Author Topic: Women becoming the breadwinners in America (Read 2288 times)

Matthew · « **on:** March 16, 2012, 01:29:42 PM »

Why women are out-earning men
By Patricia Sellers March 16, 2012: 11:44 AM ET

Author Liza Mundy and TIME's Nancy Gibbs

Women are poised to become America's biggest breadwinners.

The tipping point is a generation away, assuming women's economic power keeps rising as expected. But already, the trend is stunning enough that TIME made it the subject of its current cover.

"Almost 40% of working wives out-earn their husbands," noted Liza Mundy, author of "The Richer Sex"--both the cover story and a new book that goes by the same title--at a breakfast in New York City, hosted by TIME and Fortune.

The audience was Fortune's Most Powerful Women: female Masters of the Universe who have seven-figure salaries and househusbands. Mundy's research shows that women are out-earning men all around. In most U.S. metro areas, for instance, single childless women in their 20s have higher median incomes than their male peers. In Dallas and Atlanta, the average young woman earns $1.18 and $1.14, respectively, for every dollar earned by a male.

Why such rapid advancement? The Pill, Mundy said, helped spark the trend 50 years ago: Newly able to delay marriage and childbearing, women began focusing on their careers. America's shift to a service economy also favors college grads, who increasingly tend to be female. Today, women make up 60% of U.S. college classes and earn more masters and doctorate degrees than men.

What can stop women from out-earning men in more than 50% of U.S. households? "Nothing that I can see," Mundy, who writes for the Washington Post (WPO), told TIME Executive Editor Nancy Gibbs at the breakfast. Some industries, such as veterinary medicine, are so populated with women that few men are now entering them, she said. She calls the phenomenon "gender pollution." In 25 years, law and medicine may well be female-dominated.

And there's the fact that 41% of babies in the U.S. today are born to single mothers. While Mundy found no reliable data on how many of these unmarried moms are cohabiting vs. living alone, "what we do know from the census is that currently about 25% of children under 18 live with a mother and not a father."

This got me and the powerful women at my breakfast table asking: Can men, bred to be providers, live happily in a world where women may not need them for support? An optimist, Mundy believes that many men will cede control as breadwinners.(One bit of evidence: Marriage rates for high-income women are rising, as overall marriage rates decline.) Moreover, society will adapt by "broadening the definition of masculinity," she contends. Masculinity will include cooking as well as hunting, and child care as well as golf.

"We are always too quick to think masculinity is finished," Mundy writes in her TIME cover story. If the evolution plays out as she hopes, both men and women will become richer in their own ways.

s2srea · « **Reply #1 on:** March 16, 2012, 01:35:02 PM »

I wonder how much women working so much now, has to do with unemployment...? Its not something I think of often, but there are so many possibilities on what this has meant for the average working man.

In the 30s, the great depression and the unemployment rate essentially affected men. I'd be curious to see a study, though I know it will never happen, which looks at this and to see what the results are.

Santo Subito · « **Reply #2 on:** March 16, 2012, 05:19:54 PM »

The devil at work. Single libertine women put off childbearing. They take up jobs and earnings that married men could use to feed their families. Money so that wives can stay at home and be a mother to their children.

Instead these selfish greedy women gloat at their children out of wedlock. They pay minimum wage workers to raise them. Single 30 something women play lawyer, doctor, businesswoman as they take the pill and have casual sex. Then they frantically try to get married at 40 and then get divorced because it's all for selfish motives.

Libertine women have succeeded in becoming just as miserable as libertine men. Congratulations.

Marcelino · « **Reply #3 on:** March 16, 2012, 06:50:55 PM »

What gets me is the happy attitude of this article. How does this strategy not result in extinction? Every population that embraces it, gets a catastrophically low birth rate. If your population's birth rate is 1.0 (lots are already there), then your population is halved every generation, until there is only one couple left, who have one kid, who has nobody to breed with. The end.

Raoul76 · « **Reply #4 on:** March 16, 2012, 07:34:48 PM »

Women are favored in schools and at work. They are treated as smart and brilliant while men are treated as slugs. It is very subtle, but it is always like this.

Women hire other women because they want to keep the feminist train rolling -- it's a "Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" kind of thing, like pedoes protecting each other in VII. Men hire women to be politically correct or for ulterior motives. I have no doubt that in most cases a woman would be hired for a job despite having less qualifications than a man competing for the position.

You know how gαys are riding a wave of popularity; the same groupthink is in place that says "This is the time for women, this is their hour to rule." It's just something that permeates every atom of society.

There is something about this society that saps your ambition, your masculinity. The more women there are in positions of power, the more arbitrary and ludicrous everything seems. Careers don't even seem real. They can be given and taken away for a whim. It's like a clown car. Everything is unstable, ready to blow.

Raoul76 · « **Reply #5 on:** March 16, 2012, 07:38:35 PM »

Telesphorus · « **Reply #6 on:** March 16, 2012, 07:48:15 PM »

Quote from: Marcelino

What gets me is the happy attitude of this article. How does this strategy not result in extinction? Every population that embraces it, gets a catastrophically low birth rate. If your population's birth rate is 1.0 (lots are already there), then your population is halved every generation, until there is only one couple left, who have one kid, who has nobody to breed with. The end.

When you consider who owns the media, they're obviously happy about the progress they're making in bringing about the destruction of white Christian gentile peoples.

Santo Subito · « **Reply #7 on:** March 16, 2012, 07:51:10 PM »

Quote from: Raoul76

There is something about this society that saps your ambition, your masculinity. The more women there are in positions of power, the more arbitrary and ludicrous everything seems. Careers don't even seem real. They can be given and taken away for a whim. It's like a clown car. Everything is unstable, ready to blow.

Indeed, is it as if it is all a joke. Girls dressed like men, strutting around in business suits, running different branches of things. Many in their positions because of affirmative action and not merit. Others because of unscrupulous acts performed in our moral cesspool of a business culture.

Regardless, it does indeed make it all seem like a silly game. You are there in your suit trying to do your best and you are surrounded by career women and products of affirmative action. What's the point? Instead of competing against other men in the workforce for promotion or working with other men as a team, men are now forced to work with women and, I'm sorry, men simply don't take a job very seriously when women are doing it too. The article talked of "gender contamination" or something of the sort. It is a phenomenon of human nature. We see boys refusing to be altar boys and "altar girls" taking over. Women start increasing in numbers in a profession and men say, "to Hell with it. I want to do something worthy of a man. That men are called to do." This is why you see men still dominate jobs where physicality is a necessity. Police, prison guard, fireman, Marine, Sports, etc. A man has the need to compete and try to be the best, but at the same time be able to bond with other men as "teammates." Have a beer to celebrate victory. With women that competitive instinct is quashed as it is not in men's nature to "compete" with women. Man's nature is to protect and provide for a woman as his wife, and to lead her and his children. Not to slug back brews with or try to beat out of a promotion.

In the past it seems women were feminine and proud of it. They were maternal. In touch with their natures. Certainly they were not perfect, but for God's sake at least they had some semblance of what it meant to be a woman. Today's women are taught and trained to be short skinny men with a bun and heels. God help us.

Sede Catholic · « **Reply #8 on:** March 16, 2012, 08:05:21 PM »

Feminism is quite simply one of the most destructive tools that the devil has used to harm the Catholic Church,

the Family, and society.

Marcelino · « **Reply #9 on:** March 16, 2012, 11:52:12 PM »

My impression is men basically work to a different (usually higher, but not always) standard, than women do. So, when you put them together, the men basically slow down and take it easy. The women, on the other hand, usually are fine, unless they get jealous.