The downtrodden man is easiest to spot in the rich world. Two decades ago in the United States, a male with a high-school education or less could land a union job in a factory or dockyard and earn enough to support a family. But the blue-collar job is rapidly disappearing, shipped overseas, where labor costs less. The rise of the service economy is shifting the emphasis in hiring, almost everywhere, from brawn to brains and charm. Programs aimed at helping mill workers reinvent themselves as computer programmers have never lived up to their promise. And during the U.S. economic boom of the 1990s, men actually lost ground. Male participation in the work force fell from 80 percent in 1970 to 75 percent by 2000, while female participation rose from 43 to 60 percent. Record numbers of men are moving back in with their parents. It seems they would rather remain unemployed than pursue traditionally female jobs as, say, nurses or teachers, despite severe shortages in those professions. The trend is much the same in Europe. “There are unemployed men who sit and wait for the labor market of their fathers and grandfathers to return,” says Agneta Stark, an economist at Linkoping University in Sweden. “It won’t come back.”
It’s pretty clear what’s breaking up the male monopoly on jobs. In a competitive global market, all employers can afford to care about is profit and cost, not whether a job is men’s work or women’s work. Women are generally more willing not only to work for less, but also to uproot and move to where the jobs are. Why? They are very often more economically desperate than men are. Recent studies have shown that women account for most of the recent global boom in immigration–as much as 70 percent of new migration to some countries, particularly in southern Europe.
At the same time, a growing number of new jobs were created in the service economy, where schooling is critical. A college degree now boosts lifetime earnings by an average of $1.25 million, according to a recent U.S. study. Across Europe and the United States, women are receiving more college, graduate and professional degrees than men. In secondary school, girls are crushing boys on standardized tests in every subject, including math and science. Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University in Boston, has warned that the economic decline of men will lead to prison crowding, labor shortages, harder times for families, even declining marriage prospects for successful women. He argues for programs aimed at helping 5 million more American males go to college, knowing this “will not resonate with the ‘politically correct’ crowd.”
The growing male discontent shows up in many places: a growing number of New Age support groups for men, a spate of books with titles like “The Myth of Male Power” and a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment across once liberal Europe. “We are very aware of the glass ceiling, but less aware of the glass basement, the basement many young males are caught in,” says Aaron Kipnis, a psychologist and author of “Angry Young Males.” He argues that programs such as Take Our Daughters to Work Day have no counterpart for boys. “If women don’t succeed, in the classroom or the boardroom, we say the system is rigged against them,” says Kipnis. “If boys don’t succeed, because of the perceived advantage, we start to look for character reasons. They have too much pride. They are not flexible. They need to be medicated.”
The challenge for men will be formidable in the United States, where competition for jobs will be more intense, than in nations such as Italy or Japan facing low birthrates and growing demand for workers. Factory jobs eliminated in rich nations are often shipped to poor societies with young populations and intense competition for work. There, too, men stand at a disadvantage, if only because women are more exploitable. They are willing to work for less, less likely to organize, and more willing to withstand the tediousness of assembly-line jobs. “In Bangladesh these women need jobs, any jobs,” says Constance Thomas, head of the anti-discrimination unit at the International Labor Organization. “They’ve migrated, and they’ll work for very little.”
Even in the poorest developing nations, women are also increasingly well schooled. Males are now outnumbered in secondary school in such places as Lesotho, Namibia, Uruguay, Mongolia, Belize, even Libya and Bahrain. This can only mean stiffer competition for men in the future. In places where women are behind in education, the training they get at home as family managers often makes them more qualified for new jobs than men who have driven forklifts or assembled engines for three decades. “Each family has a hero in the mother,” says Rogelio Ramirez de la O, a Mexican economist. “She is the one who has the creative solutions to family problems, especially economic problems. When women educated this way confront a formal job, they have much less problem adapting to the responsibility than men.”
That means men will increasingly find themselves losing out to women for jobs. That’s the overwhelming opinion of professional women recently polled by the World Economic Forum (chart). And the trend is already gaining speed in countries from China to Mexico. As early as the 1970s women filled most of the assembly-line jobs in the foreign-owned factories then just starting to flourish along Mexico’s U.S. border. They still do, but since then they have also moved up the employment ladder into competition with men for posts as managers and accountants. Along the border, where most export factories are clustered, it’s not uncommon to hear male bosses explain their hiring views as: “Men get drunk; women show up for work on time.” The classified ads are often divided into “him” and “her,” with “her” getting the longer recruiting pitch. Hombres, beware. That’s your future if you don’t shape up.
