Stats from my Twenties

I just wrote a piece that has some stats and I struggled with how to phrase some points I wanted to make.

I was one of the top three students in my graduating high school class and everyone, me included, expected me to have a WILDLY successful career. One family friend told me when I was thirty "We all expected you to be a millionaire by age thirty! What happened???"

I ended up a full-time homemaker stuck in a 1950s-style marriage that was not only unsupportive of my desire to have a career, it was openly hostile to that goal. So I spent my twenties and early thirties checking out library books or buying books on feminist topics trying to sort out what happened.

I have at times tried to look up more current statistics on things like the gender-based wage gap in the US and those figures have changes some.

The problem is I don't have a ready means to fill in all the gaps in knowledge to provide context for why those figures have changed and what those changes really mean.

Women are making more money. They are also marrying later, having fewer children, acquiring more education and things have changed in a lot of ways.

Any data on social anything is a moving target. I read enough in my twenties to get a good idea of how things interrelated and why it worked that way.

Although things have changed, I don't think that makes my understanding of how things fundamentally work on topics like gender and paid work completely obsolete.

Be aware that some of the things I say are "out of date." Be aware that you may need to tweak some suggestions because of that.

I still reference those stats from my twenties because my understanding is that the insights I gained from all that reading into why women can't compete with men career-wise are generally true for the human race all over the world and throughout history.