Oh, those are some old stereotypes there....
Ah, I've spend too many time on those kinds of forums (men ranting about/hating women because of their own loserness), I guess I should leave this thread right now...
EDIT: just some last words: all those ""big truths"" has excuses. And as a "coincidence", I can see all these excuses all the time even in my not so big um... environment.
Note: I don't hate women. I'm mainly just presenting facts in the article, because I was shocked when I read it. I don't neccessarily think that just because women get higher education it'll result in a society completely biased towards single parents (neither one of which is good; that is, I don't think that single fathers nor mothers present an ideal family situation, mainly because it isn't a 'family'), but I definately think that gender roles in a society (such as which gender is supposed/expected to stay at home with the kids and which gender is supposed/expected to earn the income) has alot to say for family compositions and birth rates.
Ideally the best thing would be if both men and women could split time equally between working and staying at home with kids.
I didn't say you hate women. But I know that these kinds of threads are just as flame-baits as religious threads, and I'm pretty sure the "women only like macho guys", "macho guys fuck women and the other guys raise their children" etc. big thoughts will come up at some point.
Anyway, equality can be observed in Scandinavian countries. It's so beautiful and cute, I loved it. And it doesn't mean all the "romance" or whatever is missing. Nope, only the stupid and arbitrary games are missing. (awww, when women carry men on motorcycles, or when the thin girl is moving the furniture around and doesn't get it why I want to help her :')
Women are classified by most minority definitions. Due to minority scholarship institutions, there is more opportunity for a poor woman to go to school. Additionally, there are many business-oriented classes and grant programs only available to minorities, which give a leg-up on business entry and starting. This is a fairly likely (and intended) result of such programs. They were deemed necessary to break up the affluent (white) male control circles that dominated the higher echelons of business and education for so many years. The real challenge is going to be determining the appropriate time and method to wind down and eliminate these programs. It's fairly taboo to reduce or rebalance such programs.
Women are classified by most minority definitions. Due to minority scholarship institutions, there is more opportunity for a poor woman to go to school. Additionally, there are many business-oriented classes and grant programs only available to minorities, which give a leg-up on business entry and starting. This is a fairly likely (and intended) result of such programs. They were deemed necessary to break up the affluent (white) male control circles that dominated the higher echelons of business and education for so many years. The real challenge is going to be determining the appropriate time and method to wind down and eliminate these programs. It's fairly taboo to reduce or rebalance such programs.
That is generally called "affirmative action".
In the US at least, the SCOTUS addressed affirmative action in education back in 2003. They unanimously agreed that affirmative action programs based on gender and race need to end, but they disagreed on how long it would take, which was the main reason for the split in their decisions.
Yes it will end in the next few years, but for today the reverse discrimination of "affirmative action" is still in force.
Perhaps in a few years it will be unlawful for discrimination based on gender or race. For now it is still quite legal and occasionally required for certain groups to discriminate against white males, giving preference to women and non-white individuals who may be otherwise less qualified than the white/male applicant.
If I remember the article correctly, a lot of the argumentation doesn't suggest anything permanent or unalterable in the trend. For example, the author argues things like "manufacturing is declining, and that was one of the last areas where an uneducated man's strength is marketable", which certainly isn't good news for such men, but that just provides more incentive to acquire an education in the future. You also have temporary factors like the massive depression of construction activity reducing employment in a non-degree male dominated field.
A lot of the other ideas I recall being argued were pretty flimsy. "Women are just naturally better at service work, which is where the economy is headed", while incredibly broad, also sounds a lot like "girls are just naturally not as smart as boys and so not as good in school. We should discourage higher education for them and pigeonhole them into Home Ec". That one didn't really hold up, and the author's observation about current trends in service work isn't any better founded. Women are inherently and insurmountably better at ervice work only if you have a cartoonish view of what men are and how they interact with others.
The author chose a hyperbolic and striking title, and then spent a few pages asserting that some things she happened to see today will become ever more prominent in the future. Her basis for these assertions (implicit, perhaps) was that all socio-economic trends continue forever, that social and legal initiatives either have no impact on those trends or those initiatives will also continue forever without alteration, and that the relevant systems are static rather than dynamic (nothing will change to take advantage of these new trends).
But most disturbingly, her assertions (particularly about the "end of men") are predicated largely on the idea that the things she observes in the article are based on innate differences between the sexes which can never be overcome. The effective social differences between genders are either cultural or innate, and only one of those lends itself to an end-of-men thesis. If that position didn't stand up in the past when it was used to justify oppressing women, it's not going to do so now in the other direction.
I agree with the author to the extent that the Western-style economy is on the precipice of the future, and that a striking transition between past systems and future ones will occur. But declaring the end of men as a socially and economically relevant group is indicative of a lack of imagination on her part, at best.
It has been my experience that women generally perform far better at most male-dominated jobs than men are willing to give them credit for. Woe to the male manager who still harbors an irrational bias against them. That women are graduating at a higher rate than men and filling more managerial positions is not the least bit surprising to me.
