Women’s Educational Dominance Heralds The Death Of Manhood: In Today’s Economy Women Hold The Cards

The great recession saw a loss of a phenomenal 7.5 million jobs. Men were the bigger losers, losing 5.62 million of them, whilst the women lost 1.87 million jobs. The industries that were most affected were mainly male-dominated, where female presence, if any, was miniscule. This included the construction, manufacturing and high finance industries.

However, when these jobs, or at least some of them returned, they did not all go back to the men. Women’s educational dominance and financial independence ensured that quite a few of them went to women, permanently shutting out the men from jobs, over which they had earlier held a virtual monopoly.

As if the men losing more than two-thirds of the jobs was not enough, of the 15 industries that are predicted to grow most over the next ten years, 12 are dominated by women.

A book by Hanna Rosin, “The End of Men and the Rise of Women,” says that men may never recover from the affects of the recession simply because the recession only hastened up something that was happening for years. She explains that there was a profound economic shift that was going for more than 3 decades.

The reason why women have become more dominant is that the movement has shifted from being a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based one, an economy where brain mattered more than brawn. Men were always more dominant owing to their size and physical strength. But now with the equations changing, this primeval male advantage has been nullified.

In an interview Rosin said, “The quality the workplace most values right now, flexibility, is something that women have, and men need to catch up to succeed.”

Women are now entering the workplace in droves, no job is beyond them, in fact they are outpacing the men. The August jobs report showed that men’s participation in the workforce was at its lowest level in more than 60 years.

“Women worldwide dominate colleges and professional schools on every continent except Africa,” Rosin says. In the United States, three women receive a Bachelor’s Degree for every two men that do.

The author says that men only pine for their old jobs to come back, but they do nothing about it, whereas the women take on the challenge and become the providers.

Inspite of that, even if women are full-time job workers, they do a major share of the household work. Its time this changed, because in the America of today, it would be foolish to assume that the workplace is only male dominated.

She said that there was a cultural block, when it came to men doing household chores. They need to get more involved. “You can’t have a workplace, half of which is women, and still pretend like we live in a nation in which men work and women stay at home.” “Our thinking about men and the way men behave has to change a lot before we can push through this last barrier,” she said.

It is time the men realized that the dynamics have changed – women are longer the subservient ones, but that in more ways than one, they have surpassed them – “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.”