Daily Telegraphに載った国会議員Boris Johnson氏の”I'll tell you why women are running out of men to marry”というエッセイ。
Johnson氏によると、英国の大学におけるfeminisationが進んでいる。また、これは将来、英国社会の、特にエリート的なセクターのfeminisationを導くだろう；
しかしながら、”greater equality between the sexes is actually leading to greater division between the classes.” また、それとともに高学歴女性のいっそうの〈ブリジット・ジョーンズ〉化。下の引用にもあるように、1970年生まれの大卒女性の40％は40代になっても子どもがないだろう；
Most trainee barristers and two thirds of medical students are now women — compared with 29 per cent women in the early 1990s. If current trends continue, most doctors will be female by 2012. It is ludicrous for the Equal Opportunities Commission to keep droning on about "glass ceilings" at the top of corporate Britain, or in the judiciary, when you think how fast this transformation has been.It is a stunning fact — the biggest social revolution of our lifetime — that far more women than men are now receiving what is in theory an elite academic education. When I was at university 20 years ago, the figures were almost exactly the other way round, with the ratio 60:40 in favour of males. Far more female graduates are coming out of our universities than male graduates — and, in 30 years' time, when these people reach the peak of their careers, the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed and feminised.
そして、
Since the emergence of our species, it has been a brutally sexist feature of romance that women on the whole — and I stress on the whole — will want to mate/procreate with men who are either on a par with themselves, or their superior, in socio-economic and intellectual attainment. A recent study*1 shows that if a man's IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent; if a woman's IQ rises by 16 points, her chances of getting hitched decline by the same amount.Now look at those university entrance figures again, feed in that basic human prejudice, and some recent social phenomena become intelligible. If you have a sudden surge in the number of highly educated women — more women than men — then it is not surprising that you have a fair few Bridget Jones-type characters who are having a tough job finding Mr Darcy. It is a gloomy truth that 40 per cent of female graduates born in 1970 are likely to enter their forties childless.
As a result of the same instinct — female desire to procreate with their intellectual equals — the huge increase in female university enrolments is leading to a rise in what the sociologists call assortative mating. A snappier word for it is homogamy. The more middle-class graduates we create, the more they seem to settle down with other middle-class graduates, very largely because of the feminine romantic imperative already described. The result is that the expansion of university education has actually been accompanied by a decline in social mobility, and that is because these massive enrolments have been overwhelmingly middle-class.
Let's put it bluntly: nice female middle-class graduates are either becoming permanent Bridget Joneses, or marrying nice male graduates, and they seem on the whole to be turning up their nice graduate noses at male non-graduates. And when the nice middle-class graduate couples get together, they have the double income to buy the houses and push the prices up — and make life even tougher for the non-graduates.The result is that we have widening social divisions, and two particularly miserable groups: the female graduates who think men are all useless because they can't find a graduate husband, and the male non-graduates who feel increasingly trampled on by the feminist revolution, and resentful of all these hoity-toity female graduates who won't give them the time of day.
*1:Who has done?
