It’s a Woman’s Woman’s World: The Uprising of the Alpha Female

Toula Portokalos: Ma, Dad is so stubborn. What he says goes. “Ah, the man is the head of the house!”
Maria Portokalos: Let me tell you something, Toula. The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.
–My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Since the dawn of time, man–not woman–has been hailed as taking charge of the entire world. (This is a loose exaggeration.) Adam was first; Eve was created from his rib. Prometheus was busy bringing fire down from the gods while Mrs. Prometheus assumedly stayed home with the Prometheus children. George Washington is considered the father of our nation after having taken on the role as the first president of the United States. But who was the mother? Take a look at our currency, our national monuments–apparently Clara Barton’s coiffure was too intricate to be carved on the side of a mountain, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s face looked ghastly when reprinted in green.

In elementary school, girls were encouraged to read and write, as their male counterparts were inherently better at math and science. These girls far outnumbered boys in home economics classes, and the reverse was true later in business and engineering. Woman’s place was in the kitchen, at home, with the children, while the men worked 9 to 5 to provide for their families. The men brought home the bacon; the women fried it for breakfast. Being the more “feeling” gender meant that women’s points could not be trusted in an argument, and premenstrual syndrome is still used as a rationalization for a female’s emotional outburst. When a man would have a similar reaction, his colleagues and peers would tell him to “stop acting like a woman,” as though emotion–and estrogen–was unique to the opposite sex. (Neither are.)

But what about the lesser known female successes? Girls tend to dominate foreign language classes, especially as the subject matter intensifies. It was Rosalind Franklin, not Watson and Crick, that first discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, essentially giving the double-finger to the notion that men would always beat women in scientific success. And girls potty-train much faster than boys. Just ask my parents.

Still, these successes seem to pale in comparison to those of our world leaders, emissaries, visionaries, and inventors. Unfortunately, female successes received much less publicity in the past. In what James Brown terms a man’s man’s world, women have had to work twice as hard to break through the proverbial glass ceiling.

Until now.

Both the collegiate and corporate world are undergoing an unprecedented shift toward the female. According to an article in the Atlantic Magazine entitled “The End of Men” (perhaps a harsher titular take on this shift than actuality), in 2010 women made up the majority of the workforce for the first time in Washington’s nation’s history. For every two men that receive a college degree this year, three women will do the same, giving some credence to the adolescent idea that “girls go to college to get more knowledge while boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” Author Hanna Rosin posits:

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

What if she’s right? There is a growing number of Fortune 500 CEOs that are female. As C-suite boomers are reaching retirement age–mostly male–women have a huge opportunity to be primed and ready to fill those executive openings. This is the dawning of the age of the Virgo with Aquarius tendencies, among others. Household incomes are more often than not either dominated by the woman’s salary or completely composed by it, and men are often the ones playing house. The man’s man’s world seems to be quickly fading to make way for the woman’s…woman’s.

The men may have started out as the heads, but the necks have it. The female ability to empathize and communicate effectively have made them incredibly valuable assets in today’s conceptual age. We’ve come a long way from having masculine pronouns act in lieu of a gender neutral. And while the male influence shouldn’t be discounted, the female one should now earn more respect. Trust me. My gender’s gotten some things right.

To our readers: do you agree or disagree? Why or why not?