THAT'S MEN:Traditional male roles are being reordered, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
IS THE DEMISE of men under way? Are we spiralling towards underclass status as women take over the professions and manual labour becomes irrelevant in the age of technology?
That's the thesis put forward last autumn in a lengthy article by Hanna Rosin titled "The End of Men" in The Atlantic, which I've been mulling over since I read it. A year earlier I had noted in this column that "Last year more women than men signed up for courses in dentistry, so before long it will be a woman who will be wielding the drill . . . It is all part of the female future. If present trends continue we will have more female doctors, lawyers, vets and dentists as new graduates enter the workforce and old chaps retire."
As you can see, it was a rather facetious article, but the trend behind it is real and interesting, namely that changes in the education and expectations of women are changing the nature of the relationship between the genders.
This trend has generated doomsday scenarios of little comfort to men. For instance, in that 2009 article I wrote that, "An English language Swedish newspaper, the Local, recently reported similar trends in that country under the headline 'Swedish women to overtake stupid men'. 'There will soon be a large collective of uneducated, low-paid men who don't have any friends, and are unmarried and alone – as well as uninteresting for women looking for a relationship,' the newspaper quoted researcher Ingemar Gens (a man) as saying."
Now along comes Rosin in The Atlanticannouncing that doomsday is already here. She reports that a sperm selection service called MicroSort, which allows parents to select the gender of their babies-to-be, finds that 75 per cent of requests are for girls. In South Korea, the traditional preference for sons had died out by 2003, with only 15 per cent of women surveyed saying they must have a son.
In societies in which education is the key to most work and in which muscle no longer matters very much, mothers no longer see a son as the be-all and end-all of their existence. And this trend will continue to spread into traditionally male areas of work. We are almost at the day, for instance, when car mechanics will need to know more about computer technology than how to take an engine apart and put it together again. They will spend more time at a keyboard than lying under a car. The implications of this for the employment of women are clear.
The real doomsday scenario in The Atlanticarticle is in Rosin's description of women who see no need to have a father around the home or to involve him in decisions. As far as these women are concerned, the man will have just as big or as small a part in their children's lives as they want him to have. In this scenario, men, once the kings of the jungle, sit around with little to do and with no say in what goes on while women run the world and leave them behind.
I am not entirely convinced by this vision of the future. Yes, women will come to predominate in many professions and will greatly increase their representation and status in many other areas of work. But it isn’t a matter of men becoming lost and useless. It is a matter of the two genders working out the new balance between them. For instance, the situation in which the father is the full-time homemaker and the mother is the breadwinner will become increasingly common. This arrangement makes perfect sense in the new dispensation – of course it goes against old stereotypes and it will take time for these stereotypes to fade.
The essential point, though, is that the rise of women doesn’t mean the demise of men, though it challenges both genders to work out new ways of living and working together.
The Atlanticarticle is at bitly.com/endofmen
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail