RA #3

“The decent of men” By Dan Kildon was written in 2006 and is about how the current generation is seeing an increase in females attending college. This might result in women getting a lot more of the most wanted jobs and also better positions at these jobs.

            According to Kildon, “In 2005, nearly 59% of undergraduate degrees were granted to women.”  This gap seems to be growing, because the number of men in college is decreasing while the number of women continues to grow. One in four women makes more money then their husbands. One problem that might arise from this is that educated women will be unable to marry educated men, because there are a lot less of them. It will no longer be a big deal not to be able to find a husband to make money, because the women are doing it themselves. Having women that make enough money to sustain them lessens the dependency for alimony and child support. A lot of men these days don’t mind giving up a little bit of their power and masculinity for time with their children. If their wives are making the money, less stress is put on them to be the breadwinner of the family. It might seem that men wouldn’t want to give up this power, because tradition says that they aren’t supposed to, but according to cultural trends and this article, they are actually usually ok with it. They don’t feel threatened by successful women and are more willing to share the household work. This article claims that men are “Better suited in many ways to be contemporary homemakers.” And that it is ‘one of the only aspects of contemporary urban and suburban life that requires physical strengths is household tasks”, and I think this is because of all the technology in the workforce. A lot of boys that were surveyed for this article didn’t think that working mothers had any negative effect on child development. This change in men’s viewpoints is important iof we want to reach equality for men and women. There is nothing that says men should be any better than women, or the other way around. And in reality, boys and men that still cling to the original roles can have their own psychological problems. Men that are “hypermasculine” are at “greater risk for a host of problems, including school suspension, date rape, and drug and alcohol abuse” They also tend to try and be dominant in their relationships, and with these changes in our culture these types of men will most likely fall behind over time because there is no need for this inequality.