"Today, Elite and Highly Educated Women Have Become a Class Apart"

"It’s not about blaming women. I have to confess that one of the things I was slightly responding to is a tendency to be constantly complaining about things not being perfect for the top five percent of women, so there was a little spasm of irritation there, but it was actually much deeper than that. I do think women were oppressed [for] most of human history, and it’s absolutely wonderful that I was born late enough to be allowed to use my brain; I suppose in a way, it’s underlining the human dilemma that, in any society, it turns out almost everything has a downside. We can’t get perfection, and we can’t get perfect equality, and this is something we have to face up to. If professional women are going to be successful, then they do have to call on the labor of other people—other men or other women—and the reality is, we as human beings would rather have women looking after our babies than men. This is part of the price. It’s a slightly Faustian bargain. This is not absolving men—they’re part of it as well."

Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Republic interviews Alison Wolf, author of The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World.