DATED

The role of the gender in society is evolving. With power shifting toward women at work and home, where does that leave men?

- JONATHAN HO

ACCORDING TO NATIONAL CENTRE for Education Research, only 40 percent of college degrees are going to men versus 60 percent going to women, when just 50 years ago, the gender proportions were reversed. Academics Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko offer some explanations for the change: In the post-World War II era, the financial return to women of higher education greatly increased. At first, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, women tended to pursue female-intensive occupations such as teaching and social work upon graduation. Then, beginning from the late 1960s and early 1970s, young women’s expectations changed radically. Rather than follow in their mothers’ footsteps, they pushed the envelope by aiming for careers outside of those that were traditional for women. Case in point: working mother and MIT graduate Margaret Hamilton invented the modern concept of software and helped NASA land men on the moon in 1962.

Changing Socio-Cultural Dynamics

Inevitably, changing economic dynamics precipitated changes in sociocultural dynamics. Although it seems silly, there was a time when proper young men and women could not speak to one another unless they had been formally introduced. Even the “bro code” (where men do not date their bros’ exes), which seems sacrosanct today, would be an anathema to those living in small towns in 1950s America ‒ if it were not permissible for others to date an ex, it would be mathematically impossible to find new couplings once a relationship ended.