Startlingly, it appears that the Great American Male is not an endangered species after all, at least, not according the the New York Times.

What’s eye-opening, if depressingly not surprising, about the world Stephanie Coontz describes is that despite rapid progress towards greater equality in the 60s and 70s, women’s economic and societal advancement in the US seems to have stalled in the new millennium. Women are paid less for the same jobs (earning only 73% of mens’ wages), despite both being expected to be better educated (77% of Americans feel that a college degree is essential for women to get ahead, only 68% think so for men), and actually being better educated (in the US, women are awarded 60% of college degrees).

Women MBA graduates earn on average $4,500 less than their male contemporaries on graduation, and if you’ve committed the unforgivable sin of actually procreating…Heaven help you. In a study run by Cornell University, students making decisions on a range of CVs where the only factor changed was parental status (leading me to wonder who in their right mind would put their parental status on their CV?), decided that women with children were less suitable to be hired, should be paid $11,000 less than candidates with exactly the same qualifications but without children, and were less deserving of promotion.

The final insult seems to be that there isn’t a correlation between male academic achievement and enlightened male feminism. In dual-income households in the US it’s the men with the least education who do the most housework, unlike their highly educated counterparts (who presumably either sit luxuriating cerebrally in their own filth, or more likely, badly-pay another woman who is not their wife to pick up after them). Thankfully, those men who do the most sharing of household tasks also report having happier marriages, but good grief, can we please get some of the Alpha Males to start picking up their socks!