Bryce Covert | The Nation

(AP Photo/Erik Schelzig)
 

The wave of optimism about women’s economic fortunes has crested yet again with the release of Liza Mundy’s latest book, The Richer Sex. Her thesis is that given certain trends, any day now women will outearn men, become the majority of breadwinners and therefore upend social and cultural norms relating to marriage, sex and families. (Upfront caveat: I have only read, and will only be discussing, the part of the book that sets up the trend, and not the parts that examine what the social fallout will look like. I’ll address those in a follow up.) The exact timing of what she calls The Big Flip, where women overtake men, is unclear, but she feels we are just about there, if not already experiencing it.

This is the heart of her thesis: “Almost 40 percent of U.S. working wives now outearn their husbands, a percentage that has risen steeply in this country and many others.” She adds that “[w]ives are breadwinners or co-earners in about two-thirds of American marriages” and that “[a]lmost 7 percent of wives—nearly 4 million women, up from 1.7 percent in 1967—[are] sole breadwinners.” These are impressive statistics to be sure, but as some have pointed out, the math doesn’t add up to a claim that women are already the richer sex. After all, to flip her numbers around, 60 percent of men are still outearning their wives, a third of married women are still contributing less to their families than their husbands and 93 percent of wives are not sole breadwinners. But Mundy predicts that the time when the balance will tilt toward women is “just around the corner.” “We are entering an era where women, not men, will become the top earners in households,” she says. “We are entering the era in which roles will flip.”

How are we going to get there? One of the biggest trends that has Mundy—and many others—excited is that women are getting more degrees than their male counterparts. She points out, “By the year 2050, demographers forecast, there will be 140 college-educated women in the United States for every 100 college-educated men.” Women are getting higher degrees faster than men, it’s true—they hold 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees—and a college education is correlated with higher earnings overall. But why might women be scrambling to get a college education? Mundy says it herself: “Women have become so accustomed to discrimination they naturally assume they will need more education to be paid an equivalent wage,” and these women would be absolutely correct. As I wrote earlier, women experience a pay gap compared to men at every level of post–high school education. Overall, college-educated men make $800 more per month than college-educated women, but the gap expands the more education they each take on. Women are getting degrees not to outshine men but to try to keep pace—and they’re failing. That trend, of achieving more degrees just to fall further behind, does not bode well.

In a piece I wrote yesterday about the killing of Trayvon Martin, I urged America not to turn its back on the government and put the law in private hands. Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, is an example of how vigilante justice can (and does) go so wrong.

But many who responded felt that my solution—reforming the police force, rather than abandoning it—didn’t give enough airtime to the history of police brutality in this country. And it’s an important and disturbing one. The violence used to crack down on Occupy Wall Street just this past weekend is a perfect example. But violence against Occupy has been a visible incarnation of a problem that black America has long lived with. Elon James wrote eloquently about this when Occupy was first under attack: “While the Occupiers were dealing with such abuse, during civil disobedience, communities of color suffer these type of injustices simply because it’s Wednesday.… Abuse of this kind is all too familiar to the black community. If someone hasn’t directly experienced it, they probably know someone who has.” The NYPD, which has been at the forefront of using violence against Occupiers, is also at the forefront of racially repugnant policies. Its stop-and-frisk policy hit another record last year with 684,330 stops, and blacks and Hispanics were 87 percent of those stopped—whites were just 9 percent. Its violent tactics against minority groups led to the deaths of Sean Bell and Jateik Reed—both unarmed—and countless others.

While these actions make me sick, they only strengthen my resolve to reform our country’s police force. Because my question still remains: What’s the alternative? It absolutely cannot be putting the law in the hands of private citizens like George Zimmerman and Joe Horn, the Texas man who shot two men on his neighbor’s lawn.

It seems the grieving family of Trayvon Martin, the slain 17-year-old whose killer has thus far gone free due to a claim of self-defense, may get some justice. The US Department of Justice announced today that it will investigate the killing and the local police's bumbling investigation into the crime.

But we still need to talk about the conditions under which this crime took place. Martin was killed by a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, even though the 911 operator Zimmerman had called to report Martin’s “suspiciousness” told him not to pursue. The law that may have emboldened Zimmerman, and that has most definitely shielded him from proper prosecution, is referred to as Florida’s “stand your ground” law. Passed in 2005, it kicked off a wave of similar legislation across the country that expanded the rights of civilians who use lethal force in self-defense, undoing the former requirement that they retreat from confrontation when possible. And as Liliana Segura reported in 2008, “The new laws are particularly expansive in that they go beyond the boundaries of private homes to include cars, workplaces or anywhere else a person may feel threatened.” Months after Florida passed its bill, similar legislation was proposed in more than twenty states.

At the time, a critic warned the law could “turn Florida into the OK Corral,” Segura reported. And that warning has played out. Martin was not the first victim of cowboy-esque figures taking the law into their own hands. Segura reported the case of 61-year-old Texan Joe Horn, who saw a pair of black men on a neighbor’s property and, out of frustration that law enforcement wouldn’t arrive in time, went outside and shot them both, once again against the desires of the 911 operator. As he said in the call transcript, “I ain’t letting them get away with this shit.”