A defining indication of Old Core evolution: women PhDs outnumber males

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WAPO story on new report that says, for the first time in history, the number of PhDs being granted to women outnumber those of men.

I've made this citation in the past:  when women outnumber men in big industries (like the law or medicine), then your economy has truly reached the apex of mature development.

My mom was pregnant ten times in the first twenty years or so of marriage with my dad.  When the babies stopped, she went on to three sequential careers in county social services, then the law, and finally (and still at 85) as an author.  Now, her long life gives her that amazing productivity (on both scales) and that surprising balance (two decades of cranking babies and four decades of work), so she's an avatar of what comes next (and this is a great point that George Friedman makes in "The Next 100 Years"): women go from maybe 50-70% of their adult lives being consumed by children-making and rearing--in the blink of an historical eye--to a fantastically lower child burden (like maybe as little as 10% of their possible working life since they have 1-2 kids and work for so long into their later years).  Just releasing all that potential is a social revolution in and of itself, and American-style globalization has an amazing ability to trigger that development.  

Any smart economist will tell you that the "miracle" of any nation's rapid rise ALWAYS involves turning the women onto labor opportunities outside the home.  That process is the most comprehensive nugget of a social revolution tale that you can locate in modernization/industrialization/globalization.

And when you reach the far-side accomplishment like the one cited here, you know you've basically completed the journey in terms of making opportunity balanced by gender.

I keep having to tell my kids that women lived very different and subordinate lives from about 10,000BC until around the time of my childhood (early 1960s) and then everything changed!  That alone makes this the most amazing time in human history, and thus, the best time in human history to be someone who tracks systemic change and thinks systematically about the future.

As a side note, that's why I find watching "Mad Men" so fascinating, because it captures all this in the before and edge-of-transformation sense.

And that's also why I'm a happy guy with two sons and four daughters.  I've always said that there is nothing in this life (save lifting heavy objects and fighting) that I'd rather do with guys than with women.

To sum up:  the journey from the Gap to the Core is one of demographic aging and feminization of leading service industries (like law, education, medicine).