Even more dramatic are the Mega-Commuters who don’t just drive or take the train, but fly to work. One European travel firm has predicted that by the year 2016, the number of people who work in the U.K. but live elsewhere—and not just northern France, but also Barcelona, Palma, Dubrovnik, and Verona—will reach 1.5 million. Low-cost airlines make this possible. In 1994, there were zero low-cost airlines; in 2005, there were sixty. Airlines like Ryanair, easyJet, and SkyEurope carried some 200 million passengers in 2003 alone.

  While Mega-Commuting is growing fast in Europe, the phenomenon is in its earlier stages in Asia. Some emerging discount airlines like Jetstar, Oasis, and AirAsiaX offer low fares, but they still have to compete with the dominant state-controlled airlines. But you can expect that Asians, too, will seize on this trend as soon as they’re able. The Chinese already spend an hour or more driving to work on average—compared to that, how big a deal are twice-daily flights?

  Stay-at-Home Workers

  While 3.4 million Americans drive ninety minutes or more to work each day, 4.2 million put on their slippers and head into the home office.

  Which might be a fancy paneled den that’s off-limits to the kids and has a separate entrance. Or it might be the bed where this worker just woke up, and where—once the pillows are propped up, the cereal bowl is on the nightstand, and the laptop is plopped down in the spot it was named for—he or she can begin productive participation in the U.S. labor force.

  Whatever working from home looks like, those 4.2 million Americans doing it represent a 23 percent increase in their kind from 1990, and a nearly 100 percent increase from 1980.

  Source: U.S. Census, 2000

  Such home-workers don’t even include the approximately 20 million Americans who work from home “sometimes.” No, these are the people whose regular workday takes place just a couple seconds’ walk from their toothbrush.

  Why do people work from home? Horror at the Extreme Commutes described in the last chapter is often reason enough—it can be fabulously liberating to skip rush hour, bypass gas expenses, and pay less in car maintenance. The pleasure is only compounded by the ability to stay in one’s pajamas—showering optional.

  Increased pressure to balance work and family also favors the Stay-at-Home Worker. While it’s not likely that one can fully concentrate on work while also being chiefly responsible for (awake) children, many Stay-at-Homers find they can be just as or more productive working at home in the hours that the kids are at child care or in school.

  But the biggest reason, of course, that Stay-at-Home Working is on the rise is because it can be: laptops, high-speed Internet access, Black-Berrys, cell phones, and even videophones have made home offices nearly indistinguishable from office offices, and have lately become available with capacities and at prices totally unimaginable in 1980. So whether you’re working for yourself or someone else, there is almost no practical difference for your colleagues or clients whether you’re in a cubicle or the family den.

  Who are America’s Stay-at-Home Workers? As of 2000, 53 percent are women—compared to only 46 percent of on-site workers who are women. Eighty-eight percent are white. Sixty-eight percent have at least some college, compared to only 59 percent of the on-site workforce. The large plurality works in management and professional jobs. About 2 in 3 work full-time. Many of them make serious money.

  This is a successful, self-driven class of people.

  Indeed, a sizable majority of Stay-at-Home Workers (58 percent) run their own businesses, whether formally incorporated or not. Thirty-five percent telecommute, working for private companies or nonprofits located elsewhere. A paltry 4 percent of Stay-at-Home Workers work for the government—which is probably a good thing, considering how many government laptops with citizens’ private information on them seem to have been stolen lately.

  Stay-at-Home men are an even more successful group. They own the majority of home-based incorporated businesses, and are not only better educated, but also older and wealthier on average than the population in general. These men account for the overrepresentation of Stay-at-Home Workers at the top of the pay scale.

  But don’t think that only men are transforming the den into a personal office. The “Momtrepreneur” movement—women who take themselves out of the traditional workforce to be with their kids, but also start up part-time businesses for income, satisfaction, or both—is also picking up steam. According to the 2000 Census, more than half of all home-based businesses—which make up half of U.S. businesses overall—are owned by women. Such businesses run the gamut from Avon Ladies—5 million worldwide—to women-owned consulting firms, which are generally started by high-achieving women who build a clientele based on their former expertise. Between 2002 and 2006 alone, the average annual revenue for women-owned consulting firms (home-based and other) grew 45 percent, to over $150,000.

  And at every level, people really like being Stay-at-Home Workers. Apart from the control and flexibility that the entrepreneurs have, the 35 percent of home-based workers who don’t run their own business, but are employed by other companies or organizations, also report a lot of joy. According to a study by the American Business Collaboration, 76 percent of full-time telecommuters report high job satisfaction, compared with only 56 percent of on-site workers. And it’s not because they’re taking it easy. People who work from home full-time put in an average of 44.6 hours per week, compared with just 42.2 hours contributed by full-time on-site workers.

  Employers are happy not just about all that extra work, but also about the tax credits they get for reducing employees’ smog emissions, and increased savings in office space. In my own polling firm, we’ve eliminated our East Coast phone banks that used to house our callers, in favor of Stay-at-Home Workers. It’s not only easier for them, but I can get more people willing to call consumers in Japan—at 3 a.m. New York time—if they can do it from their apartments instead of from my call center. Eventually, all polling interviews will be done this way.

  So while Stay-at-Home Workers haven’t transformed all of industry—as was once predicted—this seriously growing group of people who work in their slippers has important implications for business and policy.

  First, Stay-at-Homers need a way to build community. It is ironic that while we are not actually Bowling Alone, we are increasingly Working Alone. Many Stay-at-Home Workers are tired of eating lunch all by themselves, in the same place they ate breakfast and dinner. We need a virtual water cooler that keeps people connected to their colleagues—not just in an insta-message kind of way, but in a collaborative, shared-space, easy-collegiality kind of way. And there is clearly a market for teaching people how to run and participate in tele-enabled meetings.

  Second, as more workplace functions move home, there arise issues of home office safety, comfort, and design. Apparently, the growing incidence rate of fire, injury, and other loss resulting from improperly plugged-in copy machines, computer equipment perched on discarded kids’ furniture, and printer wires chewed through by the family dog prompted the secretary of labor in 2000 to call for a “national dialogue” on home office safety. Can you get workers comp if you slip in your home office on your daughter’s spilled milk? If your work laptop explodes and burns a hole in your living room couch, should the boss have to pay?

  With the growing number of self-employed, Stay-at-Homers—especially successful and assertive ones—maybe we will finally come up with a better system for health insurance and retirement savings than the current employer-based one.

  And maybe we will see an increase in “lunch clubs,” which used to be the province of martini-drinking men and, in separate rooms, tea-sipping ladies. Professional, white-collar men and women need a place to meet clients and build networks when the family den just won’t do. Just as rising divorce rates created a market for longer-term hotel stays like at Residence Inn, the rise in Stay-at-Home Workers triggers a market for shorter-term business locales—one meeting or presentation at a time.

  At a minimum, we need to be sure that if videoconferencing becomes standard in people’s home “offices,” they are fully prepared to get showered, dressed, and otherwise prepared before meetings. It’s one thing to have the family pictures proudly displayed on your office credenza. It’s another thing to have Junior and the family dog squealing in the background when you’re trying to do a strategy call.

  Wordy Women

  Former president of Harvard University Larry Summers got in a lot of trouble in 2005 for suggesting that women were innately inferior to men in the sciences. But what he didn’t say—and what might have gone over better with some of the female faculty who ultimately helped oust him—was that women are on the verge of taking over word-based professions, like journalism, law, marketing, and communications.

  Lest I get into the same kind of trouble as Summers, let me be clear that I don’t know why men more often go into the sciences and women more often go into the “words.” I haven’t the slightest idea what role biology, culture, or socialization plays in those choices. But I can tell you that those choices are dramatically changing the face of certain professions, and that could mean big differences for America.

  Take journalism. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2005, 57 percent of news analysts, reporters, and correspondents were women. Even 57 percent of TV news anchors—that authoritative role once reserved for the likes of Walter Cronkite—are women. Sure, Katie Couric made big news by landing one of the coveted national evening news spots in 2006. But at the local level, the Mary Richardses of the world had long ago replaced the Ted Baxters.

  In public relations—the art of helping people express themselves in just the right way—women make up something like 70 percent of the field, up from 30 percent in the 1970s. (The firm where I serve as CEO, Burson Marsteller, is 70 percent women.) USA Today recently observed that PR may well be the first traditionally male white-collar profession to be redefined by women.

  Or look at law, that great province of written and spoken argument. Since 1970, the number of women lawyers in America has grown 2,900 percent. Women are just over half of law school graduates, and nearly half of law firm associates. They are two-thirds of law school vice deans.

  Compare all these majority and supermajority numbers to women in the sciences and in business. Women are just 14 percent of architects and engineers. They are about 15 percent of professors in the major technical universities like Caltech and Georgia Tech. They hold only 16 percent of the top officer jobs in Fortune 500 companies. They are a mere 3 percent of technology companies’ highest-paid executives.

  To be sure, that women flood the wordy professions doesn’t mean they always dominate decision-making. In journalism and in law, particularly, women drop off somewhere between the professional schools (where they are the majority) and the corridors of power. Women are only 17 percent of law partners. They are only one-third of full-time journalists working for the mainstream media. But this trend is new, so it may take a long time for it to percolate through to the top.

  In the decades that women have joined television news, the number of stories about abortion, child care, and sex discrimination in the workplace has soared. According to a Washington Post analysis, during the brief tenure of Elizabeth Vargas as lead anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, ABC devoted more time to “sex and family” stories—contraception, abortion, autism, prenatal development, childbirth, postpartum depression, and child pornography—than CBS’s and NBC’s nightly newscasts combined.

  In law schools, Family Law was kind of an arcane elective until the 1970s. Now there are dozens of Family Law journals and it’s one of the most popular classes in law school.

  The same is true in PR and advertising. Television commercials for tampons, vaginal creams, and “relief from period pain” used to be few and far between. Now you can’t watch even a half hour of prime time without seeing them.

  The other effect of women moving into word-based professions is that men may very well leave them. In 1971, over one-third of teachers in America’s public schools were men. As women surged into the profession, the number of men plummeted to under one-quarter. Already in both public relations and TV journalism, executives are starting to worry about the large-scale evacuation of men. Some claim that the “best” professionals have simply won, but others make the reverse Larry Summers objection: With half the human race underrepresented, can we really reach our full potential?

  The truth is, women are in many ways following the traditional routes that new immigrants have found to success. Women entered the workforce with less capital than men, and it is a proven route to upward mobility to flock to these kinds of professions. Wordy professions require human capital, and they are the result of study and hard work, not strength or force. While women dominated first in teaching and nursing, their upward mobility has led to a new tier of professional success beyond those careers.

  Wordy professions were a logical choice—a place where women could be successful on their own merits and where they could bring new insights that had been missing from the scene. And so women increasingly became comfortable that these professions were ones where they could excel. They left the physical combat mostly for men, and took on the verbal combat that determines so much in a peaceful democracy.

  And you can expect this trend to go global. As women everywhere have entered the workforce and gotten more education, a whole new set of professional jobs is opening up to them.

  Of course, one of the biggest-selling writers of all time, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, is a British woman.

  Politics is perhaps the next frontier for women. Having long worked with Hillary Clinton, I see how what was once prejudice against women in public life is slowly turning to acceptance and even preference. A whole generation of young women is now watching to see if America, too, will get its first woman chief executive as has already happened in the U.K., Germany, Israel, and Chile. If millions of young women are gaining ground in journalism, public relations, and law, politics is a logical jump—as they require many of the same skills you need for politics. Already many of the most respected policy directors in Washington are women, shaping what the White House and Congress produce that drives our country. We are up to sixteen women senators in 2007—a far cry from fifty, but a huge jump from only one, just twenty-five years ago.

  Larry Summers was focused on the wrong side of the issue. Rather than wondering why women were not equally represented in math and science, he might have noticed how well women are doing in the wordy professions and how their success there may lead ultimately to a whole new politics. Their verbal campaign sure had an impact on him.

  Ardent Amazons

  Wordy Women wouldn’t be a perfect microtrend if there weren’t also an equally intense identity group hurtling in the opposite direction. So now we turn to the women in America who are increasingly choosing work that demands serious physical strength.

  They range from athletes to first responders to construction workers to soldiers. First, the athletes. Although the first Female Bodybuilding Competition was essentially a beauty contest in bikinis, there is now such a following of female bodybuilders and weightlifters that, in 2000, women’s weightlifting became an official Olympic sport. Female freestyle wrestling joined in 2004. In April 2007, Ria Cortesio became the first woman to umpire a Major League Baseball exhibition game in decades.

  Football still brings to mind husky men huddling around a pigskin, but as of 2007, there were actually three professional women’s football leagues in America, comprising eighty teams—up from fewer than ten such teams in 2000. Women playing rugby—virtually unheard of a couple decades ago—are said to number about 10,000 in college and another 3,000 in high school.

  True, they’re playing each other—this isn’t Billie Jean King walloping Bobby Riggs in a made-for-TV 1970s spectacle—but ask your grandmother if she could have anticipated that, in 2007, there would be almost 100 professional women’s football teams in America.

  On the first responder front, America’s professional firefighters are about 5 percent female, or over 6,000 women (another 35,000 are volunteers). Among law enforcement personnel, 1 in 4 is a woman, up dramatically from a few decades ago. Of sworn police officers, it’s just over 1 in 10.

  In 1953, the National Association of Women in Construction started with sixteen members. Today it has almost 6,000 members, and 180 chapters nationwide.

  The military has seen dramatic growth as well. In 1960, there were only 31,700 women in the armed forces, or just over 1 percent. As of 2005, there are over 200,000 women serving, or nearly 15 percent of our armed services. (Jessica Lynch, heroically rescued in Iraq in 2003, was only one of over 150,000 American women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as of late 2006.) Altogether, there are 1.7 million female veterans in the U.S.— almost the same number as female elementary and middle school teachers. While few military jobs ever involve combat, the work clearly attracts and rewards the brawnier side of the fairer sex.

  In the spring of 2007, we did a quick poll to learn more about these women who choose careers in athletics, police, firefighting, the armed services, or building and construction. In general, they are big, conservative, happy, heterosexual women—ready for a fight and on the way up the economic ladder.

  First, they are physically big. Almost 1 in 4 is over 5'7,'' or in the 90th percentile of white women generally. (Ninety percent of the overall sample was white.) They are also heavier, with 58 percent clocking in above the 150-pound mean, and almost 1 in 3 registering over 170 pounds. Perhaps not surprisingly, 8 in 10 were athletic as girls, and many more had brothers than sisters. (Almost half had at least two brothers.)