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What's the matter with men? They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.
Link information
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- Title
- What's the Matter with Men?
- Authors
- The New Yorker
- Published
- Jan 23 2023
- Word count
- 2227 words
This is a well written article that I think describes the situation as well as any of its length can. Having boys and girls, I'm concerned by the prospects for both sexes in society, and keenly feel where our systems are strong and weak for each as I try to be the filler for all of them, supporting them where school and society doesn't.
To make a long comment short, I think we need to destigmatize the notion of using existing structures like government agencies (CDC, OSHA, etc) to examine, report, and respond to problems that disproportionally effect any group in society, regardless of race, sex, gender, etc. I don't think that progress has to be a zero sum game, and we should use the available data to quantify problems as they emerge. Until the idea of helping boys and young men, or anyone else, stops being controversial, society will continue to feel the ill effects of that outcome, as this article says in its closing thoughts.
I shouldn't be so surprised that the gender wage gap, which has been largely attributed to women dropping out or decreasing their involvement in the work force, would be "solved" by men dropping out of the work force. That's not great.
This represents a side of the unemployment rate that often gets ignored. Unemployment goes down when people give up on trying to find a job. I don't know what the numbers were in 1940 or if this is cherry picking a year, but it is interesting that it may show where a conservative complaint--the current administration is making it so we don't have enough jobs even though the unemployment rate makes it look like we do--overlaps with "woke" critical theory--what are the underlying reasons and historical causes of this problem?--as men become a more valid subject of "traditional" critical theory.
I also think this is an interesting idea in the context of (the quickly disappearing) adolescent relationships. Everyone knows the sentiments like "s(he) be(lie)ve(d);" I'm curious how these sorts of power dynamics would be the new default for romantic partners having boys be a year older than girls.
I agree that it's not great that the wage gap has closed somewhat not because of one group doing better, but the other doing worse. And I think it highlights the class struggle nature of many of societies problems. But the article also explains that it is the disproportionate impact of having children that really tanks women's earnings on average, and that mandatory paternity leave, and other policies would help address it. So I don't know that it is fair to summarize the articles position on it so simply.
Edit: final thought: the frequency of men dropping out isn't what narrowed the wage gap either, it was the stagnation of wages in general, but largely for blue collar manufacturing jobs predominately filled by men.
Edit: deleted and moved; replied in wrong place. Need more coffee. ☕
Looking at all the factors in play, I would not be surprised if the pay gap swings in favor of woman in the coming decades. Right now, woman are on average more motivated and capable in the current work environment. In isolation, if more and more men are pulling back from the workforce and legacy leaders fall away, it's only reasonable to assume that more woman will rise to senior and leadership positions while jobs will have a bias to female candidates.
However, if a woman does not want to persure a serious career, there's no stigma against them wanting more casual work or even not to work at all (despite what some trad-wife influencers have to say). In less than a century, we've started to rework our culture to recognize woman as suitable for most roles. Men don't have that flexibility.
While progressive mens movements focus on issues of masculinity, mental health and fatherhood; not many people are discussing a possibility that maybe some men do not need to participate in the workforce. I believe that families greatly benefit with the support of a full time parent, just like how communities are supported by a core of non-working residents. I don't see why men can not fill these roles.Yes, there's the whole late-stage-capitalism angle: the machine will never tolerate actors that do not generate value. But I think the issue runs a lot deeper.
When women entered the workforce, it was celebrated as an empowering phenomenon. So how do we float the idea of some men withdrawing themselves from the working world without feel ng like complete emasculation.
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I think this is one of those things where the language and definitions matters a lot. Historically, the term pay gap was used to describe the phenomena of men being paid more for the same work, while holding other factors like experience, credentials, etc, constant.
Now it's a little different in that it is describing discrepancies that are a little harder to line up neatly, such as women being underrepresented in senior positions, the impact of having children, etc. But it is still measuring what often appears to be a continuing holdover of unequal opportunities, while also reflecting, in at least some cases, different interests and career priorities like different preferences for flexible work.
Looking to the future I am somewhat skeptical that if you isolate the variables such as position, experience, credentials, accomplishments, etc, that there would be a significant gap in favor of women. However, there could be a gap in the sense that there are more college educated women than men of the same age cohort, so on average they make more. But I don't know that I would call that a gap in the same way we've used the term in the past. But maybe, depending on the apparent cause?
What I think will be interesting to see is as the rates of stay at home father's increases, will we see the same pay penalty experienced by them when they return to the work force as we saw for women? I don't know that I could make a prediction, but it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
Even today, that gap is only about 3% in favor of men. Which makes sense, intuitively. If capitalists could get away with paying one gender dramatically less than the other for the exact same work, that gender would be the only one employed.
https://hbr.org/2021/03/your-companys-pay-gap-is-about-more-than-money
Thanks for the clarification. I misused the term to refer to total proportional income earning. Men as a whole earning more because they represent more of the work force.
Thinking about it more, I'm also curious if men will ever have the opportunity to remove themselves from work. I'm not too informed on the history and policies involved, but multi-income households seems to been an effective screen for wage stagnation issues. It effectively doubled household income and might have even reduced a companies labor spending by flooding the applicant pool and the actual pay gap issue. The fact that some places are trying to bring back child labor is pretty telling on the state of things.
I suspect a more equitable world would eventually normalize to a fairly even split in gender agnostic work at least. I'm sure there's plenty of people, regardless of gender, that would eagerly reduce or stop working if thier partner(s) could happily and comfortably support them. But they'd also be economically safe to end the relationship because they could still support themselves.
There are a lot of potential factors leading to wage stagnation and the separation of wages and productivity. One possible one is dual income houses becoming the norm. I think that will be a hard trend to reverse, because as long as pay is anchored to the expectation of dual incomes, then the opportunity for a family to have a SAH parent is lessened, or other trade-offs are made.
However, there will always be some higher income positions, so we might see a normalizing of sex in SAH roles in the cases where it is feasible.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Have a great weekend!
It only applies to a particular class of work unfortunately, but I believe that since the pandemic, remote work has served as something as an in-between for desk-worker fathers.
For many of these men, the time that’d previously been going into commuting, frivolous meetings, and other somewhat extraneous job functions has instead been going into parenting and household duties, giving them the opportunity to help fill those roles while remaining a breadwinner.
It would not surprise me if over time, some percentage of this group eases out of their jobs into full-time domestic roles, working around the associated social stigmas in a sort of frog-boiling effect.
I think this is already fairly common, I know of a few full time SAH dads and I don't know that many people.
Exactly, this is why it is important to also look at the number of economically inactive people ("unemployment" usually refers only to people who are actually in the labour market, i.e. are looking for work).
Labor force participation seems to be tracking unemployment so I don’t think people dropping out is making unemployment look artificially rosy.
It isn't really, it peaked around 2000 and is now down around 1980s levels.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=3196&category_id=0
Yes, but the demographics of today's United States don't match that of the 1980s: the country is older, overall. Older people are more likely to take early retirement, so even with the same employment-rate-per-age the overall employment rate appears to suffer.
My preferred labour statistic is the prime-age employment rate: the employment ratio of people between 25 and 54. This helps control for the demographic shift.
In this case, the current prime-age employment ratio matches other cyclical peaks like 2019, 2007, and 1990, but it's a couple of percentage points below the late 90s peak – highlighting that period as a particular boom.
As another argument against a long-term weakening of the job market, the employment rate for 55-64 year olds is also near a record high. While more people are aging into the early-retirement bracket, fewer are in fact taking early retirement.
Interesting what happens when you separate out men and women in that same age range. Men are about 11 percentage points higher than women (86.1% versus 74.9%). I would have expected to see that narrowing more over the last two decades. (December 2003 was 86.4% for men and 71.5% for women, a 14.9 point difference.)
With hindsight, I don't think it's all that surprising. We saw the end of the "A woman? With a middle-class job? Because she likes it?" plot lines on TV by the middle to end of the 80s, and a woman who turned 18 in 1985 would be right in the middle of the 18-55 bracket by 2000. From the early 90s onwards, women were fully normalized in the workforce, and remaining barriers that force a family-versus-career choice (notably parental leave policies and daycare subsidization) are more slowly-changing.
Nice. Do you have a better metric than weekly earnings?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=186572&rn=279
I am trying to measure underemployment, where folks are forced to accept lower wage jobs.
It struggles with wealth inequality, so during COVID when the low wage folks stopped getting paid, it looked like wages shot up, but really those doing well continued to do well and those not doing well were in trouble.
Looking at the various series available, I think you can construct a chart showing stagnation if you look at the aggregate earnings per week, per person, essentially multiplying inflation-adjusted $/wk by either the employment/population ratio or the prime-age employment ratio.
In both cases, you see an upwards trend halted by Covid, with rough stagnation thereafter as inflation has approximately compensated for nominal wage gains. The overall series looks smoother to my eye than if you exclude the employment ratios; that sees a post-covid bump and an inflationary drop.
Labour force participation is a different statistic to employment. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics defined an unemployed person as someone who is "jobless, looking for a job, and [is] available for work" (source). This notably excludes people who are not looking for a job, for example because they are chronically unwell or retired.
But that was NaraVaras point, the labor force participation rate is an inverse of unemployment, except it counts pretty much everyone over the age of 16.
The Labor Force Participation Rate is defined by the Current Population Survey (CPS) as “the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population
Civilian noninstitutional population: Persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, who are not inmates of institutions (e.g., penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.
The true unemployment figure is somewhere between the actual unemployment rate, and 1-Labor Force Participation Rate
To be clear, the BLS collects many kinds of unemployment statistics. U3, which excludes people not actively searching for work, is usually used by the media as the "unemployment rate", but it is not the only thing tracked.
U6, for instance, includes those not actively searching for work (as well as underemployment).
The other 4 unemployment metrics are
U-1: The percentage of people unemployed for 15 weeks or more
U-2: The percentage of people who lost their jobs and anyone who finished a temporary job
U-4: The total number of unemployed people, plus discouraged workers
U-5: The total number of unemployed people, discouraged workers, and other marginally attached workers
Yeah, I wish the alternate measures were talked about more .
Even going by the U-6 rate, though, unemployment is generally down to pre-pandemic levels. But it is notably higher than the more commonly quoted U-3 rate.
Labor force participation tracks the people who are in the labor force. If there is a major change in numbers of people no longer looking for work, you would expect labor force participation to go down as unemployment goes down. If participation goes up or stays mostly steady as unemployment goes down that suggests that the change isn’t from people dropping out, it’s from people who want jobs being able to get them.
…but women are employed at something like ten thousand times the rate, so while it's pretty obvious what point "conservative demographer and economist Nicholas Eberstadt" is trying to make, he's pretty obviously cherry-picking and decontextualizing statistics to do so.
I actually have no clue what you mean by this.
I think it is meant to be simultaneously interpreted as "she believed" and "he lied"
This feels like I'm an old and out of touch thing, lol. I understand the use of parenthesis to create two statements, but completely lack the significance of the literal words in the context given. I.e., relationships with young people and age differences, etc.
While I'm also not entirely sure, if I'm interpreting it correctly, then an older example would be Blackwaterside / Roud 312 and 564?
That makes a lot of sense; thank you!
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/she-believed-sbeve
sbeve
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/TN66e