It's a single woman's world
'Sex and the City' culture is spreading, with women from Beijing to Warsaw asserting their independence and economic power
After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw's Fr̩d̩ric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman Рclearly her daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff and a large, brass-studded leather bag, into which she dropped a silver cell phone.
Yes: Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul and Dublin, and you'll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their 20s and 30s, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.
Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or is it the triumph of planetary feminism?
Neither. The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world – with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East – toward a New Girl Order. It's a man's world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much.
Three demographic facts are at the core of the New Girl Order. First, women – especially, but not only, in the developed world – are getting married and having kids considerably later than ever before. According to the U.N.'s World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of marriage for women is up two years, from 21.2 in the 1970s to 23.2 today. In the developed countries, the rise has been considerably steeper – from 22.0 to 26.1.
Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case you don't get what the big deal is, consider: In 1960, 70 percent of American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried; today, the number is 22 percent. That change took about a generation to unfold, but in Asia and Eastern Europe the transformation has been much more abrupt. In today's Hungary, for instance, 30 percent of women in their early 30s are single, compared with 6 percent of their mothers' generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40 percent of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14 percent only 20 years ago.
Nothing-new-under-the-sun skeptics point out, correctly, that marrying at 27 or 28 was once commonplace for women, at least in the United States and parts of northern Europe. The cultural anomaly was the 1950s and 60s, when the average age of marriage for women dipped to 20 – probably because of post-Depression and postwar cocooning. But today's single 27-year-old has gone global – and even in the West, she differs from her late-marrying great-grandma in fundamental ways that bring us to the second piece of the demographic story. Today's aspiring middle-class women are gearing up to be part of the paid labor market for most of their adult lives; unlike their ancestral singles, they're looking for careers, not jobs. And that means they need lots of schooling.
In the newly global economy, good jobs go to those with degrees, and all over the world, young people, particularly women, are enrolling in colleges and universities at unprecedented rates. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentages of 20-, 25-, and 30-year-olds enrolled in school more than doubled in the U.S., and enrollment in higher education doubled throughout Europe. And the fairer sex makes up an increasing part of the total. The majority of college students are female in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Norway and Australia, to name only a few of many places, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more traditional countries like China, Japan and South Korea.
That educated women are staying single is unsurprising; degreed women have always been more likely to marry late, if they marry at all. But what has demographers taking notice is the sheer transnational numbers of women postponing marriage while they get diplomas and start careers.
In the U.K., close to a third of 30-year-old college-educated women are unmarried; some demographers predict that 30 percent of women with university degrees there will remain forever childless. In Spain, women now constitute 54 percent of college students, up from 26 percent in 1970, and the average age of first birth has risen to nearly 30, which appears to be a world record.
Adding to the contemporary SYFs novelty is the third demographic shift: urbanization. American and northern European women in the 19th and early 20th centuries might have married at 26, but after a long day in the dairy barn or cotton mill, they didn't hang out at Studio 54 while looking for Mr. Right (or, as the joke has it, Mr. Right for Now). In the past, women who delayed marriage generally lived with their parents; they also remained part of the family economy, laboring in their parents' shops or farms or, at the very least, contributing to the family kitty. A lot of today's bachelorettes, on the other hand, move from their native village or town to Boston or Berlin or Seoul because that's where the jobs, boys and bars are – and they spend their earnings on themselves.
Combine these trends – delayed marriage, expanded higher education and labor-force participation, urbanization – add a global media and some disposable income, and voilà : an international lifestyle is born.
One of its defining characteristics is long hours of office work, often in quasi-creative fields like media, fashion, communications and design – areas in which the number of careers has exploded in the global economy over the past few decades. The lifestyle also means whole new realms of leisure and consumption, often enjoyed with a group of close girlfriends: trendy cafes and bars serving sweetish coffee concoctions and cocktails; fancy boutiques, malls and emporiums hawking cosmetics, handbags, shoes and $100-plus buttock-hugging jeans; gyms for toning and male-watching; ski resorts and beach hotels; and, everywhere, the frustrating hunt for a boyfriend and, though it's an ever more vexing subject, a husband.
The SYF lifestyle first appeared in primitive form in the U.S. during the '70s after young women started moving into higher education, looking for meaningful work and delaying marriage. Think of ur-SYF Mary Richards, the pre-Jordache career girl played by Mary Tyler Moore, whose dates dropped her off – that same evening, of course – at her apartment door. By the mid-'90s such propriety was completely passe. Mary had become the vocationally and sexually assertive Carrie Bradshaw, and cities like New York had magically transformed into the young person's pleasure palace evoked by the hugely popular TV show Sex and the City.
At around the same time, women in Asia and in post-Communist Europe began to join the SYF demographic, too. Not surprisingly, they also loved watching themselves, or at least Hollywood versions of themselves, on television. By the late 1990s, the SYF lifestyle was fully globalized. Indeed, you might think of SYFs as a sociological Starbucks: No matter how exotic the location, there they are, looking and behaving just like the American prototype.
With no children or parents to support, and with serious financial hardship a bedtime story told by aging grandparents, SYFs have ignited what The Economist calls the "Bridget Jones economy" – named, of course, after the book and movie heroine who is perhaps the most famous SYF of all. Bridget Jonesers, the magazine says, spend their disposable income "on whatever is fashionable, frivolous and fun," manufactured by a bevy of new companies that cater to young women.
There's much to admire in the New Girl Order – and not just the previously hidden cleavage. Consider the lives most likely led by the mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on of the fashionista at the Warsaw airport. Those women reached adulthood, which usually meant 18 or even younger; married guys from their village, or, if they were particularly daring, from the village across the river; and then had kids – end of story, except for maybe some goat milking, rice planting or, in urban areas, shop tending.
The New Girl Order means goodbye to such limitations. It means the possibility of more varied lives, of more expansively nourished aspirations. It also means a richer world. SYFs bring ambition, energy and innovation to the economy, both local and global; they simultaneously promote and enjoy what author Brink Lindsey calls "the age of abundance." The SYF, in sum, represents a dramatic advance in personal freedom and wealth.
But as with any momentous social change, the New Girl Order comes with costs – in this case, profound ones. The globalized SYF upends centuries of cultural traditions. However limiting, those traditions shaped how families formed and the next generation grew up. So it makes sense that the SYF is partly to blame for a worldwide drop in fertility rates. To keep a population stable, or at its "replacement level," women must have an average of at least 2.1 children. Under the New Girl Order, though, women delay marriage and childbearing, which itself tends to reduce the number of kids, and sometimes – because the opportunity costs of children are much higher for educated women – they forgo them altogether.
Save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries – Italy, Spain, and Poland – have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. Much of Asia looks similar. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, according to the CIA's World Factbook, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman.
For many, fertility decline seems to be one more reason to celebrate the New Girl Order. Fewer people means fewer carbon footprints, after all, and thus potential environmental relief. But while we're waiting for the temperature to drop a bit, economies will plunge in ways that will be extremely difficult to manage – and that, ironically, will likely spell the SYF lifestyle's demise.
As Philip Longman explains in his important book The Empty Cradle , dramatic declines in fertility rates equal aging and eventually shriveling populations. Japan now has one of the oldest populations in the world – one-third of its population, demographers predict, will be over 60 within a decade. True, fertility decline often spurs a temporary economic boost, as more women enter the workforce and increase income and spending, as was the case in 1980s Japan. In time, though, those women – and their male peers – will get old and need pensions and more health care.
And who will pay for that? With fewer children, the labor force shrinks, and so do tax receipts. Europe today has 35 pensioners for every 100 workers, Mr. Longman points out. By 2050, those 100 will be responsible for 75 pensioners; in Spain and Italy, the ratio of workers to pensioners will be a disastrous 1-to-1. Adding to the economic threat, seniors with few or no children are more likely to look to the state for support than are elderly people with more children. The final irony is that the ambitious, hardworking SYF will have created a world where her children, should she have them, will need to work even harder in order to support her in her golden years.
Aging populations present other problems. For one thing, innovation and technological breakthroughs tend to be a young person's game. Fewer young workers and higher tax burdens don't make a good recipe for innovation and growth. Also, having fewer people leads to declining markets, and thus less business investment and formation. Where would you want to expand your cosmetics business: Ireland, where the population continues to renew itself, or Japan, where it is imploding?
And finally, the New Girl Order has given birth to a worrying ambivalence toward domestic life and the men who would help create it. In countries newly entering the New Girl Order, what SYFs complain about isn't so much a gap between work and family life as a chasm between their own aspirations and those of the men who'd be their husbands. Adding to the SYF's alienation from domesticity is another glaring fact usually ignored by demographers: The New Girl Order is fun. Why get married when you can party on?
That raises an interesting question: Why are SYFs in the United States – the Rome of the New Girl Order – still so interested in marriage? By large margins, surveys suggest, American women want to marry and have kids. Indeed, our fertility rates, though lower than replacement level among college-educated women, are still healthier than those in most SYF countries.
Yet it's by no means certain that Americans will remain exceptional in this regard. The most recent census data show a sharp increase, over just the past six years, in the percentage of Americans in their 20s who have never married. Every year sees more books celebrating the SYF life. And SYFs will increasingly find themselves in a disappointing marriage pool. The New York Times excited considerable discussion this summer with a front-page article announcing that young women working full time in several cities were now outearning their male counterparts. A historically unprecedented trend like this is bound to have a further impact on relations between the sexes and on marriage and childbearing rates.
Still, for now, women don't seem too worried about the New Girl Order's downside. On the contrary. The order marches on, as one domino after another falls to its pleasures and aspirations. Now, the Singapore Times tells us, young women in Vietnam are suddenly putting off marriage because they "want to have some fun" – and fertility rates have plummeted from 3.8 children in 1998 to 2.1 in 2006.
And then there's India. "The Gen Now bachelorette brigade is in no hurry to tie the knot," reports the India Tribune. "They're single, independent and happy." Young urbanites are pushing up sales of branded apparel; Indian chick lit, along with Cosmopolitan and Vogue, flies out of shops in Delhi and Mumbai. Amazingly enough, fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in several of India's major cities, thanks in part to aspirant fashionistas.
If in India – India! – the New Girl Order can reduce population growth, then perhaps nothing is beyond its powers. At the very least, the Indian experiment gives new meaning to the phrase "shop till you drop."
This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News
This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News