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Women have money; men can’t deal
Yet another potential problem for professional women: men can’t deal with how much money they make. This is the argument in Alex Williams’ NY Times article (published Sunday). While this may not be a huge problem for us low-paid women academics, the article does report on research showing that women in their 20s who work full time and live in New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis earn more money than men of the same age range. Among New York City workers aged 21 to 30, the median income for women is 17 percent higher than for men.
Why? Well, because women are so smart.
[T]he gap is largely driven by a gulf in education: 53 percent of women employed full time in their 20s were college graduates, compared with 38 percent of men. Women are also more likely to have graduate degrees. “They have more of everything,” Professor Beveridge said.
And the men, as you might expect, have no idea how to cope - which makes life harder for women who want to date them.
The shift is playing out in new, unanticipated ways on the dating front. Women are encountering forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet, and are trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.
The article goes on to quote various funny stories from women about their dates, and some of the solutions women have come up with: like only dating older men, or hiding evidence of their shopping trips.
But it strikes us as an interesting side effect of discrimination. There is a fair bit of evidence from the study of science careers that women have to be more accomplished than men to reach the same level of success. Perhaps professional women have sensed this effect in many careers, and have worked harder for their success. Now, that success can have unwanted side effects in their personal lives.