Editorials & Other Articles

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Tue Feb 28, 2012, 04:42 PM Feb 2012

One Mancession Later, Are Women Really Victors in the New Economy?

http://www.thenation.com/article/166468/one-mancession-later-are-women-really-victors-new-economy

Six years ago, the housing bubble imploded, igniting the recession. Construction and manufacturing soon crumbled, taking jobs mostly held by men down with them. Not long after, AEI’s Mark J. Perry referred to the “mancession” when testifying before Congress, and hand-wringing trend pieces, worrying that men would experience a permanent slump in employment and wages, began to appear.

The apotheosis of this genre, Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men,” appeared in The Atlantic in the summer of 2010, going one step further to suggest that an “unprecedented role reversal [was] now under way.” What if, Rosin asked, women are better suited to today’s economy? What if the mancession presages a new economy in which women’s skills and talents are prized over men’s, and men’s economic prospects never recover? (To see how this trope lives on, just watch the trailers for ABC’s now-defunct show Work It in which two out-of-work—male—mechanics resorted to dressing in drag to score jobs.)

Women make up almost half of the workforce today, up from about thirty percent in 1940. We hold over half of middle management jobs. More women than men are employed in growing industries like healthcare and retail sales. Shortly after Rosin’s article appeared, a study found that young, urban, childless women make more than similar men do.

But anyone who declares that women have “won” the new economy is premature at best. Women may be over-represented in growing sectors, but those jobs pay poorly, offer few benefits, come with grudging work and provide little opportunity for advancement. The edge on wages experienced by young women evaporates as they progress in their careers. When women do get to middle management, they’re paid less than men and they struggle to advance much further up the ladder. And women with children are left far behind.

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One Mancession Later, Are Women Really Victors in the New Economy? (Original Post) xchrom Feb 2012 OP

and yet, I seem to remember reading that most of the jobs that have come back since this so-called niyad Feb 2012 #1

i don't think the author likes the word either. nt xchrom Feb 2012 #2

America’s Top Magazines: Still Not Hiring Women xchrom Feb 2012 #3

niyad

(113,966 posts)

1. and yet, I seem to remember reading that most of the jobs that have come back since this so-called

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Tue Feb 28, 2012, 05:05 PM

Feb 2012

"mancession" (what a word, as though women were not affected by the crashed economy)
were being taken by men.

xchrom

(108,903 posts)

2. i don't think the author likes the word either. nt

Reply to niyad (Reply #1)

Tue Feb 28, 2012, 05:11 PM

Feb 2012

xchrom

(108,903 posts)

3. America’s Top Magazines: Still Not Hiring Women

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Tue Feb 28, 2012, 05:55 PM

Feb 2012

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/02/28/433972/americas-top-magazines-still-not-hiring-women/

Vida, an organization devoted to examination and discussion of the roles women play in literature, has released its latest survey of the articles and reviews published by women in major magazines in 2011, and the results aren’t encouraging.

Of articles published by The Atlantic in 2011, 64 were by women and 184 were by men. In the Boston Review, the ratio was 60 to 131; in Harper’s, 13 to 65; in the London Review of Books 30 to 186; in The New Republic, 50 to 118; in the New York Review of Books a truly embarrassing 19 to 133; the New Yorker published 165 stories by women to 459 by men; and the New York Times Book Review printed 273 articles by women to 520 by men. The Nation, ostensibly a progressive publication, published 118 articles by women and 293 by men. Granta’s the only publication that’s close to parity—in fact, it published slightly more pieces by women than by men, 34 to 30. Perhaps some of these other publications should ask how Granta finds women, a task that appears so phenomenally daunting to the rest of the publishing world that it suggests that women, rather than man, are the most dangerous game.

Because really, the only answer here is not that these publications can’t find women. It’s that they don’t really care if they do or not. These numbers, and the annual discussion of them, seem to have succeeded in making a lot of female journalists and readers angry and frustrated, but they don’t appear to have made editors feel ashamed, much less called to action. And I’m not quite sure what it would take to persuade them to shake off their lethargy and acceptance of the status quo, which really means accepting sexism. Do we really have to educate editors that women can bring new perspectives on major stories, and not just to stories about living as a single woman or going through a divorce? What level of evidence would it take to persuade folks that while Katherine Boo and Marie Colvin are and were utterly extraordinary, they are not the only women who can go into profoundly difficult settings and win sources’ trust? Because at this point, I would like to know what it would take to humiliate or convince editors at the major magazines to think more creatively about story assignments and recruiting pitches. Numbers clearly aren’t doing the trick.

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