The New Inequality

It’s old news, but consistently ignored. In her 2011 book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys , Kay Hymowitz reports basic facts about gender, income, and status. Here are some arresting statistics.

Women between 25-34 with college educations now outnumber men in their age group.

The pay for women has grown 44 percent since 1970. Pay for men during the same time period has grown 6 percent.

Single and childless women living in cities now earn 8% more than men in their age cohort.

I’m not altogether sure what these changes mean over the long term. But I’ll venture one thought. Men are in trouble, or at least the median man. (Elite men flourish in the hyper-competitive environment of global capitalism.) I’ve written in the past about how globalization hammers working class men with high school educations. Our educational system does as well. These days a great deal of emphasis is put on order and compliance, an understandable reaction to the laxity and chaos of post-sixties education. It’s an educational environment in which adolescent females excel and adolescent males don’t.

My son recently graduated from a large urban public high school with a diverse student population. The honor roll was 90% female. Shocking, and surely a sign of serious problems, though nobody seems to care.