WHOSE GAP IS IT, ANYWAY?

By Barbara Ehrenreich

The expanding gender gap, which in some surveys situates women as much as 20 percentage points to the left of men, is being treated by both parties these days like some mysterious female disorder. Republicans are fretting over that ancient Freudian riddle--What do women want?--while aiming programs at them called "A Seat at the Table" (haven't they noticed many women are sitting there already?), or designing cards with "Twelve Important Messages for Women" that can "fit in a man's pocket and a woman's purse," in the words of one G.O.P. operative. Democrats too have launched a guerrilla operation to snag women in this election. But mostly the Democrats are smirking because they're pretty sure that whatever women want, or will want in November, it doesn't rhyme with "coal." On both sides, men are rubbing their eyes and seeing Woman once again as inscrutable Other--bred in primordial tidal pools and probably subject to the phases of the moon.

But it takes two genders to make a gap. The overall trend for the past 20 years has been a shift to the right, which means men are the ones who have changed, while women have remained, on average, closer to where both sexes used to be: favoring, for example, the use of public resources for something other than the construction of prisons and bombs. If men are from Mars, as the best seller claims, or some similarly parched and airless planet, then women have been on earth all along, and the real mystery is: What has been happening to the guys?

For one thing, they're less likely to enjoy the benefits of long-term female companionship. A generation or so ago, men sought out the company of women, if only to get their laundry done and hot meals served on time. But with the advent of the drip-dry shirt and the frozen breakfast burrito, it became possible for any fellow, no matter how domestically challenged, to get out of the house on his own. And they have, in droves. The age of first marriage for men has shot up to almost 27, and after divorce it is the man who gets the bachelor pad and the woman who gets the playpen and potty seat. More than at any other time in the past 25 years, men are living in a state of radical disconnection from the women-and-children part of the human race.

Even when they are ensconced in a family, men are spending more of their time in a special guy world of their own. A decade or so ago, there was just baseball and football. Then came basketball, soccer, tennis, kick boxing and "ultimate fighting"--filling in every month of the year and every hour of the day on espn and its clones. Not since the Crusades has it been possible for Western Man to spend so much time in the male-play realm of hoarse cheers and mortal competition.

The magazines devoted to men only increase their isolation. GQ, for example, tempts guys with all the cool things they can have if they don't share their paycheck with a wife and kids: Italian shoes, fly-fishing vacations, babes galore. The masculine ideal of popular culture has long since ceased to be the man in the gray-flannel suit, trudging dutifully between office and home. It has become the millionaire hoop star with a stable of interchangeable gal pals, or the yuppie bachelor investing in his home wine cellar.

Meanwhile, for better or for worse, women have tended to stay firmly embedded in the nexus of intergenerational dependencies--doing more than their share of the child rearing, for example, and of the caring for elderly and maundering parents. In the work force, women are disproportionately represented in the human services: as nurses and teachers, day-care and nursing-home workers. They may want lower taxes as much as anyone else, but not in exchange for a pink slip.

Naturally, the diverging life situations of men and women favor divergent political ideologies. Cut off from daily contact with the weak and the needy, and hypnotized by the zero-sum ethic of televised sports, men were bound to be seduced by the social Darwinism of the political right, with its vision of the world as a vast playing field for superstar linebackers and heroic entrepreneurs on leave from The Fountainhead.

Women, on the other hand, are more likely to have a vested interest in the notion of human interdependence: that we are not the freewheeling monads of free-enterprise ideology but vulnerable beings held together by mutual need. Thus to the residents of guy land, government often looks like the 50-ft. third-grade teacher from hell, taxing and regulating and otherwise spoiling the fun. But to a woman sandwiched between children and parents, the "Nanny state" is not a Republican pejorative but rather an extension of herself. Dump Granny out of the nursing home because the Medicare budget is too high, and who is going to change her Depends? Probably not Newt Gingrich or Dick Armey.

So the reason for the gender gap is not that women are "different" in the direction of better or smarter but that men have been drifting off. The aim should be to close the gap as quickly as possible--by bringing the guys back into the human race.

--With reporting by Nina Burleigh/Washington

With reporting by NINA BURLEIGH/WASHINGTON