Women have won the gender revolution

Summary: This post on our series about the gender roles revolution looks at the result of the social and tech trends — women have won. They now have a competitive superiority in a wide range of factors, which is bringing them to dominance in US society. Changes take time to upset existing hierarchies, but the trend is unquestionable.  {1st of 2 posts today.}

They talk about ‘a woman’s sphere’
As though it has a limit;
There’s not a spot on sea or shore,
In sanctum, office, shop or store,
Without a woman in it.

— Anonymous, from Jennie Day Haines’ Sovereign Woman Versus Mere Man (1905).

In 2009 I wrote a series about the coming gender role reversal — women on top of men (links below). There were also others seeing this coming. This insight went mainstream with “The End of Men” by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, 8 June 2010:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way — and its vast cultural consequences.

The more interesting fact is that this was seen first on the street — the wisdom of crowds at work (emphasis added):

… In the ’90s, when {biologist Ronald Ericsson} looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process {sex selection}, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted …  In some clinics the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. … A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, {has} girl requests … at about 75%.

… “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,” he says — a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned. At first, Ericsson says, women who called his clinics would apologize and shyly explain that they already had two boys. “Now they just call and [say] outright, ‘I want a girl.’ These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?”

Her article is well-stocked with data and logic, which I will not repeat here. Read it. Better yet read her book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. It’s not just that women are doing better (that’s a good thing), but that the absolute condition of men is deteriorating. People have been pointing that out for a decade, but it’s been shouted down by feminists until the numbers have become too dark to easily ignore (we’re still ignoring them; it’s just more difficult to do so).

The sole domains still dominated by men are paternity and war. Artificial insemination replaces men in the former, supported by women’s growing economic strength and government aid for single mothers.

As for war, other than infantry and a few similar physically demanding specialties, women can do just as well. Men supremacists advocating male-only wars are reduced to saying that women in war just will not work — just as Blacks couldn’t fight, and letting homosexuals into the military (openly) would be The End of the US Armed Forces.  Good luck with that. This also requires ignoring the long role of woman fighting on the front lines of so many 4GWs during the past century.

The evidence can no longer be disputed imo. The pushback nicely illustrates that, as in this rebuttal at The Atlantic by Chloe Angyal (editor at Feministing). First she gives some really weak evidence, citing one TV show. If you take TV that literally, the US is overflowing with serial murders and jihadist terrorists.

But the anecdotal data, the experiential accounts of what it’s like to be a young American woman in this particular cultural moment where women are on top and men are “ending,” suggests that even if the statistics say that they’re winning, young women feel like losers. This year’s critically acclaimed new HBO series Girls … takes that experience of floundering and lays it out for all to see.

What’s Angyal’s actual evidence for women disadvantaged or suffering on the road to a society with women on top?

This doesn’t square with the figures on body image and eating disorders in America. According the National Eating Disorders Association, more than half of American teenage use unhealthy methods like cigarettes, laxatives, vomiting, and self-starving to lose weight. Anorexia is the third most common chronic condition among American adolescents.

The “illness of the month” associations have a long history of exaggeration. If you believe their reports in aggregate, America is as sick as plague-ridden 14th C Europe (with scores of illnesses afflicting 10-20% of America). As for the body image problem, it’s certainly serious. But its implications are mysterious, as its relationship to the far more serious epidemic of obesity.

Fun fact: below her article is a link to one of a growing genre of articles: Why Do Female Authors Dominate Young-Adult Fiction? We’ll see a lot more articles asking this question about X, Y, and Z during the next decade or so. The other article highlighted: The End of Men, for Real: Hooters Is Desperate for Female Customers. Not enough men out there, and too little disposable income. Expect to see more of those articles too.

Rosen reports the large drop in rates of rape in America. Angyal’s rebuttal: “That may be true, but they’re still appallingly high for women of color. For Native American women, it’s 34.1%. While bad (see my post), Native Americans are only 1-2% of the US population.

Tomorrow: women’s key competitive advantage, & why they aren’t running the world.
Next: the price women pay for their success (the law of equivalent exchange).

For More Information

There are many good books about this, from The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu (1952) to Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (2015). There are many articles about this (it has gone mainstream). Here is a sampler, and could easily be 10x longer and not include all the key ones.

1. “Why Women Are the Superior Gender“, Clifford N Lazarus, Psychology Today, 2 February 2011 — “In a Battle of the Sexes, Bet on the Women!”
2. “Superiority of Female Workers Confirmed: Study Finds Women Really Do Work Longer And Harder Than Men“, Elise Ackerman, Forbes, 24 February 2013 — Findings of this study by the Ponemon Institute.
3. “Why Women Are The Stronger Sex According To Science“, Huffington Post, 24 April 2014 — Much of this is snark and gibberish, but there is a core of fact.
4. “A Better World, Run by Women“, Wall Street Journal, 6 March 2015 — “Male biology has brought the world war, corruption and scandal. Women are poised to lead us to a better place.”

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about women and gender issues, especially these about the coming reversal of roles:

1. Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?
2. A better answer to “why women outperform men in college?”
3. Update: women on top of men.
4. What’s the future of the family in America? How will that change our government?
5. Do we want to bring back traditional marriage? What is traditional marriage?
6. The feminist revolutionaries have won. Insurgents have arisen to challenge the new order. As always, they’re outlaws.
7. “Mockingjay” shows us a Revolution in Gender Roles. What’s the next revolution?
8. The war of the sexes heats up: society changes as men learn the Dark Triad.
9. The revolution in gender roles reshapes society in ways too disturbing to see.
10. A look ahead at the New America, after the gender wars.
11. Books to help us see the strange new world following the revolution in gender roles.