Why are young women more ambitious than men?

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/26/opinion/gerson-young-women/index.html?iref=allsearch

Why are young women more ambitious than men?

 

Here is an interesting report by the Pew Research Center which shows that women have more ambition for getting high-wage career than men. According to the poll, two-thirds of young women placed “being successful in a high-paying career or profession” as one of the most important goals in their lives. At the same time, marriage and children are also important things in life of both young men and women. In the face of two goals, paid work and family life, they are still skeptical to the reality. Since women are particularly aware of the hardship of maintaining relationship with working in already unfavorable condition, they are more likely to enhance a sense of self-reliance to survive. On the other hand, men also struggle with the traditional gender gap. The article analyzes that men’s lower ambition could result from the dilemma between high expectation to their financial ability and the difficulty of finding stable jobs under today’s sluggish economy.

Women’s strong aspiration for high-paying career has positive influence on enhancing women’s participation in working place. I think the fact that a great deal of women has ambition to take higher-wage career path represents the success of former movements by feminist. More and more women can believe in the success in working place. However, as the report shows, it is not so easy to achieve reconciliation of work and family. I found two problems related to gender gap in work inside and outside home.

Firstly, women tend to face difficulty especially when they try to take male-dominant occupations which require higher education, and are high-waged, and high-valued in the society. Most of the women in the poll must have imagined such “masculine” jobs including engineers and mechanics as “highly-paid career or profession.” As long as I learned from the reading, women struggle with two types of by gender: horizontal segregation across different kinds of jobs and vertical segregation within the same kinds of jobs. Women’s desire to get higher-waged jobs itself does not eliminate these segregations but it is necessary to challenge the status quo that men should be paid more or women are not bearable to certain jobs. Also, as the article mentions in conclusion, institutional change such as child care and flexible working condition is essential to advance women’s labor force participation and address current segregations.

In addition, I also think about the necessity of acknowledging the value of housework as well as enhancing the opportunity for women’s work outside the house. Working life and family life including having children seems difficult when people have to constantly devote to the job outside the house while they also have responsibility for house keeping. However, if labor in house becomes valued as highly as outside works, it would be easier to keep full family life with earning money inside the home. I do not say women should take responsibility for house works and earn money by them, but I’d like to say it will be beneficial for both men and women to admit the value of work inside home in terms of sharing labors inside and outside home and support the family effectively regardless of social expectations based on gender.