The battle of the sexes is over. Sorry to break the bad news blokes, but women have won. Well, this round at least.
The last three years have represented a global tectonic shift in women’s economic, political and professional fortunes that has unravelled gender roles centuries in the making.
This new financial reality in which many women out earn men or are the family breadwinners has triggered a startling and widespread identity crisis for men.
This recession has hit men hardest- they’ve borne the brunt of 80 per cent of job losses in the US, as traditionally masculine industries like construction and heavy manufacturing slashed staff, with 29 million more men without work in the US and Europe than an year ago.
The housing bubble and the credit crunch have been cast as the malfeasance of a testosterone-fuelled bunch of boys high on their seven figure bonuses, high-fiving their way to another Cape Cod beach house and screwing the economy in the process.
“The end of male dominance is coming to an end. Seriously,” Reihan Salam wrote in an article called “The End of Macho” for Foreign Policy magazine.
Meanwhile, women have quietly assumed a position of unprecedented economic influence.
According to analysts, women will drive the global recovery due to the $US5 trillion “of new female earnings” women employees will pocket over the next 5 years.
The growth in female spending power “represents the biggest emerging market in the history of the planet” according to Newsweek and is nearly double that of India and China combined.
Women currently account for $US12 trillion worth of the total of $18.4 trillion in retail spending globally. That’s a whole lot of Net-A-Porter.
Goldman Sachs published a report called The Power of the Purse, announcing that women are “the economic engine of the future”.
“Should we expect men to cede some control over an economy they have so thoroughly messed up?” Time posed in a piece called “The Pink Recovery: Why Women Are Doing Better” last year.
But, confronting this new economic reality has spawned what some academics would have us believe is a generation of daytime TV-watching, financially dependent men suffering from massively dented egos and deflated sex-drives.
According to a number of research projects, when women outstrip men in the pay cheque department, blokes are more likely to cheat, suffer health issues and just generally be miserable.
“Men who were completely dependent on their female partner’s income were five times more likely to cheat than men who contributed an equal amount of money to the partnership,” Christin Munsch, a sociology PhD candidate at Cornell University, and author of the study, “The Effect of Relative Income Disparity on Infidelity for Men and Women” found.
“The more economically dependent a man is on his female partner, the more likely he is to cheat on her.”
Interestingly, Munsch says it’s the reverse situation when women are reliant on men.
“But for women, economic dependency seems to have the opposite effect: the more dependent they are on their male partners, the less likely they are to engage in infidelity.”
Husbands with children and who work fewer hours than their wives are 61 per cent less likely to report that they’re “very happy” in their marriages the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project finds.
Kristen Springer from Rutgers University found that “research suggests that midlife husbands have worse health when they earn less than their wives” in a paper this year that explored the consequences for men’s health when they were economically dependent on women.
Research set to be released soon by Stanford University shows that male unemployment ups the chances of divorce, The Daily Beast reports.
“We haven’t come to terms with the fact that we’re facing a whole new social moment, in which women are doing better than men are. We need to encourage men to find other outlets for masculinity,” W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project told The Daily Beast.
It’s interesting that a hangover of the GFC may be millions of disenfranchised, bored men grappling to demonstrate their relevance in a global economy and home life in which they are no longer essential.
Men now face the daunting prospect of having to start catching up on the 50 years worth of earnest drudgery women have put in to reshape and redefine their social and cultural identities out of the kitchen.
Meanwhile, many in the banking world say the global economy is in better hands as men quietly ponder their new status.
At a recent meeting in France of the world’s most powerful women, it was predicted that women would become increasingly potent financial and political forces. As the New York Times put it, “the economic crisis, and the soul-searching it has sparked, represent an opportunity for a new female leap forward.”
Female-managed investment funds outperformed other funds, according to Jacquelyn Zehner, the first woman bond trader to make partner at Goldman Sachs and now vice chairman of the US-based Women’s Funding Network.
Corporations with women on their boards are more profitable than those that don’t the former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Henrietta Holsman Fore, told the meeting.
In the aftermath of big bank collapses like Lehman Brothers, an argument emerged that hedge funds and billion-dollar investment portfolios would have fared better if women had been in charge. Many believe female bosses would have adopted a more cautious approach, eschewing the giddy lure of easy cash.
But this change in fortune cannot necessarily be notched up as a win for feminism.
Lisa Belkin argued in a New York Times article that “so much of the history of women in the workplace (both their leaps forward and their slips back) is a reaction to what was happening to men”.
While more women may be running the banks and steering the economy, chances are they’ll still be holding the baby and changing nappies as they plot the valuation of the dollar against the yuan as they fret about their depressed husband who has spent six hours in front of Oprah or Ellen.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
RT @popculturechris: Meanwhile, Gotye holds no.1 for a sixth massive week in the US - "that" song has now sold over 4 million copies there.
I like how a tip erodes so only you can use it MT “@paulwiggins: BBC News - Why are fountain pen sales rising? http://t.co/0hk2MRtf”
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Protecting the Barrier Reef is the Fin end of the wedge
When you take on a job like being Environment Minister there’s some hits you can see coming. …
ICB: Is white bread the worst thing since sliced bread?
Welcome to this week’s I Call Bullshit column. It’s a regular column that looks at skulduggery…
Sometimes, you’ve just got to stick it to the bloody ref
We are taught early in life that we should not question authority. We must listen to our parents, our…
Nosebleed Section
choice ringside rantings
From: They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
Michael S says:
"A teacher at Geelong Grammar had criticised her for using words that were too long, which had left her confused and had made her doubt her ability to write essays. She became ''quite distressed'' when her English marks began to fall." I can sympathise. My scholastic mentors conveyed to me a causal relationship… [read more]From: Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone
Change Up! says:
I have no problem paying my taxes. As a single, childless person on a very decent income, I can afford it and not have my life severely altered. Plus I understand that my taxes paying for things like schools, childcare and infrastructure is ultimately a good thing. A better community is better for me… [read more]Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented