In Print

Women on Top

Sex & Power
by Susan Estrich
Riverhead Books, $24.95

IF A QUARTER of all MBAs in 1975 were earned by women, then how come men still hold the top job at 99 percent of Fortune 500 firms? That’s the conundrum at the heart of Susan Estrich’s new book Sex & Power, in which the USC law and political science professor marshals chilling evidence that 40 years after the feminist revolution, a wide chasm still separates women and men in the workforce.
Despite anti-discrimination legislation, 88 percent of police officers and 90 percent of firefighters are still men, Estrich relates. In professions where women have made significant inroads – law, academia, medicine, politics, entertainment and high-tech – salary inequities stubbornly persist. At the rate we’re going, a New York Times Magazine article projects, women will achieve workplace parity in 270 years and equality in Congress in 500.
Estrich’s goal isn’t to shock but to galvanize. She reminds readers that American women have access to vast power – they comprise 51 percent of the electorate and make 83 percent of all consumer purchases – if they would but seize it. Imagine if half of American corporate and government leaders were women, she hypothesizes. Would schools be better? Would video games be less violent? Would contraceptives be covered by insurance? Would men find it easier to take paternity leave?

ESTRICH'S QUALIFICATIONS to take on this thorny topic are impeccable. As the first woman to manage a presidential campaign (for Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988), she has personally scaled the parapets of power. She laces her book with anecdotes about high-profile friends such as Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She tells of testy phone calls with Vice President Al Gore and jocular exchanges with President Bill Clinton.
Sex & Power indicts the very infrastructure of the American workplace, calibrated so that the critical years for success overlap precisely with a woman’s reproductive years. This doesn’t really work in corporations’ best interest. “It may be true that mothers work fewer hours than men while their children are young,” Estrich writes, “but they also drink less, abuse drugs less, commit fewer crimes, live longer, have fewer heart attacks, get into fewer fights at work.”
The strategy of women trying to best men at their own game is a bankrupt one, Estrich believes. Instead, she advocates that women unite to change the workplace, urging them to use their enormous economic and political clout to demand that companies cooperate.

– Diane Krieger


Adventures in Chinese Bureaucracy:
A Meta-Anthropological Saga
by Gene Cooper
Science Publishers Inc., $34

This personal saga recounts the trials and tribulations of USC anthropologist Gene Cooper during a five-year research project in Dongyang county, Zhejiang Province, under the close scrutiny of the Chinese government’s Foreign Affairs and Public Security Offices. Written with a fine sense of humor, the book is an object lesson about the hoops to be jumped when foreign field researchers are strictly regulated.

Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America
by Gelya Frank
University of California Press, $19.95

This is a study of Diane DeVries, 50, “a woman born with all the physical and mental equipment she would need to live in our society – except arms and legs.” USC occupational therapist and anthropologist Gelya Frank began writing about DeVries in 1976. This book tells the story of DeVries’ life – “a cultural biography” – interweaving it with a discourse on disability in American culture, the field of disability studies and just what it means to be “disabled.”

Chance, Development, and Aging
by Caleb E. Finch and Thomas B.L. Kirkwood
The University of Michigan Press, $37.50

What are the roles of genes and chance developmental events in determining the course of aging in individuals? USC neurologist Caleb E. Finch and his distinguished co-author Thomas Kirkwood argue that chance events – both random variations during prenatal development and later cell and molecular mutations – are essential for answering questions about aging. The discussion sheds light on everything from understanding meno-pause to explaining why identical twins are not truly identical.

 

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In Print: Women on Top
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