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Originally Posted by SebC
Women are already getting more of the university degrees, even in important/prestigious fields like law and medicine. It won't be long until more lawyers translates to more politicians, judges, and lobbyists; more businesswomen translates into more CEOs; more journalists become more Editors-in-Chief. The pieces are already in place for women's power to surpass men's.
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Those pieces have been in place for a while, but you still see few women rise to the very top of their fields. Most medical school graduates today are women, as are most GPs. But 80 per cent work part-time, compared with 50 per cent of male doctors, and almost a quarter drop out of the profession altogether to raise children. Even in education, which is a female-dominated profession, principals are disproportionately men.
There comes a point in the careers of ambitious people where they face the prospect of giving up almost everything else in their lives to dedicate themselves to their job. Most people aren't willing to do it. The people who do choose to focus almost exclusively on their careers are usually men.
While the resulting gender disparity in the highest positions may be a problem for society, it isn't obvious that women who chose to only make $90k and have a balanced family/work life instead of dedicating themselves body and soul to their jobs in order to earn high status and 200k have made a bad decision personally. Which is a conundrum that feminism - and society in general - has difficulty acknowledging.
Otherwise yes, we are rapidly becoming a society where the average woman will be better off than the average man in terms of job prospects, income, health, etc. It may seem counter-intuitive, but that's not at all incompatible with a world where the top positions are overwhelmingly held by men. All that's necessary is for the bottom rungs of society to be disproportionately male too - something which is increasingly true.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
The question then would be whether feminism is willing to do for men what it will have done for women, with the same tools, or will it continue to seek redress for historical injustice. Will there be quotas, affirmative action, tokenism, "men in medicine" programs the way there is "women in STEM", or will 40%-male be considered an appropriate counterbalance to the bulk of history?
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Likely not. I mean, it's not as though there aren't all sorts of bad outcomes in our society that disproportionately affect men already. Worksite injury and death, homelessness, suicide, prison. Boys have been falling behind girls in school for decades now, in virtually every field outside tech, and yet all our attention is focused on the tech gender gap.
We're hindered by intractable cognitive biases that interpret these issues as a tug-of-war - every gain women make is at the expense of men, and vice-versa. So we have to choose whether to encourage more women to enter tech, or to encourage more men to go to university. Calls to address the extreme gender imbalance in the teaching profession are ignored, or regarded with suspicion.
We might move past this false binary if one key demographic - mothers - find their voice in these issues. It's not as though mothers aren't capable of being concerned about the future of both their daughters and sons. But the problem is that mothers are severely under-represented among the punditry and experts on matters of gender, who are overwhelming young and/or childless.