On International Women’s Day: Time to Worry about Our Sons? - Building Gender Balanced Business

How ironic then if the progress of women into higher education ends up heralding the loss of men who match our mood.

It will not be healthy for women if there are fewer educated men. A French study by Grandes Ecoles au Féminin that I was involved with a few years back found that women usually marry men who are at least as educated as they are. Men marry women with a wider spectrum of educational credentials. This is what we’ve all suspected for years, of course. Men are more comfortable with a loving supportive spouse at home who isn’t necessarily able (or inclined) to debate the finer points of the latest business deal or corporate political moves. Some men still struggle with their reactions to their super-performing wives. … Women want it all – and more.

How ironic then if the progress of women into higher education ends up heralding the loss of men who match our mood.

It is partly a class issue, of course. As David Brooks wrote in a recent New York Times column:
“For decades, men have adapted poorly to the shifting demands of the service economy. Now they are paying the price. For decades, the working-class social fabric has been fraying. Now the working class is in danger of descending into underclass-style dysfunction. For decades, young people have been living in a loose, under-institutionalized world. Now they are moving back home in droves.
“The economic response to the crisis is everywhere debated, but the social response is unformed. First, we need to redefine masculinity, creating an image that encourages teenage boys to stay in school and older men to pursue service jobs. Evangelical churches have done a lot to show how manly men can still be nurturing. Obviously, more needs to be done, and schools need to be more boy-friendly.”

Dr Leonard Sax in the US wrote a book called Why Gender Matters about the differences in learning preferences and behaviours of girls and boys. He has gone on to launch a number of all-male Charter schools and educate teachers in gender differences. For example, he says that boys’ hearing develops later than girls’, and is not complete until age 18 or so. So the natural tendency of boys to sit at the back of the class, with a soft-spoken female teacher likely to be at the front, means that many boys simply don’t hear what’s being taught. My science teacher friend, Michele, had never heard this physiological factoid. Sax says most teachers haven’t. …

While women are conquering new ground, and optimistic about it, men feel that they are losing ground … and lost about what to do.

Sax recently wrote in The Washington Post about boys’ growing lack of energy, drive and ambition. “You’ll find it in families both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents — a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women.” A national boys’ project is launching, www.boysproject.net, while a website called WhyBoysFail has been tracking the trend. The Census figures quoted in For Every 100 Girls are just downright scary.

These issues are not limited to the US. Around the world, women are the majority of university graduates. Of the 8 million jobs created in Europe since the year 2000, 80% went to women, mostly in services. Not to mention China, where The Economist recently reported that there are now 119 boys born for every 100 girls … a horror story of epic proportions and probably a good bit of unwritten personal trauma. By 2020, there will be 24 million Chinese men who will not be finding wives. The same is happening in India

This is not the best recipe for social peace. What will become of our sons? We have not prepared them in any way, in any media, in any school, for the dramatic gender shifts now intruding so abruptly into our economies, our demographics … and our families.

In fact, marriage is changing everywhere as gender roles and economic realities evolve. France now has more children being born out of wedlock than in it. In the US, Pew Research just published a huge report on The Rise of Wives. It says, “From an economic perspective, these trends have contributed to a gender role reversal in the gains from marriage. In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women.”

It seems that we are witnessing two parallel and mutually unhelpful trends:

• the continued over-masculinisation of the business world, with its unfortunate under-utilisation of female talent and misunderstanding of female consumers
• the more recent over-feminisation of the education sphere, with a similarly unfortunate exclusion and lack of success of boys in the classroom, while girls continue to clock in superior academic scores in country after country.

We have never been so close to attaining an Eden-like re-establishment of gender roles after a few millennia of male domination. It would be a shame to see it lost by mishandling or underestimating the challenge ahead.

The tipping point has been hit, with women moving in and flipping stereotypes, expectations and power. But while women are conquering new ground, and optimistic about it, men feel that they are losing ground … and lost about what to do. Watch this amazingly revelatory ad that Dodge ran during the SuperBowl, called Man’s Last Stand. It ain’t pretty.

The tragicomic absurdity of the current situation is that both men and women agree on a single thing: It is better for your economic and career prospects to be the other sex. Depending on the context, both are right. But we need to quickly unite behind a shared, collaborative construction of a new, gender balanced future. We have never been so close to attaining an Eden-like re-establishment of gender roles after a few millennia of male domination. It would be a shame to see it lost by mishandling or underestimating the challenge ahead. Foreign Policy magazine had an article entitled The Death of Macho which concluded with the gloomy declaration: “Make no mistake: The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent.”

We need to convince men that they have much to gain from the rise of women. That requires that women get over a self-perception of maligned minority and quickly – urgently even – accept the responsibilities of our newfound power, even before learning exactly what that means – or what to do with it. Women, as much as men, need to accept – and celebrate – the differences between genders, and use them to the benefit of all our daughters, all our sons.