If you didn’t, please go ahead and read the first post in this series before continuing on to this post.  

So, as I showed yesterday traditionally, women have been the ones to stay at home and take care of children – and men have been the ones to go out into the world and provide for the family.  Today, I’m focusing on a staggering segment of men as an example of how this world view is changing rapidly.

This segment of men is the segment that never leaves home.  He has no desire to uphold the traditional role of monetary caregiver and is often happy to let a woman take care of him in terms of housing as well as other traditionally women based roles (laundry, cooking, cleaning).  Admit it – every single one of you knows one of these guys, and the majority of you know more than one.  (Especially if you’re in the DC area with me – they are everywhere!)

To prove this, I’m looking at a few key numbers – the first being percentage of women and men in college.  Far fewer men are going to college, and those that do, drop out at much higher rates. In the 2007 college graduation class, 58% were women, 42% men, a dramatic reversal from just two decades ago.  If the current trend continues, it indicates that 66% of college students will be women during the next presidency.  Considering that today, a bachelor’s degree being the minimum requirement for most decent jobs, this spells out disaster for men.

The other key statistic I look to is employment rates among males and females.  For these statistics, I’ll be using data from March of 2011 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of black and white female and males above the age of 20.  Numbers shown are in the thousands.

Males 
Total Number:  72,983
Employed:  65,889
Unemployed:  7,093

Females
Total Number: 63,890
Employed:  59,122
Unemployed:  4,767

From this – we can tell that there are slightly more men available to work than there are women and as such there are still more men in the workforce than there are women.  However, the percentages of people unemployed shows something far different.  Men are unemployed at a rate of 9.7% and women are unemployed at a rate of 7.4%.  (This number gets even worse when you pull the African Americans out into a group of themselves, men are unemployed at a rate of 18% and women are at 11.5%.)  When you break out the numbers across age groups, “A higher percentage of 16- to 24-year-old males (22%) than females (15%) were unemployed. This pattern held true across levels of educational attainment.  For example, in 2010, about 33% of males without a high school diploma were unemployed, compared to 26% of females.”  [Source]

Finally, we look at the amount of men who still live at home with their parents after college (if they go).  According to the census numbers, ”The percentage of men age 25 to 34 living in the home of their parents rose from 14 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2011 and from 8 percent to 10 percent over the period for women.”  And the younger group the numbers are even more worse.  ”American men between the ages of 18 and 24, 59% of them live with their parents, up from 53% in 2005. Half of that demographic of American women currently live with their parents, up from 46% in 2005.”

Why is this?   It could be argued that this is part of the economy taking a large downturn, but if it was only the economy you would expect that women and men would be hit some what equally.  In addition, an economic downturn doesn’t explain why women are going to college at a much higher rate than men.  In fact, you can’t even argue that less men are going to school because they are working – because the employment numbers just don’t support that fact.

I will get more into this on part four on this series on Thursday, but I argue that the reason for this is the sexual revolution among females in addition to parental attitudes towards gender growing up.  In short – it hinders a young adult who is a female to live at home more than it does for a male because parents will judge a female more for sexual promiscuity than they will a male – and because more women are living on their own so that they can have sex – it’s allowing more men to stay at home with their parents because they can just “crash at my girlfriends.”  Add into this the fact that women’s self esteem seems to be plummeting by the day with relatively new cultural standards of beauty, you find that more women are apt to sleep with someone who lives at home with their parents – especially if they use the excuse (regardless of it’s it true or not) that they are saving money for a future.

Because of all these factors, the social stigma of living at home with your parents seems to be falling off males.  A quick google search shows that many people think it’s okay for men (even up to 30 and beyond) to live at home with their parents.   Gone apparently, are the days when living at home with your parents (if you were a male) meant that you were unable to “get off the tit”.  Now – it is generally accepted behavior among the 20-something age group.  More and more you see males who are content to live with their parents and don’t see it as a hindrance to any of their relationships and look down upon the people who do.   Let’s be honest though, unless a guy has been a victim of famine, and destruction, for instance, financial issues, no man who actually wants to have a relationship and do it in a healthy way is going to be literally living under his parents apron strings.

How many men do you know that are living at home with their parents?  How many are unemployed?