Prediction No. 1. Women can do anything men can do. Everything can be learned. Women can become like men in almost every respect (except childbearing). Male and female will blend into a single culture: whether traditional-up-til-now male culture; or some new variant.
OR Prediction No.2. Women are different from men: nicer, more nurturant, more sympathetic; more monogamous, less sexual drive, more family-oriented; more cautious, less risk-taking. Individual women range on a continuum of these qualities, and some women are not at all like this; but statistically, these are strongly marked differences from men (who also range on a continuum). These statistical differences will continue in the future.
OR Prediction No. 3. It is possible to combine both positions: male and female behavior will converge so that women will fill all male jobs and social positions, but everyone will become like the ideal-type nurturant, risk-averse female.
Evidence for each prediction:
[1] The proportion of women has gone up in almost all occupations since mid-20th century. In some jobs, it now exceeds men. There are substantial number of women in the elite professions and in high level management; if not yet equally with men, demonstrating that women have the ability to do it. Women have become prominent in high government positions; in some countries including the president or prime minister. It seems inevitable that this trend will continue upwards.
Even in the macho or muscle roles, there have been women in military combat, policing, and fire-fighting. There are token women as coaches and referees in male sports; and a proliferation of women's teams and stars.
If the job shapes the behavior and values of its incumbent, this supports the prediction that women are becoming more like men. This is apparent in women's sports like soccer and basketball, where rough and aggressive players are prominent.
[2a] Supportive and sympathetic vs. aggressive and competitive. A clue is trends in crime and violence. Males continue to be the majority of perpetrators in homicides, assault and battery, armed robbery, and sexual assault; though the proportion of females has increased, and is substantial in child abuse. Street gangs are almost exclusively male, although they may have female supporters (who contribute by carrying concealed weapons); so are drug smuggling and sex trafficking. Organized crime by all indications is exclusively male. Violence against oneself is highly gendered; although females consider suicide as often as males, most methods of suicide fail (e.g. drug overdoses), while successful suicide methods-- guns and jumping from heights-- are heavily male.
In the USA, violent crime rates have fallen since their peak in the 1990s. One could argue that this shows the spread of female values among males. An alternative explanation is that the biggest declines are where police forces have adopted electronic street surveillance and mobile crime squads. [Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street, 2019] In some respects, young women have become more like their male counterparts; as in the growth of violent hazing rituals in high school sororities and clubs, paralleling the potlatch-destruction of fraternity parties.
Women are more prominent in non-violent crimes, especially embezzlement, where women have many opportunities in financial and clerical positions, as well as protective cover by their reputation as supportive and trustworthy. It is not clear whether embezzlement by women has historically increased. Viviana Zelizer [The Social Meaning of Money, 1994] notes that women in the era of high gender segregation of work often stole money from their husbands by going through their pockets.
Electronic media have increased opportunities for non-violent crime. But hacking appears to be highly gendered. Virtually all known perpetrators of schemes for ransomware, political hacking, and just plain malicious hacking are males. To some extent this mirrors the continuing propensity for males to dominate in STEM skills. The spread of AI and image-generating tools has greatly increased opportunities for both malicious and gainful attacks. Substantial portions of students use AI to cheat on school assignments and exams. Is this a spread of male aggressiveness and non-conformity to females as well--- yet another contemporary arena where women share the male style? Gender proportions in cheating have not yet been well documented.
The social media era is dividing people into distinctive cultural spheres: the stay-at-home, always on-line social butterflies at-a-distance, where males share a female pattern; the party animals and carousers who venture out to night-life districts where macho values set the tone for both sexes; on-line criminals, as well as real-life criminals, both domininantly male. Both male and female cultures are spreading to the opposite sex, but in different arenas.
[2b] Sexual drive, monogamy, and family. Sex surveys from the 1940s through the present show that men have more frequent sex than women, with more partners; males report more sexual desire, and view more pornography. Disparity in number of heterosexual partners is made up by a small number of women who are prostitutes or have many partners. Among homosexuals, gay men have more partners and more frequent sex than lesbian women; and compared to heterosexual partners, gay men are more sexually active in both respects; while lesbian couples are less sexually active than heterosexuals. Which is to say sexual preference does not override gender patterns; gay couples consist of two men and thus multiply their sexual frequency; lesbians couples intensify the female pattern. [Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples, 1983]
But sexual behavior may have changed between the pre-COVID era, and the generation that grew up with the unibiquitous presence of social media in their daily lives. In this demographic cohort, both young males and females have become less sexually active, less likely to drive a car, less likely to gather socially. It appears that life on the social media is more permeated by female values: a convergence towards the female pattern of high sociability.
Traditionally, women have been more family-oriented than men: more likely to keep up contact with relatives; taking the lead in organizing family gatherings; spending more time on family gossip. Women have generally reported giving higher value to caring for children and home than to career success; whereas men, especially in the higher professions, give highest priority to career. This gender difference has apparently weakened in the vogue of life/career balance; men have increased time in child care and home-making, but still lagging their female partners.
Trending in the other direction, propensity to marry or cohabit has declined; and the birth rate among women in the US and most modernized countries has fallen to below-replacement level. This is evidence for a decline in familistic orientation; as is a larger proportion of young people living alone-- a convergence towards the male pattern or a weakening in female culture.
[2c] Cautious and conformist vs. risk-taking and norm-breaking. Gender differences in violent crime, as well as deaths from accidents, are consistent with male propensity for risk-taking and female avoidance of it. We also see this in career patterns. Women tend to follow regularized bureaucratic careers, stay in school longer, and seek degrees rather than dropping out. Men continue to be more likely to pursue careers that are physically dangerous as well as risky: military, combat sports, policing, and criminal enterprises like drug dealing or smuggling.
Especially striking is the gulf between men and women in high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. The digital revolution of the 1990s, along with the huge growth of financial speculation and ease of investment via the Internet, created opportunities for rapidly building huge fortunes. Almost all high-tech entrepreneurs have been men; many of them starting their businesses while students, and dropping out of school in order to seize the opportunity. Not to say that success was guaranteed; the large number of competitors ensured many would fail, or have their start-ups taken over by the more aggressive players. The same risk-taking and aggressiveness is found in the earlier generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as in the generation of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Eric Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Their formula for success combines cutting-edge technological ventures, flamboyant public relations, and aggressive financing.
Call this techno/financial macho. They boastfully announce their intention of transforming industries and everyday life, staging spectacular product launches, whipping up consumer enthusiasm and attracting investors. The big financial payoffs eventually come on a roaring bull market; but the main tactic is to operate through personal networks, rather than traditional banking and investment firms. Their milieu is an unregulated world of frenemies, making and breaking alliances, driving each other out and inviting them back in; skirting the legal edges of new forms of banking, bill-paying, and finance. They steal each other's technologies and poach their technical talents. They work secretively but continue to hang around together, looking for an opportunity or a deal. It is, so to speak, an "old boys" network, except instead of the traditionalism of old families and school graduates, it is a hyper-macho world of financial and technological risk-takers.
A similar style of predatory entrepreneurship existed before the digital era. Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot [From Predators to Ikons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero, 2009] analyze the tactics by which the largest fortunes were made in consumer products (IKEA, Walmart, LVMH, etc.): driving out weak competitors like traditional furniture stores by assemble-it-yourself chains, or mom-and-pop markets by warehouse-style bulk sales. (A similar tactic was used by Bezos in launching Amazon, driving out independent bookstores.) They stalk successful competitors, offering to finance them when in difficulties, then taking ownership. Again we see the strategy of network-building, monitoring one's rivals, pretending friendship until the moment comes to swallow them up. Villette notes that virtually all the successful empire-builders went through hard-ball lawsuits, stone-walling financially weaker opponents and wearing them down.
Like the American high-tech entrepreneurs, Villette's empire-builders started in business when young, rather than pursuing educational credentials. All were from entrepreneurial families, rather than parents in bureaucratic careers. Successful enterprises can become large and more bureaucratic; but aggressive entrepreneurs like Jobs, Musk, and Bezos preferred to run them hands-on, and push their employees to keep up a high-pressure atmosphere of extreme competitiveness.
To be clear, hyper-masculine behavior is not characteristic of all men. The majority of men today, and in the past, have followed routine lives, whether in bureaucracies or in small-market businesses or professions. Men, like women, are distributed across a continuum; both sexes are represented among the "female" qualities of caution, supportiveness, and family orientation; just as some women are aggressive and risk-taking. Male and female distributions overlap, though their central concentration differs. I estimate about 10% of males are at the extreme end of the distribution of high risk-taking and aggressiveness. [This is my conclusion about various kinds of violence: Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, 2008. The literature on entrepreneurship, although not statistical, gives the impression of a similar distribution: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 2011; Elon Musk, 2023. Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of Silicon Valley. 2025]
[3] Will male and female converge on a shared culture? What we see is a mixture of trends. Women are in virtually all jobs and positions, in some exceeding men. The biggest exceptions are violent crime; electronic hacking; and entrepreneurial empire-building -- areas heavily dominated by men. The recent on-line generation shows convergence towards female sociability and diminished sexual activity; but family orientation is challenged by the declining birth rate and living alone. Women's values dominate increasingly in the bureaucratic arena, while traditional male patterns continue for the risky, violent, and action-oriented arenas.
Trends can shift, sometimes quite abruptly. Merely charting the statistics across the years does not reveal the underlying causes. Here I will focus on a meta-cause: efforts to socially engineer the direction of change. Efforts to change the culture of both males and females can be made by political action, laws, ideologies taught in schools and by compulsory re-education in work places. This is the result of social movements.
Research in the sociology of social movements has uncovered many of their mechanisms: mobilizing activists through networks, getting material resources to keep their organization going, generating waves of public emotion through protest demonstrations and mass communication. What has not yet been established are the conditions that make a movement succeed or fail in its goals; including the struggle between movements and counter-movements.
In general, the most successful social movements are those that have made a multi-pronged attack: combining public demonstrations, with a violent fringe to convey their seriousness, together with political campaigns, elections, passing laws, getting favorable court decisions, and institutionalizing the new doctrine in the culture of schools and the mass media. At the same time, these multiple arenas can be places where counter-movements find their issues around which they mobilize.
The MAGA movement draws on a number of counter-movements over the decades: against affirmative action in hiring and school admission (seen as reverse discrimination); against perceived denigation of people who are religious, small-town, pro-natalist, patriotic, or heterosexual; against "language police" who enforce terminology in pronouns and identities; against "political correctness" in what is permissible to say or joke about, the breach of which can cause a scandal that gets one banned from jobs and public life. Trump's electoral victory in 2024 was helped by a counter-mobilization to bring out young males against political correctness-- the macho, frat-boy, carousing, aggressive culture celebrated in cage fights.
Do sociologists have any way of predicting which movement or counter-movement will be successful, and on what issues? I will focus on one point: whether statistical equality in jobs can be achieved by the pressure of social movements or by laws requiring the hiring of a particular target of women, non-whites, homosexuals, etc. Such rules are possible in bureaucratic organizations: those that have well-established job categories, pay scales, and promotions. But not for illicit organizations, which operate informally or clandestinely: street gangs, cartels, and mafias are generally all-male and ethnically exclusive, and it is unlikely this segment of the economy (where lower-class social mobility takes place) could be pressured to engage in affirmative action.
The most important bulwark of male dominance is pathways into the upper class. Today these are entrepreneurial start-ups, put together by young men in networks of tech-savvy peers, who aggressively gobble up opportunities for world-transforming inventions; expanding their nets into the slew of financial operators with speculative money in their hands. One could complain retrospectively about the lack of women in Peter Thiel's networks, or Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, but there is no way to enforce a gender quota in a volatile sector where moving as fast as possible determines whether you will be in the tiny fragment that makes a great fortune. You can enforce rules of gender equality (or any other criterion) in an organization that already exists; it is impossible to enforce it until it comes into existence. Given the huge wealth, power and prestige of successful entrepreneurs in today's financial mega-markets, it is unlikely that a social movement will be able to enforce identity quotas on the upper class.
Some gender equality happens later on. Wives and daughters of the mega-rich share in the money, if not in the dynamics that generates the wealth.
The only way I can envision the male upper class will become feminized, would be if they stop being entrepreneurial. Which is not out of the question, if the entire capitalist system collapses. Perhaps we will see in a few decades, when and if AI destroys human work as we know it.
