Just happened on this provocative article. Hanna Rosin asks “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?”
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
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.
She goes on to say that during the recession “three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.”
This is partly because “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male.”
This is not to argue that woman do dot continue to have it bad in all sorts of ways, only that in the late capitalist bureaucracies they in certain ways have more power than men. In the future we could be living not in a world of gender equality, but matriarchy.
The article also ties in nicely with a piece on the unemployment crisis in the US rust belt that has primarily affected men, leading to an epidemic of suicide and opioid abuse.
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/men-women-rust-belt/525888/
Any thoughts?