Can All Women Be Pharmacists?: A Critique of Hanna Rosin's the End of Men

IntroductionHanna Rosin's book, The End of Men, provocatively argues that the dominance of women has arrived.1 The new economy, Rosin contends, values women's skills more than those of men, and women are now triumphing in education, management, and other spheres. She further posits that whatever inequality persists is the product of women's choices - tradeoffs women make to secure the life they desire. Things have changed, and there is no more need to whine about the old days, Rosin concludes. A provocative thesis, to be sure, but we could not help but wonder whether it was true, and so one of us (Michael Selmi) embarked on his own mini sociological experiment by observing the day of his departure for the Conference at which this Essay was presented to see just how much things had, or had not, changed.In the morning, I dropped my children off at the bus stop where there were three other children waiting with their mothers, all of whom had advanced degrees (the mothers, not the children) and who would then return home to wait for their children's day to end. The children's bus would take them to their middle school where together they would spend the day with fourteen different teachers, two of whom were men, and one of those a physical education teacher.2As I drove to my office, I passed a fire station. If I were to have stopped to look inside, I would likely find all men, and almost certainly all white men.3 Nearby I passed a library, and if I had gone inside, I would have found all women, unless I was looking for the director, who is a man. Continuing my drive, I encountered road construction crews and, while slowly moving past, I looked to determine the gender composition and I saw one woman who was directing traffic. For some reason the construction sites remind me that we have work that needs to be done at home, and if I were to have called a plumber, there is a ninety-nine percent chance that the plumber I reached would have been a male, and the same would be true for the electrician we also happen to need.4 If I were to call for someone to clean our home, however, I would have to look hard to find a man (unless I wanted our yard cleaned, in which case it would almost certainly be a man).5At the law school, if either of us were summoned to the Dean's office, we would first encounter an army of assistants with various titles but all of whom are women; entering the inner sanctum of the Dean's office, we would likely find only men. And if we were looking for someone to complete a men's basketball team, we could safely wander into any of the many constitutional law classes where ninety percent of the professors are men, but would be sure to avoid family law where women dominate.6Before heading to the Conference, I went to my daughter's school for a track meet where there was a lot of activity going on. Boys were playing a baseball game nearby while girls played softball. In the cross-country race, the boys and girls ran separately, and there were two soccer teams playing nearby with very young kids (maybe ages five or six) running in circles, as they do at that age, but doing it on separate boys' and girls' teams, conveying the impression that even when they are doing the same thing, boys and girls must do it differently.7At the airport the TSA agents presented me with one of the first integrated work forces I encountered all day - approximately two thirds were men, but the women were present and seemingly performing the same tasks as their male counterparts. On the plane, all of the flight attendants were women, though there is little question that this is an area that men have infiltrated.8 When I was leaving the plane, the cockpit crew that was saying goodbye was all male and, in fact, I can only recall one instance when I have flown that the voice attached to "this is your captain speaking" belonged to a woman.9As I think back on when I began teaching almost twenty years ago, I wonder how much things have changed, and the answer seems to be not so much. …