Both Liza Mundy (The Richer Sex) and Hanna Rosin (The End of Men) argue that the transition to a postindustrial, service- and knowledge-based economy—in conjunction with declining gender discrimination—are leading inevitably to women's economic dominance. I have critiqued those stories in a series of posts on my site Family Inequality.
But there is one piece of Mundy and Rosin's argument I haven't questioned until now. It is so intuitively appealing that I assumed it was true: The demands of the economy are shifting dramatically in women's favor. Brains have superseded brawn and social skills have become increasingly important, they both claim (and I accepted without thinking much about it) which all favors women over men.
Mundy and Rosin make frequent references to a set of projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), showing that the occupations with the largest expected growth are dominated by women rather than men. But that description is, it turns out, misleading.
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