The growing number of academically accomplished and highly driven young women could open up a new travel niche: moneyed, single females traveling in search of an “appropriate” partner.
Liza Mundy, a long-time reporter for The Washington Post and author of The Richer Sex. How the new majority of female breadwinners is transforming sex, love, and family (Simon & Schuster, 2012), encountered the trend in researching her book.
“Women kept saying, ‘I want somebody who’s on my level.’ And women who were in communities where they didn’t feel there were enough men on their level were making a decision to travel to find them,” Mundy said.
“I interviewed a young woman in Miami who was still a college student, but she was making a lot of money directing the social networking system at her college, and she would fly to Manhattan regularly to try to enlarge her dating pool and meet men. She said her friends would do that too; they would fly to Seattle, they would go to San Francisco. If high-achieving women are determined to meet and marry a driven, high-achieving man, they are traveling if they don’t feel they can find him in their immediate vicinity.”
This is the second excerpt of a discussion between Mundy and Travel Weekly PLUS Editor in Chief Diane Merlino about the cultural and business impact of the growing economic power of women.
Merlino: In the book you describe how some women are struggling with being in top-earning positions.
Mundy: Yes, on a lot of levels. When women are just dating, sometimes they’ll lie about what they do. I think that’s because they feel men are put off by it, and also they don’t want to attract men for the wrong reasons. They don’t want men to be attracted by their money.
But when they find themselves in relationships and they're the more successful person or the primary earner, they 
can be surprisingly resentful about it. I was struck by one young woman whose boyfriend was telling her that he was really behind her and that he would privilege her career and move if she got a great job somewhere after she got her Ph.D. She said, “Getting boxed-in as the primary earner seems to me like a lot more work and a lot less play.”
Merlino: How do you see the business world itself changing as a result of more and more women earning as much as or more than men?
Mundy: I don’t think it has changed enough, and I don’t think managers are aware yet that many women are the breadwinners in their relationships. Part of the reason is because women are reluctant to talk about it. They think that it stigmatizes their husbands if they go around talking about being the primary earner.
We know that men historically benefited from what they called a “husband premium” and a “father premium”; when men became husbands and fathers, they actually made more. Back in the 1920s and ’30s companies would actually pay them more because they felt, “This guy’s a breadwinner. He’s supporting his household. We’ll pay him more.” Women don’t benefit from that yet; they’re still not perceived in the workplace as being the breadwinners.
I’ve been telling women that they need to make this clear. They need to make the workplace understand that they are breadwinners so that the pay gap will be closed, so they’ll be paid and looked at as people who have families who depend on their wages.
Merlino: You’re saying that women who are breadwinners who are earning more than their spouses should take the initiative and make that clear within their companies?
Mundy: I think they should make it clear that people depend on their wages. All sorts of assumptions are made about would your family be willing to move for you? Hopefully, the answer for women will be yes more and more, that their families will move for them, because traditionally husbands have been much less willing to move for wives than wives have been willing to move for husbands.
In terms of perception in the workplace, it’s about managers understanding that women are the breadwinners and that families are willing to sometimes make the compromises necessary to help their careers.
Merlino: Is there a way companies themselves, or possibly human resource departments, should prepare for what appears to be something that’s inevitable, or will this trend happen organically or slowly enough that adjustments in the work world will occur naturally?
Mundy: Well, they never do though, do they? It’s a very good question. I’m just speaking anecdotally, but frankly it seems to me that even when women are the breadwinners, they don’t want to work the kind of killer, killer hours that men would traditionally work. They still want to be present and home for their children at a certain point.
There’s a lot of conversation here in Washington about making the workplace more reasonable for men and women 
alike, not that anything has come of it yet. I just spoke to a group of women executives, and one of them is a breadwinner, and she’s a mom, and she talked about getting home at nine o’clock every night with little kids. Women really don’t want that.
I think there was a time in American life when men said, “You know what? If this is the price I have to pay, I will.” And men didn’t necessarily like it. They didn’t necessarily want to be at the office at eleven o’clock at night, but they were more likely to just suck it up and do it. Women will push back against that.
So I think it’s fair to say, even if I’m speaking anecdotally, that women who are breadwinners don’t want to be working a 90-hour workweek. It would be great if human resources managers could fix that, if they could give everybody a little bit more of a doable schedule.
Merlino: Any concluding thoughts on all this Liza?
Mundy: I would say it’s a good thing if we can move into a world where men and women can make choices about who’s the breadwinner and who’s the secondary earner based on who wants to do which role. And if women breadwinners push back against the expectation that employees owe their corporations a 90-hour work week, if women push back and win a little bit of flexibility, that would be a good thing for men also.
ALSO SEE:Liza Mundy on Women’s Rise to Economic Dominance.
Liza Mundy’s headshot by Sam Kittner.