For Now: It's The Family, Stupid!; Tomorrow, It Will Be Something Quite Different

Question: Why Are So Few Women at the Top of Their Professions or Companies?

The answer to that question 50 years ago was quite different than the answer to that question today. And the answer to the question today, is quite different from the answer tomorrow. Yesterday's women may not have had the opportunities to compete beyond "the glass ceiling." As for today's women? Kay S. Hymowitz explains why today's women are not willing to fight for the top job:

...women don’t ascend the career ladder in the business world the way men do. According to Catalyst, just 37 percent of those who receive the first major promotion—to manager—are women. And the higher you go, the scarcer women get. Only 26 percent of vice presidents and senior executives are female, as are 14 percent of executive committees, and those numbers haven’t changed in years.

It seems that few women are even auditioning for the star positions. A longitudinal study of Booth School of Business graduates at the University of Chicago found men and women launching careers in equal numbers and, if you take into account differences in their industries and subspecialties, earning about the same amount of money at the outset. Ten years later, though, barely half of the female grads—52 percent—were working full-time, compared with over 90 percent of the men.

In their thirties and forties, women with children are typically looking for ways to work less, not more. They’re twice as likely as men to work part-time, and surveys show that that’s the way they want it. Female physicians have been avoiding emergency-room medicine and flocking to dermatology and pediatrics, which bring fewer emergency calls and night hours. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have demonstrated that women’s preference for fewer and more flexible hours has transformed a number of professional occupations, including veterinary medicine, pharmacy work, and certain medical specialties. The group practices that have all but replaced lone practitioners in these fields allow women to limit their night and weekend hours, work three or four days a week, and avoid the headaches of ownership. The rising generation of women doesn’t look likely to change any of this. One recent survey of students by four University of Wisconsin psychologists found that college women, as they planned their careers (and they did expect to work), were already thinking about cutting back hours when they had children. A recent Gallup poll showed that 44 percent of women wished that they didn’t work at all, compared with 22 percent of men. _Kay S. Hymowitz

Ignore biology at your peril -- unless you are a politician, journalist, professor, or a bureaucrat -- and do not pay a penalty for your egregious mistakes.

So, yesterday's woman could not get to the top of the heap even if she wanted to. Today's woman, for the most part, doesn't want to pay the penalty for reaching the top, and staying there. What about tomorrow's woman?

The problem for tomorrow's women will be more complex, as coming generations of women are being raised more by peers and consumer electronics offerings than by adults who are capable of passing along meaningful principles of navigating their way through life.

Catastrophic Crisis for Girls

...young girls are in a ‘catastrophic’ state of crisis because of the ‘toxic’ influences of advertising, celebrity and pornography which pressurise them to grow up too quickly._Daily Mail

What if there is even a tiny sliver of truth in the quote above? Then rather than expect tomorrow's generations of young women to lead humans into a brave new future, we should more likely expect them to create huge new headaches for anyone even remotely connected to them.

The human capital of a society is its most precious resource. What would cause a society to squander its present and future resources -- male and female, young and adult -- at such a prodigal and cynical rate?

It may be that most of tomorrow's women will be challenged maintaining a halfway competent retail counter, or even household accounts -- much less planning important tactics and strategies for the survival or ascendancy of important public and private entities.

Where will tomorrow's competent women (and men) come from, if popular culture, the educational establishment, and the family have all been corrupted to the point of being unable to instill confidence that is based upon true competency in meaningful skills?

A lot more money is being spent on raising girls up to competitive levels in science, technology, law, medicine, business, and government. But most of that money is being mis-spent on political and ideological strategies that take no account of biology and genetics -- and are thus destined to fail.

Boys are certainly being neglected by modern hyper-feminised PC society, but in the long run that may be to their advantage -- once more unpaid volunteer mentors for boys come along and figure out what is what.

Young women, however, are caught in the political feminist's web of control, and may never emerge from the trap as a whole, independent, thinking, competent person, separate from the PC groupthink police and informer network. More's the pity.