一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day13 passage7
Passage 7 We Did It!
女性工作潮中存在的问题 《经济学人》
At a time when the world is short of causes for celebration,
here is a candidate: within the next few months women will
cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce.
Women's economic empowerment
is arguably the biggest social change of our times.
Today they are running some of the organisations
that once treated them as second-class citizens.
Societies that try to resist this trend,
will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens.
This revolution has been achieved with only a modicum of friction.
Men have, by and large, welcomed women's invasion of the workplace.
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.