Femme Fettle: The US is now a 'woman's nation'

The recent hoopla in India over legislative quotas for women has attracted considerable attention in America.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby" was a marketing slogan used by the tobacco company Phillip Morris to sell Virginia Slims cigarettes to young professional women in the 1960s. The catchphrase conveyed to American women that they were catching up with men in many ways - not always for the good, as it turned out. Female smoking increased rapidly in the '70s and '80s. Fortunately, the unhealthy fad faded. By the 1990s, the new promotional slogan, "Find Your Voice" , was greeted with snickers because the US surgeon general's warning that smoking could cause voice-destroying cancer was more potent than upbeat marketing spiel.

Indeed, American women have truly come a long way now, although they have some distance to go. The recent hoopla in India over legislative quotas for women has attracted considerable attention here, even as the US itself is in ferment over the Shriver Report, a study on female participation in the workforce, about which more shortly.

First the political bit: Around the world, 18.8 per cent of national parliamentary positions are held by women, according to surveys by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Both the United States and India, the world's two largest democracies, fall below this average. In India, only 10.8 per cent of seats in legislatures are held by women; the figure for the US is 16.8 per cent.

The world leader in female political empowerment? Hold your breath: It's the formerly tortured African nation of Rwanda, which already has the constitutional requirement (which India is agonising over) that at least 30 per cent of its parliamentary seats must go to women. In 2008, Rwanda overshot the mark, and elected women to 45 out of 80 parliamentary seats, or 56.25 per cent. Now you can see why the Yadavs and their herd are stampeding in panic.

But is legislative quota a good metric to gauge female empowerment and progress? There's an argument that a career as a politician is not exactly family-friendly , and women shun politics because they don't like its rough and tumble, especially in gruelling democracies such as India and the US. Both countries abound in women coming into politics through family ties rather than grassroots growth. Will quotas fix the problem?

Here's where the Shriver Report kicks in. Released in October 2009 to much delight and debate, it shows a broader aspect of female empowerment. For the first time in US history, the study reveals, almost half of US workers (49.5 per cent) are female. Mothers have become the primary breadwinners in four in 10 American families even as men are cheering them on and taking a back seat in a recession-era economy (they hardly have a choice; they account for three out of four jobs lost).

Signaling a sea change in social and family dynamics from 40 years ago, the report slices and dices this transformation in different ways: Female income now puts food on the table and roof over heads in America nearly as much as men's earnings. In fact, half of all families rely on the earnings of two parents. In more than 20 per cent of all families, a single mother is the primary breadwinner; 70 per cent of families with kids include a working mother.

Looking at it from the education angle, the report shows women now earn 60 per cent of college degrees awarded each year, and 50 per cent of the PhDs and professional degrees. Almost 40 per cent of working women hold managerial and other professional positions. Women make 80 per cent of buying decisions in American homes.

The number of women working for themselves doubled between 1979 and 2003, so that women make up 35 per cent of all self-employed Americans. The number of women-owned businesses is growing at a rate of 23 per cent, 2.5 times faster than the growth in the number of total businesses. Companies led by women are proving to have healthier bottom lines. Will legislative quotas bring this about?

It's not a perfect situation, and there are still issues like wage/salary differentials. But you can't miss the signs - three of the last four secretaries of state have been women; and women ran for president and vice-president in the last election. It's progress enough for Maria Shriver - author of the report, Kennedy scion, and lastly the first lady of California - to now call America a "Woman's Nation" . They got here pretty much without quotas.