Bad news comes in fours
Sigh. I don't usually let the news get me down but the nearby large metropolitan-area newspaper today was, um...
- Pharmacists may deny 'morning-after' pill
- Women earn the degrees, but not the money
- Bush backs amendment banning gay marriage
- Come on, be a man: The macho mentality is back, or so say new ads (a reprint "lifestyle" page picked up from the Sacramento Bee)
The good news? Well, there is some.
On the Plan-B thing the Governor, most doctors, legislative leaders, and almost all right-minded people with influence in the state oppose the "conscience policy" and (reading between the lines and since the pharmacy board seems to be mostly progressive appointees even though the vote was unanimous) I get the impression there might be some kind of doctor vs. pharmacist turf-war overtones to the whole thing. Anyway, the article sub-heads say things like "Pharmacy ruling spurs fury" and "rule could change." The fact that it made the front page, above the fold is itself pretty significant.
On the women, degrees, and money thing, the headlines haven't really changed over the last 30 years but there have been some qualitative changes in the articles themselves: Women now outnumber men in both colleges and grad schools, they account for about 50% in law and med schools (up from 22% in 1980) and they earn over half of all business degrees (up from 30% in 1980). And here's another between-the-lines trend: while women working full-time are *still* earning roughly 76% as much as men (not changed at all, as far as I can tell from 1980, which sort of boggles me) that's probably going to change considerably. It takes 20-25 years for college graduates to reach the upper levels of management. That means very few major decision makers in business, education, and government tended to graduate much after 1980 -- when women were still very underrepresented in professional degree programs. Based on demographics alone I think gender gaps are going to at least equalize. (I might add that unless something happens to alter contemporary boys and men's slide into slackery, college drop-outery, live-at-home-into-their-30's-ery, and video/dopery there just ain't going to be much room for them in boardrooms, executive suites, and administration offices after 2026.)
About the homophobic marriage amendment thing, one way or another this is going to be doomed by demographics. People at or below college age overwhelmingly are overwhelmingly unconcerned about gay marriage and people under 40 are only evenly divided. People *over* 40 care a great deal but... they aren't going to be around forever. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out last year (sorry, no link) conservatives are *desperate* to pass a constitutional amendment because a) they're aware that the demographic window is closing on them rather quickly and b) they see an amendment as the only possible way to legislate "from beyond the grave." (Yglesias and others have pointed out, correctly, that in the long run such an amendment will far more likely marginalize rather than strengthen marriage as an institution.)
Finally, about the "Manly men" ad business, according to a study of masculinity conducted by Rose Cameron, an executive VP and planning director for a major ad firm
...half of men polled say their role in society is unclear and that they feel "less dominant" than in previous decades. More than 70 percent of men said advertising was out of touch with men's "reality."
The bottom line to all this is a) if you're interested in a society where gender or sexual orientation is irrelevant outside the bedroom (or anywhere else we choose to have sex) we're not at all there, but b) the trends looking forward are pretty encouraging.
