The Economics Behind the 3 Waves of Feminism

Robert Wright's Nonzero forms one of the foundations to my worldview. The other day he interviewed Kat Rosenfield and Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the Wright Show. One of the topics that came up was the three waves of feminism. As Rosenfield and Maltz Bovy defined it, it seemed to me that these three waves of feminism could be defined through economics.

1. Wave one feminism most easily characterized by a woman's right to vote came in the wake of industrialization. (It was 100 years ago that women got the right to vote.)  As labor was less about muscle and more about the mind, women could less easily be ignored as equals.

2. If wave two feminism came after the Pill - approved in 1960 - maybe it was about pointing out that with family planning a woman had even more control over how she timed her entry and engagement in the job market. She had the option to take a role more traditionally associated with men. Her biology no longer kept her home raising children.

3. If wave 3 feminism is happening now, it may be coincident with what I see happening: the beginning of the shift from an information to entrepreneurial economy. If the early 1900s was about a rise in product invention, I think that the early 2000s will be seen as a time of a rise in social invention: changing and inventing institutions to accommodate who we are or aspire to be. The old quip about the Model T, "You can have any color you want as long as it is black," in the early 1900s has given way to UX research that tailors the product to the customers. We judge products by how they perform when we use them; curiously, we still judge students and employees by how well they use schools and workplaces rather than judging schools and workplaces by how well they perform for students and employees. What does this have to do with anything? There are institutional changes that need to be made to accommodate (most? some?) women and it's not enough to say to women, "You just adapt to these institutions and social norms that have been made for men." The most obvious of these is that a woman who does want to raise a couple of children will find herself carrying a heavier load in child raising than a man simply because of the biological reality of pregnancy and nursing, etc. One option is to pretend this away, another is to say that women should just revise their ambitions to accept the fact that they can't engage in the same way as men and a third way is to insist on change to institutions to accommodate both their biological realities and their ambitions.  I think one element of social invention will be intentionally adapting our institutions to the people we are rather than the people our grandfathers imagined themselves to be. What I'd call social invention or entrepreneurship. 

Put more succinctly,

3. Wave 3 feminism is not just about women's right to participate fully but changing defining institutions to adapt to who women are and aspire to be. It's about shifting the burden of adaptation from women to institutions and social norms.

In Other News, Trump Still Has a Penis

This week Bob Woodward's new book Fear and an anonymous New York Times op-ed from a Trump administration official describes a president who is inexperienced but confident, stupid, impulsive, and amoral.

We knew all this before the 2016 election. This was treated as news this week but there is nothing new in these reports. It merely confirms what we've known since Trump came down the escalator to announce his campaign and to accuse Mexicans of being rapists and murderers. In spite of the hoopla surrounding this news, Trump's poll numbers barely moved. Americans know who he is.

What remains so absurdly sad is that given the choice between that and a woman who believed in public service, was incredibly intelligent, disciplined, and experienced .... we chose that. Clinton carefully thought through the consequences of choices; Trump doesn't even have the attention span to think through the choices, much less their consequence. And speaking of choices, given the choice of someone as qualified for the presidency as anyone in our lifetimes, we chose someone who is not qualified to be a mayor.

Hillary Clinton was unable to close the deal that so many thought was done. She won the popular vote by 3 million and came within 100,000 votes in the three states that would have put her over the top in the electoral vote. I can't help but think it is because she was lacking one simple thing that every previous president had: a penis. It was a close race. She lost by inches.

Trump is so many things but maybe the saddest thing is that he is a reminder that even 96 years after women were finally given the right to vote, even the worst man as candidate wins against a woman. Some time ago my son came home from class reporting that one of the students actually said, "I think that women should be treated equal to men. I just don't think that they should be in positions of authority over men."

In Clinton's book What Happened she has a chapter on being a woman in politics. That chapter alone should be required reading. At one point Clinton quotes Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet, under FDR, who said, "The accusation that I'm a woman is incontrovertible." But women in politics is only slowly becoming normal. Clinton also writes, "Even the simple act of a woman standing up and speaking to a crowd is relatively new. Think about it: we know of only a handful of speeches by women before the latter half of the twentieth century, and those tend to be by women in extreme and desperate situations. Joan of Arc said a lot of interesting things before they burned her at the stake."

Social change seems to lie somewhere between the glacial pace of evolution and the still leisurely pace of personal development. We have so very far to go before the best kind of woman is able to beat the worst kind of man. We still weren't there in 2016.

Trump will be taught in future classes for so many reasons: the most pathetic may be to illustrate how resistant this country still was early in the 21st century to giving women power.