Even though the career I am currently pursuing has the reputation of being heavily male-dominated, the reality is that there has been a big push towards ramping up the number of women. Some companies aim for a quota of 50% women, even though there are few female graduates coming out of university. Consequently, sometimes the bar gets lowered so much that it effectively disappears, with women who lack qualifications getting the job. Yet, after you have gotten the job, you also have to pretend to do the job, and this is where some of those women may have a rude awakening.
The other day I attended a video conference at work, which had 50% women, three men and three women, to be exact. The faces of the women were arranged in a row on my screen, and I was rather amazed when I noticed how they looked. One had a nasty case of resting-bitch face, the other looked bored out of her mind, and the third one seemed close to falling asleep. I just had to take a screenshot of this and I would love to post it, but for privacy reasons I cannot do so. Needless to say, this screenshot has caused quite some amusement among friends of mine.
All of those women were in their mid to late twenties. You can bet that it was their “dream” to have their job, and that they believed that they would get great satisfaction out of it. After all, they trained their whole life for it, so why are they so unhappy? I bet that this is a question at least some of the women in this situation ask themselves. It is of course an utterly misogynist statement to make, but I have a hunch that women who spend their youth on having children and taking care of their family, while their husband brings home the bacon, are in a much better place in terms of their mental health. There are not so many young women who go down this route. However, there is the phenomenon that once women marry and start having kids, they take their career a lot less seriously. Some just work part-time, and other drop out of the workforce.
On a societal level, my hunch is that unhappiness overall has increased a lot due to women in the workplace, and by this I do not refer to nasty female bosses. Instead, women cannot fulfill their biological purpose. Call it sexist, but I just do not see how playing around with PowerPoint will trigger the same levels of endorphins as taking care of their baby. Also, by pushing women into the workforce, men get driven out. Being idle is, in my view, a bigger issue for men as, due to their higher levels of testosterone, want to achieve something. If we block one avenue, i.e. gainful employment, they will look for others, some of which are a net-negative for society.
It would be a bold statement to say that in order to solve the mental health crisis of women, we should take them out of the workforce. Yet, this seems to be exactly what is needed. In a more scientifically-minded society, we would do precisely that, i.e. pick a few women, introduce them to Chads, and give them the option to get pregnant and dropping out of the workforce. My hunch is that most would happily hop on that opportunity, figuratively and literally.
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My hunch is that, all else being equal, about 5% to 10% of the women would still choose to remain in the workforce. It would be mostly women with a rather masculinized personality, those who for some reason or another were exposed to higher than average levels of testosterone during development (in utero, typically).
You can usually figure out who these women are without much difficulty. They are less attractive to heterosexual males, their attitude, body and face shape give them away. Lesbians are overrepresented in this group, as are feminist activists.
I quite recently met one woman like that, she is a small farmer in the countryside. Drives a pickup truck, orders men around, seems to have no problem wielding a chainsaw. Only thing missing was a red MAGA hat. 🙂
Agree. There are also women on the autism spectrum that can function just fine in male dominated environments.
Guys are simping hard. If a woman is at least somewhat attractive she will get a ton of attention. For most women this beats having children, especially considering latter requires much more time and energy investment. Some of them even fear they will become less attractive after childbirth.
They work just so they can get by financially without a husband and ride the attention train all until the end. Some hop-off just in time to have a kid or two, but a lot of them crash in the wall hard and find themselves having to look for a husband after their SMV took a nosedive.
I wouldn’t want to overly generalize though. I know a couple of solid women who married early but are childless and working hard as corporate drones in their late twenties. They want to bring a fair share of bacon to the table and they have to because these days it is not easy to get by just on husband’s income, at least if they want to afford some basic level of luxury.