The post-industrial economy favors women—or at least the jobs females tend to seek these days. The phenomenon has been reported widely, in sundry articles with sobering titles such as "The Lost Boys." College enrollments are overwhelmingly female, and manly vocations such as construction, truck driving, and high-risk financial services have been damaged, perhaps permanently, during the recent recession.
Here's the weird part: The tilt toward females is incredibly rapid. After all, middle-aged Americans can recall when prospective parents rooted openly for a boy, and some couples experimented with wacky schemes to stack the cards biologically. The trend away from this sort of thing has been observed in other countries as well, where official policies were once (and in developing societies still are) geared to favor males. Normally one associates evolutionary change with gradualism, but this shift seems especially punctuated (as the late anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould once put it, comparing evolution to baseball, with long periods of routine, followed by spurts of creative activity).
Of course, aggregate female income is still behind that of males, but the gap is narrowing and, given educational projections, may close quickly.
A recent article by Hanna Rosin in the Atlantic gets into all this. One should read the entire piece, available here. Educational implications are scattered throughout. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
And:
Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment. Dozens of college women I interviewed for this story assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed at home, either looking for work or minding the children. Guys, one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.”
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