A recent academic study, The End of Men and Rise of Women in the High-Skilled Labor Market, shows that women are rapidly gaining ground in a number of high paying fields.
The reason is success in a growing number of high-skill professions requires more interpersonal skills like collaboration, empathy, and managing others. As the study points out, there's a lot of research showing women, on average, have stronger interpersonal skills than men.
Key quote from the study abstract:
Since 1980, the probability that a college-educated man was employed in a cognitive/high-wage occupation fell. This contrasts starkly with the experience of college-educated women: their probability of working in these occupations rose, despite a much larger increase in the supply of educated women relative to men during this period.
So not only are women improving in terms of their likelihood of working in high wage occupations relative to men, the number of well educated women has exceeded that of men for several decades.
We've covered the growing education gap between women and men in the past and the gap appears to be increasing.
This education gap, combined with a greater need for social skills, is resulting not just in high skill professions, but the labor market in general.
At the same time, men continue to not do well.
The recent New York Times article The Increasing Significance of the Decline of Men provides an in-depth look at the many problems men are facing. Key quote:
... men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the workforce, abusing opiods and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.
The end of men is another topic we've long covered.
Yes, we're aware that men on average out earn women, hold more senior executive positions, etc. We also know there's still more work to be done on gender equality.
But the trends driving the end of men and the rise of women are powerful and show no signs of turning around. Expect women to continue to gain relative to men across a wide variety of social and economic measures in the coming years.
Because of this, don't be surprised if in another decade or so we're talking about how to achieve gender equality for men.
Our section on Women covers both the rise of women and the problems facing men in more detail.