Census Bureau, has been tracking young families week by week, state by state. When September came around, they wisely opted for just one of those jobs.Īnd by “they,” I mean “she.” Misty Heggeness, a research economist at the U.S. Parents of little kids had already experimented in the previous school year with trying to do their own work while serving as teachers’ assistants and realized it was impossible. What complex confluence of demographic shifts converged at that critical time? School started. The recent employment wipeout dates to September 2020, when 865,000 women dropped out of the labor force, compared with 216,000 men. As with so many things, the pandemic just exposed what should have been obvious all along. Add to that late capitalism’s stagnant wages, making it nearly impossible to support a family on one salary. American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled. It’s now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning.

It was the year of the easy office-sitcom gag “Where’s the ladies’ room?” (haha, there isn’t one!). That was the year of Working Girl, when, in the grand finale, our heroine marvels at her drab new office like it’s the Taj Mahal. The pandemic landed us back at our lowest workforce-participation levels since 1988. American women had made it to half the workforce with negligible institutional support and no cultural upheaval. The chipper book jacket reads, “At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men they have pulled ahead by almost every measure.” The optimism! The smugness! The tragic naïveté! I suppose even back then I understood, somewhere deep down, that this was a high-wire act. In 2012, I wrote a book called The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Photo-Illustration: by The Cut Photos Getty Images

The end of men hanna