Women Are Overtaking Men in the U.S.

(Nov. 5) -- The United States may have officially entered the age of woman.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this fall, for the first time in U.S. history, women have surpassed men and now make up more than 50 percent of the nation's workforce. In 1967, by comparison, they accounted for just one-third of all workers.

Signs of the changing landscape in gender relations are just about everywhere you look:

• Double the number of single women are now purchasing homes in America than there are single men.
• Four out of every 10 women are are now their family's primary breadwinner, a sharp increase from past decades.
• The New Hampshire State Legislature is now made up of a majority of women, a first for a legislative body in the U.S., and the number of women in government continues to edge up nationwide.
• Women now account for 30 percent of math Ph.D.s, up from just 5 percent in the 1960s.
• On average, women read nine books every year. Men only read four, and women account for 80 percent of the U.S. fiction market.
• The World Bank recently estimated that the global earning power of women will reach an estimated $18 trillion by the year 2014, up $5 trillion today.

"Women really have become the dominant gender," said Guy Garcia, author of "The Decline of Men." "What concerns me is that guys are rapidly falling behind. Women are becoming better educated than men, earning more than men, and, generally speaking, not needing men at all. Meanwhile, as a group, men are losing their way."

That seems especially true during tough economic times. While the economy has shed millions of jobs during the recession of 2008 and 2009, men have been three times more likely to lose theirs than women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Dr. Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, said that in the case of the recession, there really haven't been any winners in the labor force.

"As the economy improves, many of the blue-collar jobs that men hold are likely to return," Shierholz said. "But the longer-term picture is that we're seeing women continue to make relative gains in the workplace. That's not surprising when women are getting good educations and earning solid degrees."




In fact, a gender education gap, in which women are far outpacing men in terms of educational achievement, has been quietly growing in America over the past few decades. In 2009, for instance, women will earn more degrees in higher education than men in every possible category, from associate level to Ph.D.s, according to the U.S. Department of Education. When it comes to master's-level education, for instance, U.S. women earn 159 degrees for every 100 awarded to men.

"The big reason for the disparity is that women are going back to finish college or get new degrees and training," said Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress and one of the co-authors of The Shriver Report, which considers the implications of shifting gender roles.

"Girls today grow up in a post-feminist environment, being told they can do whatever they want in life," Boushey said. "But then they get out into the workplace and they find that they still make just 77 cents on the dollar compared with men."

That harsh realization, Boushey argued, helps account for why women have flocked to colleges at a time when the country finds itself shifting from a manufacturing-based economy to knowledge-based one.

"It's a huge shift," Boushey said, "when you think that a generation and a half ago our attitudes and expectations for what roles women and men could play in our society were entirely different than they are today."

As for the discrepancy in wages between men and women, that, too, may be soon be a thing of the past. A study of U.S. Census data conducted by Queens College sociologist Andrew Beveridge found that young women in New York and several other big American cities actually earn more than their male counterparts.

Garcia bemoaned what he sees as a "fragmentation of male identity," in which husbands are asked to take on unaccustomed familial roles such as child care and housework, while wives bring in the bigger paychecks.

"There was a division of labor, right or wrong, that men understood," Garcia said. "Now, the trade-offs are murky, and women often get stuck doing both jobs--taking care of kids and playing the primary breadwinner."

Boushey, on the other hand, thinks that now that both men and women are starting to share in the dual burdens of work and home responsibilities, we're more likely to find solutions that benefit both genders.

"It's about finding a mutually beneficial balance," Boushey said.