PRECIPITOUS DECLINE OF MEN IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT OF LIFE

  

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 12, 2012

When I graduated from high school in the 1950s in the top ten percent, one quarter of us were boys and three quarters girls. 

When I graduated from university also in the 1950s in the top ten percent, three quarters of us were Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude male students and one quarter were female students or the reverse of the high school ratio. 

When I was a chemist in the laboratory and chemical engineer in the field in the 1960s, one hundred percent of us were men. 

When I was manager in the field and then an international corporate executive in the 1960s, one hundred percent of us in my company were still men. 

When I went back to graduate school in the 1970s in pursuit of a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, sixty percent of my fellow doctorate students were men and forty percent were women. 

When I returned to industry in 1980, first as an organizational development (OD) psychologist, and then as an international corporate executive, sixty percent of my fellow professionals were men and forty percent were women. 

In 1990, when I left the corporation to write books, CEOs across the nation were close to an exclusive all boys club.  Today, women head 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies. 

During my professional career, women, for the most part, no matter their acumen, academic accomplishments or expertise, seemed content to sit in the passenger seat trusting the driving and their safety to their male drivers.  Apparently, that is no longer the case.

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David Brooks of the New York Times in his column today carries the caption, “Why Men Fail.”  Brooks writes that boys earn three quarters of the D’s and F’s in high school.  This leaves them by the time they enter college clearly behind. 

Today sixty percent of bachelor and master degrees go to women in every field, including medicine, engineering, mathematics as well as the arts and humanities. 

Men are dropping out of the educational challenge in droves allowing women to support them with the false bravado of knowing the score and having views that matter. 

In 1954, 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked!  Today, only 80 percent of them hold any kind of real job. 

Millions of men are claiming disability and they are not even disabled, other then an inability to get off their asses and find a job.  Many who have jobs are doing poorly, complaining, backstabbing and retreating into "six silent killers" (see my book of that title). 

Men in the workforce compared to women overwhelmingly display these passive aggressive behaviors.  It is why I wrote the book.  Too often men see a paycheck as a right rather then the privilege of having a job.  This extends to believing they deserve merit increases because they need them, not because they have earned them. 

According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton Project, the annual earnings for median age males have dropped 28 percent over the last forty years.  Women have taken up the slack in productivity if not finding their earnings appreciating to the same extent. 

Brooks writes that women are still mainly denied the “tippy-top" positions in the corporate ladder because many take time off to raise children, but he adds, "women lead or are gaining ground everywhere else.” 

For instance, women in their twenties out earn men in their twenties, while they dominate twelve out of the fifteen fastest growing professions.

Brooks gives neurological and cultural reasons for male decline.  I see this as something of a rationalization.  It has been my experience that women adapt to change better and embrace fear and humiliation more courageously than men. 

Women use both sides of their brains, that is, both their cognitive (so called "masculine) and intuitive (so called "feminine") sides, which, incidentally, men have as well but prefer using only the cognitive side. 

Consequently, women are more inclined to be learners than knowers, listeners than tellers, pragmatists than dreamers, problem solvers than problem theorists.  Men seemingly have a preference for putting the best face on a problem before engaging it, better known as procrastination. 

Learning in school requires the need to focus, to sit still, and take instruction from authority figures.  Girls do this more readily.  My wife, BB, tells me that boys in her experience from pre-school through the early years of grammar school are more likely to be candidates for Ritalin for having attention deficit disorders.

Hanna Rosin in “The End of Men” (2012) blames it on immigrants coming to a new country, bringing their social-cultural baggage and mindset of the old country with them.  This is equally true of women, but men are more likely to resist assimilating the new language and ways.  Women, once they grasp the reality of the situation, will see that their children embrace the new. 

These mothers are more successful with daughters than sons.  Often the sons of immigrants drift away from school and into crime, as the Criminal Justice System can attest.  Moreover, my work as a police consultant (1970-1980) confirms this.

Reluctance to adapt to change is not confined to immigrants. Workers comfortable in the old ways of work are known to keep their minds in the old one.

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A case in point.  Engineers at Honeywell Clearwater (Florida) in the 1980s were not performing well.  This prompted me to conduct an OD intervention including a competency-compensation review of this community of more than a thousand engineers. 

Eighty percent of the engineers were found to be working on technology developed after they had left school.  Taking up the technical slack were recent engineering graduates, but only at a fraction of the compensation of the veterans. 

One neophyte engineer told me that veteran engineers got to go to all the technical seminars as a seniority gratuity, and not as a learning experience.  He complained, "We carry them and they get all the pay and perks." 

To address this problem, we developed an “in house” technical education program.  Our efforts first met with resistance from senior engineers.  This included top engineering management until it was shown competency-compensation data. 

Once the program was underway, I wrote several monographs for the program, and gave a paper at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida (re: “Combating Technical Obsolescence: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program,” 1986). 

Today, Ph.D. engineers in the facility teach credit courses for engineers and technicians interested in pursuing engineering or advanced engineering degrees at the University of South Florida's School of Engineering.

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Alas, women are showing more courage and adaptability than men to change.  Women of all ages are going back to school, while men, Brooks says, are waiting for the dial to spin back to the way it was.  

Left out, what are men doing? 

Author Rosin says men are exploiting the “hookup culture,” getting plenty of sex without the necessity of commitment or romance.  Ironically, women are supporting them in this hookup culture for it allows them to have sex and fun without carrying an immature adolescent grown man as an appendage. 

Desperate to rise, women find sex without commitment allows them to focus on their professional goals.  This is evident as women lead the charge in women-owned new businesses. 

This is not the feminism claptrap or females throwing sand in the face of the ninety-pound male weakling on the beach.  Brooks says this is less about Achilles and more about the Odysseus many-sided crafty go-getter.  He ends by saying men may have to acknowledge that in the modern world they are strangers in a strange land.

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