Why Should the Capitalists Win? A Reflection on Contemporary Gender Culture

When I was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Washington, my advisor, a brilliant man named Pierre van den Berghe, once noted “the capitalists have won, they now get two for the price of one.” At the time, the statement did not resonate with me—I was desperate to succeed as a sociologist and find a faculty job.

I was thrilled with my first faculty job—even though one of my male colleagues was anxious to let me know I was “an affirmative action hire.” I didn’t really care, although I resented him saying that. I was getting paid to do what I loved to do, for the most part. At the same time, my husband and I were living in two different states, which was not ideal, and worse, the only day care I could find for my young son was suboptimal. I used to drop him off at day care in the morning, and then go into my office and cry. This problem was solved when I found a much better, and much more expensive, day care. I knew I was one of the lucky ones. Around me I saw day care centers by the sides of major roadways and thought how awful it must be to have to take your child to one of those places.

Having now retired from nearly 30 years as a sociology professor, and looking forward to meeting my first grandchild, I recognize the truth in Pierre’s words from long ago. Many families find it difficult to support a family on one salary. The “family wage,” where a salary in most jobs was enough to support a family, is no more. Today many families, even when both parents have college degrees, must keep two people in the workforce just to attain the basics of a middle-class family life, minimally a house and car. While median household incomes have continued to rise, it is an Alice in Wonderland-Red Queen phenomenon—husbands and wives are having to work harder.

But why does it have to be this way? One reason is the relative stagnation of male wages, while female wages have grown.

We should celebrate that women have opportunities now that women in my mother’s generation did not have. I certainly benefited from them. Middle-class women back then had pretty much two career options that were considered appropriate—nursing or teaching (my mother was a teacher). Even then, women were often forced to quit when they got married. In my great grand-mother’s generation, the options for middle and upper middle-class women were even more restricted. So even after Marie Curie won the Nobel prize (jointly with her husband) in 1903, only her husband was given a professorship at the University of Paris. Marie Curie had to wait until he died to be offered the same job.

At the same time, we should recognize that part of the reason for the decline in male wages is the opening up of the labor force to women. If you double the potential workforce, then you double the supply of labor. Unless the demand for labor changes drastically, by the simple law of supply and demand, average salaries will fall. Yet the entry of women into the workplace is not the only reason for the stagnation in average male wages. There are many other reasons, such as the changing nature of the economy and the decline in the number of well-paid, blue-collar jobs. 

Yet some common employer policies also hurt male wages. By definition, policies that push for equal sex ratios in many occupations, particularly the traditionally male-dominated professions (e.g. engineering), push some men out of those occupations. Given that many of these occupations are well paid, this will also serve to lower average male wages. For those women who get those positions, some would argue that this is a win. Unfortunately, any policy that leads people to believe that the only reason a person got a particular job was because of their sex is demeaning to that person. If you think, as I do, that there is a natural tendency to undervalue women’s skills and abilities, the belief that a woman was an affirmative action hire only serves to reinforce such a tendency.

Blame can also be placed on the cultural denigration and devaluing of the work that occurs in the home and family, and the insistence that all women achieve exactly as men, namely by earning money. Such a culture only serves to further increase the labor supply for employers and to lower average wages, a win for the capitalists. This helps creates a situation where a man’s wage is often no longer enough to support a family.  

Rather than denigrating and devaluing child and home care, it should be celebrated for what it is, the backbone of society. Rather than suggesting that raising children is boring drudgery to be avoided at all costs, it should be remembered that for every Betty Friedan who finds child and home care boring, there are many other women who find it far more rewarding and fulfilling than the average white-collar job. A culture that pushes women into the paid labor force only helps the capitalists win.

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, & Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).