And it looks like it’s well on the way to being so, given these interesting stats out of the USA. I’d love to know how New Zealand compares in many of these categories
One more generation should see large numbers of these well-educated female graduates rising to high levels of private and public sector power. Not to mention the ever-increasing rise of service industries that reward so-called inherent female capabilities in language and social skills. It’s hard to see these numbers being defeated for much longer by the much-discussed glass ceiling.
But there are two other big issues about all this.
First is the data in the bottom half of the table, which show incredibly disproportionate numbers of men with learning disabilities, plus other terrible numbers showing the likely links to resulting poor or failed education outcomes
The data also suggests how this, in-turn, leads to the worlds of unemployment or low-skill/low-wage jobs, together with alcohol and drug problems and suicide. And of course prison. It also seems to show the results of men doing very dangerous things, including physically dangerous jobs.
I’ve seen arguments that this is also a result of the patriarchy.
Second, what does this mean for the future as the effects of hypergamy kick in – woman seeking as a permanent mate only those males that match or exceed her status – whether measured by social standing, wealth, simple income or some combination thereof.
It’s an old joke that one does not see Supermodels dating plumbers.
But you don’t see many high-powered, corporate lawyers dating plumbers either – yes, the implied male/female gap in each profession itself is also reality – and this “dating gap” is becoming more obvious with time and seeming to grow, as the proportion of “high status” woman increases.
Naturally the Grundian dismisses this and looks forward to a future where superior humans overcome evolutionary wiring, along with some very sweet anecdotes that don’t really seem to deny the statistical trends or the complaints of both men and women who are single:
“In the US, among people aged 22-29 who do not have a college degree, there are 9.4 million single men, versus 7.1 million single women. So the dating world is just as hard for those blue collar guys. But the reality is that we don’t talk about their dating challenges the same way we talk about the challenges faced by educated women. One of my bits of advice in the book is that I think we all need to open our hearts and minds to dating across socioeconomic lines.”
Ummmm – I hate to “mansplain” this, but outside of royalty and the snotty families of the richest 1%, men have never had any problems with dating scross socioeconomic lines because all they cared about was having sex with good looking woman who could bear them children (evolution again).
Woman have always had different goals in seeking a suitable mate and while that’s always been tough the increased education/wealth/income status of woman has begun to crash into those primeval goals and “dating down“. There’s also the advent of Tinder and the like, which enable men to have almost as much sex as they want without even the ties of a steady relationship, let alone partnership, marriage and kids.
Still, this evolving situation may resolve a number of issues with our societies, including those physical jobs that are killing men by the bucket load compared to women, as described by “feminist killjoy” Josefin Hedlund:
In the West there is strong belief in the idea of ‘free love’ and people ‘marrying for love’, as opposed to for any other reason. But when you start examining class, privilege, gender, sexual, and other identities in relationships they look remarkably like ‘arranged marriages’.
…
If you are only attracted to able, ‘mentally well’, successful (by society’s standards), cisgender, normatively beautiful, slim people, from class privileged backgrounds, then you are also upholding violent norms. This means that you cannot just declare that who you are attracted to is a personal preference. You can’t just get away with saying ‘that’s not my type’ (unless your non-type is cis-white-hetero-male, they receive enough admiration in society anyway, so lets de-centre that!)
Love can be a revolutionary force to challenge norms, promote feminist practice, and to reject capitalism.
And you thought the likes of Josefin were just misandrists.
No Minister 