New Data on the Rise of Women

Hanna Rosin

“Something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women.”

Hanna Rosin: Journalist

Hanna Rosin is the sort of journalist who dares to articulate what people are thinking –

only they hadn’t realized it yet. Born in Israel and raised in Queens, the co-founder of

women’s site Double X (an offshoot of Slate) and contributing editor at the Atlantic

Monthly is probably best known for the furor raised by her article titled (not by her) “The

End of Men”—which asserts that the era of male dominance has come to an end as

women gain power in the postindustrial economy. A similar furor greeted her well-

researched piece “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” which questioned the degree to

which scientific evidence supports breast-feeding’s touted benefits.

Rosin has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post and contributes to such

publications as the New Yorker and the New Republic. "Rosin makes her most powerful

argument when she looks, not at the current workforce, but at what is happening on

America’s college and university campuses. There, she explains, “we can see with

absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by

women. "

Important ideas

The recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was

affecting women:

1. These were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was

giving men—that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shifts in our

global economy.

2. The story was no longer just about the crisis of men, but it was also

about what was happening to women.

Women, a majority of the workplace. And labor statistics: women take

up almost managerial jobs…. You can see that families and marriages

are starting to shift…: young women earning more than young men.

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.

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.

Women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men. Why?

This is a real mystery.

Now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys, for whatever

reason, are doing worse in school than very young girls.

Vocabularyspecimen: example, sample

parody: imitation, caricature

ingrained: deep rooted

fertility: physical maturity and strength of adult male or female

patriarchal: fatherly

top dog: manager over other employees

stagnate: decline zoom up: grow

serum: substance that helps cure, alleviate, or prevent illness

cascade: something falling, especially water

disheartening: depressed

counterpart: match; identical part or thing

enshrine: hold as sacred

misanthrope: person who hates others phlanthopist

antagonistic: opposing

exhilarating: exciting, delightful

Phrases

“Men are the new ball and chain.”

The allusion being to the presumption that a man's wife held him

back from doing the things he really wanted to.

This, of course, refers back to the actual ball and chain, which wa

s a heavy metal ball, secured to a prisoner's leg by means of a chain

and manacle. The ball and chain was in use in both Britain and the

USA by the early 19th century (and possibly much earlier).

The earliest citation in print is from The Times, January 1819:

"They sentence the prisoner to receive 50 stripes on his bare back, and be confined with a ball and chain to hard labour for 12 calendar months."

“Omega male” :

The polar opposite of the Alpha Male. Omega Males can have

friends and close acquaintances but prefer to accomplish things on

their own without the help of a group. Omega Males generally don't

belong to any cliques and have no desire to be the leader or most

outstanding of said clique. Omega Males have relations with people

from all groups and carry a resourcefulness and cunning (sometimes

strength) to get a job done with their own skill. This being said, an

omega male can have great pride without it manifesting as "ego."

An Alpha Male MUST absolutely be perceived by his peers as the

toughest, most popular, and smartest. An Omega Male cares little for

this recognition...but knows that he is all those things and more.

“Glass ceiling” :

“The unseen, yet unbreachable barrier that keeps minorities and

women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder,

regardless of their qualifications or achievements."

While the phrase glass ceiling is metaphorical, many women who fi

nd themselves bumping their heads on it find it very real indeed. It is m

ost often used to describe the sexist attitude many women run into at t

he workplace. In a discussion of ascending the corporate ladder, the w

ord “ceiling” implies that there is a limit to how far someone can climb i

t. Along with this implied barrier is the idea that it is glass, meaning tha

t, while it is very real, it is transparent and not obvious to the observer.

The term glass ceiling is most often applied in business situations i

n which women feel, either accurately or not, that men are deeply entr

enched in the upper echelons of power, and women, try as they might,

find it nearly impossible to break through.