Canada: The new heavyweight champions

Article here. Excerpt:

'Could this be the future? Very likely. At every age and income level, women are more likely than ever before to be the major or sole breadwinner in the family. The reason is not that more women are working, but that fewer men are. Three-quarters of the people who lost their jobs in the U.S. recession were men, and the hardest-hit sectors were the male worlds of construction, manufacturing and finance. Many of those jobs aren’t coming back. In the city of Hamilton – once known as Steeltown – just 2 per cent of the population still works in steel. In Sudbury, the town that nickel built, Inco’s unionized labour force has shrunk from 12,000 to around 3,300 souls, who are currently locked in a futile long-term strike with their foreign owner.
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All evidence suggests the gender shift is permanent. It would be nice to report that the sons of the striking nickel workers have gone off to university to become metallurgical engineers. But they have not. Just 18 per cent of Canadian males between 18 and 21 are currently attending university. Their sisters, though, are doing fine. They outperform their brothers in school and are far more focused on getting the credentials that will land them jobs as dental hygienists, bank clerks, office managers and nurses.
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Men and women also behave differently once they get there. Here’s what guys typically do in first-year university: play video games, work out, watch TV, party. Here’s what girls do: study.

“If men were operating rationally in an economic sense, they should be flooding into higher education,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington. But people don’t always operate rationally. And so we have that most modern of stereotypes – the aimless, slacker man-boy who isn’t really qualified for anything and can’t quite latch on to the job market.

As women bring home more and more of the bacon – and sometimes the whole hog – what will men do? How will relationships between the sexes be renegotiated? How will men figure out new ways to be a man? I have no idea. But for the first time since women relied on men to chase away the lions and bring home a tasty side of mastodon, it’s all up for grabs.'