Bryce Covert | The Nation

Hanna Rosin’s new neon-covered book, The End of Men, just hit bookshelves and has already led to a slew of interviews and excerpt placements. The title may sound familiar: the book grew out of her Atlantic article of the same name. That piece came out at the height of the recession, when men were suffering historic levels of unemployment. Rosin’s thesis is that the recession exaggerated a broader trend already well underway, in which American men are ceding economic dominance to women, who are better suited to a new economy that values communication, collaboration and service work. Her story’s moment may have faded: since the recession officially ended, women have gotten less than 20 percent of the jobs added to the economy, regaining just a quarter of the jobs they lost during the crisis. Men have recovered 42 percent of lost jobs.

But perhaps the biggest challenge in grappling with Rosin’s book is her tendency to use key concepts over and over without stopping to consider what they actually mean. “Matriarchy,” “success,” even “feminism” all play major roles in the End of Men, but they’re sketchily defined at best. Women have what it takes to be successful in the economy, she tells us, and calls this a matriarchy, suggesting that thousands of years of ruling patriarchy are coming to an end.

Let’s do some defining, then, starting with patriarchy. What does it mean to live in a patriarchal society? It is not just men’s ability to earn more income and control the TV remote. In Stephanie Coontz’s fantastic Sunday New York Times op-ed, she describes a

Welfare has been on the forefront of the GOP’s brain lately, as the Romney/Ryan team has been relentlessly (and falsely) accusing President Obama of “gutting” welfare reform. So it’s unsurprising that it might came up in President Bill Clinton’s speech at the DNC last night. After all, Clinton was the one to sign the 1996 welfare reform bill, transforming the program into what it is today. It made sense for him to defend President Obama from the Republican attacks saying he was undoing his own legislation.

In the midst of his defense of Obama, not one to miss a chance to give himself a little back-pat, Clinton said of the ’90s reforms: “This is personal to me. We moved millions of people off welfare. It was one of the reasons that in the eight years I was president, we had a hundred times as many people move out of poverty into the middle class than happened under the previous twelve years, a hundred times as many. It’s a big deal.”

But while welfare reform may have initially reduced poverty, it left those still living at that income level worse off than they were before, reaching fewer of them and giving those it did reach less. And our poverty rates didn’t stay low. When they began to rise again, the program couldn’t offer them the support it used to. The recession has been a crystal clear, and incredibly painful, demonstration of this fact.

The recession seemed to mark the dying gasp of blue-collar jobs: as construction and manufacturing tanked, it sped along the decline of solid factory work for middle-class American men. That intensification of a long-term trend inspired such hard hand-wringing that there was a crisis of raw knuckles. Less noticed, however, has been a similar hollowing out in the middle for pink-collar work. Beyond the decent-paying public sector jobs that women have been kicked out of thanks to budget cuts in the recovery period, there’s another reason women are losing middle-class jobs and taking new ones as clerks and waitresses: job losses among secretaries and administrative assistants.

Back in 2011, a question perplexed many, even the likes of the Pew Research Center: why were women losing jobs in the private sector? Teachers were being fired because state budgets were so crunched, but that couldn’t explain why private sector women were falling behind men. My Roosevelt Institute colleague Mike Konczal and I took a look at the job losses by occupation and found a stunning trend: women had lost a total of 925,000 jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “office and administrative support occupations” category.

Checking in a year later, a new report from the National Employment Law Project shows this trend is continuing. It finds that mid-wage jobs—those making $13.84 an hour to $21.13 an hour—have been decimated during the recovery, while job gains have happened mostly in low-wage jobs that make between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour. When the report stacks up the mid-wage jobs with the weakest recovery growth, secretaries and administrative assistants clock in at number two, having lost 345,101 jobs. Third are first-line supervisors and managers of office and administrative workers—those just above the secretaries but in similar roles—who have lost 327,559 jobs. That’s a grand total of 672,660 administrative jobs lost since 2009.

After having an Internet-based back and forth on the causes (and therefore potential solutions) of the gender wage gap, Ramesh Ponnuru and I took our discussion to Bloggingheads to hash it out in real time. I want to echo his sentiment at the end: I’m really grateful not only that he agreed to do this with me but that we could have a fact-based, bipartisan, civil conversation that both highlighted some common ground—we need to give parents more childcare support, women’s choices may be constrained by society’s expectations, the GAO should do another study on the gap—and some of our differences. And as I said to him during the video, it’s refreshing to have a discussion with a conservative that doesn’t fight over the existence of the gender wage gap itself but can instead move to a conversation about how we might best address it.