Hanna Rosin reviews startling new data that shows women actually surpassing men in several important measures, such as college graduation rates. Do these trends, both US-centric and global, signal the "end of men"? Probably not -- but they point toward an important societal shift worth deep discussion.
Hanna Rosin isn’t afraid to shine a skeptical spotlight on people’s cherished ideals, whether it’s politically correct dogma or the conservative Christian agenda.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/hanna_rosin.html
Transcript
We are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly. And in many of the places where it counts the most, women are, in fact, taking control of everything. In my mother's day, she didn't go to college. Not a lot of women did. And now, for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same. Women, for the first time this year, became the majority of the American workforce. And they're starting to dominate lots of professions -- doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants. Over 50 percent of managers are women these days. And in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two of them are dominated by women. So the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men, believe it or not, and these economic changes are starting to rapidly affect our culture -- what our romantic comedies look like, what our marriages look like, what our dating lives look like, and our new set of superheroes.
For a long time, this is the image of American manhood that dominated -- tough, rugged, in control of his own environment. A few years ago, the Marlboro Man was retired and replaced by this much less impressive specimen, who is a parody of American manhood. And that's what we have in our commercials today. The phrase first-born son is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that this statistic alone shocked me. In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys. And in places where you wouldn't think, such as South Korea, India and China, the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little, and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons.
If you think about this, if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots, you can see the evidence everywhere. You can see it in college graduation patterns, in job projections, in our marriage statistics, you can see it in the Icelandic elections, which you'll hear about later, and you can see it on South Korean surveys on son preference, that something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women. Certainly this is not the first that we've had great progress with women. The 20's and the 60's also come to mind. But the difference is that, back then, it was driven by a very passionate feminist movement that was trying to project its own desires, whereas this time, it's not about passion, and it's not about any kind of movement. This is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in. the 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end, believe it or not, and that's why I talk about the end of men.
Now all you men out there, this is not the moment where you tune out or throw some tomatoes, because the point is that this is happening to all of us. I myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom I dearly love. And this is why I like to talk about this, because if we don't acknowledge it, then the transition will be pretty painful. But if we do take account of it, then I think it will go much more smoothly. I first started thinking about this about a year and a half ago. I was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else, and I started to notice a distinct pattern -- that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women. And I remembered back to about 10 years ago when I read a book by Susan Faludi called "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man" in which she described how hard the recession had hit men. And I started to think about whether it had gotten worse this time around in this recession. And I realized that two things were different this time around. The first was that these were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was giving men -- that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shift in our global economy. And second, that the story was no longer just about the crisis of men, but it was also about what was happening to women.
And now look at this second set of slides. These are headlines about what's been going on with women in the next few years. These are things we never could have imagined a few years ago. Women, a majority of the workplace. And labor statistics: women take up most managerial jobs. This second set of headlines: you can see that families and marriages are starting to shift. And look at that last headline: young women earning more than young men. That particular headline comes to me from a market research firm. They were basically asked by one of their clients who was going to buy houses in that neighborhood in the future. And they expected that it would be young families, or young men, just like it had always been. But in fact, they found something very surprising. It was young, single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood. And so they decided, because they were intrigued by this finding, to do a nationwide survey. So they spread out all the census data, and what they found, the guy described to me as a shocker, which is that in 1,997 out of 2,000 communities, women, young women, were making more money than young men. So here you have a generation of young women who grow up thinking of themselves as being more powerful earners than the young men around them.
Now, I've just laid out the picture for you, but I still haven't explained to you why this is happening. And in a moment, I'm going to show you a graph, and what you'll see on this graph -- it begins in 1973, just before women start flooding the workforce, and it brings it up to our current day. And basically what you'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy. Now what does that mean? It means that the economy is dividing into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs -- and that the middle, the middle-skill jobs, and the middle-earning jobs are starting to drop out of the economy. This has been going on for 40 years now. But this process is affecting men very differently than it's affecting women. You'll see the women in red, and you'll see the men in blue. You'll watch them both drop out of the middle-class, but see what happens to women and see what happens to men. There we go. So watch that. You see them both drop out of the middle-class. Watch what happens to the women. Watch what happens to the men. The men sort of stagnate there, while the women zoom up in those high-skill jobs. So what's that about? It looks like women got some power boost on a video game, or like they snuck in some secret serum into their birth-control pills that lets them shoot up high. But of course, it's not about that.
What it's about is that the economy has changed a lot. We used to have a manufacturing economy, which was about building goods and products, and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy. Those two economies require very different skills. And as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been. It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills, and with the help of a union, you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life. But that really isn't true anymore. This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength, which is what's helped men along all these years. What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills. You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. And those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing.
If you look at management theory these days, it used to be that our ideal leader sounded something like Gen. Patton, right. You would be issuing orders from above. You would be very hierarchical. You would tell everyone below you what to do. But that's not what an ideal leader is like now. If you read management books now, a leader is somebody who can foster creativity, who can get his -- get the employees -- see, I still say "his" -- who can get the employees to talk to each other, who can basically build teams and get them to be creative. And those are all things that women do very well.
And then on top of that, that's created a kind of cascading effect. Women enter the workplace at the top, and then at the working-class, all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home. So that's child care, elder care and food preparation. So those are all the jobs that are growing, and those are jobs that women tend to do. Now one day it might be that mothers will hire an out-of-work, middle-aged, former steelworker guy to watch their children at home, and that would be good for the men, but that hasn't quite happened yet.
To see what's going to happen, you can't just look at the workforce that is now, you have to look at our future workforce. And here the story is fairly simple. Women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men. Why? This is a real mystery. People have asked men, why don't they just go back to college, to community college, say, and retool themselves, learn a new set of skills. Well it turns out that they're just very uncomfortable doing that. They're used to thinking of themselves as providers, and they can't seem to build the social networks that allow them to get through college. So for some reason men just don't end up going back to college. And what's even more disturbing is what's happening with younger boys. There's been about a decade of research about what people are calling the boy crisis. Now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys, for whatever reason, are doing worse in school than very young girls. And people have theories about that. Is it because we have an excessively verbal curriculum, and little girls are better at that than little boys? Or that we require kids to sit still too much, and so boys initially feel like failures? And some people say it's because, in 9th grade, boys start dropping out of school. Because I'm writing a book about all this, I'm still looking into it, so I don't have the answer. But in the mean time, I'm going to call on the worldwide education expert, who's my 10 year-old daughter, Noah, to talk to you about why the boys in her class do worse.
(Video) Noah: The girls are obviously smarter. I mean they have much larger vocabulary. They learn much faster. They are more controlled. On the board today for losing recess tomorrow, only boys.
Hanna Rosin: And why is that?
Noah: Why? They were just not listening to the class while the girls sat there very nicely.
HR: So there you go. This whole thesis really came home to me when I went to visit a college in Kansas City -- working-class college. Certainly when I was in college, I had certain expectations about my life -- that my husband and I would both work, and that we would equally raise the children. But these college girls had a completely different view of their future. Basically, the way they said it to me is, that they would be working 18 hours a day, that their husband would maybe have a job, but that mostly he would be at home taking care of the kitties. And this was kind of a shocker to me. And then here's my favorite quote from one of the girls: "Men are the new ball and chain."
(Laughter)
Now you laugh, but that quote has kind of a sting to it, right. And I think the reason it has a sting is because thousands of years of history don't reverse themselves without a lot of pain. And that's why I talk about us all going through this together. The night after I talked to these college girls, I also went to a men's group in Kansas. And these were exactly the kind of victims of the manufacturing economy, which I spoke to you about earlier. They were men who had been contractors, or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom, and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support. And the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age. He was telling them they no longer had any moral authority, that nobody needed them for emotional support anymore, and they were not really the providers. So who were they? And this was very disheartening for them. And what he did was he wrote down on the board $85,000, and he said, "That's her salary." And then he wrote down $12,000. "That's your salary. So who's the man now?" he asked them. "Who's the damn man? She's the man now." And that really sent a shudder through the room. And that's part of the reason I like to talk about this, because I think it can be pretty painful, and we really have to work through it.
And the other reason it's kind of urgent is because it's not just happening in the U.S. It's happening all over the world. In India, poor women are learning English faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in India. In China, a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses, small businesses, faster than men. And here's my favorite example, which is in South Korea. Over several decades, South Korea built one of the most patriarchal societies we know about. They basically enshrined the second-class status of women in the civil code. And if women failed to birth male children, they were basically treated like domestic servants. And sometimes family would pray to the spirits to kill off a girl child so they could have a male child. But over the 70's and 80's, the South Korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize, and so what they did was, they started to push women into the workforce. Now they've been asking a question since 1985: "How strongly do you prefer a first-born son?" And now look at the chart. That's from 1985 to 2003. How much do you prefer a first-born son?
So you can see that these economic changes really do have a strong affect on our culture. Now because we haven't fully processed this information, it's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways, where you can see that the stereotypes are changing. And so we have on the male side, what one of my colleagues likes to call the "omega males" popping up, who are the males who are romantically challenged losers who can't find a job. And they come up in lots of different forms. So we have the perpetual adolescent. We have the charmless misanthrope. Then we have our Bud Light guy who's the happy couch potato. And then here's a shocker: even America's most sexiest man alive, the sexiest man alive gets romantically played these days in a movie. And then on the female side, you have the opposite, in which you have these crazy superhero women. You've got Lady Gaga. You've got our new James Bond, who's Angelina Jolie. And it's not just for the young, right. Even Helen Mirren can hold a gun these days. And so it feels like we have to move from this place where we've got these uber-exaggerated images, into something that feels a little more normal.
So for a long time in the economic sphere, we've lived with the term glass ceiling. Now I've never really liked this term. For one thing, it puts men and women in a really antagonistic relationship with one another, because the men are these devious tricksters up there who've put up this glass ceiling. And we're always below the glass ceiling, the women. And we have a lot of skill and experience, but it's a trick, so how are you supposed to prepare to get through that glass ceiling. And also, shattering the glass ceiling is a terrible phrase. What crazy person would pop their head through a glass ceiling?
So the image I like to think of, instead of glass ceiling, is the high bridge. It's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge, but it's also pretty exhilarating, because it's beautiful up there, and you're looking out on a beautiful view. And the great thing is there's no trick like with the glass ceiling. There's no man or woman standing in the middle about to cut the cables. There's no hole in the middle that you're going to fall through. And the great thing is that you can take anyone along with you. You can bring your husband along. You can bring your friends, or your colleagues, or your babysitter to walk along with you. And husbands can drag their wives across, if their wives don't feel ready. But the point about the high bridge is that you have to have the confidence to know that you deserve to be on that bridge, that you have all the skills and experience you need in order to walk across the high bridge, but you just have to make the decision to take the first step and do it.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)
Tony Porter: A call to men
At TEDWomen, Tony Porter makes a call to men everywhere: Don't "act like a man." Telling powerful stories from his own life, he shows how this mentality, drummed into so many men and boys, can lead men to disrespect, mistreat and abuse women and each other. His solution: Break free of the "man box."
Tony Porter is an educator and activist who is internationally recognized for his effort to end violence against women.
Transcript
I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating -- no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear -- that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior, women are inferior; that men are strong, women are weak; that women are of less value -- property of men -- and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted. And we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.
This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. They're 11 and 12. Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. There was a period of time when my wife, her name is Tammie, and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. (Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. It didn't matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. Daddy's got you. That's all that's important.
Now Kendall on the other hand -- and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her -- he came to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "Why are you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what's wrong. Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you. Why are you crying?" And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, "Just go in your room. Just go on, go on in your room. Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a --" What? (Audience: Man.) "like a man." And he's five years old. And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, "My God, what's wrong with me? What am I doing? Why would I this?" And I think back. I think back to my father.
There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. We lived in New York City, as I said. We lived in the Bronx at the time. And the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. And the limousine empties out. My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine. And no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. He didn't want cry in front of me. But he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground -- something I just can't even imagine. The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me. And at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying.
I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12 year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad, I'd be mad, I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me -- the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?"
(Applause)
It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner-city. At this time we're living in the Bronx. And in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16 year-old boy doing with these 12 year-old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, "He was fine." He was having sex. We all looked up to him.
So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around, doing something -- I don't know what. He looks out his window, he calls me upstairs, he said, "Hey Anthony." They called my Anthony growing up as a kid. "Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, do you want some meant one of two things, sex or drugs -- and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, card, man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. (Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.
Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short. I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice's-worth of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.
So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything. And I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room. And lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it. And I say to them, "It was good." And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.
Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear getting outside the man box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.
See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.
So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.
I remember asking a nine year-old boy. I asked a nine year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?" He said to me, "I would be free."
Thank you folks.
(Applause)
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