Men's Jeans Don’t Fit Feminine Curves

The shape of the American career path doesn’t match the shape of the female life. How would it have to change for women to truly thrive?

Hips Don’t Lie

Thanks to Levi Strauss, women now have access to sexy, elastic jeans. But where is the sexy, elastic career path we so desperately need? 

You can’t force female hips into men’s jeans.

Or rather, you can, but it’s very uncomfortable.

I found this out recently when I tried to squeeze into a pair of old-school (read: stiff), narrow-hipped Levi’s. The waist fit, but nothing else sat right. The unyielding denim cut into my skin, making it impossible to concentrate. Throughout the morning, I tugged on the waistband, wriggling to escape discomfort, growing increasingly irritable.

Finally, I decided looking good wasn’t worth the pain, and ripped those babies off to slip into the cool embrace of black, elastic jeggings.

When, in 1934, Levi Strauss introduced the “Lady Levi’s” to the American public, it was considered scandalous. But Levi had seen what women wanted, and being a good entrepreneur, he gave it to them.

After squeezing into their husbands’ jeans for decades, American women breathed a collective sigh of relief. Finally, a comfortable option that didn’t take finicking and fidgeting to sit right. Finally, a pair of jeans that fit the female form.

Thanks to Levi Strauss and other fashion innovators, women now enjoy a wide selection of jean styles to suit any figure—bellbottoms for the slender, jeggings for the curvy, wide-legged for the statuesque. I suppose it’s a triumph of modernity that all women now have access to sexy, elastic Levi’s.

But where is the sexy, elastic career path we so desperately need? 

Women’s life timelines, like our figures, are not linear but curvy. Our modern work culture ignores that.

The American Dream Is Male

A woman’s fertility window doesn’t smile, nod, and agreeably move over to accommodate man-made social norms. It peaks in the late teens and twenties— coinciding exactly with society’s career-building phase and leaving women torn between the prospects of family and career.

The American dream is that, with grit and dedication, any ambitious person can work their way to the top. But in practice, it favors men by operating on a male timeline.

Nowadays, to land a prestigious job, one proceeds linearly from high school to college to graduate school, and then to a demanding period of early-career ladder-climbing.¹ During this time, one is pretty much married to one’s work.

This isn’t a bad option for a man. Spending his twenties improving his social status and financial security conveniently works double-time to improve a man’s marriage prospects. By the time he decides to settle down in his mid-thirties, the women are queuing down the block.

A woman’s fertility window, however, doesn’t smile, nod, and agreeably move over to accommodate man-made social norms. It peaks in the twenties— coinciding exactly with society’s career-building phase and leaving women torn between the prospects of family and career. (See my essay on the low global birthrate.)

Even the woman who manages to “have it all” often incurs a cost the man never does. She either does both at the same time—well-nigh impossible, but some queens manage—or she delays family ‘til her mid-30’s. In contrast to the man’s mid-30’s, by a woman’s mid-30’s, the dudes aren’t usually queuing up around the block. That’s the first challenge. Then, there’s the longer period of trying for a kid; then the risky and physically taxing pregnancy. All that on a short and stressful timeline.

Think what a biological burden this places on the woman compared to the man.

Its effects are visible. Many of the new (prestigious career) moms I see in my college town look exhausted. Their skin is papery, they’ve got dark circles, and their bodies are collapsing. I wasn’t surprised to see this because it’s exactly how I remember my mom in my early childhood. I thought it the trademark “look” of motherhood.

Imagine my shock then, when, after giving birth for the first time at 24, I was back to my normal self in two weeks, skin glowing, eyes bright. “What witchcraft is this?” I wondered. I had braced myself to buy a whole new wardrobe. Then it hit me. The worn women, like my mother, didn’t look like that because they were mothers per se but because they were first-time mothers in their late thirties. A decade makes a big difference in how the body copes.

If biological facts can’t be changed, it seems a no-brainer that the social constructs ought to be changed instead.

The professional sphere should adapt to the female timeline instead of forcing the female to adapt to a male timeline, so that women can pursue marriage and children without sacrificing their ambition, and vice versa.

Why Hasn’t Feminism Already Changed The Career Path’s Shape?

If you don’t respect your own femininity, you’ll never demand that respect from others.

Feminism’s been around for over a century. Why, then, are career-minded women still advised to accommodate themselves to a male-centric life schedule?

Perhaps female agreeability is feminism’s Achilles heel. Ever compliant and ever yielding, we women assume every inconvenience is our fault. “It’s not you,” we say, “It’s me. I’ll figure out how to live in a man’s world.” And so self-proclaimed feminists continue to squeeze their curves into bloodflow-restricting, wedgie-inducing men’s jeans; to suffer in silence; to take birth control pills that drive them crazy and make them fat; to train so hard they lose their periods. We keep trying oh-so-hard to be “one of the bros” that we never pause to consider that we are worth oh-so-much more than that.

In other words, feminists haven’t demanded a woman-centric career path because they loathe their woman-ness and decide to try becoming pseudo-men. If you don’t respect your own femininity, you’ll never demand that respect from others.

Conversely, the women who chose family over feminism may decline to demand change simply because they’re content with the status quo. According to a 2015 randomized-controlled trial with 4,000 participants, women are not as interested in pursuing professional goals when they might conflict with other life goals. Maybe the ideal work-life balance looks different for a woman than for a man, and that’s okay.

I know many women who flex their talents in creative entrepreneurship—freelance web design, music lessons, fine art, tutoring, or selling homegrown produce at a farm stand. Instead of waiting for men to manufacture “Lady Levi’s” en masse, these women have learned to cut and tailor trousers for themselves. They’re building their own alternative career paths to fit their own lives’ many curves.²

You Tell Me What Female Utopia Would Look Like

But still I like to imagine a future world in which ambitious career paths are designed to be more friendly towards women, a world that, instead of penalizing us for the beauty of our bodies, respects and adapts to our female difference so we can shine.

I wonder very much what that world would look like, whether it’s possible to create it, and how we can get there.³

Is there a way to optimize our professional careers, our sexuality, and our families much like the current model optimizes those things for men?

How do you think a female-friendly work culture would operate?

Would women just start their professional life later, after their kids are grown? Or can women find professional fulfillment in other ways concurrent with child-rearing, like the many small business entrepreneurs on Etsy?

What of the (in)famous Ballerina Farm? Is it ever healthy to blend your private life and public work like that?

How do you personally balance childbirth and rearing with your other ambitions?And, especially if you are an older woman, what has the shape of your career and/or life path looked like?

Please let me know your thoughts. You know I live for the comments section.

1. This is the typical path for ambitious upper-middle class people who want to become doctors, professors, lawyers, vets, etc. That’s what I know, so that’s what I’m talking about (see “The Humiliation of Motherhood Has Been Good for Me” for more of my story). I realize that any upper-middle class person in America is in the top 1% quality-of-life in human history and that criticizing the system from this perch of being well-off, educated, and happily married might sound rather silly and spoiled. To that I say: gratitude’s good, but so is seeking improvement. We can always make things better.

2. I’m trying to do this now! For a glimpse at what it looks like to care for a baby fulltime and do journalism, see my essay “I Take The Baby to Interview A Cornell Professor.”

3. Incidentally, other women have been wondering too, and for a much longer time than I have. Please do visit Leah Libresco Sargaent’s “Other Feminisms” for heaps of discussion around the nuts and bolts of female-friendly policy and culture. In one post, she sums up her blog’s manifesto as:

1. The world is the wrong shape for women.

2. When the gap is noticeable, society treats us as defective men and expects us to change ourselves to fit a narrow idea of what it means to be human.

3. A full, just feminism advocates for women to be welcome as women, rather than finding tools to help us more easily reshape ourselves into a male-normed mold.