Future Trends in the Information Society

The circumstances in which men and women live together have changed considerably over the past 30 years. The huge wave of women entering the labour market, the possibility of planning maternity, divorce and women’s growing independence in financial matters, has had its effects in recent years on the ways in which male and female managers coexist in Spain and elsewhere. Motherhood has ceased to be a ‘natural’ function in industrial society, and is now a matter of a planned birth in modern and post-modern society. Research did not reveal very significant differences between the ways in which both genders live together, although there were twice as many women with partners with whom they did not share a home as there were men in both age groups. As far as female managers were concerned, we observed that in both generations the percentage of women who had not formed a new partnership after losing a partner, (better couple because partner appears twice) whether through divorce or widowhood, was three times that of the men in the older generation and twice that of the women between 30 and 45. Among the youngest of both sexes, attention is drawn to the high number of individuals who had not succeeded in finding a partner, the so-called ‘singletons’ (Table 5.1 and Figure 5.1).