Why are men being hit harder than women by the ongoing
unemployment crisis? 1. Consider the different intelligence
distributions of men and women. Men and women have very similar
mean intelligence, but men tend to have greater variance. One
consequence of this difference is that there are more very smart
and very dumb men, whereas more women are clustered near the
mean. 2. As technology continues to improve, more and more
workers will be displaced by automated systems. Manufacturing
won't be the only sector affected: how many tax preparation jobs
have been eliminated by TurboTax? Sales jobs by Amazon? Using
intelligence as a proxy for a person's general capability to
contribute to the economy, we would expect that as technology
improves the people who will be affected first will be those who
are working jobs that require the least capability. Let's call
the red line the displacement line: it represents the minimum
amount of capability a person must have in order to be able to
do a job that cannot be done by a