Section A Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following
passage. Although clichés about the "vulnerability" of women
in the economy have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them.
When women lose jobs, the victims are women. When men lose jobs, the victims
are, 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 Polls, 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 arduous work while men sit around
smoking and chatting in coffeehouses and barbershops. For decades, policymakers
have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal (男性制),
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. Where can we see economies in which women do all the hard work while men sit around enjoying themselves