Women Just Wanna Have Fun

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

-- Gloria Steinem

It’s not right to blame women for men’s failure to carry out the duties of fatherhood. But Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal contributing editor, persuasively argues that women around the world want a new lifestyle that has limited space for men and even children. She calls it, “The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle,” after the “Sex and the City” star:

 Conceived and raised in the United States, you can find Carrie in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYF) who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global.

 women are getting married and having kids considerably later than ever before. According to the UN’s World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of marriage for women is up two years, from 21.2 in the 1970s to 23.2 today. In the developed countries, the rise has been far steeper—from 22.0 to 26.1. In 1970, just 7.4 % of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried; today, the number is 22%. In today’s Hungary, 30% of women in their early thirties are single; in South Korea, 40% of 30-year-olds are single.

 in the global economy, good jobs go to those with degrees, and women are enrolling in colleges and universities at unprecedented rates. The majority of college students are female in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Norway, and Australia, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more traditional countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. In Denmark, Finland, and France, over half of all women between 20 and 24 are in school.

 in the U.K., close to a third of 30-year-old college-educated women are unmarried; some demographers predict that 30% of women with university degrees there will remain forever childless. In Spain, women now constitute 54% of college students, up from 26% in 1970, and the average age of first birth has risen to nearly 30, which appears to be a world record.

 today’s bachelorettes move from their native village or town to Boston or Berlin or Seoul because that’s where the jobs, boys, and bars are—and they spend their earnings on themselves. By the mid-1990s, in Canada, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Russia, women were out-urbanizing men, who still tended to hang around the home village.

 according to The Economist, many towns in what used to be East Germany now face Frauenmangel—a lack of women—as SYFs who excelled in school have moved west for jobs, leaving the poorly performing men behind. In some towns, the ratio is just 40 women to 100 men. Women constitute the majority of both high school and college graduates in Poland.

 to delayed marriage, urbanization, expanded higher education—add a global media and some disposable income, and voilà: an international lifestyle is born—long hours of office work, often in quasi-creative fields like media, fashion, communications, and design, followed by new realms of leisure and consumption enjoyed with a group of girlfriends.

 Marian Salzman of the Intelligence Factory notes that by the 1990s, “women living alone had come to comprise the strongest consumer bloc in much the same way that yuppies did in the 1980s.” The National Association of Realtors reports that in the U.S. last year, single women made up 22% of the real-estate market, compared with a paltry 9% for single men. The median age for first-time female buyers: 32.

 a majority of Japanese single women between 25 and 54 say that they’d be just as happy never to marry. The SYF is partly to blame for a worldwide drop in fertility rates. To keep a population stable, women must have an average of 2.1 children. But save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5. The most Catholic European countries—Italy, Spain, and Poland—have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. Much of Asia looks similar. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman.

 yet in the United States—the Rome of the New Girl Order—surveys suggest large margins of American women want to marry and have kids. Our fertility rates are healthier than those in most SYF countries. Still, the most recent census data show a “sharp increase” over the past six years in the percentage of Americans in their twenties who have never married, and every year sees more young women working full-time now outearning their male counterparts; trends that are bound to further impact marriage and childbearing rates.

 SYFs complain about a chasm between their own aspirations and those of the men who’d be their husbands. But there’s another glaring fact: the New Girl Order is fun. Why get married when you can party on?