The news, when it emerged this summer, had an air of inevitability: women for the first time are scoring higher on IQ tests than men. Girls have long been doing better than boys in GCSEs and today they make up the majority of university students. When they graduate, they’re more likely than men to find work and an increasing number are now the family breadwinners. The word ‘pursewhipped’ — referring to men being in financial thrall to women — is slowly entering the English language, and with it the understanding that this is not about equality. Britain, like many other places, is witnessing a gender power flip.
It is odd that this phenomenon should be the subject of jokes when its implications are so far-reaching. But five years ago, there was one senior politician whom no one could accuse of not taking women seriously. When Boris Johnson was higher education spokesman, he noticed that it had become a women’s game. ‘Far more women than men are now receiving what is, in theory, an elite academic education,’ he wrote. ‘It is a stunning fact, the biggest social revolution of our lifetime.’ By the time these graduates have reached the peak of their careers, ‘the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed and feminised… This thing is huge, and it is happening at every level, and no one seems to be thinking about the -consequences.’
For the last few years, I have been thinking about those consequences. I wrote a book, The Richer Sex, about the power flip under way in America. When I dug into the British data the trend was, if anything, more pronounced. But there is one crucial difference: in Britain, this change is largely seen as a lifestyle issue; men who depend on their wives financially are seen as a semi-comic anomaly.
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