Life is speeding up — and it’s women who will thrive in an accelerated age

We’ve all had the sense that life is speeding up, that even as our computers get faster, our attention spans get shorter. For some, this phenomenon — what I call “the great acceleration” — is a source of wonder. For others, it’s closer to terror.

There’s an obvious reason why we can’t agree on whether technology is changing society in positive or negative ways: the effects of acceleration are far from uniform. The benefits are wide but often diffuse: a marginally quicker phone, or pennies shaved off a stock market transaction. The drawbacks can be sharp and personal: a child bullied via social media, or a job automated out of existence.

One of the best examples of the unbalanced nature of acceleration comes in its different effects on men and women. For example, there’s a wonderful experiment that shows how addicted we’ve become to receiving a stream of information via our mobile phones. Researchers asked people to spend just 15 minutes alone in a room with their thoughts: more than half confessed to not enjoying the experience.

The really fascinating thing, however, happened when the experiment was repeated, with the subjects being given the opportunity to alleviate their boredom via an unpleasant electric shock. A quarter of the women chose to push the button — and two-thirds of the men.

Men and women are, in some vital ways, wired differently: the former, judging by this example, are idiots. But they’re lucky idiots. For a variety of biological and social reasons, women appear to be more prone to suffering from stress, anxiety and depression — conditions that have a huge impact on your physical as well as mental health, and which can be promoted by an accelerated environment, with its ceaseless demands.

In their book Top Dog, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman talk about the COMT enzyme, the job of which is to calm us down after fight-or-flight moments by clearing dopamine out of the prefrontal cortex.

A quarter of Europeans have a strong version of the enzyme and a quarter have a weak one. The former are “warriors” who thrive on stress, and the latter are “worriers” who find its effects especially debilitating.

But there is a twist: the presence of oestrogen slows down COMT’s work by 30 per cent. This means that the old clichés about women being worse at handling stress are partially grounded in reality — although they also tend to be better judges of the stock market, because they are better at taking their ego out of the equation. It’s not just about biology. An accelerated economy offers ever-increasing rewards to the highly skilled and highly educated. This has contributed to the rise of ultra-intensive parenting in an effort to equip our children with every tool they may need to compete — the burden of which, in traditional families, often falls on the female partner. Even though far more women have jobs than in the 1960s, the average mother spends more time actively looking after her child. And the amount of high-quality “interactive care” — reading to and playing with your children — has tripled.

Pressures and stresses

Acceleration therefore tends to increase the pressures and stresses on professional women more than on professional men. Among young people, the pattern is the same. While statistics suggest that, overall, children and teenagers are as happy as they ever were, episodes of stress and anxiety are indisputably on the rise: a 2013 study reported that 57 per cent of female and 40 per cent of male American university students had experienced an episode of “overwhelming anxiety” in the previous year. A new book by Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls, sets out the part played in this by social media: for girls especially, life on Instagram or other social networks is “like being a contestant in a never-ending beauty pageant”.

Yet there’s a powerful argument that, over the longer term, it’s women who will thrive in an accelerated age, and men who will fall behind. For one thing, the confessional culture of the online age is also one that privileges sharing and sympathy and emotional literacy — skills that are not exactly associated with men in general, let alone teenagers.

For another, all the scare stories about robots taking our jobs gloss over the fact that the jobs they will take are mostly male. When Oxford University researchers analysed more than 700 different occupations, they found that 47 per cent of jobs are susceptible to automation.

But overwhelmingly, it is the traditionally male positions — taxi drivers, truckers, construction workers — that are likely to be lost. That’s because computers are very good at carrying out a specific range of repeated tasks, but not so good at reading intentions or emotions, or coping with the unpredictable, in the way required in female-dominated professions such as nursing or teaching.

For all of us, technological change is likely to be a source of both significant challenges and significant opportunities in the years to come — requiring us, both as individuals and as a society, to devise ways of harnessing and channelling acceleration, rather than letting it overpower us.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Robert Colvile is the former comment editor of the Telegraph and news director of BuzzFeed UK. His latest book is The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster.