Although clichés (陈词滥调) about the "vulnerability" of women in the economy have been disproved by hard Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, we want to believe them. When women lose jobs, the victims are women. When men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women, because they have to make up for that lost male income. The scale of male job losses was evident even when the stimulus bill was passed. That did not stop incoming Congressman Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, from warning Obama that "gender imbalance in occupations related to basic facility development means that the direct job creation will benefit mostly men."
Men still make up 53% of the workforce, and the percentage of society’s work they do is considerably higher, owing to women’s shorter hours and more frequent leave for child-rearing. In prosperous times, women may yearn for more time at home. But economic realities have a way of washing away these yearnings. One such reality is the recession. Another is that women receive 58% of the bachelor’s degrees in this country, along with half the professional degrees.
Should we expect men to give up some control over an economy they have so thoroughly messed up No. We have no examples of that ever having happened. What we have plenty of examples of- you can see variants of it all over the developing world -- is economies in which women do all the demanding work while men sit around smoking and chatting in coffeehouses and barbershops. For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal (父权制), middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented model of family economics -- and their attention remains fixed on it. Whether or not that model dominated American society as much as its critics claimed, we are now leaving it behind. Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it. We have not found one yet.
The economic decline forces women to give up the desire for ______ at home.