The Acent of Woman

"Of late, men have been rapidly declining – in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects – relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4% of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26% in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60% of all bachelor's and master's degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32% since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they'd lost – but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.
The implications are extraordinary. If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men's overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it encouraged them to "marry up" – how else would they improve their lot? Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn't it? When Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, "We're becoming the men we wanted to marry," I doubt even she realised the prescience of her words.

Kate Bolick,
The Observer, Sunday 27 November 2011