Posted on 08/13/2003 8:04:19 PM PDT by new cruelty
The extinction of the old-style white professional male is already far advanced and within a generation it will be complete. This is the intended result of a grandiose exercise in social engineering with the declared aim of extending the same opportunities to women as men.
The rate of change is so fast that it is hard to take in, with the result that the whole phenomenon is often ignored, or else regarded as so inevitable that one might as well ignore it.
Politics, the law, medicine, banking, accountancy, science and engineering are among the many professions in which deliberate - and often very expensive - efforts are being made to ensure that a far greater proportion of women are recruited to senior posts.
Virtually nobody pauses to ask whether this is practicable, let alone whether it is a good thing. Fashion – or perhaps an enlightened understanding of the way the world is going – has encouraged even the Conservative Party to declare its determination to recruit many more women parliamentary candidates, while the Commons has already changed its hours in order to make it easier for women, including those with children, to belong to it.
Whether these efforts will succeed, or whether, as a successful white male barrister educated at a famous public school and Oxbridge put it, "the cunning and ambition of the white middle-class male" will outwit all attempts to get him to make way for women, is not yet clear.
The barrister contended that life at the top of all professions is by its nature so exhausting and so ferociously competitive that very few women will wish to put themselves through it, and that, in the end, "something will have to give" and most women will decide that their children are more important to them.
He freely conceded that the Bar is full of "egocentric, workaholic men", but added disobligingly that a considerable proportion of the small number of women who manage to stay the course are "the leathery, lesbian types".
We have not yet discovered how to get by without doctors, lawyers and bankers and it is still true that these professions are dominated, as they always have been, by white men, who still hold the vast majority of senior positions.
But on present trends, this dominance is unlikely to last. In 2001, when the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) last published a summary of professional employment for men and women in Britain, it found that, since 1993, women have formed the majority of those admitted to the solicitors' roll, and they already made up 35 per cent of the profession.
Even at the Bar, where women have found it more difficult to make inroads, 26 per cent of barristers practising in England and Wales in October 2000 were female, compared with only 18 per cent in 1990. Much the same changes have occurred in Scotland.
And the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which has 119,000 members and boasts a 90-year history under various names, says that, whereas 20 years ago, 75 per cent of its members were men, now only 20 per cent are.
Medicine presents a similar picture. Until a generation ago, the vast majority of medical students were white men, and the rest of us would from time to time hear tell of the laddish pranks with which they filled the hours when they could relax from their studies. But when was the last time you heard such a story?
Today the majority of medical students are women. Some white men continue to go into medicine, but their numerical dominance has vanished, especially when one bears in mind that a considerable proportion of new entrants, male and female, are of ethnic minority descent.
Vast changes have flowed from the belief that sexual equality is part of the natural order of things, and some of those changes may paradoxically have ended up reducing equality.
Single-sex schools and colleges, which some girls as well as boys need in order to fulfil their potential, have become more unusual. A teacher at a mixed comprehensive school in a good catchment area said: "In my school, we're producing fewer really able boys than girls. I just think girls are more organised and more disciplined. Boys need competition with other boys, which they aren't getting."
The environment in many schools, particularly at primary level, has become much more feminine. Boys, particularly small boys, are less likely to be taught by men, and sports such as boxing have become rare.
The EOC confirms that 84 per cent of full-time teachers in maintained nursery and primary schools in England were female in 1999, and 53 per cent of full-time teachers in maintained secondary schools, with the female proportion of teachers increasing in both sectors.
Investment banking is generally thought of as a quintessentially male field: a prejudice that the banks are trying to break down by encouraging first-year female undergraduates to come and see them for two days in London.
The banks say they want to recruit the best, so cannot afford to ignore women; added to which they make a poor impression on their clients if they employ nobody but white males. Yet the whole exercise will strike some of us as patronising to women and unfair to men.
One professional woman to whom I talked suggested how men could avoid being marginalised by the rise of women: "We've got to make men's communications skills better. They're neglected by their parents, because their mothers go out to work, which disadvantages boys even more, because they need a lot more talking to."
If boys get the impression that it is a women's world out there, they may just give up in disgust. The William of the Just William stories would certainly not have been prepared to turn himself into the school swot in order to keep up with a lot of girls. He would have opted instead for a glamorous life of crime.
My company recently hired a black female for my division. It took a lot of the white men many years to get into this position. She was hired without any experience. Not only that but she doesn't have a degree and she's NOT VERY BRIGHT. It's almost laughable. I remember when I was looking for my first job after college. I went on three interviews with this one compamy and then they told me they had to hire a woman. The person said that they liked me better and thought that I was more qualified but that their corporate office told them to hire the female. This female didn't deserve the job anymore than me. I needed a job too. The whole system has become a bunch of bs.
Yours for proper grammar, and FReegards!
Yeah, and you know there is only one hard thing about getting the order.
GETTING THE ORDER!
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