I can’t remember where I heard this, perhaps on NPR. There was a whole piece on how women now make up maybe 53% of college students. Men can’t cut the mustard, anymore, academically speaking.
I also believe that women now make up close to 50% of the workforce. It’s hard to tell because everyone talks about labor participation rates, not total employment.
It’s true that the glass ceiling hasn’t been cracked yet, but demographically speaking it has to happen. There just won’t be enough men around to band together to keep women out.
Anyway, if women are smarter, and they do more work, it can’t be long before it becomes a standard that in couples, women make more than the men. Again, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is nearly already the case. I know the wage gap has been coming down. I remember that ten or twenty years ago, women made something like 63 cents for every dollar a man made.
Lately I’ve heard the number is up in the high 70s. Having a few men make horrendous amounts of money could skew the figures, and perhaps in a majority of couples, women make more than men.
The trends, should they continue, will end with women being the “breadwinners” not too far in the future. Certainly less than fifty years, which is a drop in the bucket in terms of the amount of time humans have been around.