Creative Women, Managerial Men
Some Graphic Reflections on Gender and the Rise of the Creative Class
The tone of Richard Florida’s 2002 blockbuster The Rise of the Creative Class was nothing less than breathless, but this (p.13) should surely have been ominous:
Artists, musicians, professors and scientists have always set their own hours, dressed in relaxed and casual clothes and worked in stimulating environments. They could never be forced to work, yet they were never truly not at work. With the rise of the Creative Class, this way of working has moved from the margins to the economic mainstream.
Combining what we might think of as a description of a ‘post-Fordist’ labour market with what was then known (typically in a similarly breathless tone) as the ‘knowledge economy’, Florida made a case for gentrifying urban areas and intensifying work effort. The professional class, he reckoned, was markedly ‘creative’ and so they needed to live in cool areas, together. They needed to continually invest in their own human capital, behave like individual entrepreneurs but also gather together in really cool places.
Doesn’t seem to have worked out all that well for San Francisco.
Or, arguably, for those now plagued by ‘flexploitation’, producing in some cases an ‘underclass’ (perhaps especially among Aboriginal Australians) in the name of creative work that, in real life, is not actually all that creative, very often. More on that in a minute.
I am currently thinking about this from a gendered perspective. The expansions of the professions (and the higher education that underpinned it) ‘benefited’ (which I am starting to think we might need to put in air quotes) women more than men.
Check out the difference in tertiary attainment among men 25-34 (the round dots) and women everywhere except for India and sort-of Mexico.
In Australia tertiary attainment among young men of that age group is 48.8%, women 63%. In the USA young men are 46.2%, young women 56.3%. In the UK young men are 54.8%, women 60.7%. In Canada the gap is enormous: of young men, 58.4% are tertiary educated, while 75.8% of young women have tertiary qualifications. The OECD average is more than 12 percentage points apart: 41.1% of young men and 54% of young women. Aotearoa New Zealand is the only country of my sample where both men and women fall below this average (Sample = Oz, NZ, UK, US, Canada), suggesting that now is not the best time for cuts.
This is a recent development, which we can see because the gender gap in tertiary attainment is tiny for those aged 55-64, though still in favour of women.
The OECD average is Men 30.9 Women 32.2. Oz men 37%, women 40.4, UK men 39.3%, women 40.2% and so on.
Want the data? OECD (2024), Population with tertiary education (indicator). doi: 10.1787/0b8f90e9-en (Accessed on 01 June 2024)
This is great, right? After centuries of systematic educational disadvantage, women are succeeding. They battled for this, and are succeeding. I think that it is an achievement indeed.
Check out the entry of women to the professions, too. Professional women were always a relatively high percentage of women in the workforce, higher than men in all the sample countries. Everywhere there was a massive surge in professionals in the 1990s. This graph shows the USA, from the census.
The graph below is just Australia, also from the census - how different is 2001 compared to 1991? That is an awful lot of women going to university in the 1990s (I was one of them).
George Morgan and Pariece Nelligan argue that young working class men, growing up in traditions dominated by collective homosociality were less well prepared for the individual entrepreneurship associated with pursuit of ‘creative class’ work.
On the other hand, as Angela McRobbie suggests in her brilliant Notes on The Perfect, ‘having it all’, including professional work led to an ‘amplification of control of women, mostly by corporeal means, so as to ensure the maintenance of existing power relations’. Professional women’s merit based achievement is not only confined to an intensification of work processes, but to discipline at the gym, in eating kale and purchasing designer shoes. McRobbie: ‘The ‘perfect’ emerges as a horizon of expectation, through which young women are persuaded to seek self-definition’. (Thanks to Zora Simic for pointing me to the McRobbie article…sorry it took me so long to actually open it).
Remember flexploitation? Florida’s book was published five years before the iPhone ensured we carried our work, and our opportunities for endless educational improvement (the perfect always looming), with us everywhere. The pressure, especially for young people is intense. For young women it must be overwhelming.
OK here is the last graph. Well, actually the second-last graph. This is the growth of the professions in the USA, again from the census. See that massive purple bit, the category that is evidently the biggest driver of growth in white collar work at all? That is management.
Want to see the graph in Australia? Not a lot of point, it is almost exactly the same. You know, but (like everything else, perhaps) smaller and slightly later.
What do you think might be the gender split in management? From Virtue Capitalists:
These managers were mostly men, while growth in most other professions was driven by women. Women professionals were growing in the United States for some decades, increasing from forty per cent in 1970, to 49 per cent in 1980 and reaching 56% of all professionals in 2000, with fifty per cent growth in women professionals just in the 1990s. In Australia, growth in higher education was delayed until the 1990s, but when it did expand women joined in droves. Professional women in the Australian census grew by a whopping 102 per cent in the 1990s, increasing their share of professional work from 44 per cent of all professionals in 1991 to 54 per cent in 2001. In Canada, though professional work grew altogether by more than two hundred per cent, women’s share of that work was steady between 1990 and 2000. It was already quite high, at sixty per cent of all professionals. Management as a discrete category did not make the same gender gains. In Australia, men dominated the field at 72 percent in both 1991 and 2001 censuses. American managers were not quite so gender imbalanced, but the 58 per cent male share of managerial jobs stayed steady over the 1990s. Only in Canada did women make any real gains in management, increasing their share from thirty to 35 per cent.
More than just the striking stability in the percentage of men in this very rapidly growing field of work, management was also valued increasingly for its ‘toughness’ in…well, mostly in sacking people and ensuring they felt precarious at work. There is more to this…maybe another day.
The professions were being ‘feminised’ in other ways too, so that professional work increasingly resembled the insecure work typical of women in earlier periods.
Virtue matters here too, for though it was a characteristic of all professions as the emerged, the virtue that was and is still needed to do professional work started to seem ‘soft’ and feminine by contrast to managerial toughness. The result, as I’ve said dozens of times here, was a managerialisation of virtue into risk and quality systems that could be managed by a (likely male) manager who and not the (likely female) professional.
This was moral deskilling, but applied to autonomy and creativity too. Managerialism means that creativity, too, is increasingly deskilled. The fact that such deskilling has been applied first and hardest to professions like teaching and nursing, dominated by women, is also telling.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the inroads women made into the professions were good and important, but we might also note:
Though women are becoming more educated than men, the gender pay gap persists.
The pursuit of perfection makes women primarily and personally responsible for our collective accumulation of human capital.
Work intensification is particularly intense for well educated women.
The personal fulfilment promised by the ‘rise of the creative class’ is undermined by moral and creative deskilling.
In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks suggests that attaching creativity and personal fulfilment to waged work reinforces capitalist systems. Instead, she suggests we decouple our industrious effort from both profit and wages, freeing creativity from that fundamental quality of capitalism: labour exploitation.
That really would be f*cking with capitalism.
Data:
Graphs from census data were made by me.