Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Gender reversal on career goals


These two Pew graphs show how young women are now more ambitious than men. Sixty-six percent of females ages 18 to 34 say career success is "one of the most important things" or very important" in their lives. The corresponding figure for young men (seen below) is only 59 percent.


I expect this new gap will further weaken the institution of marriage. I'm not sure if the Girl Power crowd is aware of this consequence. Radical feminists, of course, are cheerleading the decline. If a man does not earn more than a woman, he is less attractive as a partner. Most women want a husband, but they are less likely to enter marriage and are quicker to exit it if the man offers fewer positives. Marriage is still comparatively strong among high status people, but economic incentives matter.

6 comments:

  1. Have you commented before on the dangers of marriage for lower-income men? A lot of paleocons have...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elizabeth Warren puts the paleocons to shame in her presentation of the ridiculous definition of "inflation" used by the government when it comes to the economic unit called "the family".

    The liberation of the individual woman's godhood in choosing what bloodlines she will preserve, while failing to liberate the individual man's godhood in choosing what bloodlines he will risk his life to terminate via natural duel, is even more central than racial rent-seeking in "...a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object" which "evinces a design to reduce them under absolute" Genocide.

    What is going on now is just mopping up after the genocide of founding stock Americans.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11:38 AM

    I disagree that its all over but the shouting. Indeed there is a substantial increase in stay-at-home mothering over the last 15 years. I know lots of people that are stay-at-home moms.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/30/AR2009093005106.html

    "In 1994, 19.8 percent of married-couple families with children younger than 15 had a stay-at-home mother. Last year, it was 23.7 percent of families -- an increase that Elliott said was statistically significant. "I don't think we exactly know why," she said. "

    I remember a coworker saying he would never marry someone who would work outside the home after they had kids.

    A female coworker overhead and announced, 'That's discrimination!'

    He smiled and said, "Yes. Yes, it is."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Let's put it this way, marriage is by far the strongest among A) middle-upper class people and B) religious people. These two groups also tend to have the highest consciousness and work discipline, anyone who's done serious management can tell you that.

    Thus we would expect that the female members of these two groups have reaped the most gains from the rise of career women. Basic observation bares this out, high SES or religiosity women are much more likely to have a successful career.

    Meanwhile marriage has fallen apart the most in the very groups that basically don't work at all, and certainly have no concept of a "career." Murray was right 20 years ago, if something is attacking the institution of marriage it's certainly women working.

    It's government welfare programs that eliminate the incentive of both men and women to do productive work.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous3:57 PM

    Most career women don't do "productive" work.

    Also the government prevents companies from discriminating against women, among other things it does to promote career women. So blaming the government (specifically gov't welfare programs) for there not being even more career women doesn't make sense.

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  6. I wonder what the racial breakdown of these numbers looks like.

    ReplyDelete

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