[Vision2020] Why Men Fail

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 06:54:12 PDT 2012


  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=84de2ffb/98f1fc94&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787510c_nyt5&ad=BOSW_120x60_June13_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fbeastsofthesouthernwild>

------------------------------
September 10, 2012
Why Men Fail By DAVID
BROOKS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html>

You’re probably aware of the basic trends. The financial rewards to
education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get
the memo.

In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys
earn three-quarters of the D’s and F’s. By college, men are clearly behind.
Only 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of
master’s degrees.

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In
1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked.
Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday’s jobs report, male
labor force participation reached an all-time low.

Millions of men are collecting disability. Even many of those who do have a
job are doing poorly. According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton
Project, annual earnings for median prime-age males have dropped by 28
percent over the past 40 years.

Men still dominate the tippy-top of the corporate ladder because many women
take time off to raise children, but women lead or are gaining nearly
everywhere else. Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s. Twelve out of
the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.

Over the years, many of us have embraced a certain theory to explain men’s
economic decline. It is that the information-age economy rewards traits
that, for neurological and cultural reasons, women are more likely to
possess.

To succeed today, you have to be able to sit still and focus attention in
school at an early age. You have to be emotionally sensitive and aware of
context. You have to communicate smoothly. For genetic and cultural
reasons, many men stink at these tasks.

But, in her fascinating new book, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin posits a
different theory. It has to do with adaptability. Women, Rosin argues, are
like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social
context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like
immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept
their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the
old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.

This theory has less to do with innate traits and more to do with social
position. When there’s big social change, the people who were on the top of
the old order are bound to cling to the old ways. The people who were on
the bottom are bound to experience a burst of energy. They’re going to
explore their new surroundings more enthusiastically.

Rosin reports from working-class Alabama. The women she meets are flooding
into new jobs and new opportunities — going back to college, pursuing new
careers. The men are waiting around for the jobs that left and are never
coming back. They are strangely immune to new options. In the
Auburn-Opelika region, the median female income is 140 percent of the
median male income.

Rosin also reports from college campuses where women are pioneering new
social arrangements. The usual story is that men are exploiting the new
campus hookup culture in order to get plenty of sex without romantic
commitments. Rosin argues that, in fact, women support the hookup culture.
It allows them to have sex and fun without any time-consuming distractions
from their careers. Like new immigrants, women are desperate to rise, and
they embrace social and sexual rules that give them the freedom to focus on
their professional lives.

Rosin is not saying that women are winners in a global gender war or that
they are doing super simply because men are doing worse. She’s just saying
women are adapting to today’s economy more flexibly and resiliently than
men. There’s a lot of evidence to support her case.

A study by the National Federation of Independent Business found that small
businesses owned by women outperformed male-owned small businesses during
the last recession. In finance, women who switch firms are more likely to
see their performance improve, whereas men are more likely to see theirs
decline. There’s even evidence that women are better able to adjust to
divorce. Today, more women than men see their incomes rise by 25 percent
after a marital breakup.

Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant
to be a man or a woman. Young women today, Rosin argues, are more like
clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist
preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits
their vision and their movement.

If she’s right, then men will have to be less like Achilles, imposing their
will on the world, and more like Odysseus, the crafty, many-sided
sojourner. They’ll have to acknowledge that they are strangers in a strange
land.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120911/ab0b118b/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Vision2020 mailing list