BlogWonks

Grace, one of the regular commenters on this blog asked me to opine on why men rule the world. Glad to oblige:

To the extent that more men have leadership positions, it’s overwhelmingly NOT because of some male-erected glass ceiling. It’s because more men than women are willing to trade work/life balance and do what it takes to get and succeed in positions of maximum influence. They believe doing so results in a life more meaningfully-led than if they stopped work at 40 hours so they could see their kids’ soccer game and play Monopoly with them on a regular basis.

So, these men are, for example, willing to put in the 60+ hour work weeks that the average Fortune 500 CEO or congressperson puts in, they’re more willing to move their family across the country to some god-forsaken place so they can learn how to run a plant, they’re more willing to take big risks (e.g., run a risky venture). The book, Why Men Earn More, describes 25 such reasons.

But just because more men are in leadership positions doesn’t mean that men, in the most important sense, rule the world. Women have much more power than the men than the media would have us believe. Women have lifestyle power: they have manipulated the world to give them many more choices than men have: Society will not denigrate women for becoming CEOs, doctors, lawyers, holders of low-level full-time jobs, part-time jobs, or no jobs at all. Most men do not as wide a range of options.