The Richer Sex

Women taking over as breadwinners.  We're talking about everything that changes.

Latest numbers:  four in ten working women out-earn their husbands.  Under-thirty women - the majority are pulling away from men on income.  With sixty percent of Americans in college now female, writer Liza Mundy sees the trend only accelerating. And remaking gender roles and expectations, relationships and power dynamics in this country.

She’s ready to call women “the richer sex.”

This hour, On Point:  women taking the role of major breadwinner, and what it means for sex, love and family.  What it means for the country.
-Tom Ashbrook

Liza Mundy, author of "The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family."

Time "Today’s high-earning women are justly proud of their paychecks — I explore the rise of the female breadwinner in this week’s TIME cover story — but they still often feel that men will be intimidated rather than attracted to them as potential mates. They think their success will seem too threatening and be held against them."

The Atlantic "Construction isn't an industry usually considered hospitable to women, but Kimberly Reading of Deltona, Fla., found it a firm foundation for opportunity. Working at a family-owned home-building firm, she started off "in the front office ... answering telephones and purchasing pencils," she recalls. But the father and sons who ran the company gave her an opportunity to prove she could handle more responsibility."

The Guardian "The 'so what?' feminism plateau is familiar to us in the west: 40 years after the second wave, the standstill is obvious. Western women are stuck populating middle management and pink-collar ghettos. A small fraction of elite women have fabulous careers, supported by the low-wage childcare and domestic work of other women. In news coverage, women remain pegged at about 15% of bylines and subjects. They run no more than 5% of Fortune 500 companies. And so on."