X the Last Woman
I was thinking of writing a reverse version of Y the Last Man. In the series and the book (graphic novel) the women are pretty screwed , Most of the world's infrastructure is still kept running by men. In a prophetic line about truck drivers the new president says that the country was run on trucks delivering things. She says only 5% of truck drivers are women. (there is a shortage of truck drivers currently in a few countries since covid) A dam breaks and floods towns as there is no one to fix it. Power is off etc.
I wondered what would happen if all the women disappeared. The nasty misogynist in me wants to make a joke like a guy gets home and the washing up isn't done and only then he notices then that there are no women.
Apart from the obvious things that men would need to sort out an artificial womb to gestate babies in from harvested eggs. Most of the caring, teaching and desk jobs are done by women. Most of the engineering and driving jobs are still done by men.
I have looked at a 2020 breakdown of jobs by men and women. I won't list them all, the first column is women the second is men.
Sorry about the the results, I spent ages tabbing and putting spaces in to get neat columns and the HTML removes them?
293 Cleaners and domestics 589,500 (82.25%) 127,175 (17.75%)
294 Nursing auxiliaries and assistants 315,740 (82.37%) 67,566 (17.63%)
295 Child and early years officers 31,245 (82.45%) 6,651 (17.55%)
296 Physiotherapists 55,036 (82.93%) 11,332 (17.07%)
297 Playworkers 33,366 (83.34%) 6,668 (16.66%)
298 Veterinary nurses 13,246 (83.4%) 2,637 (16.6%)
299 Care workers and home carers 776,722 (83.91%) 148,936 (16.09%)
300 Nurses 628,402 (84.1%) 118,826 (15.9%)
301 Beauticians and related occupations 87,899 (84.99%) 15,524 (15.01%)
302 Podiatrists 16,284 (85.22%) 2,824 (14.78%)
303 Pharmaceutical technicians 30,074 (86.03%) 4,884 (13.97%)
304 Travel agents 36,315 (86.09%) 5,866 (13.91%)
305 Primary,nursery education teaching 424,756 (86.22%) 67,873 (13.78%)
306 Psychologists 41,289 (87.41%) 5,948 (12.59%)
307 School crossing patrol occupations 106,640 (87.91%) 14,659 (12.09%)
308 Educational support assistants 145,386 (88.77%) 18,397 (11.23%)
309 Pharmacy dispensing assistants 77,388 (89.1%) 9,465 (10.9%)
310 Therapy professionals n.e.c. 43,007 (89.46%) 5,067 (10.54%)
311 Dancers and choreographers 16,660 (89.61%) 1,932 (10.39%)
312 Receptionists 185,439 (89.9%) 20,844 (10.1%)
313 Housekeepers and related occupations 42,280 (90.56%) 4,408 (9.44%)
314 Teaching assistants 391,963 (90.75%) 39,963 (9.25%)
315 School secretaries 54,086 (91.68%) 4,909 (8.32%)
316 Childminders and related occupations 148,018 (95.12%) 7,600 (4.88%)
317 Personal assistants and secretaries 185,934 (95.19%) 9,404 (4.81%)
318 Medical secretaries 60,561 (95.55%) 2,819 (4.45%)
319 Legal secretaries 37,516 (96.39%) 1,406 (3.61%)
320 Nursery nurses and assistants 212,035 (97.76%) 4,867 (2.24%)
This is the top of the list, as you can see most of the driving and fixing is done by men at the moment.
1 Vehicle technicians, mechanics and electricians 1,633 (0.81%) 199,877 (99.19%)
2 Carpenters and joiners 2,312 (0.95%) 240,970 (99.05%)
3 Welding trades 1,007 (1.36%) 73,208 (98.64%)
4 Electricians and electrical fitters 4,277 (1.74%) 241,899 (98.26%)
5 Metal working production and maintenance fitters 3,648 (1.91%) 186,909 (98.09%)
6 Plumbers and heating and ventilating engineers 3,258 (1.91%) 167,101 (98.09%)
7 Mobile machine drivers and operatives n.e.c. 1,232 (2.08%) 58,026 (97.92%)
8 Large goods vehicle drivers 8,297 (2.48%) 326,078 (97.52%)
9 Fork-lift truck drivers 2,960 (2.59%) 111,323 (97.41%)
10 Elementary construction occupations 5,296 (2.96%) 173,839 (97.04%)
11 Floorers and wall tilers 1,042 (3.24%) 31,137 (96.76%)
12 Glaziers, window fabricators and fitters 1,444 (3.38%) 41,282 (96.62%)
13 Electrical and electronics technicians 1,179 (3.61%) 31,466 (96.39%)
14 Construction and building trades n.e.c. 9,479 (3.86%) 236,217 (96.14%)
15 Electrical and electronic trades n.e.c. 2,981 (3.89%) 73,669 (96.11%)
16 Design and development engineers 3,303 (4.12%) 76,780 (95.88%)
17 Paper and wood machine operatives 1,178 (4.35%) 25,909 (95.65%)
18 Taxi and cab drivers and chauffeurs 10,501 (4.43%) 226,804 (95.57%)
19 Train and tram drivers 1,174 (4.64%) 24,153 (95.36%)
The full list is here https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...
This is a UK site.
I'm not sure what would happen if all the women died out, but not the same thing as happens if the men die out. It still looks like things will still get delivered and fixed.
There would be a lot of frustrated guys though.
Comments
HTML formatting to the rescue
Try some HTML tables:
How did you do that?
How did you do that? Looks great.
Leeanna
Philip Wylie's The Disappearance
In 1951 Philip Wylie (When Worlds Collide) wrote a novel where all the women on Earth somehow just disappeared. And on another version of Earth created by this weird (quantum?) event all the men disappeared. I read it in the 70's when I was on a Wylie kick; don't remember a whole lot about it, except each sex had to deal with the problems this created (not the least of which was how or if our species wold be able to survive), and that the novel having characters resort to situational homosexuality (like humans will do on pirate ships and in nunneries; but pirate-nuns are the best!) was pretty daring for it's day. And from his other books I'm sure it was largely a social critique of gender roles mid-20th century American society, with the author's opinions inserted into the dialogue in the form of a lot of long speeches. Which could get tedious except Wylie is really good at giving speeches, caustic and witty in the vein of Robert Heinlein, where even if you don't agree with his opinions you admire his keen mind and no-punches-pulled audacity. He's got Heinleinish libertarian streak too (an ideology that's always fascinating on paper but I suspect as doomed as any other in the application- like people are really gonna stay out of each other's business!)
One thing I don't like about Wylie is his raging misogyny (in his 300 page Swiftian non-fiction rant Generation of Vipers he describes American womanhood as "Butterscotch on top, underneath raw sewage", and he lambasts American men's worship of their mothers as a grave psychological illness, with a lot of predictable boo-hooing about "emasculinization"); But his vilification of females is slightly tempered by his coming down almost as hard on men. Anyway The Disappearance is $7.99 on kindle (or old falling apart paperbacks starting at $3.39) if anyone's interested, and his other books range from "what the hell is this shit?" to brilliant (Finnley Wren is my favorite, a really fun experimental novel), but they're all interesting. He also wrote for the screen, his last work of any kind being a 1971 made-for-TV movie (shown as part of the series The Name of the Game) about an ecological crisis of some sort called Los Angeles 2017 that was directed by a young Steven Spielberg and I don't recall ever seeing so I'm gonna go watch it right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgZmsYqC3tk&t=50s
~hugs, Veronica
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
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Beat Me To It...
My parents acquired it in hardcover sometime in the 1950s, and I read it a few times in my mid-to-late teens and afterwards. Cold War era, of course, with the men heading for nuclear war with the USSR and the women trying to cooperate with their adversaries. (Soviet women visitors are awed by the average American home and its modern appliances.)
Haven't read anything else by Wylie; the women were treated sympathetically in this book -- probably more so than the men. I don't recall any gay themes, except for around three paragraphs, with no direct plot significance, about the rise of groups of "G-boys", taking on feminine appearances and demeanors, and that it included people who had never shown any tendencies that way before the break.
(Also one paragraph right after the split, where female impersonators came out in front of their night club to shout at passers-by that they were all that the people had left.)
It was presented as a mainstream novel, not SF; no effort was made to explain how the situation occurred; it was just the premise for the story.
One thing that stuck with me: as things on the male side were coming to a head, men were more or less obliged to wear American flag lapel pins reading "100% American".
Eric
Thanks Veronica. A review
Thanks Veronica. A review said
After families and loved ones separate from one another, life continues in very different ways for men and women, boys and girls. An explosion of violence sweeps one world that still operates technologically; social stability and peace in the other are offset by famine and a widespread breakdown in machinery and science. And as we learn from the fascinating parallel stories of a brilliant couple, Bill and Paula Gaunt, the foundations of relationships, love, and sex are scrutinized, tested, and sometimes redefined in both worlds. The radically divergent trajectories of the gendered histories reveal stark truths about the rigidly defined expectations placed on men and women and their sexual relationships and make clear how much society depends on interconnection between the sexes.
That sounds about right. Men could keep everything going , but would probably drink a lot to drowned their troubles, the women would not act as violently , but back then there were very few that could maintain the machinery needed.
The novel explores issues of gender role and sexual identity. It depicts an empowered condition for liberated women and a dystopia of an all-male world. Wylie's setting allows him to investigate the role of homosexuality in situations where no gender alternative exists. Producer George Pal was extremely interested in the story and purchased the option to it soon after publication. Because Pal wanted to emphasize its highly sexual nature and wanted to include nudity, Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman refused to make the film. It remained in development hell as Pal repurchased the rights and took it to several studios. He continued working on it until his death in 1980.
Leeanna