I have a face for online annotating, so I wouldn’t have a chance to answer this on the glamorous stage of a Miss USA competition, but let me endeavor to try.

It says less about “society” as it does about the state of our post-industrial economy. Our former well-paying positions for men–which were sufficient to provide for a family–have in recent decades been offshored to places of repressed or otherwise cheap labor.

In the place of those unionized jobs has emerged the service economy, which is a historically gendered sector. Dr. Bethany Moreton in her To Serve God and Walmart illuminates the way that the Walmart corporation relies on traditional gender roles (woman as subjugated caregiver) to define the character of those positions. As the Walmartization of the economy proceeds–i.e., as formerly well-paid men are forced into low-paid female positions–corporations are able to distribute that traditional subjugation of women across the economy.

So while it’s a risky overstatement to say, “We’re all women now,” the corporations who profit off of lower and lower wages would certainly prefer the ongoing phenomenon to continue.