I knew this was coming. Because we’ve been seeing this same pattern among black men. And what happens to us eventually trickles up, for good or ill. Note the last couple of paragraphs.

Several experts also said that rising income for women might affect marriage rates if women expect their mates to have at least equivalent salaries and education.

“When New York college women say there are few eligible men around, they’re right if they mean they’ll only settle for someone with an education akin to their own,” Professor Hacker said.

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Now among working class women I am not sure what the trends are, nor am I sure what the trends will be. Could be that they too will experience a rise in income while their male counterparts fall behind. But this may not be true. There are more manufacturing jobs for white men than there are for black men if for no other reason than the fact that many of those jobs are still the product of patronage and whites have more power to allocate those types of resources than blacks do. Or Latinos for that matter.

But whatever backlash we see, I’m not sure this genie will ever be put back into the bottle. Not unless some type of catastrophe occurs.