What’s Next: The End of Men

by Bill Noblitt

Flabbergasted, I almost drop my pen and paper when Stetson University’s Faculty Learning Community Day speaker, James H. Johnson Jr., Ph.D., talks about the end of men.

What? I’m sitting right here. Can’t he see me? Have I become invisible?

women in the workplace
Johnson: For the first time in history, women outnumber men in the workplace, and men are attending college in ever-lower numbers.

Well, men are not so much invisible as missing in action. Johnson, a University of North Carolina professor and demographer, pointed out that, for the first time in history, women outnumber men in the workplace, and men are attending college in ever-lower numbers.

Johnson also poked holes in thoughts on illegal immigration and other sacred cows by citing data from the 2010 census. Just the huge numbers migrating from the Northeast and Midwest to the South is head-scratchingly hard to understand. Johnson says that on average we will have 28 major shifts and life-changes in our lifetimes.

His numbers shatter the Mad Men TV show-era fantasy of a male-dominated, white society. Now, according to those figures, it’s increasingly less white and more female dominated. (Listen to Johnson’s presentation.)

James H. Johnson, Ph.D.
James H. Johnson, Ph.D.

In her Atlantic Monthly article, titled, oddly enough, “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin wrote about the biologist Ronald Ericsson, who developed a method in the 1970s that would help couples determine the sex of their children. Ericsson then believed, according to Rosin, that he could help couples produce more male children who would better benefit society.

However, Ericsson was shocked when more couples — to the tune of 75 percent — wanted more daughters than sons. Today, he’s changed his way of thinking.

“Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of ’em graduate from college,” Ericsson quips in the book. “They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way — these females are going to leave us males in the dust.”

Johnson and Rosin both say that is exactly what happened.

“The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions,” Rosin wrote. “Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools — for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women.”

Where Are the Men?

“The sex ratio in higher education has been 60 percent female and 40 percent male for decades,” said Johnson. “In 2010, colleges and uniEnd of Men sex-ratio-comparisonversities granted 522,000 more degrees to women than to men. You can’t have stable families. You can’t have stable communities when you leave that many men out.

“Where are the men?” he asked.

Similarly, according to Stetson University’s 2013-14 Common Data Set, the undergraduate population has more women than men. Women make up 57 percent of the undergraduates while 43 percent of the undergraduate population is men.

And the problem goes deeper.

“Eighty percent of the job loss in the 2008 Great Recession happened to men,” he explained, calling it a “Man-cession.”

“Today, three times as many men of working age do not work at all compared to 1969,” said Johnson. “In fact, since 1969, the median wage of the American male has declined by almost $13,000 after accounting for inflation.

“And a lot of these men have not been able to make the transition to this new, post-industrial economy,” he asserted.

Rosin’s Atlantic Monthly article asked this question: “What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?” In other words, with fewer men obtaining college degrees and with more women in the workplace, will these numbers mean a power shift in the American economy?

Women who made it to the top.
Women who have made it to the top (clockwise from upper left): Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook; Indra Nooyi, CEO, Pepsico; Mary Barra, CEO, General Motors; Angela Ahrendts, Sr. VP, Apple (and former CEO of Burberry).

“We know women have made gains in the labor market in terms of their labor force participation and even in terms of the wage gap,” said Diane Everett, Ph.D., Stetson sociology professor who interprets Johnson’s figures in a different way. “And women have moved into jobs that are historically male dominated.

“But that’s because a lot of male-dominated occupations have disappeared with the changes in the economy, with economic restructuring and globalization,” she said. “Jobs that were around in the ’50s and ’60s and were the backbone of the American economy are not around any more.”

Even with these changes, according to Everett, “a lot of women are still relegated to service positions that pay minimum wage with no benefits.

“And if you look at the Fortune 500, you will see that the CEOs are still predominantly white men,” she underscored.

“Generally, women rarely come into an occupation, and then that job suddenly shifts from male dominated to female dominated until the men start leaving that line of work,” she added.

This Is Biology. This Is Sociology.

Women, too, figure into the illegal immigration issue, with the median age of Hispanic females at 27 and the median age of white women at more than 40, according to Johnson.

“Young people are more likely to have children than old folks,” he said simply. “There’s something in demography called completed fertility. Completed fertility for women begins between the ages of 40 and 44.

“This is biology. This is sociology. Hispanic women having children is where the growth is going to occur in our country. And if you shut down immigration, your economy can’t grow,” he asserted.

End of Men Immigrant flow

“The immigration debate is nothing to be taken lightly if we are aging out of the childbearing years,” he continued. “Where will the next generation of talent come from?” He noted, for example, that in 1990, 66 percent of the births in America were non-Hispanic whites. That percentage dropped below 50 percent in 2011.

As part of the “Browning of America,” Johnson believes that growth is coming from those of color. Will this growth hurt the U.S. economy?

“How many of you have heard that Hispanics are a burden on the healthcare system?” he asked. “But how many chronic health problems do you really have when you’re 27, the median age of Hispanics? What kind of health problems do you have when you’re 40, the median age of non-Hispanic whites in America?”

“You have also heard that these immigrants are a burden on the system, that they cost more than they contribute,” Johnson reiterated. However, illegal immigrants help the economy by buying goods and services and paying taxes, he pointed out. North Carolina Hispanics, for example, spent $9.2 billion ($15,130 per person) while the cost of essential services to them (healthcare, corrections, K-12 education) was $817 million or $1,360 per person.

A Net Benefit

“The net benefit to North Carolina was about $8.3 billion or about $13,000 per person,” he explained. For every $1 spent, the return to the North Carolina economy was $10.

“You are going to hurt your economy if you take this money out,” he said. “Every study we have done — including one in Arizona — shows this huge net benefit. If you want to be anti-immigrant, you also need to understand that it’s not just the people you’re targeting, it’s the whole economy.”

With the graying of America, those dollars become even more important for funding Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, according to Johnson.

“Think about how much more they would be contributing to the economy if they had the same rights and privileges as legal citizens,” Everett emphasized.

Why, then, do so many have this stereotypical view of illegal immigrants?

“One explanation is scapegoat theory. When people lose their jobs or experience hard economic times, they often do not blame the economy or the government as the cause of their hardship,” Everett stated. “They often look at somebody else as the source of these problems, and that ‘somebody else’ is often groups that are worse off than they are, such as illegal immigrants or other minority groups.

endofmen1
Everett: People who lose a job during hard economic times often “scapegoat” minorities.

“Those groups become the targets of frustration and hostility, because they are seen as a threat and the cause of problems such as the disappearance of jobs,” she adds “They become scapegoats.”

Johnson also pointed to other misperceptions about illegal immigration and declared, “If you have a problem with immigration, get over it.”

“Those from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are the nonwhite ethnic minority members who are part of this Browning of America,” he said. “The U.S. immigrant population went from 10.3 million in 1900 to 40.4 million in 2011 because we liberalized our immigration policy in the mid-1980s.”

Citing history and laws as reasons for the U.S. to hold back the numbers from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, Johnson stressed, “We’ve put the blame on one ethnic group, Hispanics.”

But the numbers show that those who come as tourists and international students are a major part of the illegal immigration issue.

“They are more likely to be well educated and sit right beside you, and you don’t even know it,” he added.

According to his research, these groups now number 53 million, and many times have overstayed their visas, thus making them illegal immigrants. He said that 40-45 percent of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. get into the country this way.

“These are folks we invite to come on a temporary basis,” he said. The reason little is heard about this population is that “they contribute $12.8 billion to our economy, and this is big business for us.”

Dealing With Change

It’s one thing to understand this brave new world. It’s quite another to know how faculty can help their students deal with these dramatic changes.

“We’re facing a free-agent economy,” Johnson pointed out. “Our students are going to have to sell their services and themselves. And they need to stay on top of information in their fields and know the trends.

End of Men workforce“Furthermore, we need to help our students develop this cultural elasticity where they can move among cultures with ease,” he continued. “This requires them to be agile and flexible.”

Everett believes that Johnson’s discussion of demographic disruption goes beyond preparing students for this new society.

“We need to turn the lens on ourselves and ask how we are going to respond,” Everett says. To drive home her point, she reaches for a recent Orlando Sentinel, where she points to two stories on the front page that reflect the radical changes Johnson discussed, one about students who “step out with business startups” and the other about “sitcom shows life for Asian-Americans.”

“This is happening now,” she stressed. Everett recalls hearing students coming out of classes in Davis Hall on Stetson’s DeLand campus speaking Spanish. “And I am thinking that if I’m going to be a responsible member of this community, I need to go back and relearn Spanish to be able to communicate with people.

“In other words, the challenge is on us to adapt.”