Death of the Male.

This is not another voice in a whiny chorus of disgruntled males, who after millenniums of ruling the world find themselves having to compete with the other half of humanity. No, the whining won't wash. Almost everywhere men dominate the elite levels of business and politics. There is still no country or industry--with the exception of high- fashion modeling--in which men earn less than women. But it is nonetheless true that men are in peril: a massive shift is already underway at the base of the job pyramid, where most people work. Global competition is killing off the job-for-life--a position that in cultures from Britain to Bangladesh secured a man's place in society and the home. Everywhere, education is becoming the most important qualification for jobs, and women are either doing much better than men in school or catching up fast.

The downtrodden man is easiest to spot in the rich world. Two decades ago in the United States, a male with a high-school education or less could land a union job in a factory or dockyard and earn enough to support a family. But the blue-collar job is rapidly disappearing, shipped overseas, where labor costs less. The rise of the service economy is shifting the emphasis in hiring, almost everywhere, from brawn to brains and charm. Programs aimed at helping mill workers reinvent themselves as computer programmers have never lived up to their promise. And during the U.S. economic boom of the 1990s, men actually lost ground. Male participation in the work force fell from 80 percent in 1970 to 75 percent by 2000, while female participation rose from 43 to 60 percent. Record numbers of men are moving back in with their parents. It seems they would rather remain unemployed than pursue traditionally female jobs as, say, nurses or teachers, despite severe shortages in those professions. The trend is much the same in Europe. "There are unemployed men who sit and wait for the labor market of their fathers and grandfathers to return," says Agneta Stark, an economist at Linkoping University in Sweden. "It won't come back."

It's pretty clear what's breaking up the male monopoly on jobs. In a competitive global market, all employers can afford to care about is profit and cost, not whether a job is men's work or women's work. Women are generally more willing not only to work for less, but also to uproot and move to where the jobs are. Why? They are very often more economically desperate than men are. Recent studies have shown that women account for most of the recent global boom in immigration--as much as 70 percent of new migration to some countries, particularly in southern Europe.

At the same time, a growing number of new jobs were created in the service economy, where schooling is critical. A college degree now boosts lifetime earnings by an average of $1.25 million, according to a recent U.S. study. Across Europe and the United States, women are receiving more college, graduate and professional degrees than men. In secondary school, girls are crushing boys on standardized tests in every subject, including math and science. Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University in Boston, has warned that the economic decline of men will lead to prison crowding, labor shortages, harder times for families, even declining marriage prospects for successful women. He argues for programs aimed at helping 5 million more American males go to ...