Passage 7 We Did It!
女性工作潮中存在的问题 《经济学人》

[00:01]At a time when the world is short of causes for celebration,
[00:06]here is a candidate: within the next few months women will
[00:11]cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce.
[00:18]Women's economic empowerment
[00:21]is arguably the biggest social change of our times.
[00:25]Today they are running some of the organisations
[00:29]that once treated them as second-class citizens.
[00:33]Societies that try to resist this trend,
[00:36]will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens.
[00:44]This revolution has been achieved with only a modicum of friction.
[00:50]Men have, by and large, welcomed women's invasion of the workplace.
[00:56]Yet even the most positive changes can be incomplete or unsatisfactory.
[01:03]This particular advance comes with two stings.
[01:07]The first is that women are still under represented at the top of companies.
[01:13]The second is that juggling work and child-rearing is difficult.
[01:19]These two problems are closely related.
[01:23]Many women feel they have to choose between their children and their careers.
[01:29]Women who prosper in high-pressure companies
[01:32]during their 20s drop out in dramatic numbers in their 30s
[01:37]and then find it almost impossible to regain their earlier momentum.
[01:43]Less-skilled women are trapped in poorly paid jobs
[01:47]with hand-to-mouth child-care arrangements. Motherhood, not sexism,
[01:53]is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men,
[02:00]but mothers earn significantly less.
[02:03]And those mothers' relative poverty also disadvantages their children.
[02:09]Demand for female brains is helping to alleviate some of these problems.
[02:15]Even if some of the new theories about warm-hearted women making
[02:20]inherently superior workers are bunk,
[02:23]several trends favour the more educated sex,
[02:27]including the "war for talent" and the growing flexibility of the workplace.
[02:34]Law firms, consultancies and banks
[02:38]are rethinking their "up or out" promotion systems
[02:41]because they are losing so many able women.
[02:45]More than 90% of companies in Germany and Sweden allow flexible working.
[02:52]And new technology is making it easier to redesign work
[02:57]in all sorts of family-friendly ways.
[03:01]All this argues, mostly, for letting the market do the work.
[03:06]That has not stopped calls for hefty state intervention of
[03:10]the Scandinavian sort. Norway has used threats of quotas to dramatic effect.
[03:17]Some 40% of the legislators there are women.
[03:22]All the Scandinavian countries provide plenty of state-financed nurseries.
[03:29]They have the highest levels of female employment in the world
[03:32]and far fewer of the social problems that plague Britain and America.
[03:37]Surely, comes the argument,
[03:40]there is a way to speed up the revolution
[03:43]and improve the tough lives of many working women and their children?
[03:47]If that means massive intervention,
[03:51]in the shape of affirmative-action programmes
[03:54]and across -the-board benefits for parents of all sorts,
[03:57]the answer is no. To begin with,
[04:02]promoting people on the basis of their sex is illiberal and unfair,
[04:07]and stigmatises its beneficiaries. And there are practical problems.
[04:14]Lengthy periods of paid maternity leave can put firms off hiring women.