Learn to Settle for Less, Girls

More and more intelligent women are being forced to 'marry down' and find a less-educated man

Women are overtaking men in education and in the workplace, a senior Government minister said yesterday – creating a new generation of stay-at-home fathers. Universities minister David Willetts predicted relationships and traditional household structures will be transformed as the fairer sex powers ahead, and women earn more than their male partners.

Successful women will have to ‘marry down’ by choosing partners less qualified than them – and may increasingly select men based on how supportive they might be to their careers, rather than whether they can support them financially.

Although this article is from the UK, the same is largely true in the US as well, in most field.  Except for the "hard" sciences (physics and math come to mind) women are the majority of students in many fields. In the environmental field that I work in, I would estimate that good intern applications from women outnumber those from men 2:1, or more.  Although the upper ranks of the field are still largely male dominated, it's pretty clear that even in the middle and certainly in the entry levels, women are dominant.

Mr Willetts said there was clear evidence from schools that boys are ‘lagging behind’, and are being overtaken by female students at university.

He said: ‘I am not against women having those advantages but there is now a rather striking gap, if you look at the statistics, where it looks as if approximately 50 per cent of women are graduating from university by the time they’re 30 and perhaps about 40 per cent of men.’ 

I think the "education bubble" is responsible for much of this.  With education loan dollars easy to obtain, women, who often initially have more nebulous career plans (a few years in the workforce, take off a few years for the family, and a few more years back in the workforce) have been encouraged to go in

I also believe the current "knowledge centered" industries favor women due to some mental traits that differ from men on the average.  Women, by and large, are less competitive and more into "networking".  When the task at hand involves felling, bucking and hauling hundreds of trees out of the woods, a healthy sense of competition, is good, and spending a lot of time talking about your feelings about killing trees isn't.  When the job is selling a complex plan to a large and complicated hierarchy involving multiple people superior networking skills are likely to be rewarded.

Also, not all the best jobs require a formal education.  I will offer the cases of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both of whom dropped out of college to pursue their dreams in the "knowledge industries", and succeeded beyond what anyone might have anticipated.

What does this mean for men of the future?  Well, women are going to have to start identifying the ones with promise younger and younger:

Thanks to the Wombat at The Other McCain for listing this in his weekly collection, Rule 5 Monday. The Classical Liberal also picked it up in his collection of cuties.