One spends, the other doesn't

Two new books promise to help women come to terms with money but instead sink into hysterical left-wing cliches about the gender gap and consumerism.

By Ann Marlowe

Read more: Books, Women, Money, Reviews, Book reviews, Ann Marlowe

March 13, 2006 | There's a newish genre of books that aim to position a big, common, ancient human problem -- how to love or eat or invest or run a business wisely -- as specific to women, and then tell women how to solve it. Some of these books are transparently commercial. And why not? It's a no-brainer to target female readers. That's why we don't have gender-inspecific titles like "The French Don't Get Fat" and "Your Lover Just Isn't That Into You." The more interesting of the group are sincere, motivated by passion of one kind or another, but so obsessed with the idea that the problem in question is a female problem that they ignore the very facts that could help everyone solve it.

Journalist Liz Perle's "Money, a Memoir" is a case in point. The crucial error occurs very early in the book. After recounting the end of her first marriage, she describes her long-delayed "examination of my convoluted relationship with money" at the age of 42. "[That examination] ultimately lead[s] to my conversations with hundreds of other women," she continues. "When it comes to money, women everywhere have so many fears and fantasies in common." Huh? How did we go from Perle's anxieties and issues to surveys of hundreds of women? In the next 240 pages, she never convinced me that women have any more convoluted relationships with money than men do, or even that her relationship with money has much to do with her being female. Don't people everywhere have fears and fantasies in common having to do with money? But that observation wouldn't necessarily sell books.

What if on Page 10 Perle had written, "Jews everywhere have so many fears and fantasies in common," or "Writers have so many fears and fantasies in common"? Doubtless true, but the reader would impatiently object, why explain your convoluted relationship with money by your Jewishness or your being a writer? For reasons that are tiresomely obvious, if someone claims that her neurosis derives from being a woman, she has the benefit of the doubt.

Perle calls for the need to get "beyond an emotional relationship with money" and especially beyond the taboos against discussing it. She argues that a lot of materialism stems from the wish to locate ourselves in an "emotional middle class" of security and tranquility. And to achieve this, according to Perle, "we will go into debt, spend on impulse ... save too little ... We spend on luxuries we can't afford and simultaneously deprive ourselves of real necessities."

The "we" she has in mind is female, and her book has an archaic flavor, echoing nothing so much as the late Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," a vastly superior work. It's full of women sliding "into true poverty" because they aren't able to charge enough for their work, and stay-at-home wives stealing from their husbands' wallets to establish a separate, secret bank account for emergencies. Turns out Perle did the same thing in her own marriage in 1994. When her husband sends her and their 4-year-old son back to the U.S. from Singapore with $1,500, she admits to having recourse to "a bank account my husband knew nothing about."

Yet Perle has little evidence to support the idea that women are more irrational about money than men, or that the differences in their neuroses are so large. (I've known men who had bank accounts that were secret from their wives, too.) Women may be more prone to shopping sprees -- and even, lately, to declaring personal bankrupcy -- but men have their own ways of wasting money. They may buy a new car and immediately crash it, or spend it self-destructively on cocaine, or, on the tamer side, pursue a "sure-fire" investment strategy into ruin. (And some of Perle's argument is pretty class-bound; working-class men in many cultures turn their paychecks over to their wives.)

In fact, on detailed inspection, Perle's urgency seems misplaced. Perle takes a certain relish in reminding her readers how improvident and ill-prepared for old age women are. "More than 48 percent of female baby boomers have saved less than $10,000 in a pension or 401(k) plan. Between one-third and two-thirds of women now thirty-five to fifty-five years old will be impoverished by age seventy." Sounds pretty serious.

But then, distracting myself from these grim facts with the cover story on the trendy field of "behavioral economics" in the current Harvard Magazine, I read that "about half " of American workers over age 59 = don't even contribute to a 401K plan. A Harvard professor who "may be the world's foremost authority on enrollment in such plans" has concluded that "People want to be prudent, they just don't want to do it right now." And doing a little digging on the Web, it seems that 401K behavior has more to do with age, income and employer policies than gender. One 1998 study by AARP of 2.3 million federal employees concluded, "There is only a small difference between the average overall participation rates for men and women -- 84 percent and 82 percent respectively. It is worth noting that when the participation rates were adjusted for salary difference between men and women, participation rates for women were slightly higher than for men."

Although Perle's hope is to demystify money so that women do not continue to live without control over their finances, I can only describe Perle as hystericizing the subject. She admits that there are many reasons why "women still earn only 78 percent of what men do" but emphasizes, "We simply don't ask to be paid what we're worth." This line of reasoning may be emotionally gratifying to some women, but as I discovered while researching this terrain a half dozen years ago, it just isn't true.

The 78 percent number includes both women with children and those without, and it includes women born in the 1930s and '40s, when far fewer women attended college or prepared for a professional job. Denise Venable, a researcher with the National Society of Policy Analysis, notes that "June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98% of men's."

A host of National Bureau of Economic Research studies that are shorter and infinitely more interesting than Perle's book have investigated the "gender gap" and found that it is really a child-care gap. Claudia Goldin, a Harvard and National Bureau of Economic Research economist who is one of the leading lights in this field, concludes, "Whether or not the gap will continue to narrow and eventually disappear is uncertain, and probably depends on the gender gap in time spent in child care and in the home." The problem is in how to reconcile careers and family life, not a problem of women's failure to ask for or be paid proper wages -- but that is a lot less sexy.

Next page: Judith Levine quits shopping for a year -- and bashes Bush