Author Description

"For most of history, being female defined the limits of a woman's achievements. But now women can be successful careerists equal to men. In Norway, women legally must constitute a third of all boards; in the U.S.A., women have gone from being 3 percent of practising lawyers in 1970 to 40 percent today, and over half of all law students are female. Currently, more than seventy million educated women throughout the world work alongside men. Many delay marriage and children, and some forego them entirely. Yet professional women remain a minority. These changes are revolutionary but not universal--the "sisterhood" of working women is deeply divided. Young, educated, full-time professional women, who have put children on hold, are making enormous strides in the workplace. But for a second group of women, this is unattainable; instead, they work part-time, earn less, are concentrated in heavily feminized occupations such as cleaning, and gain income and self-worth from having children at a young age. Sisterhood is gone. The new female elite, the top 10 percent, lead lives completely different from all previous women in history or from other women today. As these two groups move ever further apart, shared gender no longer automatically means shared interests. Rather, for the first group, their working lives--and priorities--increasingly resemble those of the successful men they work with. One of the most profound changes in all human history is taking place before our eyes. Patterns are changing far faster in the developing world than they ever did in the West, yet we seem curiously blind to this remaking of our social landscape. A groundbreaking look at modern women, The XX Factor lifts the curtain on the social, cultural, and economic schisms behind the phenomenal rise of women in the workplace."--Publisher's website.