Are we experiencing an historic, below-the-radar change in the making?
Hillary Clinton's campaign during the 2008 Election brought this issue to the fore: can a female politician become a serious candidate, win the nomination, and even become President of the United States? The answer was a resounding yes. That Hillary didn't win the nomination doesn't negate the fact that she won almost 18 million votes and came oh-so-close to winning the Democratic Party's nomination. If she'd been the nominee, could she have won the General Election last November? I think probably yes but we'll never know.
Arcadio Esquivel, La Prensa (Panama)
An interesting article published in Foreign Policy magazine explores the issue of declining male dominance.
The article makes the following assertion
The Death of Macho
Manly men have been running the world forever. But the Great Recession is changing all that, and it will alter the course of history.
The era of male dominance is coming to an end.
Seriously.
For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe.
What are the factors and examples contributing to this change?
- Men have suffered more than 80% of job losses during the current economic recession. Millions more may be lost due to outsourcing. The numbers are similar for European job losses.
- In most of the developed world, female college graduates will soon outnumber male college graduates by 3 to 2, furthering the knowledge gap between the sexes.
- An article in American Journal of Public Health found that the "the financial strain of unemployment" will affect men much harder than women in the coming years, creating many unhappy men and all that entails.
- Two countries -- Iceland and Lithuania -- recently elected female leaders who were not a part of the all-male economic elite which guided the two countries towards the current recession.
Will this trend accelerate and will more countries (literally) throw the male bums out? Entrenched institutions on Wall Street and capitalism itself will survive the turmoil but earth-shaking changes are underway.
For several years now it has been an established fact that, as behavioral finance economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean memorably demonstrated in 2001, of all the factors that might correlate with overconfident investment in financial markets—age, marital status, and the like — the most obvious culprit was having a Y chromosome. And now it turns out that not only did the macho men of the heavily male-dominated global finance sector create the conditions for global economic collapse, but they were aided and abetted by their mostly male counterparts in government whose policies, whether consciously or not, acted to artificially prop up macho.
How will different countries -- both developed and developing -- counter this trend? Which measures will they adopt to reduce the number of angry and unemployed men? How will the relationship between the sexes be redefined? Read the full article to appreciate the scope of change about to happen.
The author concludes that
This is not to say that women and men will fight each other across armed barricades. The conflict will take a subtler form, and the main battlefield will be hearts and minds. But make no mistake: The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent.
I found this to be a fascinating and provocative article which suggests the kind of change the world has never experienced before. It may certainly have some interesting ramifications. In particular, I am interested in your thoughts as to how politics in this country would be affected in the future.