovascular disease affects women every bit as much–or even more–than it does men. Indeed, since 1984, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men in the United States. When it comes to women’s health, cancer gets a good deal of the attention; somehow, it hasn’t fully registered that so many of our mothers, sisters, friends and daughters are being affected by another, often silent killer.

Commonly referred to as heart disease, cardiovascular disease includes both heart disease and other vascular diseases. When tallied separately, stroke is the third leading cause of death among women. Both strokes and cardiac events are all too common in women over 40 and, sadly, so are deaths.

Consider a few statistics:

• In the U.S., women account for 60 percent of stroke deaths, and 55,000 more women than men suffer a stroke each year.
• Worldwide, heart disease and stroke kill 8.6 million women annually–accounting for one in three deaths among women.
• Whereas one in seven women develops breast cancer, more than one in three women has some form of cardiovascular disease.

Although the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign has done much to raise awareness, there is still too little attention devoted to preventing heart disease in women and improving the quality and outcomes of their care.

While we should celebrate the significant improvements in the care and survival of men with cardiovascular disease, those gains began decades ago, and the death rate among men has fallen more quickly than it has for women. Unfortunately, women continue to face lower rates of diagnosis, treatment and survival. The new Million Hearts campaign aimed at preventing a million heart attacks and strokes by 2017 has partnered with WomenHeart, a national coalition for women with heart disease. This effort is essential and represents progress, but prevention is not the only challenge.

Why are outcomes worse for women? Even if biomedical research on cardiovascular disease had not traditionally focused almost exclusively on men, these conditions would likely still be harder to recognize and treat in women. Women don’t tend to have the “TV heart attack”–the familiar image of a man clutching his left arm or his chest in pain. Rather, for women, the symptoms of a heart attack are often more subtle and less specific. Women can present with symptoms like throat pain or a sore back. In fact, 64 percent of women who die suddenly from heart disease had no previous symptoms at all.

Furthermore, tests that are mostly reliable in assessing men’s cardiac risk are not as accurate in women, largely because they are aimed at identifying major coronary artery blockage. At least half of heart attacks in women are caused by coronary microvascular disease, which involves narrowing or damage to smaller arteries in the heart. This not only makes the diagnosis challenging, but it poses problems for treatment as well. Women often go undiagnosed or incorrectly untreated after major blockages have been ruled out, and optimal treatment of microvascular disease remains unclear. Consequently, 26 percent of women over age 45 will die within a year of having a heart attack, compared with 19 percent of men. The deficits in women’s cardiovascular care may have developed unintentionally, but our efforts to address them need to be both intentional and focused.

Fortunately, we know what it will take to close the gap and get women better diagnosis and treatment for cardiovascular disease. We can start by looking to the fight against breast cancer. Our first task is to call for increased public and private funding for public-health, biomedical and health-services research to reduce women’s risk and improve their outcomes. Second, on the private side, there are many foundations dedicated to addressing cardiovascular risk in women. But they and the women they serve would benefit from more collaboration and better coordination of effort. Finally, doctors and medical clinics need to do more to improve assessment and the quality of women’s cardiovascular care. Otherwise, women’s care and outcomes will continue to lag behind men’s.

Our bodies are complex systems. So, if we want to take on women’s health in a way that truly moves the needle on outcomes, we need a comprehensive approach. Women’s health care in general needs to become a primary focus for research and practice. And improving women’s health and longevity will require us to expand our focus beyond sex-specific reproductive cancers and predominantly female diseases, such as breast cancer. This doesn’t mean that we should divert resources from other areas of study, of course. But we need to recognize that woman-specific health care should not be confined to conditions that don’t (or don’t often) affect men.

The stakes for women are high, but we can and must bring greater attention to women’s cardiovascular health. Personally, I am not willing to let go of another friend, colleague or relative to a condition that could have been caught and treated if women routinely received appropriate preventive care, diagnostic testing and treatment.  It’s time for feminists to take on heart disease as a women’s issue.

— Crossposted with permission from the Ms. Blog —

March is a long, cold, windy month in New England. Now and then a softer breeze or a sunny day can fool one into thinking spring has arrived, but more often than not these hopeful signs are followed by more rain, wind and cold. Snow storms are common, if somehow still unexpected. So it is with the struggle for gender equality—important steps forward followed by stormy backlash and the cold winds of repression.  Case in point, the reauthorization, finally, of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) by the House of Representatives on the last day of February, an encouraging start for March, officially Women’s History Month in the U.S.  Unfortunately headlines such as ”Steubenville Defense Case: Near-unconscious Jane Doe Gave ‘Consent‘ and “Survivors Share Experiences of Sexual Assault in the Military” followed soon after.

The VAWA was a key victory for women when it first passed in 1994. The law signaled an end to the silence surrounding violence against women, the idea that this violence was merely a ‘private matter’, rather than an issue of public concern and criminal law. Two decades ago few anticipated how strong the opposition to any extension of these protections could be.   Gendered violence is only one example where progress toward gender equality has stalled or been subjected to serious back sliding.  Women in leadership positions, equal pay for equal work, and reproductive rights all exhibit similar patterns.

But the very existence of Women’s History Month is itself a cause for celebration and a mark of progress. It is also an example of what one small group of women can do, to paraphrase Margaret Mead.  March 8th was first celebrated as International Women’s History Day in Europe in 1911. Seventy years later the work of Molly McGregor and her colleagues at the National Women’s History Project in Santa Rosa, California persuaded Congress to designate the week of March 8th as National Women’s History Week. The initial week was expanded to a full month in 1987.

Women’s History Month was primarily designed to encourage K-12 schools to develop and use classroom materials focused on women’s accomplishments. The explicit focus on women’s history provided an opportunity for all students to learn more about women’s contributions to the nation and the world—a chance, as a Women’s History Project slogan put it, to ‘write women back into history‘. After all, how could boys and girls view women and men as equally capable and worthy of respect  if they knew little of women and their achievements?  This knowledge is as critical today as it ever was. Today’s world requires that women and men work together, both outside and inside the home, in order for families and society to thrive.

But history is more than a celebration of accomplishments. Setbacks can teach as much as successes.  Once a battle is clearly in the ‘won’ column, the story is no longer controversial, making it reasonably easy to discuss. Women’s suffrage is a good example; few today would suggest that women be denied the right to vote. Less than one hundred years ago this was not the case.  However,  the closer we get to present day issues, to unfinished struggles, the harder telling the story becomes.

And this brings me back to gender violence. Does anyone remember Tailhook?  This was the 1991 ‘incident’ when more than a hundred  male Navy and Marine Corps aviation officers were accused of sexual assaulting  and harassing at least ninety individuals, both women and men? The public outcry that followed resulted in official inquiries and, ultimately the resignation, early retirement or shortened careers of close to three hundred officers for their roles in the ‘incident’ and the subsequent investigations.

But here we are again, seemingly having learned nothing. Rape is still too often portrayed as something women should ‘prevent’. If they aren’t appropriately careful, well, they get what they deserve. Talk similar to that of various military men twenty  years ago is still around—laments about the way punishment damages perpetrators’ lives and ruins their careers.  As a high school teacher of mine used to say when someone made a particularly outrageous remark, “Stop! Do you hear what you’re saying?”

Rape is a crime; it is about power; there is nothing ‘sexy’ about it.  In any nation that respects the rule of law, crimes must be exposed and punished. These simple realities are barely visible in too many conversations. ‘After all,’ some say, “it’s just boys being boys.” How insulting to men, to assume that swagger, violent and aggressive behavior and ugly taunting are part of their ‘true nature’!

Many good men have stood side by side with women in the long struggle for equality. More are working with us today.  These men understand that equality for women is key to better, fuller lives for men as well as women; that women’s human  rights are crucial in the global struggle for justice for all people.  Women’s History Month provides an  opportunity to highlight unsung women and the men who supported their efforts. It is a chance  to bring boys and men into the conversation and the work; a time to broaden the ranks for the battles ahead.

Tots in Genderland is a multimedia experiment in thinking aloud, and in community, about the gendering of earliest childhood.  I’d love it if you’d join me.

Here’s how GWP readers can get involved:

1.  Watch my TEDxWindyCity talk Born That Way?, which brings to life key research about the gendering of earliest childhood. Taking us through a personal journey peppered with blunders and epiphanies, I challenge us to move beyond pink and blue and learn something new about gender from society’s smallest experts: our kids. Please leave a comment, post on FB/Twitter, and pass the link on. (It just went live – tonight!)

2.  Take the Born That Way? quiz below and test your Gender + Tots IQ.  (The answers are in the talk.)

3.  Post a photo of a young child breaking, or upholding, gender norms on the Pinterest board Tots in Genderland. Email me to join this board and pin freely – deborah(at)deborahsiegelwrites(d0t)com

4.  Visit The Pink and Blue Diaries for random musings on gender, parenthood, writing, and life — and add random musings of your own.

5.  Suggest a site to add to the Tots in Genderland Community Well by emailing me at deborah(at)deborahsiegelwrites(dot)com

Ok, you’ve read to the bottom.  Huzzah!  Ready for the quiz? I bet you GWP readers will know the answers.  Heck, some of you even wrote the books.  Have at it:

Test Your Gender + Tots IQ

1. Children rarely have a firm sense of what “gender” they are until they are how old?
a) 1 year
b) 2 years
c) 3 years

2. This past holiday season, which country produced a toy catalog featuring a boy cradling a doll and a girl riding a race car?
a) the US
b) Sweden
c) France

3. True or false: In a study of 120 pregnant women conducted shortly after amniocentesis allowed women to learn fetal sex, those knew they were carrying females described their fetuses movements as gentle, quiet, and rolling while those carrying males described kicks, jabs, and a saga of earthquakes.

Answers: in the talk.

Oh – and I launched a new site. Everything’s moved over to here: www.deborahsiegelwrites.com.  Thanks so much for being in this all with me, dear GWP community.  I’ll see you there!

In celebration of International Women’s Day, UN Women has released an English-language song, “One Woman,” featuring 25 female artists from 20 countries.

Personally, I prefer “Break the Chain,” the “mass rising” theme song for One Billion Rising, which I wrote about last month. Partly because of the music itself (though I do love the roster of female vocalists who came together for “One Woman”). Partly because of the catchy lyrics. “Break the Chain” names the issues in the very beginning (rape, incest, abuse, ownership of women’s bodies) and defies this violence in powerful lyrics that embrace dancing as an act of self-empowerment and connection. (The creators did such a good job that I’ve witnessed elementary-age kids singing along, in a girl power kind of way: “This is my body, my body’s holy….”)

Plus, “Break the Chain” fits in nicely with the “official theme” of this year’s International Women’s Day: violence against women. As the UN website tag line puts it, “A promise is a promise: Time for action to end violence against women.”

By contrast, “One Woman” doesn’t directly address rape or sexualized violence. While I very much like the different women’s voices—each artist sings a line about a different woman in a different part of the world—it’s not as catchy or as issue-based. Instead, it wades right into the fraught feminist territory of sameness and difference.

Take, for example, the following line: “We are One Woman, your dreams are mine, and we shall shine.” Last I checked, feminists had pretty roundly critiqued the notion of “one woman,” led by many women of color in the U.S. and globally (including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and the members of the Combahee River Collective, to name only a few). These critiques of overly idealized notions of global sisterhood have pointed to the deeply significant differences of race, nation, and class in our capitalist world. Many feminists have theorized and acted upon alternative models of alliance and coalition-building that can allow for difference and disagreement even as solidarity can take shape around particular issues.

To be fair, the song also contains examples of difference: it identifies many individual women living in particular locations (Kigali, Hanoi, Tangier, Kampala, Juárez, Jaipur, Manila, and so on) whose everyday lives are sources of inspiration and strength. And one line says, “Though we’re different as can be, we’re connected, she with me.” These elements of difference, however, are framed within the refrain of “We are One Woman”—which is, after all, the title of the song.

So who is this song for, and what is it trying to do?

The press materials for UN Women state that “‘One Woman’ aims to become a rallying cry that inspires listeners about the mission of UN Women and engages them to join in the drive for women’s empowerment and gender equality.” This suggests that the song wasn’t written for activists on the frontlines, but rather potential donors and women (primarily in the U.S.? across the “developed” world? or throughout the entire world?) who aren’t involved in struggles for gender justice.

I do love the voices of each of these female artists, many of whom I was not familiar with before this song. And who knows? Perhaps some of their fans at home will listen to “One Woman,” learn about International Women’s Day, and experience heightened consciousness around gender-based violence.

That’s the thing about cultural productions like songs. You just never know how listeners will understand what they hear.

Yesterday in the New York Times, Tamar Lewin reported on declining financing for college as costs rise. Turns out this is a gender story. Here’s how: Women earn 58 percent of all undergraduate degrees. They enter college at higher rates than men, and they are less likely to drop out once they enter. According to conventional wisdom, this is because men are less studious and committed to school than women. Some recent books even claim that men are slackers who cannot adapt to a changing economy.

However, a new study, “Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out of College,” released in February in the journal Gender & Society, suggests quite a different reason for men’s dropout rates: men are less willing to tolerate the high levels of debt that are increasingly needed to complete a college education—on average, men tolerate $2,000 less educational debt than women do.

According to study authors Rachel Dwyer and Randy Hodson of Ohio State University and Laura McCloud of Pacific Lutheran University, this isn’t because men are slackers, but because in the short term men without college degrees can earn the same salary as college graduates, which makes it tempting to forgo debt and get to work. The same is not true for women.

Men who drop out face no financial penalty in their entry-level salaries. Women, on the other hand, are financially penalized for dropping out right away, earning an average of $6,500 less in their starting salaries than women college grads. Ironically, this initial gender advantage for men imposes considerable long-term costs in their lifetime earnings: by midlife, college-graduate men’s salaries are on average $20,000 higher than those who did not complete college.

This trend in men’s and women’s response to debt comes at a time when graduating from college has become increasingly difficult for low and moderate income Americans over the past 25 years. This is largely because the average cost of an undergraduate degree has climbed at a faster rate than stalling family incomes in the U.S. The cost of college (public and private/non profit) in 1992–net of grant aid–was $9,600; in 2010 it was a little more than $13,000 (inflation adjusted/2012 dollars).

Scholars from Sociologists for Women and Society and the Council on Contemporary Families, put this trend in larger context, noting that:

• Graduation rates have remained flat in the U.S. since the 1980s, and only about half of students who start a four-year degree complete by the 6-year mark. Australia, the United Kingdom, and Norway, Japan, and 11 other OECD countries exceed our graduation rate today. Fifteen years ago, only Australia matched graduation rates in the U.S.
• One reason for this stall is that students must work more hours than in the past to pay for schooling. In 1970 only one in ten full time college students worked 20-34 hours per week. Today that proportion has doubled to one in five.
• In addition to working more, students whose parents cannot fund their college education typically go into debt. According to the College Board, in 1975, 80% of student aid took the form of direct grants, and only 20% in loans; now that is nearly reversed: 70% of student aid is in the form of loans, and only 30% takes the form of grants.

Gender,Debt and Dropping Out of College. Going into debt to finance college does not have uniformly negative results. Dwyer and colleagues found that having some college debt makes staying in college more likely for both men and women. But when men reach a debt level of slightly less than $12,500, they are more likely to be discouraged, while women’s debt level can reach about $14,500 before they become more prone to be discouraged.

The job market. Why are men more likely to give up on college and get a job instead when their college debt mounts, while women stick to their original plans? In “Gender, Debt, and Dropping Out of College,” Dwyer and colleagues suggest that women’s willingness to stick it out longer in the face of higher debt is a paradoxical result of women’s continuing disadvantage on the job market. In the short run, men who drop out of college do not experience a wage penalty in comparison to their peers who go on to graduate. It may be harder for men than for women to see the advantage of staying in college because in the early years after college, men who complete college make no higher pay than men who drop out.

In contrast, women who complete college earn on average upwards of $6,500 more than women who have dropped out. The authors explain, “Female dropouts simply face worse job prospects than male dropouts.” In particular, women who drop out are more likely to be employed in lower-paying service work, while men who drop out have opportunities in higher–paying manufacturing, construction, and transportation work.

So men withdraw sooner, but pay later. While men don’t face a wage penalty early on if they drop out, the penalty accumulates later. By middle age, men with a college degree earn $20,000 more on average than men with some college but no degree.

As University of Massachusetts sociologist Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society, puts it, “Dwyer and her colleagues show that looking at gender differences can’t be reduced to ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ Women’s recent advantage in college graduation rates is associated with their relative disadvantage in the job market. At the same time, men’s seeming advantages in the short run can lure them away from a surer path—college completion—to longer term economic security.”

The study is based on analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort (funded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The researchers used a nationally representative sub-sample of nearly 9,000 young adults that was interviewed yearly from 1996 until 2011. At the most recent interview, the average age was 28 years old.