A question posed last week at Times Higher Education, a data company that analyzes university trends and reported on recent government statistics that show the gender gap on college campuses has widened, asks, “Should we be worried that women outnumber men on college campus?”
And the answer is yes, we should.
There is, of course, more than one reason why it matters that women are outpacing men in education and, as a byproduct, in the marketplace. But I’m concerned with one in particular: how this new reality affects marriage.
It may be no longer be fashionable to admit that women need men on whom they can depend, but this remains a biological imperative. Women tend to marry across and up the dominance hierarchy, and for good reason: pregnancy, childbirth, and the immeasurable needs of children put women, and children, in a vulnerable position. That women have entered the marketplace in spades doesn’t make this any less true.
We know from the research that most women choose to leave the workforce when they have children, either temporarily or permanently (hence, the reason for feminist angst about America’s ‘gender gap’), which means they will need a man on whom they can rely. If the man they marry is unable to carry the financial load, conflict is never far behind.
I hear from these women often. Take Laura, who writes, “I have a Master’s degree and worked hard to ensure I could support myself, but all I ever wanted was to be a stay-at-home mom, and I’m the only one working. My husband sleeps all day and drives an Uber a few nights a week and never does anything to clean or provide. We are broke and in debt, and I make a really good salary but don’t do anything I want to do because there’s no extra income, and I have to support the entire family. As I write this, I am working from home today, and he is snoring in the next room.”
Laura’s circumstances may be extreme, but the overall arrangement is not. More and more wives are feeling the brunt of breadwinning, and it always makes me want to say, “Be careful what you wish for.” This is what equality looks like. No one ever told women how the equality meme would ultimately play itself out.
That’s not to say all high-achieving women end up with low-achieving men. But with far more women than men going to college, it’s a common scenario and will become even more common as the years roll by. And the forecast for this type of arrangement isn’t good. Not only does it put undue pressure on wives to continually produce, women tend to lose respect for men whose earnings are considerably less than theirs.
Moreover, the health of both partners suffers under this arrangement. In 2013, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found that wives who out-earned their husbands “were more likely to suffer from insomnia and to use anti-anxiety medication.” They also found that men who are out-earned by their wives “are more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication than their male breadwinner counterparts, even when this inequality is small.”
This all sounds rather blasphemous, but that’s only because it undermines the equality narrative. If we approach the subject biologically, rather than ideologically, we can see that men are emboldened when they take on the provider role. Feeding their families is as instinctual to them as pregnancy is to most women. That’s not to say there aren’t some husbands who willingly forgo the breadwinning role in order to be full-time dads. It is simply to say that it’s rare. Most of the men who are falling behind educationally and professionally will not choose to depend on a woman, and the women who are pulling ahead will not be looking for a man to support.
So what’s the answer? To be honest, I’m not sure. But women outpacing men in school and at work is a huge cause for concern. As Jordan Peterson explains in this five-minute video, “As a woman’s IQ increases, the probability that she’ll be married decreases.”
Case in point: My friend Sarah has an M.B.A. from a prestigious university and an extremely successful career. She is also twice divorced, and that is no coincidence. At present, Sarah is dating and hoping to find a match, but it isn’t easy. She likes the man she’s dating, but he’s already expressed ambivalence about the amount of money Sarah makes relative to him.
To be sure, this is a very difficult topic to address — and there are no winners and losers. Nevertheless, it’s a new reality that demands a response.
So yes, we should be worried. We should be very, very worried.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, Fox News contributor, and trustee of Leading Women for Shared Parenting. Her fifth book, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage: HOW LOVE WORKS, was published in February 2017.
