Are Men Becoming the Second Sex?

Back in 2009, Christina Hoff Sommers wrote an article titled Are Men the Second Sex Now? She raised that question because of the gains women made since feminists had stirred up the female masses in the 1960s.  She noted that, compared to men, women were now equally employed (by number), better educated, healthier in mind and body, living longer, and had momentum on their side.  While that was good news, Sommers complained that the plight of men was not receiving the attention it deserved.

“Why are there no conferences, petitions, workshops, congressional hearings, or presidential councils to help men close the education gap, the health care gap, the insurance gap, the job-loss gap, and the death gap? Because, unlike women, men do not have hundreds of men’s studies departments, research institutes, policy centers, and lobby groups working tirelessly to promote their challenges as political causes.”

To consider whether or not men were becoming the second sex, one must understand the meaning of that descriptor as it was originally applied to women.  The term was enshrined when the French writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir chose it as the title of her 1949 book in which she proclaimed that women have biological traits, and cultural traits that are imposed upon them, and it is the latter that mainly produce what society has viewed as womanhood (“one is not born a woman, one becomes one”).  De Beauvoir’s work would serve to motivate women who would come after her.  They would drive the feminist movements that have made much progress in recognizing women more as social equals to men than as subordinates to men as had been practiced for millennia under various forms of patriarchy.

Gerda Lerner provides perhaps the best description of how women went from essentially co-equals with men in early history to little more than slaves to a patriarch in pre-Biblical times in her book The Creation of Patriarchy.  The transition from the generally relaxing hunter-gathering existence in Mesopotamia to sedentary cities and states based on an agricultural economy was a horrible period for mankind.  The development of this “civilization” demanded hard physical labor on such a scale that slavery had to be invented in order to accomplish what was needed.  The creation of wealth worthy of coveting was part of this development.  The increased human population density, coexisting with herds of animals of different varieties, generated frequent deadly disease epidemics that decimated populations.  The constant need and desire for resources of all kinds generated an age where war and mercenary soldiers were critical concerns of governmental entities.  The result was that somewhere along this developmental path men, who were better at defending wealth, conquering neighboring cities and states, and performing exhausting physical labor acquired the superior role to that of women.  Females, willingly or otherwise, accepted their role as subordinates who would focus on their biological roles of conceiving and raising children, and providing sexual services to males.  This was probably at some point conceived of as an efficient solution to the needs at hand, but, over millennia, this arrangement would become the type of patriarchal construct familiar from Hebrew sacred documents that would be canonized as dogma by three major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Lerner points out that in the earliest years recorded by the Hebrews, the patriarch had absolute authority over the lives of his wife and children with the right to sell a mere daughter into prostitution or slavery.  This degree of control would gradually change over the years, but patriarchal attitudes and practices would persist into the current century.

Women of recent generations were the result of thousands of years of indoctrination as to their status in the patriarchy.  This left them with no recorded history containing women of accomplishment and authority yet knowing that they were capable of more than was being allowed them.  There would be the occasional woman of note, but it would take someone like de Beauvoir to focus women on the tyranny of cultural values and help them generate a movement.

In this context, men can never become a second sex in the same manner as women, but they could become a lesser sex in the sense of social, economic, and technological contributions.  Is there any indication of such a trend?  Yes, there is.

One of the attributes of a contributing citizen to society is a good education.  It seems that women are much more educable than men.  This trait begins early in life when girls are known to develop physically earlier than boys.  That means they enter primary schooling with a more mature brain and better emotional control than boys of the same age.  It appears that it takes until about age eight for boys to catch up.  Meanwhile, girls have been able to sit patiently and listen to what teachers are saying while boys are dreaming of being outside playing.  If schools begin separating out high performing children from lower at an early age, then women will be favored in this process and will receive more rigorous and more advanced schooling than the average student.  Where this practice is not formalized, it still may take place informally.   Ironically, men allowed women to become teachers of children because the vocation was deemed too lowly for male focus.  Consequently, most children are taught by women (90% of public primary school teachers are female), and some people are becoming concerned that there is a bias that exists in the process that favors docile girls over rambunctious boys.  These issues are further discussed in Are Our Schools Biased Against Boys?

Regardless of the details, girls tend to outperform boys in school from childhood through training for professions and advanced degrees.  This source tells us that women began earning more bachelor degrees way back in the 1981-82 academic year.  In 2016-17 women earned 57% of the degrees, and in 2019, for the first time there would be more college-educated women in the workforce than men.

One might argue that these are average numbers and the story might be different in the truly elite schools.  Data from Ivy League colleges which admitted no women at all for a very long time are different, but only slightly.  This source tells us that after starting from zero, female undergraduates at these elite schools now outnumber males by about 2%, suggesting that in the competition for admission the women are at least holding their own.

Women are also producing more advanced academic degrees than men.  This source provides this perspective.

“Of the 79,738 doctoral degrees awarded in 2017….women earned 41,717 of those degrees and 53% of the total, compared to 37,062 degrees awarded to men who earned 47% of the total…Women have now earned a majority of doctoral degrees in each academic year since 2009, and the 53% female share last year is a new record high. Previously, women started earning a majority of associate’s degrees for the first time in 1978, a majority of master’s degrees in 1981, and a majority of bachelor’s degrees in 1982 according to the Department of Education. Therefore, 2009 marked the year when men officially became the ‘second sex’ in higher education by earning a minority of college degrees at all college levels from associate’s degrees to doctoral degrees.”

The professions are also seeing a surge in female activity.  Consider data on medical doctors from this source.

“From January to June 2017, athenahealth surveyed 18,000 physicians at 3,500 practices on its network, and determined that more than 60 percent of physicians under the age of 35 are female, while just under 40 percent are male. In the next-highest age bracket (35 to 44 years of age), women are the dominant gender as well – just slightly – coming in at 51.5 percent. As each age bracket gets older, the percentage of female physicians drops, with 82.4 percent of physicians over the age of 65 being male.”

“The trend shows no signs of slowing down: In 2017, the number of women enrolling in U.S. medical schools exceeded the number of men for the first time, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.”

And then there is the legal profession from which this source provides relevant data.

“Women were 50.3 percent of law-school grads in 2017 and are 51.3 percent of those currently enrolled”

Important employment trends in recent years affect gender issues.  Economic developments have tended to eliminate semiskilled jobs and midlevel white-collar positions and replaced them with service-sector jobs.  Positions that were traditionally the domains of men are being converted to lower-wage service jobs for which employers seem to prefer hiring women.  Women with their advanced educations are competing successfully with men for elite, high-paying positions, but not without some problems.  Daniel Markovits provides some insight into occupational gender issues today in his book The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite.  He focuses on how meritocracy, combined with limited access to a few elite private schools, produces a class of highly-educated workers willing to work long, hard hours to maintain their status and to successfully pass on that status to their highly-educated children.  The trap for the well-paid elite is that they cannot escape the need to continue to compete successfully in order not to fall out of the rat race.  The work demands for these elite performers are particularly burdensome for women who might wish to raise a family.  To do so might involve exiting from the competition entirely or losing a considerable degree of status—and income—as a result.

“…The most elite, highest paying jobs in the economy belong among the most male-dominated.  Only about 14 percent of the top executives (and just about 8 percent of the highest earners) in Fortune 500 companies are women, and more than a quarter of these companies have no women in top management; Wall Street remains overwhelmingly male-dominated; women make up only 18 percent of equity partners at American law firms; and the gender pay gap among doctors has widened in recent years.”

Markovits claims that many women whose elite education granted them access to these high-paying jobs will choose to retreat from competition to invest time in providing the same sort of elite education to their children.  Presumably, she will have married another elite performer whose income will remain sufficient for the task.

“The intense personal involvement that elite education now demands, when overlaid on gender norms that distinctively bind mothers to parenting, rationalizes these patterns.  The hours that superordinate work requires are incompatible with bearing (let alone raising) children.  Elite women therefore no longer stay home to signal their leisure, as Veblen imagined, but rather to labor intensively at training their children.”

In this view, women’s biological role limits their ability to compete with men performing at an elite level.  With lower income families a totally different situation emerges.

“On the other hand, middle-class men traditionally dominated the jobs—quintessentially in manufacturing—that have been lost or seen wage stagnation in recent decades, even as many of the service jobs that displaced them are conventionally done by middle-class women.  (In fact, progress in diminishing the gender pay gap overall principally comes courtesy of declining wages for men without a college degree.)”

So, men are clearly not becoming the second sex at the higher incomes but may be becoming so at the lower income levels.

“Moreover, poorer men are less successful than poorer women at acquiring the schooling needed to secure better jobs in a meritocratic labor market: men make up only 42 percent of college students from households with annual incomes below $30,000.”

“Together, these patterns entail that the wage gap between men and women has been growing among the elite even as it has been falling among the middle class and the poor.  Indeed, among dual-earner households with incomes in the top quintile, just 29 percent of wives earn more income than their husbands, whereas among dual-earner households in the bottom quintile, fully 69 percent of wives out-earn their husbands.”

Markovits presents a compelling argument that it is meritocratic inequality stemming from the inherent inequality that is present when private schooling competes with public schooling that is driving the diverging trends in gender equality.  One can support this claim by looking at the Scandinavian countries that always seem to be at the top of the lists of those with the greatest gender equality.  In them, education is almost completely public and mostly free.  In our country, the well-off compete for elite private education from the time of birth until their children exit from an elite university.  Where everyone receives a good education throughout their lives the same intense meritocratic competition does not seem to grow.  People seem content to work hours that leave them time for a satisfying non-work life.  This allows women to compete better at the high-income levels.  Meanwhile, the economies continue to grow, and the people claim to be among the happiest on earth.

There is another reason why women fare better in the Nordic countries: men seem more willing to accept gender equality which demands that they play a more active role in parenting.  Most countries have exceptionally generous family leave rather than maternal leave policies.  These require men to also take time off from work to care for their children and not burden only the mother.  Why are the men so much more accepting of these practices?  Perhaps, because they had Christianity imposed upon them very late in their cultural evolution and the patriarchal subordination of women it taught never really had much effect on society.

So, the conclusions that emerge from all this are that private education is inherently bad for society, and gender equality will only come when men are more willing to share parenting responsibilities equally.  Surely those things can be quickly fixed.