We are living in an unprecedented age, in which women’s needs dominate the national agenda while women also manage to be society’s foremost oppressed group. Yet women in most western society societies today preponderate in the professions. For example, Ireland was the first country anywhere in which most practising lawyers were women, while simultaneously the attorney general, the minister for justice, the garda commissioner and the chief justice were all women. Likewise, by 2022 in the USA, women held 52% of professional-managerial roles, collected 57% of bachelor degrees, 61% of master’s degrees, and 54% of doctoral degrees. At 73% they dominate professions such as human resource management which largely define and enforce workplace behavioural norms, giving them a disproportionate influence on professional culture. This is also true in these islands: how else would our television schedules be cursed with women’s rugby, which as a spectacle is rather like watching caterpillars knit?
Yet to read the endless litany of public complaint from some women today, one would think Emeline Pankhurst was still chaining herself to railings. The evidence is irrefutable. Women are taking over the world. This is certainly not a bad thing, merely a new one. To be sure, things are not perfect, but they never are. In all societies there have been inequities. In the 20th century, in the UK alone, 50,000 men were killed in coalmines, 30,000 in the merchant marine, 20,000 in accidents in the armed forces, and 5,000 in fishing. The women’s figures were roughly, 0, 0, 0, and 0.
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