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The obsolete male: Is this really 'end of men'?

October 13, 2012 12:10 am

BOSTON--

Hanna Rosin writes in "The End of Men" that the U.S. is fast becoming a "middle-class matriarchy" as women become the major breadwinners. In "The Richer Sex," Liza Mundy claims that one in four women out-earn their spouses.

Men are allegedly as sensitive as bricks. In "The Female Brain," Louann Brizendine claims that women "know what people are feeling, while a man can't spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm." She says this female ability comes from a larger corpus callosum--the band of fibers that connect the brain's halves--in women.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher claims in "The First Sex" that women's brains can integrate many sides of an argument while men are stuck with plodding linear thinking. "The future belongs to women," she argues.

After reading this, men might be tempted to just give up and leave the field to all these flexible, sensitive, high-achieving women. The arguments seem very convincing--until you examine the facts.

In broad terms, women have indeed made enormous strides over the last 40 years, but those gains appear to be slowing. Catalyst, a nonprofit research group that seeks to further women's roles in business, has studied the gender gap at the top ranks in the U.S. and found that it's no closer to closing than it was six years ago.

In no area of the 13 industrial sectors studied did women earn more than men. At no educational level did women earn more. And in none of the 22 countries studied did women earn more.

Rosin's "The End of Men" argues that because women outnumber men in college classrooms, they will replace men in the "broad striving middle class" that "defines society and provides leaders." But numbers alone aren't decisive; there is a real question whether women will attain leadership positions in the areas for which they have been trained.

A report from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation found that so far, women's earnings have not kept up with their gains in education. Even though women earn more advanced degrees than men, their wages still trail far behind.

Catalyst reports that female MBAs earn, on average, $4,600 less than male MBAs in their first jobs out of business school. Female physicians earn, on average, 39 percent less than males. Women financial analysts take in 35 percent less, and female CEOs a quarter less. Salary gains that female managers acquired in the 1980s and 1990s have dropped off, and men's salaries are pulling far ahead once again. Women start behind and never catch up.

As for Mundy's claim that 40 percent of women out-earn their husbands, the only segment of society in which a substantial percentage of wives makes significantly more than their husbands is low-income workers. In 2010, among couples in the bottom 20 percent of earners, 70 percent of women out-earned their husbands. But Anne Winkler of the University of Missouri points out that when you look at women who really are the primary breadwinners--earning 60 percent of family income or more--the figure drops to about 10 percent.

As for women's supposed superior sensitivity and communication skills, science disagrees. Recent studies show no difference between men and women in the size of the corpus callosum. Researchers at Purdue and the University of Pennsylvania find that men and women react in a very similar way to their colleagues in the workplace, with men being just as sensitive and understanding as women to the problems of others.

With end-of-men scare stories, the media exaggerate women's success and present the worst possible scenarios for men. The implicit message to women: "Step back, you've gone too far. You're hurting men." But women still have miles to go to achieve gender equality.

Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett are at work on a book, "The New Soft War Against Women." They wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.