Martin Van Creveld writes: As Margaret Mead, perhaps the greatest female anthropologist of all time, wrote in 1948, in all known societies whatever men do is considered most important by both men and women. As she also wrote, when any number of women enter fields previously reserved for men the latter start leaving. Unless the hemorrhage is stopped, the social and economic rewards attached to the field in question decline. As the history of professions such as secretaries, teachers, social workers, and the like show, often the end result is a female ghetto with few if any men about.
The process also works the other way around. If women start entering a field previously dominated by men, one can be well-nigh certain that, in one way or another, that field is in decline. That is true both in terms of the prestige that is attached to it and the economic rewards it can provide. Dozens of scholars, many of them female, have confirmed Ms.
Mead’s findings in fields as diverse as pharmacy, book-editing, and school-teaching. For good or ill, it is the way the world works.
So what do we make of the fact that the number of female defense ministers is growing and that, as of November 2014, no fewer than five European countries had female
secretaries of defense? Does this prove, as many feminists claim, that even the last “male bastions” are crumbling in front of the onslaught of the fair sex? Or is there a different, and
perhaps better, explanation?
