The new workforce majority

USA Today ran a cover article detailing the impending female majority in the workforce. At the current pace, we are very close to seeing women at 50%+1 of the workforce.

Women are on the verge of outnumbering men in the workforce for the first time, a historic reversal caused by long-term changes in women's roles and massive job losses for men during this recession.

Women held 49.83% of the nation's 132 million jobs in June and they're gaining the vast majority of jobs in the few sectors of the economy that are growing, according to the most recent numbers available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Men have been hardest hit in the recession with the majority of jobs lost being in male dominated industries and new jobs being created in female dominated industries.

Through June, men have lost 74% of the 6.4 million jobs erased since the recession began in December 2007. Men have lost more than 3 million jobs in construction and manufacturing alone.

The only parts of the economy still growing — health care, education and government — have traditionally hired mostly women. That dominance has increased in part because federal stimulus funding directed money to education, health care and state and local governments.

The answers is not to send more people to college. We already have too many people with college degrees and the ones that do are carrying a ton of debt around (see this article in the WSJ on the burgeoning college debt load). This push to send even more people to college makes no economic sense. All that accomplishes is to provide jobs for professors, increase the debt load of America, create a larger class of over-educated workers and cheapens college educations.

This raises one big question in my mind:

Who is raising our children?

In large part, they are being raised by three groups in place of their mothers: paid staff at daycare facilities/schools, the mass media and their peers.

This represent a seismic shift in the American landscape. More and more women are working outside of the home, at least part time. That relegates more of the rearing of children to someone else, either a family member or more likely a paid helper in the home or in a day care until a child is old enough to go to school (which in many ways is day care on a grander scale). Children develop their character from all sorts of places, few of which have anything to do with the home and their parents. Call me a conspiracy monger but I don't think that is unintentional. I have long held that separating children from parents is a major goal of a certain section of our society that sees parents as an impediment to the raising of children. We are already reaping the harvest of generations of children raised by strangers and by their peers. I shudder to think of the character of America 20-30 years from now.

It also is creating a larger and larger body of unemployed and underemployed men. Nothing good can come from that. A bunch of idle men is a recipe for disaster. It is a troubling demographic trend in places like India and China with enormous populations that are increasingly male because of sex selection abortions. It is not healthy for the world to have an overabundance of young men, especially coupled with an economic downturn that leaves those men without jobs and without families.

These trends are the gathering clouds of a serious demographic storm.