Journalists, authors and campaigners have been talking about a ‘crisis of masculinity’ for at least 50 years. It’s become a running joke. Every decade or so, a flurry of new books appear, interrogating the state of men and boys. And we’re in the middle of one such cycle. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it’s become common – at least in some, less thoroughly feminist circles – to see men as the primary losers of the post-crash economy. And this has renewed older concerns about the seeming decline of men as they struggle to find their place in a post-patriarchal world.
As Hanna Rosin notes in The End of Men, the crash hollowed out the American middle class, but affected men and women differently; it sped up economic trends that appeared to blight men and benefit women. Since 2000, the US economy has lost over six million manufacturing jobs. While job gains in sectors such as education, healthcare and services made up the difference, these are sectors almost entirely dominated by women. As a result, Rosin writes, men have become ‘unmoored’ and women have been left to ‘pick up the pieces’.
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The drawn-out decline of manufacturing industries goes hand in hand with the rise of working women and the decline of working men – a trend that is reflected in the UK economy, too. According to the Office for National Statistics, between 1971 and 2013, the rate of women in work rose from 53 per cent to 67 per cent, while, for men, it has fallen from 92 per cent to 76 per cent. This, the ONS notes, is only partly the result of the reduction of barriers to entry for women – the end of workplace discrimination and the introduction of equal pay. Instead, it is the decline in male-dominated manufacturing – beginning in the 1960s – that seems to play the most crucial role in the fall in male employment.
The End of Men: And th...
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But this is not just about the economy producing more ‘girl jobs’ as ‘boy jobs’ suffer. In the space of just a few decades women, have stormed the traditionally male professions. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2011 women held 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs; 61.3 percent of accountancy jobs; and about half of banking and insurance jobs. Trends suggest that women will outnumber men in medicine very soon. This reflects a phenomenon Rosin refers to as ‘Plastic Women’ and ‘Cardboard Men’, whereby women have been flexible, adaptive, seizing new economic opportunities, while men have stayed still, and shown a reluctance to change.
According to recent UK figures, women are now 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men. And white working-class boys are the least likely of any other demographic to attend, at just 8.9 per cent
The shift in Western job markets has created a higher demand for university-educated workers – and yet, here, men notoriously lag behind. According to recent UK figures, women are now 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men. And white working-class boys are the least likely of any other demographic to attend, at just 8.9 percent. In the space of a few generations, the gender bias in higher education has reversed. Now, some administrators at US colleges have admitted to practicing positive discrimination towards male applicants.
Though women are still underrepresented in both the boardroom and the corridors of power, the strides they have made have been remarkable. As Rosin puts it, ‘given the sheer velocity of the economic and other forces at work, these circumstances are much more likely the last artifacts of a vanishing era rather than a permanent configuration’. And yet, during this period, men’s position in work and the family has both remained stagnant and withered. Women now work more and parent more. While men work less and parent slightly more. ‘They lost the old architecture of manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one’, concludes Rosin.
