The new paradigm: Women on top

On Monday afternoon, with a couple hours to kill in the lobby of an auto repair shop, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a lengthy magazine article I've been meaning to get to for some time. Turns out there couldn't have been a more fitting place to read "The End of Men."

Hanna Rosin's piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic has caused quite a stir with its eye-opening statistics and bold questions about the transformation of American society. Rosin makes a persuasive case that women have made enormous progress in education and in the workforce, so much so that it raises the question of whether they even need men.

Consider the following:

-- Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history.
-- Most managers are now women.
-- 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. (Men still dominate as janitors and computer engineers. Women have everything else: nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation --many of them "nurturing" jobs that women used to do in the home for free.)
-- Women dominate today's colleges and professional schools. For every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same.
-- Women now earn 60 percent of bachelor's and master's degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees and 42 percent of all M.B.A.'s
-- Women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs (twice as many as in 1980). They account for a third of America's physicians and 45 percent of law firm associates.

Men still earn more pay for equivalent jobs but by just about every other measure in the workplace or classroom, women have caught up or passed men.

None of this has happened overnight nor has it happened only in the U.S. Think China, India, South Korea.

"Up to a point, the reasons behind this shift are obvious," Rosin writes. "As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest."

Clearly, though, the Great Recession has exacerbated things, with male-dominated industries like construction, manufacturing, high finance, losing millions of jobs. The working class, a traditional bastion of masculinity, "is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions," Rosin writes.

Now, if you're the parent of young daughters, this trend toward a level playing field may come as a pleasant surprise. (Or as a worrisome phenomenon if you have boys). But if you're like us -- i.e., a little older -- chances are good you've seen your adult daughter as part of this transformation, surrounded by like-minded overachievers from high school through college. Still, the scope of such change is daunting.

If you want to see where we're headed in the future, you start with the gender gap at U.S. colleges and universities and follow that thread to its logical implication: In the coming decades, the middle class will be dominated by women.

"What would a society in which women are on top look like?" Rosin asks. "We already have an inkling. The is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics."

The typical working wife brings home a much larger proportion of the household income than before, and four in 10 mothers are the primary breadwinners in their families. Women are marrying later and increasingly having to consider "settling" for a less educated, often-unemployed mate (typified by the lovable losers portrayed by actor Seth Rogen, right).

Judging from the length of this post, it's easy to see I found the article fascinating. There's much more to these themes that are fleshed out in personal interviews and anecdotes, as well as conclusions we might draw from pop culture and the arts.

I didn't see a single female among the several mechanics who were working at the auto repair shop yesterday. I suspect that's not likely to change much in the next decade or two. But just about everywhere these seeds of change are bearing fruit in the form of new and expanded opportunities for women. As a feminist, I say "right on."

Image from The Atlantic, by John Ritter.