Great article. I would bet a million dollars that male flight from college is also a big factor in the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years.
My son is in high school. 4.0 GPA, student awards, phenomenal athlete. He came home today and told me that high school is stupid and he doesn’t want to go to college. His LGBTQ teachers always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males; the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department. Combine the feminine ration with favoritism, discrimination, and a non-objective reward system and boys will opt out…
“science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys”
Sorry to burst your bubble but that, of itself, isn’t enough to prove a “non-objective reward system”. It could be (and I know this will be hard to hear) that the girls in that cohort were objectively better at *science* 😱 than their male peers.
The double standard here is interesting. Imagine if I claimed that the predominance of men in software engineering means that men are simply better with computers. This would be seen as clear evidence of the sexism which keeps women out of the industry.
When women underperform, it's always an urgent issue that society has a moral obligation to address with various supportive programs. Anyone who suggests patriarchy is *not* to blame can be dismissed as a misogynist. When men underperform, on the other hand, it's probably their own darn fault.
But historically, ONLY boys and men were allowed to attend school/participate in professions of any kind. Women and girls were historically prohibited from attending school and not allowed in ANY profession. The discrimination that stood in women's way is historical.
If boys and men are now underperforming in educational settings where they used to do well, of course it's a problem that should be addressed, but nobody anywhere is prohibiting boys from going to school, or forcing them out of any professions.
As far as "discrimination" in awards is concerned, I suspect that if a particular boy loses out in competition with ANOTHER BOY for an award, it's automatically fair, but if a girl wins over a boy, it must be due to anti-male/pro-female "discrimination."
The history you’re bringing up is decades old and has little relevance for the present moment. [edit: instead of "present moment" I should have said "present youth"]
Here in 2024, it’s far more socially acceptable to make discriminatory statements about men than about women. (E.g. you can hold down a PMC job and tweet "men are trash"; you can't hold down a PMC job and tweet "women are trash".) And it's far more socially acceptable to advocate for discrimination against men (often in order to bring more women into an organization or profession where they are a minority).
So claims that men are being discriminated against are more plausible, a priori, here in 2024.
If you wish to make it clear that you stand against anti-male discrimination, simply advocate for gender-blind meritocracy. Given that most feminists advocate *against* gender-blind meritocracy, it's easy to infer their discriminatory motives. This leads to justified suspicion.
Oregonian said: “the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department”. Taken in the general context of his comment he’s implying the awards were skewed because the female teachers favored the girls.
I pushed back saying that for all he knows, the 11 girls deserved the awards on merit. That doesn’t mean:
(a) I am asserting women are “simply better” at science; or
(b) the underperformance of the boys in that cohort shouldn’t be addressed.
Supposing the computer science department awards were split 11/2 boys/girls. I predict someone would throw a fit, or I would be accused of sexism, if I said something like: "Imagine that. It appears that the boys in this cohort are objectively better with computers."
I think you're bringing up technicalities which don't speak to my core point.
That is not what the tone of your first reply suggests.
Oregonian gave context which suggested that the reason was not down to the ability of the boys in the class. Note her son who is intelligent and is high achieving, and reported discrimination.
Why should we discredit their experience of boys in the classroom? Especially when the report is from a student with high scores who feels boys like him are being overlooked and he notes stats to prove his point.
If that's true, one of Celeste's foundational assumptions is wrong in that case. If it's true, those boys are right to avoid college, because they would do badly anyway. They would be making rational choices.
You make a point of saying your son's teachers (are they all LGBTQ? That's odd) "always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males." "Reprimand" them for what?
And didn't you just say your son has a 4.0 GPA and has won student awards?
Your son can't be WINNING awards and ALSO deprived of awards because he's straight and male.
Or are you saying that awards are "objective" when they go to boys, and "non-objective" when won by girls?
I have no citation for this, sadly. Back in the 1980s, or 1990s, I remember running across this in a Christian book, one that was presumably arguing why women should stay in the home and raise children, since having a book that pointed out misogyny would be rare in those days. I remember the book cited the Russian medical profession, or at that time, the Soviet medical profession, which had been exclusively male for most of its history, and then at a certain point, as women entered the field, it began to be viewed as a women's profession, and Men stopped applying to medical school.
I'm assuming that it was trying to derive a natural theology from this, that women were to stay out of men's professions, but I do not remember. But it indeed did cite the idea, that at some point, the presence of women in a profession tipped it to being a women's profession. The idea that perhaps this was due to a culturally-approved flaw deep in the male psyche was not considered.
Honestly, that line of thinking seems to reinforce the notion of masculine fragility. It's almost as if though the very premise of being male is anchored to being anti-female. Females do not experience this dependency. They are just female and that is enough.
I, failing to recognize the tectonics of these changes, andcoming from a heavily academic, professionally "educated" environment, have come late to the game, but am putting the puzzle pieces together.
It seems the increase in female students has been in lockstep with courses and emphases such as a ‘gendered approach to law’. I recall my daughter having to pay for various ‘elective’ courses that had nothing to do with her targeted studies and included BS like the impact of vampires on modern literature. (The Twilight books were rampant at the time). Prestigious universities now offer courses on Taylor Swift! Easy to see young men opting out of this era bullshittery.
I think whoever wants to fund courses and study Taylor swift should be free to do so but if they’re presented as an elective, that must be taken, in a stream where it has zero bearing (such as law, medicine) then it’s just dishonesty on the part of the institution.
Fretting about things that aren’t actually happening has become quite normal. You do understand that electives are elective, right? No one is “forced” to take electives.
That may be true and gives me an idea. What do women want to stop? Deer hunting, perhaps? We could swarm the hunting areas, appropriately dressed, and play pretend, making sure our women's voices were ringing loudly over the distances. A sacrifice of time, but could be worth it.
Which shows the idiocy of 'feelz' over reason. To stop deer hunting for even one season allows an over-propagation and over-abundance of deer - properly labeled as pests in some quarters, which in turn threatens the quality and quantity of existing feeding grounds and threatens the overall health of the remaining deer population. Killing deer in reasonable numbers is properly culling a resource which could quickly outstrip its own habitat and should be considered absolutely environmentally sound - not just men acting 'macho' out to make loud popping noises and posing for beer-piss pictures. And yes, this is an absolute (and effing appropriate) example of mansplaining.
We need MORE deer hunting. They grow their population to an unsustainable level and then their environment gets degraded plus farmers crops decimated. I'm in UK. We need more deer hunting and cheap meat from it. Kill em and eat em and enjoy it
No. Not a good comment or article. You have forgotten or reject the basic principles of capitalism and supply and demand that occur in every profession. For example, in the case of veterinary science, how many veterinary doctors practice on large animals common to agriculture versus how many practice on family pets? What was the ratio 50 years ago? Why might one gender be better suited for one type of practice over another. Years ago I was told that it was harder to get into vet school than med school. If true, why? Is it still true today? What changed in engineering is that by 2005, when I was recruiting women engineers to join Caterpillar, there was a significant starting salary bonus for women in order to attract them to the profession. Unfortunately, many did not have the mechanical experience to be very good at design development and were promoted to managers where they were in charge of doing personnel performance reviews for people doing work on projects that they had no personal interest in or skills to determine best course of action. Consequently, decisions were made by uneducated committees instead of product experts. The cost of product development skyrocketed at the same time that the overall end result was less satisfactory.
Science is a process of question what is currently known. Assuming men are more likely to question the validity of COVID precautions is just as valuable as suggesting women aren't good at math. These sorts of stereotypes aren't really helping anyone.
We actually don't 'know' that to be true and we can't know. Historically, women weren't allowed to study and do research. Of those who did, their husbands often published their work and got the credit.
THE SCIENCE. It's the immutable truth in a Big Book that you swear and oath on. THE SCIENCE,the Sacred Text of the contemporary angry Thunder and Lightning God.
No! It’s the fact that intellectuals and scientists have been so consistently pushing wrong or false narrative! They lose respect because they have been DEAD WRONG on too many issues of i importance !
Plus, so many academics are effeminate dweebs, even the males are feminists!
What even makes someone an "effeminate dweeb" lol...is it because they don't do woodworking or something? They wear glasses and have other "intellectual" pursuits in life than just getting laid? They play video games (because that was the previous definition of the "effeminate dweeb" before video games went mainstream)? Or is it still that they're "eating too much soy"--even though that manosphere myth has already been debunked 1000x ad nauseum?
Also, feminism literally just means that you believe in gender equality, which is just...believing in human rights. There have been 4 different waves of feminism so far, and it's an incredibly diverse field with many different philosophical schools of thought.
The hollowed out "corporate feminism" that we see everywhere in media isn't actually feminism, and every feminist that I know is extremely frustrated/conflicted with its nonsense shallow "girl boss" crap--it's just corporations jumping on the Overton Window shift around gender equality to profit off of it as much as possible. And they do that with literally everything/anything.
Maybe learn what feminism is before going around and using the word in a way that is supposed to mean something, because this is just incredibly confusing to try and understand.
Quite likely. And in my more suspicious moments, I wonder if it is also a factor in the use of AI to replace intellectual work. Remember that before the invention of the typewriter, secretaries were respected (and of course male).
Do you have a million dollars to bet? Are you willing to give odds based on your confidence level? I think that you are confusing and conflating issues. As an engineer I am eager to embrace new developments in any of the sciences. What I reject is censoring countervailing opinions and research that is not part of current group think. It is idiotic to call it being anti-science to challenge prevailing scientific dogma with new evidence.
Again it’s the mandating of courses like ‘vampires in modern literature’ (during the Twilight series boom). Don’t mandate courses outside educational stream, let the market decide if they’re of any interest. Why do you think it’s valuable to force them on students?
I don’t agree. Anti-intellectualism has been an obvious factor in American society. When the first atom bomb exploded and its explosion took “too long” (there was a fear that other atoms would continue the chain reaction) General Leslie Groves, then in charge of the Manhattan Project, is reported to have cried out, “The long hairs have gone and done it…!”
Intellectuals at colleges have been complaining about "the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years" for at least the past 40 years. It's like a meme. Plus, you have to define what "anti-intellectual" means, and how "anti-science" attitudes have been growing in a time like now when so many people think that anything labeled as science is automatically true. Is it anti-intellectual to think you're wasting your time sitting in a class where the lazy prof is supposed to teach you the fundamentals of linguistics but prattles on every week about his own research? Is it anti-intellectual to think it's a waste of time sitting in a classroom where the prof drones on about his garbled version of Marxism instead of teaching English composition and then everybody gets an A?
I used to buy into the “men and women are interchangeable” narrative but 10+ years of coaching work teams (tech but also other fields) have changed my mind. It’s fascinating to see the differences between men and women at work. I’m a woman btw.
A quick Google search will confirm my position. The core reason why women prefer male bosses is female relational aggression. I have rarely seen a man go after other men or women with the I have seen women go after other women. Call it ruthless versus vicious. Men don’t try to destroy someone’s career because they’re younger and more attractive. That’s psychodrama.
I’ve observed that women have an innate equality bias. Perhaps as a way to ensure offspring get access to resources, they promote collaboration, consensus, and sharing more. Actually, the workplace push for hypercollaboration is precisely an aspect of feminization. In contrast, men prefer to order themselves within a hierarchy based on (perceived) merit and tend to want to work by themselves but that’s penalized now (also penalizes introverts of either gender).
Another Google search will show that women trend more neurotic and take things more personally. Also, more likely to involve authority in disputes like HR.
Many male employees fear of giving female workers developmental feedback because they fear being called sexist. It reflects one of the most corrosive social shifts: labeling anything less than praise as bias, if not discrimination, especially among younger female workers.
Earlier this year, a young female worker accused a male coworker of calling her stupid. I smelled Damsel manipulation vibes, so I asked her to repeat exactly what he said. Turns out, he didn’t call her stupid but she *felt* stupid and therefore it’s the same thing. For fucksake!
A quick Google search proves NOTHING. That’s not researh.
You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish. Most of us have greater ambitions — and frankly, children do grow up! I’ve had an empty next for quite a while now. Even if I’d stayed home for much longer than I did (I was home with my kids until they were both in school all day) I’d still have had decades to do something with after they grew up.
Madam, the research can found via Google because it’s available digitally.
> You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish.
Completely unfounded projection. As mentioned *twice*, I’m a professional workplace coach in tech. Moreover, ambition is not limited to goals that require a person to clock in/out of an institution. Also, there’s nothing wrong with being a “tradwife” whatever that means if a woman chooses to be.
You’re drifting farther into an emotive frame of discourse. Every piece of psyche illustrates the differences between male and female archetypes. By and large, they hold true.
This kind of unwillingness to acknowledge what so many men are saying supports the author’s premise. Thus is especially true when even pop art relies on the same tropes about women in the workplace. These ideas were created in neither a vacuum nor the thin air of fantasy. I know too many men who left female-dominated professions because of gossip, passive-aggression, and emotive reasoning.
Imo there is nothing greater than bringing forth and rearing the next generation. Those other (not greater) ambitions will be forgotten two weeks after your retirement or death unless you have contributed something unique enough to be commemorated and that excludes 90% of the gen pop. Your descendants will remember and appreciate your place in the family tree of life.
There was a study years ago comparing men and women's soccer teams: if one male player committed an off field offense against another, it was quickly shaken off but if a female soccer player committed the same offense, she was shut out. Gender? Culture?
The reason I preferred a male supervisor is because they were direct, consistent and had probably done the job they are supervising. It’s bad enough when you hire someone with no experience but much worse when it’s a person that could never actually do the work in the first place. It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children. That’s the natural order and this completely explains what has happened to wages in the Western world, every job has been turned into woman’s work. All labor has been devalued because we now have twice the labor pool. Why not go back to a traditional employment situation that yielded the highest standards of living we have ever had. I guess because it doesn’t fit the gay/trans/ single self centered attitude about why we are here. The most important part of being here is to have and raise children. All the education, work and money does nothing for the advancement of people if it’s all squandered on pets and thyself.
Why don’t we women just stay home and have kids? Let me explain this to you.
First of all, I found motherhood very fulfilling, actually. I had my kids just as soon as I could — after I finished my degree, got married and started working. I really do love babies, baking, all that traditional mom stuff. I stayed home until my youngest was ready to start school.
But let me clue you in! SO MANY WOMEN HAVE BEEN FUCKED OVER SEVERELY FOR THIS CHOICE. Women who don’t have solid careers are stuck with men who beat them, belittle them, cheat on them, etc. When my first husband decided to leave the marriage, it meant my job — which I had seen as a supplement to the family and not as something I could afford to support myself and my children with — was not nearly enough. My kids are grown now and I’m STILL being punished by our system for having stayed home with my kids for many years and for not working on my career hard enough. I will never be able to afford to retire, because I was not prioritizing my financial wellbeing — I was prioritizing my children and allowing my then-husband to concentrate on his career, unencumbered by domestic concerns.
Now, not every woman wants to have babies and stay home, regardless. But some percentage of us wouldn’t have minded it a bit as long as we were treated with respect, not financially exploited, etc., etc. You can blame bad men for that. We’ve learned not to trust any of you.
Eventually, I ran the newsroom for a daily newspaper. I assure you I was better at it than the man who came before me and was fired. I’d been working in newspapers since my youngest started school. I knew what I was doing. I had a degree and years of experience and I’m really proud of what a good job I did as the editor of a newspaper.
Your claim that women aren’t as competent simply proves you’re sexist. And sexist men are not good people. They certainly are not good husbands or fathers.
Also -- what's with that weird mention of pets at the end? Let me guess -- you're a Vance follower who fixates on single women with cats. And "thyself"? What fucking century are you from, anyway?
You sound like an incel who hates women because you cannot attract one.
YES. Thank you!! I lived a similar life of choices for marrying, having children, able to stay home & raise them, then go back to school for a Masters and then to work outside the home.. I am so glad I did all of it that way. HOWEVER I too was punished: My Social Security, it was explained, is less because I "stayed home during prime earning years." As if lazy?! So if I had paid someone else to raise our children, I would have been a good little soldier and gotten another $500+ per month for my time as a worthless, long-lived Grannie. Our economy is seriously deficient for everyone except white males. We women--old and young-- are in process to change that. Stand back.
My understanding is that a number of Westernized countries do adjust their public pension systems appropriately to reflect the years a caregiver was home with children (whether the caregiver was male or female does not matter). I hope Americans can work together on having the same approach.
On your deathbed are you going to be wishing you spent less time with your children so that you could have upgraded to an ocean view room on your retirement cruises?
Having dwelt with the fall out from my mother's self centered choices since I was nine yrs old - for well over half a century. Endured abuse at the hands of two stepmothers and watched my father die from a Hep C infection deliberately given to him by one of my stepmothers. As well being married for well over four decades I've learned not to trust women and prefer to live alone now that my wife has passed away than dwell within the living hell of feminine emotional chaos.
"More sexist than men have ever been"? When women pass legislation barring men from certain professions, excluding them from higher education, taking away their right to vote and signing their property over to their wives, I might start to believe you.
All she said was "the so-called "traditional" system has harmed women and still harms women today; here is my own story of how I didn't prioritize my financial wellbeing and when my husband left me, it greatly harmed me and I'm still living with the effects of that harm today."
That's it.
She only pointed blame at the restrictive "traditional" system that categorizes what people's entire lives are "allowed" to look like based on nature's arbitrary chromosome sorting, as well as "bad men" + "sexist men."
She literally went out of her way to not generalize all men--like, she went out of her way to not trigger any "not all men"s...and you *still* managed to get offended?
You guys really are out here at this point just calling anything a woman says about a man "misandry" unless it's overt praise or something.
You seriously cannot be this fragile (a person, because fragility has nothing *inherent* to do with gender or sex).
If a woman just *speaking* of her own personal life experience is "misandry" to you, you need to do some serious reflection as to why.
You are not helping. You may be are trolling for your own ego, or you maybe you are becoming what they want you to be. Or maybe you are a feminist flooding threads with random hate. Either way, you are spoiling the debate and not just boys will suffer. Everyone will.
“It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children.”
Better for *you* bro, is what you mean. Earn $, control the family and have someone raise your kids.
How do you not writhe with embarrassment at your audacity when you exhort the singular importance of having and raising children *at the very same time* as you advocate returning to a social system that would ensure you personally would have next to no involvement in the having and the raising.
Get away with that sanctimonious clap trap. It’s 2024 and we see right through you.
I don't know what makes them think they can convince us to go back to a time women risked everything to extricate themselves from in the first place. We know it was a better time for white men, so they can quit beating that drum.
While I don’t entirely agree with the original comment, and I’m not against women working per se, it does have some merit we would best not dismiss.
It’s uncharitable to assume believing in the traditional gender arrangement to be purely a matter of control. This arrangement had persisted through history until very recently because it potentially affords the most optimal conditions for childrearing.
Breast milk tailored to your children is better than formula. Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t and can instill unwanted values and behavior-- that is, daycare workers and teachers (aka the State).
That means, especially when very young, mothers ARE the best primary caregivers along with dad. Dads are next. Close family after that. Live-in nanny next perhaps. Best overall: mom, dad, and close family. It is what it is. Furthermore, most women, when they become mothers, wish to work less to some degree (if I recall correctly, 20% want to be FT SAHM). Yhis is natural and reasonable. This is an unacknowledged driving reason behind the pay gap.
However, society prioritizes the wants of adults over the needs of children. Liberal feminism has a strong anti-motherhood and child bias. Women entering the job market created surplus workers which drove down wages. Combined with inflation, and other various factors means both parents must work to make ends meet.
Not I didn’t offer solutions. I’m just spitting inconvenient truths.
I know it's always tempting to revert to nostalgia, but it's really not really historically accurate to say that a working dad and a stay at home mom nuclear family must be the best and most natural because that's how it's been in the past, taking an anthropological lens and looking across cultures and places amd economies. That's actually just the most recent past. Si many factors, including the GI bill after the second world War that, speaking very simplistically, made single generational nuclear family living even possible for a plurality of people in America. This doesn't even address other places and cultures and natural degrees of variation towards the economy and care roles. I highly recommend the first several episodes of the podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy for an overview of these topics.
>Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t
This is a false dichotomy, though of course it is important that children are raised by loving family.
>and can instill unwanted values and behavior
Children are best raised by those who will instill good values which has nothing specifically to do with who is the child's parent or not. All of parents, extended family, friends of the family, complete strangers can instill bad values or behaviors. The values or behaviors parents want their children to have might well be very bad ones and it is not hard to find examples of this.
What is 'unwanted' or 'unwanted' by anyone (parents or otherwise) has nothing to do with how children should be reared and is entirely relative. There is no particular reason to privilege the values or behaviors parents want if we are thinking about what is best for the child and of course, the parents (much less grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other members of the family) may want incompatible values or behaviors so that standard is even more of a non-starter.
Depending on the culture, breastfeeding generally lasts around a year. It doesn’t justify prescribing a particular role for the rest of a woman’s life. “Optimal conditions” for child-rearing are two caring, attuned, involved, competent parents, both of whom can provide materially for the child.
“ The most important part of being here is to have and raise children.”
According to whom? Not to me. Not to my husband of more than 30 years. Not everyone can have children and it does not make one ’less-than’ if we don’t.
Eric, my grandma was a stay at home mother with young children when her husband, my grandpa, was killed by a drunk driver. They were plunged into poverty. Thoughts on how society should handle that?
Relatedly, my husband - an incredibly healthy individual - had a stroke this year. Thank god I have a good paying job or else the same might have happened to me and my young kids.
I've had the opposite experience with male supervisors, actually. Most didn't know what they were doing, but grossly overestimated their own skills + knowledge. Or they managed to skate by on so little effort that they were essentially just "existing" in their role while doing the absolute bare minimum.
I've never experienced an incompetent or bare minimum/passive female supervisor, though I'm sure they exist as well (because I'm not going to absurdly overgeneralize billions and billions of people).
Now, do my anecdotal stories weigh more than yours? Do they weigh anything at all to you? No? Is it because anecdotes aren't a basis for any kind of logical conclusion, and using them for "logic" is a recognized logical fallacy?
Yeah, not sure why you would think that supports your "we need to return to patriarchy, even if it means removing the right to individual liberty/freedom/self-determination/etc" comment.
Plus, are you literally implying that women "could never actually do the work in the first place"? That's such a big yikes, dude. I can't even imagine being that blindly prejudiced--do you hold similar views about the competency, capabilities, and intelligence of other entire demographic groups, like black people or gay/trans people too?
I suppose it's a yes for the latter, at least, via implication.
Like, you rail against their "single self-centered attitude" but that's...the foundation of American identity + culture. Haven't you heard of "American individualism"? The core tenet of the American Dream?
That individualistic culture/mindset is the primary factor in why so many Americans are still so opposed to even the most basic social welfare programs or socialist policies (despite FDR himself saving us from the Great Depression and setting the foundation for the "American Golden Age" with his aggressive implementation of them...because their intention/design is about sharing wealth + resources more fairly overall to benefit all society, rather than letting a small group of individuals hoard everything disproportionately).
Based on your own gender essentialism, anyone could come up with literally any random "justification" for any random societal system, though I'm sure you've never thought about systems outside an individualistic, capitalist framework.
Because, ironically, that "natural order" you're referring to--the extremely isolated nuclear family model--is *recognized* to be a relatively recent capitalist "invention" to promote + optimize economic efficiency + profit. Humans lived in communal models (ie. large intergenerational families, close-knit villages/communities) basically up until the Industrial Revolution, even in America. It's not "natural" by any measure.
But let's try this--if we should all be less "single self-centered" and need to "optimize" economic recovery, then how about switching it up to:
"Men can't 'naturally' raise children like women can, they're (apparently?) only good at working for paychecks. So men should go work but then pay huge taxes so that women can live together in special large family co-op residences to dedicate all their time/energy to raise children communally. That would, in fact, be an even *more* efficient model of traditional separated gendered spheres--because genders wouldn't even have to waste time interacting and getting distracted by each other! Men could even just donate sperm and women could order it straight to their communal family living co-op residences and everyone could go about and do their 'natural roles' better + undistracted + unfettered."
I'm going to take a wild guess, though, and assume that this doesn't seem so appealing to you, does it?
Because what "traditional" men want in that "natural order" is far more about access to a woman, her body/intimacy, and her labor + care via marriage. It has crap all to do with "employment/economic crisis" or "wages" or whatever "every job being turned into women's work" is supposed to mean.
Those "highest standards of living we've ever had" just translates to "highest standards of living that *men* have ever had" and it's obvious to everyone, even if it's not obvious to you.
I wish you trad-types would all at least stop pretending otherwise.
Ugh, ok. I'm still frustrated by this shocking level of ignorance, so I'll reply one more time.
All the economic trends you've mentioned have nothing to do with women joining the workforce. In fact, according to the UN, that's actually the *number one* solution for struggling + developing countries to trigger an exponential economic growth rate...because cutting off half your population from participating in your economy....obviously cuts your economic production and thus strength in half?
You're complaining about something that has so many recognized + well studied factors, but arbitrarily blaming it all on women to justify the society that you *personally* want (which is actually very "single self-centered" of you, isn't it).
What you should look to is decades of neoliberalist policies, decades (arguably centuries) of corporate greed + labor exploitation, and the rise of automation + globalization. That's actually your "twice the labor pool" source...except it's even larger than "twice the labor pool," because it's every single country's labor pool, and not just "the other half" of the population in your own country.
How did you even manage to conclude your premise? Like, did women somehow "kill the coal mining industry" by "feminizing it" or something too, in your eyes?
And lastly, that "natural order" (regarding your gender essentialist beliefs--ie. patriarchy) of yours has only been around for 5,000-8,000 years, which is a blip in time because our species is *hundreds of thousands* of years old.
Anthropologists have completely debunked the "man the hunter, woman the gatherer/homemaker" myth, and now report that we lived in completely egalitarian communities for all of that time. Biologists also believe that we evolved as an egalitarian species too, via our extremely negligible sexual dimorphism (via comparing it to the dimorphism in other animal species--both those with very large + very negligible dimorphism like ours).
It's like every single sentence is based on a wrong premise that has way too much baggage to unpack in a comment section. I'm going to stop writing before this one turns into an article-length comment too.
🤪 You chuckled! Menz are soooooooo funny and *never* arseholes! You’d seek him out for your team so he could actively work to spread his misogyny and undermine your authority! You are *so cool* and 100% definitely not like the other girls!!!!!
I'd much rather work for a woman than for a man. Whether it has anything to do with being gay, I do not know, but I never learned how to earn the approval of male authority figures. It may go back to prep school in the early 70s. They probably don't see their younger selves in me. I know I can't identify with the average male corporate type.
I doubt I would have found myself in the following scenario had my boss been a woman. It was my first day on a new job. One of the first things my new boss, a man, said to me was "Do you play golf?" When I said I didn't, his response was "Too bad."
I feel the same and I am straight. I have a bad temper. I have had violence issues. That is not an issue with women. Even as I age, sometimes I need to work hard not to punch men I disagree with.
I see that happen too. On the other hand, I have also seen male bosses who prefer their female staff over their male staff. We humans are flawed but endlessly interesting (and we do need enlightenment on how we treat one another...it's a work in progress).
I bet you were a charmer then who could harmlessly flirt and get away with murder cos you made them feel beautiful and sexy . Some men can do that. Bad boys,we love em.
In my loooong career in the private and later the public sectors, it was observable that in many cases males had better work relations with female bosses than did the females who worked for those bosses. It was intriguing to see.
That old canard of Italians (or Irish) not being white is totally fabricated and isn't held up to even the slightest bit of research. They weren't allowed into higher society because they were recent immigrants, that's all. And race isn't a social construct. Terms may change over time but every culture and language has words for black, white, Amerindian, etc. To say that there is no race of people who are from South and Central America because 60 years ago the US government didn't have a place for it on their forms is absurd. The ancient Greeks wrote of race, as did the Chinese, Romans, Indians, Japanese. Its a thing, it exists, it matters. We've all known this for thousands of years up until about 3 weeks ago when academics started thinking that it makes them sound intelligent to say otherwise.
By construct I think people are referring to the idea of skin color equating to race, which was made up (contructed) around the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Race in more ancient times that you mention referred mainly to culture, ethnicity. This is typically what people mean when they describe race--and gender--as constructs. Things that are part of the ever evolving ways humans conceptualize and categorize themselves and gatekeeping rules we make up. Gravity=not a construct. Long hair is for girls= a construct (and a recent one).
Usually it has been culture and language. Religion can get in there as well, but culture is a huge block. The Chinese referred to the "black skin and black souls" of the British during the Opium War. The fight was racial from the Chinese perspective, and had nothing to do with skin color.
I can’t speak to the Irish, but even in my early years (60’s & 70’s,) there was plenty of bigotry against people with names like mine. I wasn’t until I learned some Roman history that I began to feel some pride in my ancestry.
Races as we describe them have definitions. If they did not, we could not categorize them. My wife is from Thailand. They are shorter than people from Sweden. They have black hair. My blond hair makes me stand out when I am in Asia. My blue eyes are not common in many places.
Race is used as a rough proxy for place of your ancestors' origin. There are differences here that can involve skin color, but that is one characteristic. Sickle cell anemia is common to West Africans but not to Southern Indians who share a dark skin color. Skin cancer is common among those of European ancestry.
At least from a medical standpoint, knowing one's race is actually useful.
How did you even find this substack and why are you reading it? This is usually a place for thoughtful conversation. Construct in this context means the way humans arrange our lives and rules that govern our societies--and these things change over time. What is considered masculine and feminine behavior, clothing, work, etc., changes over time, and so has our views on what determines social boundaries of race. This doesn't equate to a belief that there are no differences between men, women, or people from different genetic and cultural histories. This article is about trying to understand our current cultural concerns, not be pushy or defensive of any specific ideology.
To clarify, it’s not a binary concept. But to say there is no social construction at all between races is too absurd to even argue against. Groups aren’t monoliths and individuals vary. Consider also racial genetic mixing. Nurture and perception still play roles.
I bet you that I can pick most people out by race. Even more, may medical issues cluster by race. Not all, but a number less than zero. I hate this mindset. People die because of this foolish mindset. We need to stop this "I do not see race" BS. You ethnic heritage is actually important. It has a direct bearing on what diseases to look out for.
No, you can pick most people out by the social constructs of race that you have been taught. The parity of genetic variation within and across categories of race is a fact, not an opinion. The validity of that statement does not depend on your personal beliefs. It does not matter if you are ignorant of it...it remains true.
I agree with you! Further, in my experience, Working for women, changed the concept of job well done, from actually accomplishing what was requested, to presenting the appearance of accomplishing what was requested.
Perhaps you can say this to the original commenter and their "blanket assumption" that this person was directly refuting, or any of the other 10 or whatever commenters that were all backing up his equally insane "blanket assumption" about female bosses.
Why'd you feel the impulse to pick + respond like this to the *one* comment that refuted the original blanket assumption via an equivalent blanket assumption? And interpreted entirely out of that context, too. It's very suspect regarding biases on your part, dude.
Like you're just unintentionally illustrating more of the insane, irrationally sexist position found throughout this entire thread of:
"Male bosses bad = we need to pick better bosses because they were chosen poorly + were an exception to the rule of male bosses being better" vs "female bosses bad = because they were female"
Of course men and women are different, which is why it’s so important that women be in the workforce. If women didn’t bring unique gifts, there would be no need to try to increase the number of women in different fields, but they do
"women's covert psychodrama"? Is THAT what it is? Oh well then. Where have I heard this before? Oh. Yes. ALL MY LIFE (and I'm 78 years old)! Just didn't want you to labor (so to speak) under the erroneous idea that women should be like men or go home.
Gender is absolutely a social construct. Sex is not.
Gender is socially constructed, which means the source of the concept comes from society — not biology. If you have ever raised a child in the United States, suffering through aisles of “boy” toys and “girl” toys; “boy” diapers and “girl” diapers, bottles, books, etc. Etc., that should be self evident.?
Biological sex is largely a matter of sex organs and XX/XY chromosomes. There's some variation, but this is generally the case. It is biological.
Gender is a construct. The meaning of gender is socially created. So the ways that various societies understand gender can and do vary significantly across time and space.
Because gender is a construct created by societies, a society can link gender to a lot of things that have nothing to do with gender at all. In the United States, the pinnacle of late-stage capitalism hell bent on pointless consumption, gender is attributed to objects, to preferences, to colours, to anything that might cause people to purchase more than they need.
I can understand saying that sex is a fungible thing, but the imaginary concept of gender is absurd. It is another silly rambling of rich white ladies who imagine nightmare worlds where they spend other people's money to create hell for everyone. I have respect for transgender rights, and it is deeply upsetting to see the monsters who oppose basic human rights for transgendered people, but I do not see any utility in imagining this thing "gender" and pretending that it matters. It is part of a long, useless parade of imaginary concepts such as "gaslighting" or "disparate impact." Too many over-fed white people dreaming up new ways to make themselves significant at the expense of marginalized people.
I know that I cannot change it, but I am keen on new spaces where innovation can occur in the absence of professional nannies.
I agree that generally this is the situation, but it seems to me to be more a symptom than a cause of what ails humans (in Western societies, anyway, which are the only ones I have lived and worked in).
Great comment. You are, predictably, going to be punished for your "emperor has no clothes " honesty. My wife, former HR, and a "disagreeable giver" (her father's only son!) would have written a very similar comment. I hear echoes of this with a disturbingly frequent regularity.
I work in a pretty much male environment-construction. The government is trying to bribe women to take it up because it's a male environment, which apparently is not allowed.
I hadn't thought about it before, but if sizeable numbers of women started entering the workforce I would leave. You're spot on. Working with women isn't enjoyable, I like working with other men. I used to be a school teacher and I find the idea of going back to working with lots of women quite dispiriting. I don't want to oppress anyone or anything, I just want to be left to get on with it.
I don't think you're quite getting it though. Workplaces with large female cohorts are substantially different... I mean we're not doing the 'men and women are interchangeable' shtick are we?
Teaching is a completely different profession to what it once was when it was largely male dominated, as is university. Women are very good in pushing for their environment to be shaped to reflect their sensibilities, men are not so socially adept in comparison. Men don't really like the environments that women produce but they aren't able to push back against them, so instead they just opt out and go and do something else. The problem for a lot of men now is that western society has become so ubiquitously feminized (ie. there's nowhere else to go) that opting out basically means locking themselves away from everyone and everything and (probably) living in a resentful fantasy world.
Also.. at the risk of making people angry, have you considered that when all the men leave, things get a bit shit? That's the other side of the coin. Men's strength is that they're generally good at building things, technique and structure. It may be that things that men leave get devalued because they actually become less valuable. Educational outcomes since women started dominating the teaching profession, they're not the best. A lot of things seem to be not working properly anymore... Maybe it's unrelated but the correlation seems to be there.
I was going to say something to the same effect as you, but you put it better, so thanks!
I used to teach elementary school, but as my male colleagues retired or left, the environment changed and I ended up leaving as well. I generally like women, as individuals, but not so much in larger groups. I believe there is a dynamic in large groups of females that is detrimental (in my view) to the working environment. There seems to be less room for individualism, and a large pressure to conform in female dominated workspaces. Further, exchanges of ideas seems to be less welcome if they challenge the group cohesion.
Workplaces run by almost all men (like construction) don’t exactly have the best workplace culture either. I’d rather be the only man in an office than in an office that was almost all men, but I do honestly thinking having a healthy balance of genders is good for the workplace.
It really depends upon the work. A true balance is great, but once that transition occurs, and the environment takes on a female vibe, then it gets creepy, passive-aggressive, everyone shit-talking everyone else, and many of us rush for the exits.
Guess again. That’s evolution, not your personal brand of sociology. In almost any effort of high purpose or seriousness or competition, women are a distraction—again, evolution.
i agree, there is an unspoken rule, that we all have to protect each others feelings, in stead of stating obvious facts that need addressing. people have always called me a rather masculine person, i just have no patience for feelings when things need getting done. this quality annoys me no end with other women, even those i know and love. They need approval, even if they are incompetent. No. If you have hand tremors, you cannot, CANNOT be a dental hygienist. The other person safety is more important than your feelings. (this was a true story by the way) she paid to take the program thinking she could work at it. no. I just tell them to join a religion or something else that makes them feel important. because that is what they deeply want.
This may generally be true, on average—but it depends on the women and the culture set by leadership in an organization.
I’m a woman who worked in aviation (95% male) and I enjoyed the direct, focus-on-results culture. It’s something I’ve worked to bring to all organizations I’ve been evolved in leading, including those that were majority female.
Women compete socially differently than men. Women are much more likely to use Gossip, Shaming, Rallying (GSR) and other social techniques to get what they want. I think men prefer to compete directly and cooperate in a hierarchy based on the results of that competition; eg best on top, others following according to capabilities.
To a certain extent I can understand what you are saying. But a problem with the male concept of a hierarchy built on the results of competition is that there are many men who do not care about the results of competition from women. We are invisible, or disliked for the same competitiveness that is admired in men, or only valued for looks/agreeability or other traditionally feminine traits.
Men are far more likely to get that passive-aggressive attitude in workplaces where they are safe (government, teaching,...). I suspect many men go out of their way to avoid such environments, at least the individuals who can afford to.
I think a lot of them do. In these conversations I take it as a given that the qualities of 'man' and 'woman' are bimodal. There's overlap and messiness.
But even if you favour a more masculine style, the problem is that the feminine version of social organisation outcompete the masculine one once violence and physical strength are not valuable traits. Even if you like the masculine style, you're still going to get the feminine where the two meet.
But it's unlikely that you like masculine organisation better because you share it as an impulse (just generally), you like it because it's nice. It's already had decades, maybe hundreds of years of regulation and civilizing. Men have generally learned to play well together in large groups. In it's most primitive elements men have been forced to organise into armies etc forever.
This is not to say 'women should never be in charge of anything', just that they need to be aware that they have a lot of stuff they need to get ahold of, just like men have to learn not to punch people in the face (and generally do learn from a very young age), women have to learn that their impulses are generally maladaptive in this weird modern world. I don't think we've had to deal with this much before, so we just haven't, and as a result the pathologies of femininity are poisoning our civilization.
“But it's unlikely that you like masculine organisation better because you share it as an impulse (just generally), you like it because it's nice. It's already had decades, maybe hundreds of years of regulation and civilizing. Men have generally learned to play well together in large groups. In its most primitive elements men have been forced to organise into armies etc forever.”
What the fuck, now? So much bullshit on this thread I could be here all night. Fucking hell.
“you like it because it's nice”. ???? Bro you’re so brainwormed, so pilled on male superiority complex that you can’t distinguish between opinion and fact. “Nice”???
“Men have generally learned to play well together in large groups.”
Have they, though? Because I’ve worked in some incredibly dysfunctional organisations led by men, where the mass loss of talent and productivity due to shitty toxic “masculine” attitudes and traits was in our faces every day.
I suppose though, that by asserting that somehow women haven’t learnt to work collaboratively 🙄, you’re at least pushing back against the traditional story of women as the gatherers that worked together in large groups to raise children and source the majority of the tribe’s food supply while the menz were away doing the all important hunting.
Or, and hear me out, are you simply spouting total nonsense without ever stopping to think it through properly, on the basis that you’re a man so your ideas are by definition correct? Because that’s how I read this drivel you’re writing.
He's actually getting at a deep truth that is hard to accept or even discuss. If you want to ignore it, go ahead. But your "these thoughts are not allowed to be spoken" attitude is exactly the problem that occurs in female-dominated organizations.
I have two female bosses, and I don't tell them what I really think because that's not allowed. I tell them what they want to hear. Now to be clear, I have had one female boss I could be real with, but she was the exception. 90% of women require you to keep it fake. All positive all of the time. Its much easier to have a honest, frank conversation with a man.
What is this “deep truth that is hard to accept or even discuss”? If it’s that a lot of men dislike working with women, or even dislike women full stop, that is being discussed very frankly by men all over this comments section, so your point doesn’t really make sense.
What I think you’re getting at, is that this guy, and many like him, try to dress up their misogyny with some kind of biological 🤪 justification (“deep truth”) to make it sound more “rational”.
Reality is, you think men and traditionally male ways of being and acting are superior. Women are inferior and you don’t like taking orders from them or having to do anything that is “female-coded” because it’s inherently status-diminishing to you as a man.
If you’re going to have the audacity to write about “deep truth” you should really be able to call it as it is.
What he is saying is that all institutions in our society have had centuries to create rules dealing with male bad behavior. We have only had female-dominated companies, departments, schools,..., for about forty years. We have yet to "fix" or "constrain" female-oriented problems.
Unless you are saying that women have no problems, or have the same problems as men (violence, duplicity, rage,...). There is no judgment here, simply the fact that we are only having female-dominated work spaces vey recently. We have no idea how they fail, whereas we do know the way males tend to fail (usually related to rage and violence).
Look, I believe in the principle of diversity. I’ve seen the problems arising when organisations are entirely controlled by a homogenous group of people (same race, gender, class, age-group etc.), and I’m certainly not asserting that homogenous groups of women are somehow immune from problems.
However: (a) the idea that society has been finely tuned to deal with all problems caused by men running things is, um, laughable; and (b) it’s only really in the last, say, 20 years that the problems caused by men running things have even been discussed or widely acknowledged.
So, given society has been dealing with the fall-out from fallible male leadership for centuries, I’m not amenable to suggestions that because particular issues might arise in the context of all-female leadership, that means women leaders aren’t competent, can’t be trusted, shouldn’t be followed etc (which is where old mate was going).
i do, and i worked with many women who were amazing. but a degree does not make you that. it's just a piece of paper. Your character does. I have known women with great character. doulas midwifes, herbalists. ER nurses. they took initiative, and were just the kind of people you want by your side when life gets hard. karens, are the opposite of that. anyone can get a diploma. if they want one.
Agreed. I don't know how one would quantify it, but I'd wager women managers with a masculine style have statistically signficantly less employee turnover than male managers or women with a women's style.
Don't give us that— if women produce workplace cultures that are unpleasant for men, then clearly it's the women who are responsible, for creating such a hostile environment, not the men trying to get away from it.
You’re blaming women again. You’re taking it as a given that we are producing workplace cultures that are unpleasant for men. Don’t give me that bullshit. As if those poor men are just helpless and can’t get away from all the mean, powerful women … listen to yourself.
First, it is not a given that women produce toxic workplaces. I work with "powerful" women now. (They are my bosses; the ceo, and her second in command) I have no problem with them as women, or as my bosses.
Our team is small, five people, that lets us relate to each other as individuals rather than demographics. And we are responsible for different tasks and topics, with clear areas of responsibility.
Second, I have experienced the opposite as well, serving in the Air Force, we had a few women serving in our unit. Most of them left within the year. It could, of course be because of us lads "producing workplace cultures that were unpleasant for women", but their stated reason for leaving was that it just didn't work for them.
There still is a couple of men teaching at my old school, and some of the women in my unit stayed, but both places the majority (of the minority) left at some point. I'm not blaming anyone, but maybe men and women produce different workplace cultures, cultures that are less agreeable to the opposite sex?
You can laugh at it, just do not complain about the leftover men raping, robbing and killing people. There has been an enormous cost to opening up opportunities to all, and it has been born entirely by men of the majority group.
The real danger is not that men with nothing to lose will rebel, video games and porn seem to have sedated them, but that a right wing movement will rise up and change everything. That risk is not small. Donald Trump is not that bad. It could be so much worse.
“There has been an enormous cost to opening up opportunities to all, and it has been born entirely by men of the majority group.”
This is so telling. You can’t perceive your own brainworms. You’re still operating from a place where you think “men of the majority group” *deserved all the opportunities as some kind of natural right* and have done the “others” a huge favour by “allowing” them a share.
Of course this is the case. Do you think slaves freed themselves in 1865? Were the concentration camps in Europe freed by Jewish prisoners or by the Red Army? If you think otherwise, you are delusional.
This is how societies collapse. You are so far gone that you cannot observe what is right in front of you. Men necessarily had to allow women to hold these positions. That is why women have more rights here than in say Saudi Arabia. Our society is more productive having better qualified women taking roles above less qualified men, but there has been a cost to this. It has come in the form of greater inequality, broken families, drug addiction and mass psychological distress.
I have no idea what you mean by "deserving." That is a useless term. No one "deserves" anything. With regards to female empowerment, people such as yourself are not contributing anything. If we have any hope of creating a better society, we must recognize problems and attempt to solve them, or at least ameliorate the collateral damage. Screaming that men are bad, or promoting a victimhood religion is counterproductive unless you are shooting for societal collapse or a radical rightwing takeover. Silly posturing and demonizing normal people for existing has created Donald Trump and his kind. Is that your goal?
Your comment is revealing about how you want to categorize me, but it has no connection to reality. But if you want Trump to win and agree with his vision, keep on going strong. People like you will get him in the White House forever, president for life.
So if men produce workplace cultures that are unpleasant for women, it’s clearly the men who are responsible for creating such a hostile environment, right?
Sexual harassment; general hostility; sexist condescension; exclusion from the so-called "boy's club" (ie. just networking) which is key to professional development/paths; invisibility and being passed over for less qualified and/or less experienced men??
These are all *literally* well-known, well-studied patterns in especially male-dominated fields. Where have you been, dude? You can google the studies and see the statistics yourself.
I'm not refusing to work with women - I still work with women. My boss is a woman, her boss is a woman. We work together just fine. But at every workplace there is a woman like you, and the more women, the greater the chance of having several Karens!
Totally - but I am probably less annoyed/off-put by Chads than by Karens. I accept that the opposite maybe true for women. I know how to deal with Chads. I do not have the same tools at my disposal towards Karens.
But again, I totally agree with what I percieve to be your point; the more males gathered together, the bigger the chance that some are dicks.
Well, it sounds like we are basically in agreement -- some people are just assholes, and nobody likes to work with assholes, be they male or female.
It may well be true that you find it easier to deal with Chads, while I find it easier to deal with Karens -- but it's so much nicer to have a workplace where everyone, male and female alike, treat each other with respect and cordiality.
It's unrelated. Education (especially since becoming a female-dominated field) has become increasingly undervalued and experienced insane fund-slashing from every level of government. We've also double downed on the standardized testing metrics/system, despite that just teaching rote memorization and not critical thinking skills.
Correlations are not causations.
Your assumption isn't just a well-known logical fallacy, it's incredibly condescending and gender essentialist (ie. sexist): "Men's strength is that they're generally good at building things, technique and structure. It may be that things that men leave get devalued because they actually become less valuable."
So essentially you're saying that men or "man skills" are inherently more valuable than women or "woman skills," because if they leave a profession it "inherently becomes less valuable" regardless of profession or skills or whatever else?
But that also contradicts your own bringing up of educational outcomes that immediately follows it--education is literally one of the most important contributors to a healthy + stable society. You seriously think it's been devalued just because most teachers don't have penises? That's your thesis statement?
And ignoring how vague "building things, technique and structure" is (like...technique of what? Just technique of doing a thing? Anything? Structure of what? Buildings?)....neither my dad nor my brother are good at anything that you're likely referring to here--are they not men to you? And my mom is excellent with what I think you're referring to--so is she a man, now?
Assuming binary universal traits like this for entire demographic groups is useless and inapplicable to reality. "Black and white thinking" (ie. binary thinking) is another main logical fallacy, so I caution you against it.
I also literally don't understand what men ever mean by saying that things become "feminized." Because none of them can ever seem to give an internally consistent or even commonly agreed upon answer to that.
Can you not just explain it directly, rather than talking around it and using vague words like "feminized" or "substantially different" to refer to whatever it is you're talking about here, that drives you out of female-dominated spaces? Isn't direct + straightforward communication what men like to claim that they're "superior" at?
As you pointed out, women have become incredibly adept at navigating male-dominated spaces, and still have to do so in pretty much all other fields to at least some extent. So what gives? Are they just more resilient? Why can't men handle a space that isn't literally tailored for them and their needs? I'm so genuinely confused with what men are upset about here.
Honestly, I find zero difference between male-dominated vs female-dominated fields or spaces on average. It's far more based on the dynamic of said environment and if extremely gendered behaviors + norms are disproportionately expected or the only "acceptable" professionalism allowed.
Well, that and male-dominated fields have far more issues with both overt and covert sexual harassment/assault and sexism. But women are still there, working their way in? Why can't men stand a more "openly communicative" work environment, or whatever "feminized" means?
Regardless, any gendered behaviors, expectations, or norms are just socialization (including the sexual harassment and sexism). It's not like some baked in, inherent, "essentialist" difference.
So I don't really understand why so many men hate "feminized" whatever so much, or what they even perceive that to be, other than "the women are there" or "the women are doing it." Whenever men explain or talk about it, all I see/hear is an absurdly gendered + overly generalized framing for literally *universal* practices or behaviors.
Like your "women are very good in pushing for their environment to be shaped to reflect their sensibilities"--are you suggesting men aren't good at this whatsoever as well?
Women and men might often appear to do such things in different ways, because of their specific gendered socializations, but it's ultimately literally the same thing.
Like, when men argue and debate on what they want at their workplace, or "directly communicate" what they want or whatever....what exactly do you think that is, except "pushing for their environment to be shaped to reflect their sensibilities?"
What exactly do you think YOU'RE doing, by leaving a workplace that "doesn't reflect your sensibilities"?
I had the same thought reading this piece: obviously men prefer masculine environments, and given the choice they clearly opt for them. I don't think that invalidates the argument about prestige, but it has to be a factor in this.
I would like to think we're talking about being adaptable to change. I humbly ask, why are men always backing away from/hiding from the presence of women?
For similar reasons that many women don't like the environments produced by men?
We have a double standard here. If a woman feels uncomfortable in a predominantly men's environment, it's the men's fault. If a man feels uncomfortable in a predominantly women's environment, it's the man's fault. Maybe both feelings are valid.
The main reasons women don't like certain environments produced by men are:
- the high incidence of sexual harassment/ assault;
- women are assumed to be less competent due to their gender;
- men think it’s acceptable to belittle/ bully/ dismiss women, just because they are… women.
If it were acceptable for women to reverse the above and do these things to men, then I’d 100% agree that a double standard would be at play. But in my experience it’s *not* common or generally acceptable for women to do those things to men.
So, to be intellectually honest, as a starting point we have to examine the actual behaviours that make men feel uncomfortable in a predominantly women's environment, and compare those to the behaviours that make women uncomfortable in a predominantly male environment. You haven’t done that.
It's the part about competence, though I would put it a little differently.
In predominantly women's environments, feminine behavior is considered "the right way to do this", and consequently men are perceived as not doing things the right way, so kinda incompetent. Like, yeah, maybe they are getting the results, but they are still getting them the wrong way.
But what IS "feminine behavior"? What does that even mean?
Because most men can't seem to agree on that, and often can't even seem to individually offer an internally consistent explanation.
Like, this just reminds me of the manosphere's absurd conspiracy about "therapy being feminine/feminized now," just because women are currently the majority of therapists and "talking is a woman thing; men don't want to talk about their feelings like women do."
But talk therapy was literally invented + developed as it's still practiced *by* male psychologists *for* male patients, based on how humans process emotions and how human behaviors stem from deeply embedded + repressed ones. Female patients were literally an afterthought, a sort of "oh hey, it works for the women too."
Way too often, men's use of "feminine behavior" or "feminized" just appears to end up meaning "women like it/do it/literally just exist too." Or widely incorrect + prejudiced sexist stereotypes about "obedience" or some crap.
So maybe you're making a different point here, but the whole "feminine behavior" or "feminized" nonsense is just starting to reek of fragility on a lot of men's part + how they use it.
Might be something you want to keep in mind going forward if you want to keep using those sorts of terms (essentially, there's a subset of men out there actively ruining the usage of these for you--which sucks, you have my sympathy).
Talk therapy was invented by and for fresh-off-the-shtetl Ostjuden in the West who couldn't cope with the fact that it was considered impolite in civilised society to share every lurid facet of their lives with anyone in their general vicinity. And, as Otto Weininger (well-known Freud associate) famously said, "Women are Jews" (or "Jews are Women" I forget).
To your point though, "Feminine behaviour", downstream of female nature, demands conformity, abhors direct conflict, encourages consensus and mitigates volatility. All of these are anathema to the base instincts of any man. This is why men flee them like the plague, and also why any female-dominated field is doomed to haemorrhage prestige and become irrelevant. The opposite phenomenon is just as potent, though. Masculinisation is the telos of prestige. Tailoring becomes high fashion when men start doing it, cooks become chefs when men start doing it, the 'novel' as a discrete literary genre is and was a marketing contrivance intended for and largely dominated by leisure-class women (many of whom are forgotten by the canon) save for the window in time between the period when men divested from poetry/theatre and the period following invention of cinema. Practically every novel and novelist you know of comes from this relatively brief window. Institutionalised misogyny is *literally* the only common thread uniting the Peak Eras of human intellectual achievement. Ancient Athens was the Afghanistan *of its time* wrt the treatment of women. Further, women's participation in politics, science, art, commerce or anything other than clone incubation is largely superfluous, if not decidedly costly. Women's 'emancipation' lies atop a decades long regime of state-mandated lawfare against unsurveilled male-exclusive bonding as well as (probably) hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded transfers, all in the name of 'getting women into education and employment'. We *could* run the Modern West with the same gender norms as Boko Haram without even the slightest hitch to living standards, and it would probably be better for innovation too. We don't for moral reasons, not because women are trailblazing non-fungible geniuses. Some are, but they would be more than ok in a man's world.
You’re right about the teaching profession becoming primarily women. This happened when the pay for teachers didn’t keep pace with other professions and the wives had to supplement the family income by teaching AND raise the children so that the husbands could get the higher paying jobs. This occurred in the business field as women left the teaching profession to get better pay. While there are many great female teachers, most women are now in higher paying fields to support their family as men turned to divorce. Women who have worked in largely traditional male dominated fields like IT (I did for 50 years), were severely bullied along the way as I was during my last 10 years. I raised a family and worked my way to get equal pay but it wasn’t easy and for what? So I could accomplish the same thing as my male counterparts in a shorter period of time with higher quality? Evaluations and job descriptions always describe ‘team work’ but that doesn’t happen when both men and women are on the same team. Heaven forbid that a woman is just plain better! Men often don’t see other men as equals so it’s easy to see why they won’t ever see women as equals.
Yeah that’s where this is going. If we want men to enroll in tertiary education in larger numbers, women need to step back and stop influencing those environments.
We need to go back to “normal” where study and work environments were male influenced and that worked just fine for *everybody* - men and women. Dudes be absolutely as pilled as fuck.
In Australia women are really being pushed down that path, even single mothers are being forced to work mowing lawns and in traffic control for parenting payments and community service.
And high-vis is increasingly bright pink. Same in sporting codes like football and cricket - men are now made to look stupid by wearing a pink uniform.
The first comment could have been a wry joke, yours and other responses not so much. This I think is what makes "feminist" a pejorative term in today's culture. True feminists want gender equality. The proper term for someone who believes women should have all power is a female supremacist and a misandrist.
You do not determine the definition of words. Usage determines the definition. English is a descriptive language, not a prescriptive language.
Feminist means what most people use the word to mean; not what most people say the word means, or what an authoritative source says the word means. There is no 'true feminist', there is no 'proper term'. The word "literally" means both one thing and the opposite of that one thing because people use it that way and the world and all its linguistics don't care if that's inconvenient.
The reality is that feminism has always been used to mean, is still used to mean, and will continue to be used to mean, "advocacy for women as a class, particularly in legal and social activism arenas, especially when perceived as correcting inequality". It doesn't mean equality. It isn't predominantly used to mean equality. It is, as a word, a subcategory of helping women which often has but explicitly does not require a goal of specific or general equality.
The common statement that it means equality — aside from it being obvious evidence that it DOESN'T mean that, else people would not feel the need to tell you what the definition of a common word is, something that is self evident because usage is definition — is a simple defense mechanism used by activists that advocate for women against people who claim their advocacy goes too far.
Feminist is pejorative term in today's culture because a lot of people think feminists go too far.
Feminism is about women's rights and power. Nothing more, nothing less. Feminism don't concern themselves with men's problems. There's no such thing as one sided equality, it's not about equality.
That’s how we fix the wealth gap! Brilliant! More CEOs become women, 60% is reached, the job loses status, it’s no longer a bidding war for “top talent”, the wage drops, the men in the “lower” positions decide that money should be theirs, their wage raises, it now takes months instead of hours for a CEO to earn the wage of a worker. Increased wealth means increased security and people’s minds turn from survival to enjoyment. Creativity flourishes. Quite a few more people now have the bandwidth to worry about the environment and the money to put where their mouth is. Long term survival (saving the planet) is now the focus, instead of day to day or paycheque to paycheque survival.
CEO pay sky-rocketed because so many junior managers were leaving to start rival companies. It was cheaper to pay them more. The same thing can and does happen with large corporations. Women are free to start small businesses, but for some reason, they do not do so in similar numbers. It would benefit everyone if they did. Furthermore, female CEO's are great. There are never problems with hard-charging, successful women. The problem workplaces are filled with unambitious ladies who want to limit work hours and promote work-life balance at the cost of pay. Those are the monsters ruining life for everyone where they work. I will take 1,000 tough, compensation-oriented female managers over any man who gives me BS about work-life balance. I hate that BS. It is a scam to cheat people out of a proper career.
How well have female-run societies done in the past? Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.
(I'm going to guess that you won't want to answer the question, because our society is historiphobic--it actively seeks to suppress knowledge of the past.)
If trends continue, I believe Gen Z will have their day in Congress and we will see women at the forefront of the medical field, law, and business. Already women are taking a strong lead in opening small businesses and in entrepreneurship. Once women receive the same support that other developed nations enjoy for early childhood care and education and after school care, more women will choose not to interrupt their careers for motherhood and at the same time more businesses will learn to adapt to their greatest workforce by opening up more flexibility for working women. In this way women won't feel guilty when their lives have support and balance between professional and personal. And fewer women will choose to have biological children in order to pursue their goals. Meanwhile, the patriarchal forces that oppress women today will weaken as their supporters age, retire, and enter nursing homes. My guess is 15 years will be the tipping point for Congress. Gen X and Gen Y women (like AOC) will support and guide Gen Z women as mentors and financially to gain ground. CEO positions will follow in 20 or so years, although not in private corporations that maintain their dynasties.
It will take a while to undo horrible mess men have made. Let's pull together and hope against hope that we can force men out of positions of power and somehow fix their misogynistic mistskes.
That's a fantasy world love,everything I see in the real world about me and in the world I see via what media I choose to use suggests to me that the old "feminist" ideas have crumbled away and not by activism but just by nature,that Men are regainng their ascendancy.
How it should be. As for women relying on other women as guides and mentors. I don't think so. Watch your back,comes to mind.
My suspicion is that this won’t happen, because there is a minority of men who are willing to sacrifice everything else in their life in order to advance their career or to get their startup off the ground. And people who put more time and effort in to things tend to accomplish more and to gain more experience, skills, knowledge and to sharpen their professional judgement and expand their professional networks. So until young women are killing themselves to get ahead in the same way that the ultra-ambitious minority of men are killing themselves, then men will still probably make up a majority of the wealthy and powerful. I don’t think it is a priori clear if society would be better off if those men worked (and advanced less) and women worked more and advanced more, although I think society would be better off if more women put in that many hours to their careers and therefore more women were founders of high-growth startups and leaders of existing institutions.
Research Sweden's depression 1990-1994. With sufficiently bad government, a country can drive its productive people out. Sweden saved itself, but it got very close. Countries need to realize that there is value in those hard-working people. If not, they can destroy it. Many countries have.
Women have more work flexibility in Canada and fewer women choose to give birth here. But the result has been increased incentives for immigrants, not women. I think it will be similar in the US, though I imagine there will be small gains made with regard to things like ECE, maternity leave, etc., simply because America is a bit behind Canada and Europe.
It will be interesting to see. Women already dominate medicine. In law, women have tended to focus on more high-status, low-pay jobs, or low work, easy money jobs. The intense, high-pay areas are still male-dominated. That does not seem to be changing.
Business is more interesting. Women in many fields (finance, tech, management consulting) are great and doing well. The toxic environments discussed above appear to be concentrated in certain fields (teaching, government, non-profit,...). It will be interesting to see how American society develops. I suspect it will be different from anyone's predictions.
One problem with a lot of policy is an emphasis on small businesses, rather than businesses with high growth potential. If you looked at "unicorn" companies (start-ups worth over a billion dollars), it's much rarer for them to have a female founder. https://www.affinity.co/blog/number-women-led-unicorns-in-decline
Yeah! We ALL should have plenty of lead in the drinking water! Tax breaks should only go to the folks who don't need it, and wouldn't really notice. We need more pollution in this country, dammit. And get away from my Freedumb Stick sidearm.
When I got into law school and told my mom it was the first cohort that was over 50% female, she said she felt bad for all the men who didn’t get in that should have since there were so many women. When I said it had the highest LSAT and GPA averages of any cohort as well, she said it would have been even higher if more men were accepted. Additionally, she constantly says my husband should have gotten accepted to more medical schools and is worried he won’t match into a good residency because he’s a white man. Not only is college being seen as more feminine, but to justify women excelling in their fields, society feels the need to then put down their accomplishments and say men are still more talented and the only reason we aren’t seeing it is because of female preference. It’s also interesting that the narrative around college (an institution pushing the liberal agenda and brainwashing students) delegitimizes the opinions of educated people, specifically women. Now when women have a voice supported by evidence and education, men can say it’s simply a product of the establishment and that they are still more critical will less education.
Every institution that has admitted women enmass has had to lower its admission standards. When the military lowered the physical standards for women it was called Gender Norming.
Two different areas. Top universities have ever higher standards while those at the bottom will do anything for money. They are totally unique systems with zero overlap.
I meant admissions and tenure-track jobs in real subjects, not gift admin jobs. Any job in a Grievance Studies department is a gift as well. You might as well say that Google is a joke because their DEI department has nepotism hires, or Goldman Sachs is a joke because their HR has friends and family hires. I used to work in finance, and we often hired the not-so-bright offspring of important people at key client firms. That does not mean that our analyst hires were stupid, it simply meant that playing the game at that level requires a host of special actions. Vendor lock-in don't come easy in commodity services markets. The same is true in non-profit organizations.
Hiring buffoons is part of playing the game. Universities might have had a golden age after WW2, but that has passed and often one must engage in unsavory actions in order to get the job done. It happens in the for-profit sector as well. I know of a special situation where a bunch of lucrative jobs were given to the children of key World Bank employees who did not want their children to return to their parents' country of origin, but could not determine a way to keep them stateside. A firm took on a few hundred grand in payroll to originate an eight-figure deal. It was a no- brainer, totally unethical and completely legal. I will also say that the American competitors would not do it because it broke US laws, but not British ones. Whoohoo, capitalism! You shop for the right domicile for the right product, even when taxpayers are picking up the tab.
Life is dirty. Clearly running Harvard is even more so.
“but to justify women excelling in their fields, society feels the need to then put down their accomplishments and say men are still more talented and the only reason we aren’t seeing it is because of female preference”
Bingo - the evershifting goalposts as men grapple with the cognitive dissonance induced by ever-mounting, incontrovertible evidence that undermines their core, unquestioned belief that women are fundamentally inferior physically, intellectually and behaviorally. Keep fighting.
No one has claimed women are intellectually inferior. Men are physically superior in terms of upper body strength, but not intelligence. That is simply incorrect.
It is still ridiculous. That said, I will believe women are serious about remedying performance gaps when they start using them to remedy gaps that favor women (high school graduation, university attendance, university graduation, law school admission, medical school admission, increasingly compensation for younger generations (controlling for industry and university major),...).
I think the pushback on female-oriented preferences has occurred because women are no longer displaying the gaps in achievement and testing results that we saw decades ago, while is is obvious that there is a serious problem with young men in the US. We do not like to hear about it because men are supposed to be tough and not complain, but at a certain point, all the female complaints start looking absurd, such as women complaining about CEO positions in the top 500 public companies, when women are dominating everything for Americans age 30 and younger.
This is not small. I was all-in on pro-female empowerment when I started my career 24 years ago, but when I look at university graduates today, the relative absence of high-performing males is strange. Furthermore, the glaring absence of so many young men from the job market is terrifying. I wish for all young people to thrive, but I worry more about jobless young men with nothing to lose. Those are the ones who will rape your wife and kill your children.
We MUST focus more on them, at least for a few years, then get back to worrying about traditional gender gaps. If someone figures out how to get all of those leftover men angry and committed, the system they create will be a nightmare for everyone. Google "Andrew Tate" for a sample of what we might be seeing going forward. No one wants somebody like that running a country, but it has happened too many times before.
Perhaps people have *correctly* lost faith in college as an institution that produces knowledge, if university speech is now a popularity contest over what to censor, as opposed to an open and fact-driven discussion.
The USA has been an empire arguably since the Supreme Court came up with Judicial Review. Google John Glubb's Fate of Empires (under 30 pages) and see that America is past its expiry date.
But I want to think you are wrong. In spite of considerable evidence, I REALLY want to think that you are wrong. Give us at least until the interstate commerce clause was shamelessly exploited to expand federal powers, can we agree on that? It is jut a few decades! Besides, negotiating truth is fun, and intelligent! Yes, intelligent! Definitely not self-delusion. Not at all!
Very true in my experience. On my first day of PhD grad school, back in 1994, our older woman professor warned us that this would be happening. She said that by the time we finished our degrees the easy access to lifetime tenured jobs with high pay would be gone because women were finally outnumbering men in the PhD track. So true. When I finished my Ivy League PhD, there were so few 'real' jobs left. Most of my female cohort has had to make do with temporary jobs, adjunct positions and teaching outside of the traditional academy. When the women showed up, the jobs, pay and opportunities did not rise to meet the increased pool of highly qualified workers.
This kind of specious reasoning is a pretty good example of why some men prefer to avoid female-dominated environments. If there are not enough jobs for which your training is suitable, it’s not that “jobs, pay, and opportunities did not rise to meet supply” it’s that *there wasn’t enough demand for what you spent/wasted your time doing*.
That’s a hard truth but since our society conditions men to deal with their own problems, it’s the kind of truth you can say to a man without serious collateral damage. Meanwhile, it’s been 20+ years since you got your PhD and you’re still implying it was some misogynist conspiracy that tenure track slots at elite universities were kept from you.
No, dear, it's not about the number of teaching jobs. It's about the TYPES of teaching positions which CHANGED from full-time, tenure-track professorships to temporary adjunct roles. Before the 1990s, universities hired more tenure-track professors and a few adjuncts. Since 2000, universities have shifted to hiring hundreds of adjuncts and only a few full-time professors. The ratio is about 30% tenure-track professors to 70% adjuncts.
Yes, that’s what happens when labor supply outstrips demand: compensation falls. Tenure protections being a significant component of total compensation for an academic.
This may shock and appall you, but men are subject to the cruel vagaries of labor markets as well.
Maybe the coal mines in West Virginia were shut down and the manufacturing in the rust belt was offshored as part of a grand misandrist conspiracy? (/s)
It's called the law of supply and demand. When women flooded the labor market the price of labor went down causing men's wages to fall. In the exact same way that today's college graduates flooded the white collar job market causing the price of labor based on a college degree to fall. Because of the oversupply of workers with college degrees today's employers can be picky in whom they hire and pay far less.
The shift from full-time to adjunct faculty began long before 1994, and actually the 2010s/20s are the first period during our lifetimes during which that trend has been reversed.
Per the US Department of Education, the percentage of full-time faculty at colleges and universities was as follows.
"From fall 2011 to fall 2022, the number of full-time faculty increased by 11 percent (from 762,100 to 842,400) while the number of part-time faculty decreased by 13 percent (from 762,400 to 665,200)."
Do keep in mind, these were female-dominated administrations that created these systems. They were the ones who switched to having graduate students as slaves. They were the ones who hired their friends and had classes taught by adjuncts for $3,000 per class. This was the ghettoization of academia, and it was done by the activist university managerial class, and they had a whole lotta ladies running that show. They are terrible people (male and female), and we need to get them out. That said, none of them did this thinking "let's screw women." They did it to free up funds to hire their friends.
What a weird line of reasoning. You doubled the supply of people trying to fill these positions and expected the number of them available to also just magically double to match that increase in supply? Perhaps your PhD should've been in economics, although you'd only need to take Econ 101 to understand the error in your thinking here.
I was in the academic job market in the 1990s as well. Oxford DPhil. Dozens of publications. My female counterparts would send out three job applicants and get shortlisted for all three; my male counterparts would send out 150 applications and be lucky to get shortlisted for one. I published extensive statistical analyses of university hiring at the time, proving that this discrimination in favour of women was rampant across the disciplines. Men did not "flee" academia; they were actively pushed out.
Should they have created more jobs to accomodate more qualified people or should they have created more people qualified for positions that were in need of thos people?
The shift from full-time to adjunct faculty began long before 1994, and actually the 2010s/20s are the first period during our lifetimes during which that trend has been reversed.
Per the US Department of Education, the percentage of full-time faculty at colleges and universities was as follows.
"From fall 2011 to fall 2022, the number of full-time faculty increased by 11 percent (from 762,100 to 842,400) while the number of part-time faculty decreased by 13 percent (from 762,400 to 665,200)."
just being a woman entitles your to human respect. being a great person, developing you character, skill at communication, logic and reason, creative problem solving, depth of understanding(knowing a bit of history) negotiations are things all women Should, be good at. I wish i could tell those women at a glance. They still all go to the ladies room together. they want consensus thinking. perhaps they need it. they love bureaucracy. there may be a time and place for that, say in the judiciary, but in real life. real time. this makes a living hell. Like at the Department of motor vehicles, to get paperwork or something. and they can never admit their mistakes or take responsibility. I was just doing my job.
The Department of Motor Vehicles has had a bad reputation since there has been a Dept. of Motor Vehicles. And that includes the decades when mostly men worked there.
Funny, but the jobs disappeared for men as well. I graduated from my undergrad in 2000. I was too scared to attempt an academic career. That is a luxury only rich people can afford.
This was how it had been before the explosion in university slots. ONce again the baby boomers got a good thing and ruined it for everyone who came after. Schools with zero chance of placing PhD's never should have produced them, but that would have destroyed the research economy, so they started importing PhD's. The entire academic world is a scam.
I have no idea why this article ended up on my timeline over two weeks after it was posted, and I was getting a pretty good laugh reading through all the crazy comments. But, here you are with a reasonable challenge to the author's assertions and I am not surprised in the least that the author has no interest in responding. Nor do the more hysterical commenters that seemed to be jumping at the chance to reply to any comment not along the lines of "fascinating article" or "I totally agree". Telling.
“Betty Holberton, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas, programmed the ENIAC to perform calculations for ballistics trajectories electronically for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.”
I don’t know, man, the first six of six computer programmers were women.
This is fascinating. Hopefully the same trend continues in other fields as well for more of a “the dynamic changes because most people don’t like to work with all the opposite sex” rather than “men won’t pursue powerful jobs and they’ll all just become more unhappy”
Thanks for bringing awareness to this. Seems like male flight could be very subconscious for many. So many men don’t even know why “they don’t feel like it”. I know this is my straight son’s experience. He is “embarrassed” to be enrolled in college right now and didn’t want me to tell people or announce it. And my gay son is enrolling into college and specifically in the medical field starting January with no embarrassment and is excited for something to be working towards. It’s a social phenomenon that keeps happening in all our institutions. I see it in religion too: We can’t let more women speak, pray, teach, lead etc… because then the men will leave. If it looks like half the leadership is female, the men will stop listening and will leave “cause they don’t feel like staying”. As a society, it seems we keep centering the male perspective and experience as if it’s the “better, smarter way”. Even though the statistics show that women are leaving religion….and men are dominating, we still can’t add more women to the leadership of churches because the men will leave. And we just can’t have that.
Fascinating about your sons Jamee! So crazy how much the perception of college has changed in just a few decades- it used to be embarrassing not to go to college
And a feminised church is boring so then the hot females start going to the church where the charismatic male preacher looks like he's got a Bad Boy spark in him (charisma is both a gift and a curse).
Why not just let men have their own churches and colleges, if the thing that they most want to do is spend time with other men? Is there a reason why there shouldn’t be single sex churches or schools?
Ok hang on. Women are 60/40 receiving college degrees and the reason is…oppression by men? Oppression by men evidently can’t be falsified. And what does it mean when a hypothesis can’t be falsified? It means it likewise can’t be proven.
Here’s an alternate hypothesis, offered by a lowly individual with a lived experience in both male-dominated and female-dominated environments: the more women in positions of power, the more toxic the environment becomes.
Yeah, it's like a restaurant where the food is bad and absurdly overpriced, and when you go there they just insult you. But there is something wrong with the customers for not wanting to go there. Maybe if we just upbraid them even harder, they will want to come and spend their money!
One very small point to add -- an outcome of the devaluing of college because it is becoming feminized is that our government is also defunding it. We are investing less money in universities as a society -- I'll bet that the decrease in funding aligns very neatly with the increasing percentage of women students. Just like the increasing percentage of women in a (formerly male) profession leads inexorably to a decrease in the wages in that profession and a decrease in the perceived value of that expertise.
When I taught K-12 in one of the largest school systems in the US a constant half-joking philosophical question was this: The school district has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. It does NOT go toward building maintenance, instructional materials, or teachers' salaries. So where does it go?
That answer makes sense but was not the case anywhere in the district I worked. Special Ed classrooms and facilities had rooms, equipment, materials, etc. of the same age, quality, and maintenance as regular ed. The only across the board exception was that kids who had physical issues had a/c in their rooms. Special Ed staff was also paid the same as regular ed in my particular district. My gut is that the money went to administrative positions staffed by people with little or no experience with whatever they were supposed to administer.
Why does anyone want to be in school after the age of 14 anyway. I've only ever seen USA high schools and colleges (what we used to call University but now call Uni,in Aussie fashion)in films or tv shows (I'm in UK) and it seems like Americans go to school until theyre pushing 40. Ha ha. Thats because the actors playing the school kids tend to be well mature. But the other day on the radio a young woman was saying how she'd done her degree at University,then she'd done a post-graduate degree,and she said,and ingenuously,I honestly don't think she realized WHAT she was saying ,I'm now starting a research degree (can't remember the exact name but that's what it was) so by the time I graduate from that I'll be just over 40 years old. And when the radio host asked her what sort of job her education would qualify her for she replied,oh I expect I'll do another degree. So I know learning is stimulating and fun but this long drawn out education seemed an end in itself. As for money,she was of an Asian family so of course did not need to work as they supported her.
As a former teacher I agree with you. By age 14 or 15 interests and aptitudes should be taken into account. If a kid is hopeless at biology and loves physics he should be able to take physics to satisfy science requirements.
Another problem is that programs for auto repair, electrician, HVAC, etc. have all but disappeared from American HS's.
Idk if you’re so pilled you can’t actually see the misogyny in your comment, or if you’re just not that smart.
When supply of labour exceeds demand, wages go down. Well done - correct.
Women have been in most, if not all, professions for decades now. Why* do you assume it’s women who constitute the excess, the surplus that causes the problem? Maybe fewer *men* should enter the oversupplied professions, hey?
But of course you’d never think of that because you’re brainwormed to believe that men are *entitled* to a professional life and women are not.
Do you know I think what we need is a good old fashioned World War. I don't suppose anyone else,like any people with political and financial power has thought of that.
Loved the article, but seeing men comment saying “it’s because women are awful to be around” is very dispiriting.
I work in a relatively female industry (market research) which qualitatively I think feels like it is getting more female. I deeply enjoy working with my female colleagues, as communication is more straightforward and there tends to be less hiding / face saving. It is true that you have to be more emotionally engaged; e.g. know when to gossip / reassure / quietly listen to female clients / bosses - but I don’t think it is particularly hard.
In my opinion, the author’s perspective that men drop out if they refuse to lower themselves to femininity is bang on. I have worked with guys who refuse to engage with women on their level and so it ends up not working out. Especially when it is often female clients who are paying us. Ultimately I think to work well with women you have to like women as people and be willing to be associated with them.
It's not that women are awful to be around, quite the contrary, they are delightful and most often bring levity and joy to interactions.
The problem is female-dominated workspaces are unwelcoming and uncomfortable for, I suppose we could say, "traditionally masculine" men. I don't want to couch my language in kind terms in order to avoid hurting feelings. I don't want to gossip. I don't want to be "emotionally engaged". I don't want to learn how to "reassure" other grown adult professionals. I don't want the concept of emotions to exist at all. I want to just get on with the job. I want the task to dominate everything. An I want to be surrounded by other people with this mindset and this attitude: that the job, the task, is the most important thing, the single overriding concern, and we should focus 100% on it. Working in female-dominated spaces is exhausting because it requires focus to be drained away from the mission towards superfluous interpersonal interactions that I have no interest in.
If you don’t see women as serious people that’s on you, friend. And if you seriously think that male-only environments are free of emotions… keep thinking.
That’s not what he said at all, you made a bad faith, straw man response to his well articulated comment, because you have no ability to reply thoughtfully.
Is market research a field with clear deliverables and metrics for performance? Is it a field where, at the end of the day, you can say, “the client paid us this much, it cost us this much to provide the service, the client took this decision made on our advice/research, and then their sales of their product increased by 100% (or whatever)”? I work in a field where recent cohorts of new hires have been majority women, but so far it doesn’t look to me like there has been a flight of men so much as a decline in the number of recent graduates, and in addition to that recent graduates being hired into adjacent, higher paying fields when that wasn’t an option 10, 20, 30 years ago. And more men are taking up the option of going into the higher paying jobs than women. But the men in the field and going into the field don’t seem to be uncomfortable with women entering the field. I suspect that has to do with having crystal clear performance metrics (your employer knows exactly how much revenue you contributed and how much it costs to employ you), and client outcomes easily measured in dollars and cents. So there isn’t ambiguity as to what a good job consists of, or who is and isn’t a top performer.
Interesting point. That commercial situation sounds similar to what I’ve seen - I guess like a lot of agency-style jobs it is pretty clear whether you are doing well or not by how much client money is coming in, and at what margin.
In your thinking, do you think that kind of commercial clarity helps address any anxiety? E.g. even if I’m worried that the dynamics will change, I know what doing a good job looks like so that doesn’t matter so much.
I think that it is more that it appears that the dynamics won’t really change, because the commercial clarity is so obvious and overwhelmingly important. That doesn’t mean that the dynamics and ideas of how to behave as a professional haven’t changed, it’s just that the focus has always been so much on the bottom line, and the actions that impact the bottom line so clear, that the changes appear to be marginal. I’m also in a field of professional services where the pay isn’t high enough that people entering the field are willing to pour in endless hours, so that may impact things as well. From what I have read high finance still has a pretty male oriented culture, and my guess is that the high compensation and long hours contribute to that.
Fantastic essay. It's like the elementary school playground for adults. The girls have cooties! Run away! I was at the emergency vet with my puppy last month and was looking around at the open floor plan ER where all the providers were in one room, and noticed that it was 100% women. This explains why. Publishing is another industry that used to be aggressively male-dominated and now is majority female. I transcribed an interview with the literary agent Maxine Groffsky years ago where she talked about how she became an agent because at the time, in the 1960s, only men were allowed to be editors, while women were relegated to support roles. Starting her own literary agency was her only way forward. Sidebar: I'm not surprised that the Freakonomics episode missed the main story here. Michael Hobbes has a great takedown of Freakonomics on his podcast, If Books Could Kill.
I can’t emphasize how wrong and misunderstanding this is of the situation. I worked at a university dominated by women for five years, trying to elevate and achieve a better career trajectory. This was in a red state, and the university was an island in this regard.
This work experience included conversations about tampons and learning and understanding how to work with women, how to adapt and do it. But the whole experience was a sunk cost.
Some men are better at articulating this than others, but I get the sense that most of them have the right idea. That status is a factor. That work environments are differ. The young men need mentors who are men.
And the that the boys have the right instinct to find other lines of work, and that the universities and the departments managed by women will continue to lose prestige. The things that drive the military-industrial complex or however you call this, they’ll continue to be led by men (for better or worse).
I love and respect women, was raised by women, worked in women-dominated work places my whole life, but my fields of study were women-dominated fields and this only set me up to be institutionally, intellectually, and politically homeless after investing time in these things.
There was no cooties business. I worked with and respected the women as human beings. But I’ll start from scratch again.
I think you misunderstand. Men want to work and study with other men. Female dominated spaces are not inherently pleasant for most of us. We avoid these spaces not because of some elementary school aversion, but because they are genuinely uncomfortable and unwelcoming. It's just a matter of style. we have different ways of doing things and different priorities. Female-dominated work and study spaces are simply not desirable or enjoyable for the vast majority of men.
Spaces that are specifically tailored to appeal to women, that are shaped by women, designed to make women comfortable, are going to be inherently to men, by their nature. That's just how things are. There are very few natural cross-gender spaces.
"To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving. - Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality "
I don't think is is accurate, or charitable, or relevant, or remotely true. I don't know who Marilyn Frye is, I've never read her work, but she sounds like a person who has been deeply hurt and needs to heal. Simply making a statement does not make that statement true. I would caution against internalizing this attitude, it will cause you nothing but pain and misery in your relations with men, because it is profoundly wrong.
This quote hypes me up so much on being heterosexual! It makes us sound so based. Also supports my hypothesis that gay men are an elite force of chauvinism.
🤣🤣🤣 Absolutely nothing wrong with being gay or homoerotic. I read “homoerotic” as a neutral descriptor in that quote. But fucking hilarious and telling that *that* is the point you take away 🙄🙄🙄🙄
I often see in discussions of masculinity gayness and homoeroticism being used pejoratively to suggest both that it is wrong or shameful for men not to fulfill certain expectations of masculinity and that being gay is shameful and makes a person less of a man. It appears to me that you used that quote to suggest that the above commenter engages in homoeroticism and is therefore bad, blameworthy, or less of a man in some way because of that.
Nope - you’re so brainwormed you can’t perceive what the quote is getting at. She is saying that traditional expectations of masculinity themselves are inherently “homoerotic”. Traditionally, men are expected to admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, imitate and idolize other men only. (i.e. not women). That is what she’s identifying as “homoerotic”, or man-loving. So she’s saying that by fulfilling traditional expectations, men behave in a homoerotic way. Which is the opposite of what you are asserting she is saying. Frye is a lesbian herself.
Yes!😊 Anything Michael Hobbes does is great, plus the wonderful and varied co-hosts. I had heard the freakonomics episode on IBCK a while ago, and I actually caught most of the broadcast last Sunday on Freakonomics regarding men’s college rates dropping. I was going crazy while they circled around the issue, but never quite got to the heart of it (sometimes they were so close!). I couldn’t put my own finger on what was so agitating, but it really just felt like they had weird blinders on. It was so nice to see Celeste’s essay in my inbox. Right on time 👍🏻
I spotted a news article recently that straight men aren't reading novels anymore, but gay men and women are. Same issue? Probably. Methinks you hit the nail on the head.
I find that the topic of many novels no longer interests me, the way novels once did. As a kid, I read so many old novels of adventure and exploration from the 1800s and novels that used memorable characters to tell a deep story about society (think Dickens) that I had huge trouble adjusting to modern literature starting in the 1980s and up till now. Most modern novels are so introspective...I know that is part of our overall times and is important in and of itself, but they are not pleasurable to read, IMO. I would rather read philosophy, and peer-reviewed research in neuroscience and sociology, for insight on the human condition.
It's also my understanding that females are the primary readers of fiction. Non-fiction is primarily read by males, with the one big exception of true-crime.
I have read about the same (Non Jewish white) male flight from a number of professions in NYC post WW2 when significant numbers of Jewish men entered them, such as teaching. Similar flight from a profession populated by those considered “lesser”.
Bingo. Thanks for saying out loud what I've been observing for years. Happened in ordained ministry as well -- as women came to be ordained, they took the small, part-time positions while men got the big, prestigious church positions, and when that generation died out, fewer men wanted to go into ministry.
I believe health, education, and literacy are important. I’d like to see more young men involved, but I wouldn’t recommend it today. when the fields are dominated by women, the odds are against the boys flourishing. DEI-tactics, compulsive identitarianism, and narcissistic women will push them away and try to flatten them
What? I think you are projecting your fear that women will do to men what men did (and are still doing in many cases) to women and people they don’t like.
Do you think that never happens? That where straight cis men are in a minority, that they don’t ever get scapegoated as the representative of “the oppressor” by the majority?
More men are willing to work longer hours, it's not because they're treated better. The previous poster is correct. I work in the education system and I have been told in more ways than I can count that I'm automatically an oppressor.
Your anecdote doesn’t discount the actual data on the subject. Female-dominated industries have a tendency to over-compensate to male employees because of the impression that it takes more to retain them compared to the female employees. Women are aware that the male workers are compromising on status, so they do more to make them comfortable. The studies show that the male employees end up leaving anyway because of low wages, not mistreatment.
I probably am projecting a fear, but it does happen and I’ve seen it happen. It doesn’t always happen. I sort of regret commenting here, but it definitely happens and it happens among women, and it happens with women with power over men, and I think it does deter
Maybe. Male flight also happens because men are not well-versed or supported or trained or female-communication-intuitive enough to know how to fight back when a the wrong sort of woman is in the position of power… and there are great women in leadership roles too. There are many of them, doing great things, and they are bringing a lot to the table. So this is a difficult dance to make this argument here in a comments section! On Substack, in education, in many institutions private and public, women are leading in great ways.
Not to pile on, but the evidence doesn't support your theory, Anthony. If anything, in female-dominated professions, the few men in the industry are often promoted to the highest levels faster than the women around them. For example, even though elementary education is heavily female-dominated, men disproportionately hold the highest status administrative positions. It sounds like you may have had a bad work experience that doesn't apply more generally.
It's not a theory, it's a personal observation and lived experience. All of the college presidents who testified before congress in December 2023 were women. And the one who didn't show up was a woman. These were college presidents of the top colleges in the country. The president of where I worked was a woman, the dean and assistant dean also women, and department head and program manager women. The vast majority of my colleagues, administrative and faculty, were women. This is not a problem, but pushing men away from higher education is a problem. Men aren't leaving primarily because of sexism, but because they are seeking a place where they feel validated. Men are pushed away because and they are losing role models and flock whoever sells false promises online or elsewhere. I think this is a big societal problem. Bad behavior is promoted because it sells or gets attention, while cultures in education and literacy are devalued. I think I'm making these comments on the wrong article, though, sorry! I have subscribed to too many Substacks. I think it is important for young men to have role models and they've rapidly been disappearing. I may have misread the main idea here. But that's the point I wanted to make.
It sounds like you're speaking to college administration and I specified elementary education, where superintendents, principals, etc are still more likely to be male even though most teachers are women...
Men have a MUCH higher commitment to the workforce than women. When women get married, their commitment decreases, men's increases. Again, when couples have children, women's commitment decreases again, men's intensifies again. So when men enter female-dominated occupations, they are competing against a pool of candidates for promotion who are MUCH less in search of a promotion, much less committed to the career. This is a well-established truth that feminists just won't hear or accept. They'd rather blame the victims. It's easier and more gratifying.
It seems you did your research and found a lot of decent explanation for why there is more women in college. It is good but you missed something important: male enrollment in college/university in the last decade in all western countries increased? It is just that for women it increased more. College and universities are getting overcrowded. The return in the investment is getting lower.
Also, have you maybe mentally experimented with the hypothesis than when women enter a field, the law of offer and demand makes it so that wages decrease. And that men really want money when they work so they gtfo in another field that still pays money? (Or least does not cause a lot of debt) Getting a good job is getting more complicated for young people, many men just decide to rot at home playing video games.
The hegemonic patriarchy or unconscious misogyny explanation for everything is just getting too boring.
You honestly think all those baby boomer women who went to college weren’t supported by their dads?
Many of the men were, but it was also very common for men to work their way through college because at one point that was affordable.
My dad was born in 1947 and his aunt paid for his books but he paid tuition and living expenses by working summers and part-time during the school year. My mom, also born in 1947, had her dad pay for it all. Both were from a very similar economic background
Great article. I would bet a million dollars that male flight from college is also a big factor in the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years.
Yes great link! I think we are going to be seeing more of this
My son is in high school. 4.0 GPA, student awards, phenomenal athlete. He came home today and told me that high school is stupid and he doesn’t want to go to college. His LGBTQ teachers always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males; the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department. Combine the feminine ration with favoritism, discrimination, and a non-objective reward system and boys will opt out…
“science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys”
Sorry to burst your bubble but that, of itself, isn’t enough to prove a “non-objective reward system”. It could be (and I know this will be hard to hear) that the girls in that cohort were objectively better at *science* 😱 than their male peers.
The double standard here is interesting. Imagine if I claimed that the predominance of men in software engineering means that men are simply better with computers. This would be seen as clear evidence of the sexism which keeps women out of the industry.
When women underperform, it's always an urgent issue that society has a moral obligation to address with various supportive programs. Anyone who suggests patriarchy is *not* to blame can be dismissed as a misogynist. When men underperform, on the other hand, it's probably their own darn fault.
But historically, ONLY boys and men were allowed to attend school/participate in professions of any kind. Women and girls were historically prohibited from attending school and not allowed in ANY profession. The discrimination that stood in women's way is historical.
If boys and men are now underperforming in educational settings where they used to do well, of course it's a problem that should be addressed, but nobody anywhere is prohibiting boys from going to school, or forcing them out of any professions.
As far as "discrimination" in awards is concerned, I suspect that if a particular boy loses out in competition with ANOTHER BOY for an award, it's automatically fair, but if a girl wins over a boy, it must be due to anti-male/pro-female "discrimination."
The history you’re bringing up is decades old and has little relevance for the present moment. [edit: instead of "present moment" I should have said "present youth"]
Here in 2024, it’s far more socially acceptable to make discriminatory statements about men than about women. (E.g. you can hold down a PMC job and tweet "men are trash"; you can't hold down a PMC job and tweet "women are trash".) And it's far more socially acceptable to advocate for discrimination against men (often in order to bring more women into an organization or profession where they are a minority).
So claims that men are being discriminated against are more plausible, a priori, here in 2024.
If you wish to make it clear that you stand against anti-male discrimination, simply advocate for gender-blind meritocracy. Given that most feminists advocate *against* gender-blind meritocracy, it's easy to infer their discriminatory motives. This leads to justified suspicion.
It’s 2024. Women have been in stem fields for a while now.
What are you talking about?
Oregonian said: “the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department”. Taken in the general context of his comment he’s implying the awards were skewed because the female teachers favored the girls.
I pushed back saying that for all he knows, the 11 girls deserved the awards on merit. That doesn’t mean:
(a) I am asserting women are “simply better” at science; or
(b) the underperformance of the boys in that cohort shouldn’t be addressed.
Supposing the computer science department awards were split 11/2 boys/girls. I predict someone would throw a fit, or I would be accused of sexism, if I said something like: "Imagine that. It appears that the boys in this cohort are objectively better with computers."
I think you're bringing up technicalities which don't speak to my core point.
That is not what the tone of your first reply suggests.
Oregonian gave context which suggested that the reason was not down to the ability of the boys in the class. Note her son who is intelligent and is high achieving, and reported discrimination.
Why should we discredit their experience of boys in the classroom? Especially when the report is from a student with high scores who feels boys like him are being overlooked and he notes stats to prove his point.
If that's true, one of Celeste's foundational assumptions is wrong in that case. If it's true, those boys are right to avoid college, because they would do badly anyway. They would be making rational choices.
Not very likely.
Oh yeah?
You make a point of saying your son's teachers (are they all LGBTQ? That's odd) "always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males." "Reprimand" them for what?
And didn't you just say your son has a 4.0 GPA and has won student awards?
Your son can't be WINNING awards and ALSO deprived of awards because he's straight and male.
Or are you saying that awards are "objective" when they go to boys, and "non-objective" when won by girls?
I have no citation for this, sadly. Back in the 1980s, or 1990s, I remember running across this in a Christian book, one that was presumably arguing why women should stay in the home and raise children, since having a book that pointed out misogyny would be rare in those days. I remember the book cited the Russian medical profession, or at that time, the Soviet medical profession, which had been exclusively male for most of its history, and then at a certain point, as women entered the field, it began to be viewed as a women's profession, and Men stopped applying to medical school.
I'm assuming that it was trying to derive a natural theology from this, that women were to stay out of men's professions, but I do not remember. But it indeed did cite the idea, that at some point, the presence of women in a profession tipped it to being a women's profession. The idea that perhaps this was due to a culturally-approved flaw deep in the male psyche was not considered.
Honestly, that line of thinking seems to reinforce the notion of masculine fragility. It's almost as if though the very premise of being male is anchored to being anti-female. Females do not experience this dependency. They are just female and that is enough.
Spot on.
My son bailed early.
I, failing to recognize the tectonics of these changes, andcoming from a heavily academic, professionally "educated" environment, have come late to the game, but am putting the puzzle pieces together.
See my post below.
It seems the increase in female students has been in lockstep with courses and emphases such as a ‘gendered approach to law’. I recall my daughter having to pay for various ‘elective’ courses that had nothing to do with her targeted studies and included BS like the impact of vampires on modern literature. (The Twilight books were rampant at the time). Prestigious universities now offer courses on Taylor Swift! Easy to see young men opting out of this era bullshittery.
Taylor Swift is a cultural phenomenon that should be studied imo. Do you think they're dressing up and dancing?
I think whoever wants to fund courses and study Taylor swift should be free to do so but if they’re presented as an elective, that must be taken, in a stream where it has zero bearing (such as law, medicine) then it’s just dishonesty on the part of the institution.
Fretting about things that aren’t actually happening has become quite normal. You do understand that electives are elective, right? No one is “forced” to take electives.
Is there any bias in his and/or your analysis and conclusions?
I'd wager its far more about what women reward or avoid in the mate market than what teachers reward or reprimand in class.
That may be true and gives me an idea. What do women want to stop? Deer hunting, perhaps? We could swarm the hunting areas, appropriately dressed, and play pretend, making sure our women's voices were ringing loudly over the distances. A sacrifice of time, but could be worth it.
Which shows the idiocy of 'feelz' over reason. To stop deer hunting for even one season allows an over-propagation and over-abundance of deer - properly labeled as pests in some quarters, which in turn threatens the quality and quantity of existing feeding grounds and threatens the overall health of the remaining deer population. Killing deer in reasonable numbers is properly culling a resource which could quickly outstrip its own habitat and should be considered absolutely environmentally sound - not just men acting 'macho' out to make loud popping noises and posing for beer-piss pictures. And yes, this is an absolute (and effing appropriate) example of mansplaining.
I mean, she just chose a random example. Plenty of women are actively involved in culling pests and plenty of men go to Africa to trophy hunt.
And that is precisely why men dont want to go to college. They want to avoid...women like you.
LOL
Love this idea.
We need MORE deer hunting. They grow their population to an unsustainable level and then their environment gets degraded plus farmers crops decimated. I'm in UK. We need more deer hunting and cheap meat from it. Kill em and eat em and enjoy it
No. Not a good comment or article. You have forgotten or reject the basic principles of capitalism and supply and demand that occur in every profession. For example, in the case of veterinary science, how many veterinary doctors practice on large animals common to agriculture versus how many practice on family pets? What was the ratio 50 years ago? Why might one gender be better suited for one type of practice over another. Years ago I was told that it was harder to get into vet school than med school. If true, why? Is it still true today? What changed in engineering is that by 2005, when I was recruiting women engineers to join Caterpillar, there was a significant starting salary bonus for women in order to attract them to the profession. Unfortunately, many did not have the mechanical experience to be very good at design development and were promoted to managers where they were in charge of doing personnel performance reviews for people doing work on projects that they had no personal interest in or skills to determine best course of action. Consequently, decisions were made by uneducated committees instead of product experts. The cost of product development skyrocketed at the same time that the overall end result was less satisfactory.
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/the-feminisation-of-public-life-cory?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Came to say this. Now that being informed is gay, apparently, suddenly it’s cool to make up your own facts.
This “anti-science” trend you speak of affects men in my area! Because if Covid taught us anything, it’s that SCIENCE can’t be questioned.
Science is a process of question what is currently known. Assuming men are more likely to question the validity of COVID precautions is just as valuable as suggesting women aren't good at math. These sorts of stereotypes aren't really helping anyone.
But women actually aren’t as good at math as men are, on average
We actually don't 'know' that to be true and we can't know. Historically, women weren't allowed to study and do research. Of those who did, their husbands often published their work and got the credit.
Because men like to question everything and in my experience at least,women don't fucking care. Or maybe that's just my neighbourhood.
THE SCIENCE. It's the immutable truth in a Big Book that you swear and oath on. THE SCIENCE,the Sacred Text of the contemporary angry Thunder and Lightning God.
Please be sarcasm
No! It’s the fact that intellectuals and scientists have been so consistently pushing wrong or false narrative! They lose respect because they have been DEAD WRONG on too many issues of i importance !
Plus, so many academics are effeminate dweebs, even the males are feminists!
What even makes someone an "effeminate dweeb" lol...is it because they don't do woodworking or something? They wear glasses and have other "intellectual" pursuits in life than just getting laid? They play video games (because that was the previous definition of the "effeminate dweeb" before video games went mainstream)? Or is it still that they're "eating too much soy"--even though that manosphere myth has already been debunked 1000x ad nauseum?
Also, feminism literally just means that you believe in gender equality, which is just...believing in human rights. There have been 4 different waves of feminism so far, and it's an incredibly diverse field with many different philosophical schools of thought.
The hollowed out "corporate feminism" that we see everywhere in media isn't actually feminism, and every feminist that I know is extremely frustrated/conflicted with its nonsense shallow "girl boss" crap--it's just corporations jumping on the Overton Window shift around gender equality to profit off of it as much as possible. And they do that with literally everything/anything.
Maybe learn what feminism is before going around and using the word in a way that is supposed to mean something, because this is just incredibly confusing to try and understand.
Quite likely. And in my more suspicious moments, I wonder if it is also a factor in the use of AI to replace intellectual work. Remember that before the invention of the typewriter, secretaries were respected (and of course male).
The tyranny of inventions. 🙄
There are still plenty of important respected job with “secretary” in the title. You know, like “of treasury”
It's also a big factor in the rise in anti-intellectual and anti-science attitudes at colleges.
Do you have a million dollars to bet? Are you willing to give odds based on your confidence level? I think that you are confusing and conflating issues. As an engineer I am eager to embrace new developments in any of the sciences. What I reject is censoring countervailing opinions and research that is not part of current group think. It is idiotic to call it being anti-science to challenge prevailing scientific dogma with new evidence.
Again it’s the mandating of courses like ‘vampires in modern literature’ (during the Twilight series boom). Don’t mandate courses outside educational stream, let the market decide if they’re of any interest. Why do you think it’s valuable to force them on students?
I don’t agree. Anti-intellectualism has been an obvious factor in American society. When the first atom bomb exploded and its explosion took “too long” (there was a fear that other atoms would continue the chain reaction) General Leslie Groves, then in charge of the Manhattan Project, is reported to have cried out, “The long hairs have gone and done it…!”
Intellectuals at colleges have been complaining about "the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years" for at least the past 40 years. It's like a meme. Plus, you have to define what "anti-intellectual" means, and how "anti-science" attitudes have been growing in a time like now when so many people think that anything labeled as science is automatically true. Is it anti-intellectual to think you're wasting your time sitting in a class where the lazy prof is supposed to teach you the fundamentals of linguistics but prattles on every week about his own research? Is it anti-intellectual to think it's a waste of time sitting in a classroom where the prof drones on about his garbled version of Marxism instead of teaching English composition and then everybody gets an A?
Define intellectual and science.
I had the same thought.
Who the hell prefers a male boss! What?
I don’t appreciate your claim of “women?/ covert psychodrama.”
I used to buy into the “men and women are interchangeable” narrative but 10+ years of coaching work teams (tech but also other fields) have changed my mind. It’s fascinating to see the differences between men and women at work. I’m a woman btw.
A quick Google search will confirm my position. The core reason why women prefer male bosses is female relational aggression. I have rarely seen a man go after other men or women with the I have seen women go after other women. Call it ruthless versus vicious. Men don’t try to destroy someone’s career because they’re younger and more attractive. That’s psychodrama.
I’ve observed that women have an innate equality bias. Perhaps as a way to ensure offspring get access to resources, they promote collaboration, consensus, and sharing more. Actually, the workplace push for hypercollaboration is precisely an aspect of feminization. In contrast, men prefer to order themselves within a hierarchy based on (perceived) merit and tend to want to work by themselves but that’s penalized now (also penalizes introverts of either gender).
Another Google search will show that women trend more neurotic and take things more personally. Also, more likely to involve authority in disputes like HR.
Many male employees fear of giving female workers developmental feedback because they fear being called sexist. It reflects one of the most corrosive social shifts: labeling anything less than praise as bias, if not discrimination, especially among younger female workers.
Earlier this year, a young female worker accused a male coworker of calling her stupid. I smelled Damsel manipulation vibes, so I asked her to repeat exactly what he said. Turns out, he didn’t call her stupid but she *felt* stupid and therefore it’s the same thing. For fucksake!
A quick Google search proves NOTHING. That’s not researh.
You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish. Most of us have greater ambitions — and frankly, children do grow up! I’ve had an empty next for quite a while now. Even if I’d stayed home for much longer than I did (I was home with my kids until they were both in school all day) I’d still have had decades to do something with after they grew up.
Madam, the research can found via Google because it’s available digitally.
> You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish.
Completely unfounded projection. As mentioned *twice*, I’m a professional workplace coach in tech. Moreover, ambition is not limited to goals that require a person to clock in/out of an institution. Also, there’s nothing wrong with being a “tradwife” whatever that means if a woman chooses to be.
If you’re a woman with a career, why are you shitting on the idea of women having careers?
Here from the future to say a quick Google search did, in fact, prove exactly what she said it would prove.
Women in aggregate prefer male bosses.
I'll go with my own experience and those of the women I know in real life instead of a butthurt misogynist on social media, thanks.
You’re drifting farther into an emotive frame of discourse. Every piece of psyche illustrates the differences between male and female archetypes. By and large, they hold true.
This kind of unwillingness to acknowledge what so many men are saying supports the author’s premise. Thus is especially true when even pop art relies on the same tropes about women in the workplace. These ideas were created in neither a vacuum nor the thin air of fantasy. I know too many men who left female-dominated professions because of gossip, passive-aggression, and emotive reasoning.
Imo there is nothing greater than bringing forth and rearing the next generation. Those other (not greater) ambitions will be forgotten two weeks after your retirement or death unless you have contributed something unique enough to be commemorated and that excludes 90% of the gen pop. Your descendants will remember and appreciate your place in the family tree of life.
There was a study years ago comparing men and women's soccer teams: if one male player committed an off field offense against another, it was quickly shaken off but if a female soccer player committed the same offense, she was shut out. Gender? Culture?
Nicely explained Hermosa.
Does one have to agree to appreciate an explanation?
Jesus Christ! This post really brought out the incels and misogynists, didn’t it?
Shocking
Conforming to each others’ stereotypes…
The reason I preferred a male supervisor is because they were direct, consistent and had probably done the job they are supervising. It’s bad enough when you hire someone with no experience but much worse when it’s a person that could never actually do the work in the first place. It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children. That’s the natural order and this completely explains what has happened to wages in the Western world, every job has been turned into woman’s work. All labor has been devalued because we now have twice the labor pool. Why not go back to a traditional employment situation that yielded the highest standards of living we have ever had. I guess because it doesn’t fit the gay/trans/ single self centered attitude about why we are here. The most important part of being here is to have and raise children. All the education, work and money does nothing for the advancement of people if it’s all squandered on pets and thyself.
Why don’t we women just stay home and have kids? Let me explain this to you.
First of all, I found motherhood very fulfilling, actually. I had my kids just as soon as I could — after I finished my degree, got married and started working. I really do love babies, baking, all that traditional mom stuff. I stayed home until my youngest was ready to start school.
But let me clue you in! SO MANY WOMEN HAVE BEEN FUCKED OVER SEVERELY FOR THIS CHOICE. Women who don’t have solid careers are stuck with men who beat them, belittle them, cheat on them, etc. When my first husband decided to leave the marriage, it meant my job — which I had seen as a supplement to the family and not as something I could afford to support myself and my children with — was not nearly enough. My kids are grown now and I’m STILL being punished by our system for having stayed home with my kids for many years and for not working on my career hard enough. I will never be able to afford to retire, because I was not prioritizing my financial wellbeing — I was prioritizing my children and allowing my then-husband to concentrate on his career, unencumbered by domestic concerns.
Now, not every woman wants to have babies and stay home, regardless. But some percentage of us wouldn’t have minded it a bit as long as we were treated with respect, not financially exploited, etc., etc. You can blame bad men for that. We’ve learned not to trust any of you.
Eventually, I ran the newsroom for a daily newspaper. I assure you I was better at it than the man who came before me and was fired. I’d been working in newspapers since my youngest started school. I knew what I was doing. I had a degree and years of experience and I’m really proud of what a good job I did as the editor of a newspaper.
Your claim that women aren’t as competent simply proves you’re sexist. And sexist men are not good people. They certainly are not good husbands or fathers.
A sexist man is worthless in every way.
Also -- what's with that weird mention of pets at the end? Let me guess -- you're a Vance follower who fixates on single women with cats. And "thyself"? What fucking century are you from, anyway?
You sound like an incel who hates women because you cannot attract one.
YES. Thank you!! I lived a similar life of choices for marrying, having children, able to stay home & raise them, then go back to school for a Masters and then to work outside the home.. I am so glad I did all of it that way. HOWEVER I too was punished: My Social Security, it was explained, is less because I "stayed home during prime earning years." As if lazy?! So if I had paid someone else to raise our children, I would have been a good little soldier and gotten another $500+ per month for my time as a worthless, long-lived Grannie. Our economy is seriously deficient for everyone except white males. We women--old and young-- are in process to change that. Stand back.
My understanding is that a number of Westernized countries do adjust their public pension systems appropriately to reflect the years a caregiver was home with children (whether the caregiver was male or female does not matter). I hope Americans can work together on having the same approach.
On your deathbed are you going to be wishing you spent less time with your children so that you could have upgraded to an ocean view room on your retirement cruises?
Surely you meant heterosexual white males 🤔 😳 🙄
Having dwelt with the fall out from my mother's self centered choices since I was nine yrs old - for well over half a century. Endured abuse at the hands of two stepmothers and watched my father die from a Hep C infection deliberately given to him by one of my stepmothers. As well being married for well over four decades I've learned not to trust women and prefer to live alone now that my wife has passed away than dwell within the living hell of feminine emotional chaos.
"More sexist than men have ever been"? When women pass legislation barring men from certain professions, excluding them from higher education, taking away their right to vote and signing their property over to their wives, I might start to believe you.
Can’t get laid, huh?
Point out the "misandry." Specifically.
All she said was "the so-called "traditional" system has harmed women and still harms women today; here is my own story of how I didn't prioritize my financial wellbeing and when my husband left me, it greatly harmed me and I'm still living with the effects of that harm today."
That's it.
She only pointed blame at the restrictive "traditional" system that categorizes what people's entire lives are "allowed" to look like based on nature's arbitrary chromosome sorting, as well as "bad men" + "sexist men."
She literally went out of her way to not generalize all men--like, she went out of her way to not trigger any "not all men"s...and you *still* managed to get offended?
You guys really are out here at this point just calling anything a woman says about a man "misandry" unless it's overt praise or something.
You seriously cannot be this fragile (a person, because fragility has nothing *inherent* to do with gender or sex).
If a woman just *speaking* of her own personal life experience is "misandry" to you, you need to do some serious reflection as to why.
Lol, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel. Misandry 🤣🤣🤣
You are not helping. You may be are trolling for your own ego, or you maybe you are becoming what they want you to be. Or maybe you are a feminist flooding threads with random hate. Either way, you are spoiling the debate and not just boys will suffer. Everyone will.
“It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children.”
Better for *you* bro, is what you mean. Earn $, control the family and have someone raise your kids.
How do you not writhe with embarrassment at your audacity when you exhort the singular importance of having and raising children *at the very same time* as you advocate returning to a social system that would ensure you personally would have next to no involvement in the having and the raising.
Get away with that sanctimonious clap trap. It’s 2024 and we see right through you.
I don't know what makes them think they can convince us to go back to a time women risked everything to extricate themselves from in the first place. We know it was a better time for white men, so they can quit beating that drum.
While I don’t entirely agree with the original comment, and I’m not against women working per se, it does have some merit we would best not dismiss.
It’s uncharitable to assume believing in the traditional gender arrangement to be purely a matter of control. This arrangement had persisted through history until very recently because it potentially affords the most optimal conditions for childrearing.
Breast milk tailored to your children is better than formula. Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t and can instill unwanted values and behavior-- that is, daycare workers and teachers (aka the State).
That means, especially when very young, mothers ARE the best primary caregivers along with dad. Dads are next. Close family after that. Live-in nanny next perhaps. Best overall: mom, dad, and close family. It is what it is. Furthermore, most women, when they become mothers, wish to work less to some degree (if I recall correctly, 20% want to be FT SAHM). Yhis is natural and reasonable. This is an unacknowledged driving reason behind the pay gap.
However, society prioritizes the wants of adults over the needs of children. Liberal feminism has a strong anti-motherhood and child bias. Women entering the job market created surplus workers which drove down wages. Combined with inflation, and other various factors means both parents must work to make ends meet.
Not I didn’t offer solutions. I’m just spitting inconvenient truths.
I know it's always tempting to revert to nostalgia, but it's really not really historically accurate to say that a working dad and a stay at home mom nuclear family must be the best and most natural because that's how it's been in the past, taking an anthropological lens and looking across cultures and places amd economies. That's actually just the most recent past. Si many factors, including the GI bill after the second world War that, speaking very simplistically, made single generational nuclear family living even possible for a plurality of people in America. This doesn't even address other places and cultures and natural degrees of variation towards the economy and care roles. I highly recommend the first several episodes of the podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy for an overview of these topics.
>Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t
This is a false dichotomy, though of course it is important that children are raised by loving family.
>and can instill unwanted values and behavior
Children are best raised by those who will instill good values which has nothing specifically to do with who is the child's parent or not. All of parents, extended family, friends of the family, complete strangers can instill bad values or behaviors. The values or behaviors parents want their children to have might well be very bad ones and it is not hard to find examples of this.
What is 'unwanted' or 'unwanted' by anyone (parents or otherwise) has nothing to do with how children should be reared and is entirely relative. There is no particular reason to privilege the values or behaviors parents want if we are thinking about what is best for the child and of course, the parents (much less grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other members of the family) may want incompatible values or behaviors so that standard is even more of a non-starter.
Depending on the culture, breastfeeding generally lasts around a year. It doesn’t justify prescribing a particular role for the rest of a woman’s life. “Optimal conditions” for child-rearing are two caring, attuned, involved, competent parents, both of whom can provide materially for the child.
“ The most important part of being here is to have and raise children.”
According to whom? Not to me. Not to my husband of more than 30 years. Not everyone can have children and it does not make one ’less-than’ if we don’t.
Eric, my grandma was a stay at home mother with young children when her husband, my grandpa, was killed by a drunk driver. They were plunged into poverty. Thoughts on how society should handle that?
Relatedly, my husband - an incredibly healthy individual - had a stroke this year. Thank god I have a good paying job or else the same might have happened to me and my young kids.
I've had the opposite experience with male supervisors, actually. Most didn't know what they were doing, but grossly overestimated their own skills + knowledge. Or they managed to skate by on so little effort that they were essentially just "existing" in their role while doing the absolute bare minimum.
I've never experienced an incompetent or bare minimum/passive female supervisor, though I'm sure they exist as well (because I'm not going to absurdly overgeneralize billions and billions of people).
Now, do my anecdotal stories weigh more than yours? Do they weigh anything at all to you? No? Is it because anecdotes aren't a basis for any kind of logical conclusion, and using them for "logic" is a recognized logical fallacy?
Yeah, not sure why you would think that supports your "we need to return to patriarchy, even if it means removing the right to individual liberty/freedom/self-determination/etc" comment.
Plus, are you literally implying that women "could never actually do the work in the first place"? That's such a big yikes, dude. I can't even imagine being that blindly prejudiced--do you hold similar views about the competency, capabilities, and intelligence of other entire demographic groups, like black people or gay/trans people too?
I suppose it's a yes for the latter, at least, via implication.
Like, you rail against their "single self-centered attitude" but that's...the foundation of American identity + culture. Haven't you heard of "American individualism"? The core tenet of the American Dream?
That individualistic culture/mindset is the primary factor in why so many Americans are still so opposed to even the most basic social welfare programs or socialist policies (despite FDR himself saving us from the Great Depression and setting the foundation for the "American Golden Age" with his aggressive implementation of them...because their intention/design is about sharing wealth + resources more fairly overall to benefit all society, rather than letting a small group of individuals hoard everything disproportionately).
Based on your own gender essentialism, anyone could come up with literally any random "justification" for any random societal system, though I'm sure you've never thought about systems outside an individualistic, capitalist framework.
Because, ironically, that "natural order" you're referring to--the extremely isolated nuclear family model--is *recognized* to be a relatively recent capitalist "invention" to promote + optimize economic efficiency + profit. Humans lived in communal models (ie. large intergenerational families, close-knit villages/communities) basically up until the Industrial Revolution, even in America. It's not "natural" by any measure.
But let's try this--if we should all be less "single self-centered" and need to "optimize" economic recovery, then how about switching it up to:
"Men can't 'naturally' raise children like women can, they're (apparently?) only good at working for paychecks. So men should go work but then pay huge taxes so that women can live together in special large family co-op residences to dedicate all their time/energy to raise children communally. That would, in fact, be an even *more* efficient model of traditional separated gendered spheres--because genders wouldn't even have to waste time interacting and getting distracted by each other! Men could even just donate sperm and women could order it straight to their communal family living co-op residences and everyone could go about and do their 'natural roles' better + undistracted + unfettered."
I'm going to take a wild guess, though, and assume that this doesn't seem so appealing to you, does it?
Because what "traditional" men want in that "natural order" is far more about access to a woman, her body/intimacy, and her labor + care via marriage. It has crap all to do with "employment/economic crisis" or "wages" or whatever "every job being turned into women's work" is supposed to mean.
Those "highest standards of living we've ever had" just translates to "highest standards of living that *men* have ever had" and it's obvious to everyone, even if it's not obvious to you.
I wish you trad-types would all at least stop pretending otherwise.
Ugh, ok. I'm still frustrated by this shocking level of ignorance, so I'll reply one more time.
All the economic trends you've mentioned have nothing to do with women joining the workforce. In fact, according to the UN, that's actually the *number one* solution for struggling + developing countries to trigger an exponential economic growth rate...because cutting off half your population from participating in your economy....obviously cuts your economic production and thus strength in half?
You're complaining about something that has so many recognized + well studied factors, but arbitrarily blaming it all on women to justify the society that you *personally* want (which is actually very "single self-centered" of you, isn't it).
What you should look to is decades of neoliberalist policies, decades (arguably centuries) of corporate greed + labor exploitation, and the rise of automation + globalization. That's actually your "twice the labor pool" source...except it's even larger than "twice the labor pool," because it's every single country's labor pool, and not just "the other half" of the population in your own country.
How did you even manage to conclude your premise? Like, did women somehow "kill the coal mining industry" by "feminizing it" or something too, in your eyes?
And lastly, that "natural order" (regarding your gender essentialist beliefs--ie. patriarchy) of yours has only been around for 5,000-8,000 years, which is a blip in time because our species is *hundreds of thousands* of years old.
Anthropologists have completely debunked the "man the hunter, woman the gatherer/homemaker" myth, and now report that we lived in completely egalitarian communities for all of that time. Biologists also believe that we evolved as an egalitarian species too, via our extremely negligible sexual dimorphism (via comparing it to the dimorphism in other animal species--both those with very large + very negligible dimorphism like ours).
It's like every single sentence is based on a wrong premise that has way too much baggage to unpack in a comment section. I'm going to stop writing before this one turns into an article-length comment too.
😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣
I just hated taking orders from chicks.
I chuckled. I love your honesty. I would actually seek you out for my team. Clear communication is the best, and you have it.
🤪 You chuckled! Menz are soooooooo funny and *never* arseholes! You’d seek him out for your team so he could actively work to spread his misogyny and undermine your authority! You are *so cool* and 100% definitely not like the other girls!!!!!
I'm comfortable with my masculinity. Have lived with it all my life, and like it. To each their own.
Indeed. At least half of the disruptively dramatic people I met in the workforce were men.
Equality! Men and women can be equally disruptively dramatic.
That said, I had some truly wonderful colleagues and bosses of both persuasions. 😁
I'd much rather work for a woman than for a man. Whether it has anything to do with being gay, I do not know, but I never learned how to earn the approval of male authority figures. It may go back to prep school in the early 70s. They probably don't see their younger selves in me. I know I can't identify with the average male corporate type.
I doubt I would have found myself in the following scenario had my boss been a woman. It was my first day on a new job. One of the first things my new boss, a man, said to me was "Do you play golf?" When I said I didn't, his response was "Too bad."
I feel the same and I am straight. I have a bad temper. I have had violence issues. That is not an issue with women. Even as I age, sometimes I need to work hard not to punch men I disagree with.
-When women do poorly
"It's the men's fault!"
-when men do poorly
"Still the men's fault!"
:/
Good one. This is an article about why *men* are allegedly doing poorly, and how some people try to make that *women’s* fault.
Where did you read that second part?
I must be in anecdote alley
With rare exceptions, in my 20 years of working as a pleb, male bosses were easier 90% of the time.
People who prefer to get real work done prefer a male boss.
Enough sexism for today, buddy.
I’m a male and I prefer female bosses because they tend to promote me over more capable female peers.
I see that happen too. On the other hand, I have also seen male bosses who prefer their female staff over their male staff. We humans are flawed but endlessly interesting (and we do need enlightenment on how we treat one another...it's a work in progress).
She replied, dramatically.
I almost always prefer a male boss.
Sure. Individuals preferences vary. Out of curiosity, why do you prefer female managers?
I bet you were a charmer then who could harmlessly flirt and get away with murder cos you made them feel beautiful and sexy . Some men can do that. Bad boys,we love em.
In my loooong career in the private and later the public sectors, it was observable that in many cases males had better work relations with female bosses than did the females who worked for those bosses. It was intriguing to see.
Race is not a social construct.
This is not a binary.
That old canard of Italians (or Irish) not being white is totally fabricated and isn't held up to even the slightest bit of research. They weren't allowed into higher society because they were recent immigrants, that's all. And race isn't a social construct. Terms may change over time but every culture and language has words for black, white, Amerindian, etc. To say that there is no race of people who are from South and Central America because 60 years ago the US government didn't have a place for it on their forms is absurd. The ancient Greeks wrote of race, as did the Chinese, Romans, Indians, Japanese. Its a thing, it exists, it matters. We've all known this for thousands of years up until about 3 weeks ago when academics started thinking that it makes them sound intelligent to say otherwise.
By construct I think people are referring to the idea of skin color equating to race, which was made up (contructed) around the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Race in more ancient times that you mention referred mainly to culture, ethnicity. This is typically what people mean when they describe race--and gender--as constructs. Things that are part of the ever evolving ways humans conceptualize and categorize themselves and gatekeeping rules we make up. Gravity=not a construct. Long hair is for girls= a construct (and a recent one).
Usually it has been culture and language. Religion can get in there as well, but culture is a huge block. The Chinese referred to the "black skin and black souls" of the British during the Opium War. The fight was racial from the Chinese perspective, and had nothing to do with skin color.
United States vs. Ozawa and United States vs Sinngh Thind. Reading those briefs in order explains quite a bit.
I can’t speak to the Irish, but even in my early years (60’s & 70’s,) there was plenty of bigotry against people with names like mine. I wasn’t until I learned some Roman history that I began to feel some pride in my ancestry.
Race is not a social construct in the slightest. The biological differences between races are as immutable as those between the sexes.
Oh, yes, like the biological differences between (natural) blondes and brunettes, I'm sure skin tone makes a big difference. 🙄
You’re probably right Donna, But why can’t i find any brunette jokes?
they are too common. Most jokes rely on the joy of skewering a minority.
Gary! Of course it’s true, but Don’t explain a joke away!
With labrador dogs, chocolate, cream and black all tend to have different personalities and behaviour.
We're talking about human beings, not dogs. Dogs are bred to exhibit certain traits. Most human beings aren't.
Yes but the effect of groups of humans being largely geographically separated for thousands of years has had a similar effect.
Indeed.We might as well classify people by the size of their ears.
Races as we describe them have definitions. If they did not, we could not categorize them. My wife is from Thailand. They are shorter than people from Sweden. They have black hair. My blond hair makes me stand out when I am in Asia. My blue eyes are not common in many places.
Race is used as a rough proxy for place of your ancestors' origin. There are differences here that can involve skin color, but that is one characteristic. Sickle cell anemia is common to West Africans but not to Southern Indians who share a dark skin color. Skin cancer is common among those of European ancestry.
At least from a medical standpoint, knowing one's race is actually useful.
How did you even find this substack and why are you reading it? This is usually a place for thoughtful conversation. Construct in this context means the way humans arrange our lives and rules that govern our societies--and these things change over time. What is considered masculine and feminine behavior, clothing, work, etc., changes over time, and so has our views on what determines social boundaries of race. This doesn't equate to a belief that there are no differences between men, women, or people from different genetic and cultural histories. This article is about trying to understand our current cultural concerns, not be pushy or defensive of any specific ideology.
To clarify, it’s not a binary concept. But to say there is no social construction at all between races is too absurd to even argue against. Groups aren’t monoliths and individuals vary. Consider also racial genetic mixing. Nurture and perception still play roles.
Incorrect. The genetic variation within a “race” is the same as genetic variation across “races”. As a category, “race” is meaningless.
I bet you that I can pick most people out by race. Even more, may medical issues cluster by race. Not all, but a number less than zero. I hate this mindset. People die because of this foolish mindset. We need to stop this "I do not see race" BS. You ethnic heritage is actually important. It has a direct bearing on what diseases to look out for.
No, you can pick most people out by the social constructs of race that you have been taught. The parity of genetic variation within and across categories of race is a fact, not an opinion. The validity of that statement does not depend on your personal beliefs. It does not matter if you are ignorant of it...it remains true.
This seems very obvious to me.
Are we talking about genetic differences or behavioral differences? I imagine i’m seeing some disagreement on definitions…
And i doubt we disagree much beyond our slogans…
I agree with you! Further, in my experience, Working for women, changed the concept of job well done, from actually accomplishing what was requested, to presenting the appearance of accomplishing what was requested.
Once I had a female boss, I never wanted a male one again. Women DO NOT prefer a male boss.
Perhaps we should pick better bosses rather than make blanket assumptions.
Perhaps you can say this to the original commenter and their "blanket assumption" that this person was directly refuting, or any of the other 10 or whatever commenters that were all backing up his equally insane "blanket assumption" about female bosses.
Why'd you feel the impulse to pick + respond like this to the *one* comment that refuted the original blanket assumption via an equivalent blanket assumption? And interpreted entirely out of that context, too. It's very suspect regarding biases on your part, dude.
Like you're just unintentionally illustrating more of the insane, irrationally sexist position found throughout this entire thread of:
"Male bosses bad = we need to pick better bosses because they were chosen poorly + were an exception to the rule of male bosses being better" vs "female bosses bad = because they were female"
Of course men and women are different, which is why it’s so important that women be in the workforce. If women didn’t bring unique gifts, there would be no need to try to increase the number of women in different fields, but they do
Gender is an imaginary social construct. Sex is not.
Sure it is
"women's covert psychodrama"? Is THAT what it is? Oh well then. Where have I heard this before? Oh. Yes. ALL MY LIFE (and I'm 78 years old)! Just didn't want you to labor (so to speak) under the erroneous idea that women should be like men or go home.
Gender is absolutely a social construct. Sex is not.
Gender is socially constructed, which means the source of the concept comes from society — not biology. If you have ever raised a child in the United States, suffering through aisles of “boy” toys and “girl” toys; “boy” diapers and “girl” diapers, bottles, books, etc. Etc., that should be self evident.?
So trans people are nothing? Should they go and commit suicide? Sex can be changed and should not a source of exclusion and pain.
Biological sex is largely a matter of sex organs and XX/XY chromosomes. There's some variation, but this is generally the case. It is biological.
Gender is a construct. The meaning of gender is socially created. So the ways that various societies understand gender can and do vary significantly across time and space.
Because gender is a construct created by societies, a society can link gender to a lot of things that have nothing to do with gender at all. In the United States, the pinnacle of late-stage capitalism hell bent on pointless consumption, gender is attributed to objects, to preferences, to colours, to anything that might cause people to purchase more than they need.
I can understand saying that sex is a fungible thing, but the imaginary concept of gender is absurd. It is another silly rambling of rich white ladies who imagine nightmare worlds where they spend other people's money to create hell for everyone. I have respect for transgender rights, and it is deeply upsetting to see the monsters who oppose basic human rights for transgendered people, but I do not see any utility in imagining this thing "gender" and pretending that it matters. It is part of a long, useless parade of imaginary concepts such as "gaslighting" or "disparate impact." Too many over-fed white people dreaming up new ways to make themselves significant at the expense of marginalized people.
I know that I cannot change it, but I am keen on new spaces where innovation can occur in the absence of professional nannies.
Disparate impact is…something we can measure empirically. It’s not something we imagine.
Race is a social construct? Then you begin your second paragraph with biology matters.
🙄😂🤣
Society is a racial construct. Biology matters. Different races are different. Hence they construct different societies.
I agree that generally this is the situation, but it seems to me to be more a symptom than a cause of what ails humans (in Western societies, anyway, which are the only ones I have lived and worked in).
Great comment. You are, predictably, going to be punished for your "emperor has no clothes " honesty. My wife, former HR, and a "disagreeable giver" (her father's only son!) would have written a very similar comment. I hear echoes of this with a disturbingly frequent regularity.
I work in a pretty much male environment-construction. The government is trying to bribe women to take it up because it's a male environment, which apparently is not allowed.
I hadn't thought about it before, but if sizeable numbers of women started entering the workforce I would leave. You're spot on. Working with women isn't enjoyable, I like working with other men. I used to be a school teacher and I find the idea of going back to working with lots of women quite dispiriting. I don't want to oppress anyone or anything, I just want to be left to get on with it.
I don't think you're quite getting it though. Workplaces with large female cohorts are substantially different... I mean we're not doing the 'men and women are interchangeable' shtick are we?
Teaching is a completely different profession to what it once was when it was largely male dominated, as is university. Women are very good in pushing for their environment to be shaped to reflect their sensibilities, men are not so socially adept in comparison. Men don't really like the environments that women produce but they aren't able to push back against them, so instead they just opt out and go and do something else. The problem for a lot of men now is that western society has become so ubiquitously feminized (ie. there's nowhere else to go) that opting out basically means locking themselves away from everyone and everything and (probably) living in a resentful fantasy world.
Also.. at the risk of making people angry, have you considered that when all the men leave, things get a bit shit? That's the other side of the coin. Men's strength is that they're generally good at building things, technique and structure. It may be that things that men leave get devalued because they actually become less valuable. Educational outcomes since women started dominating the teaching profession, they're not the best. A lot of things seem to be not working properly anymore... Maybe it's unrelated but the correlation seems to be there.
I was going to say something to the same effect as you, but you put it better, so thanks!
I used to teach elementary school, but as my male colleagues retired or left, the environment changed and I ended up leaving as well. I generally like women, as individuals, but not so much in larger groups. I believe there is a dynamic in large groups of females that is detrimental (in my view) to the working environment. There seems to be less room for individualism, and a large pressure to conform in female dominated workspaces. Further, exchanges of ideas seems to be less welcome if they challenge the group cohesion.
Misogyny much?
Workplaces run by almost all men (like construction) don’t exactly have the best workplace culture either. I’d rather be the only man in an office than in an office that was almost all men, but I do honestly thinking having a healthy balance of genders is good for the workplace.
It really depends upon the work. A true balance is great, but once that transition occurs, and the environment takes on a female vibe, then it gets creepy, passive-aggressive, everyone shit-talking everyone else, and many of us rush for the exits.
Knee jerk, much?
Reading comprehension, much?
Him: "Women often apply pressure on others to conform."
You: "Conform with my ideology, doofus!"
You forgot to mention Patriarchy!
It's always misogyny when someone says something that a woman doesn't like. BTW you forgot to call him an incel
Careful deary your MISANDRY is showing.
You don’t even know what that word means.
I love men! I have a wonderful husband and son and many male friends.
I dislike SHITTY men. I dislike shitty people, actually.
Not all men are shitty. I only dislike the shitty ones.
I love this. If you are not trolling, I am fascinated that you are literally behaving like a conservative puppet. Amazing.
No mate. Conservatives don't want her either
As men we have to deal with" shitty ones "too
Yeah, but we can hit them, haze them, and get them in line.
Guess again. That’s evolution, not your personal brand of sociology. In almost any effort of high purpose or seriousness or competition, women are a distraction—again, evolution.
You mean like when dudes be gaming??
We know when to work and when to game. Mixing them helps no one.
“We know when to work and when to game”
Do you, tho?
You must have been paid by a conservative troll. This is too perfect.
Hag much?
More like... Observing reality
i agree, there is an unspoken rule, that we all have to protect each others feelings, in stead of stating obvious facts that need addressing. people have always called me a rather masculine person, i just have no patience for feelings when things need getting done. this quality annoys me no end with other women, even those i know and love. They need approval, even if they are incompetent. No. If you have hand tremors, you cannot, CANNOT be a dental hygienist. The other person safety is more important than your feelings. (this was a true story by the way) she paid to take the program thinking she could work at it. no. I just tell them to join a religion or something else that makes them feel important. because that is what they deeply want.
This may generally be true, on average—but it depends on the women and the culture set by leadership in an organization.
I’m a woman who worked in aviation (95% male) and I enjoyed the direct, focus-on-results culture. It’s something I’ve worked to bring to all organizations I’ve been evolved in leading, including those that were majority female.
It sure does. As I clarify beneath, I have a great working relationship with all my female coworkers (80% female) and my female boss.
Absolutely. You are 100% correct. I love that you can see this.
Women compete socially differently than men. Women are much more likely to use Gossip, Shaming, Rallying (GSR) and other social techniques to get what they want. I think men prefer to compete directly and cooperate in a hierarchy based on the results of that competition; eg best on top, others following according to capabilities.
To a certain extent I can understand what you are saying. But a problem with the male concept of a hierarchy built on the results of competition is that there are many men who do not care about the results of competition from women. We are invisible, or disliked for the same competitiveness that is admired in men, or only valued for looks/agreeability or other traditionally feminine traits.
If you feel invisible as a woman, you should try being a man sometime.
“ I think men prefer to compete directly and cooperate in a hierarchy based on the results of that competition; eg best on top”
🤣🤣🤣🤣 clearly you’ve never worked in the corporate world
Men are far more likely to get that passive-aggressive attitude in workplaces where they are safe (government, teaching,...). I suspect many men go out of their way to avoid such environments, at least the individuals who can afford to.
Some women prefer the masculine style.
I think a lot of them do. In these conversations I take it as a given that the qualities of 'man' and 'woman' are bimodal. There's overlap and messiness.
But even if you favour a more masculine style, the problem is that the feminine version of social organisation outcompete the masculine one once violence and physical strength are not valuable traits. Even if you like the masculine style, you're still going to get the feminine where the two meet.
But it's unlikely that you like masculine organisation better because you share it as an impulse (just generally), you like it because it's nice. It's already had decades, maybe hundreds of years of regulation and civilizing. Men have generally learned to play well together in large groups. In it's most primitive elements men have been forced to organise into armies etc forever.
This is not to say 'women should never be in charge of anything', just that they need to be aware that they have a lot of stuff they need to get ahold of, just like men have to learn not to punch people in the face (and generally do learn from a very young age), women have to learn that their impulses are generally maladaptive in this weird modern world. I don't think we've had to deal with this much before, so we just haven't, and as a result the pathologies of femininity are poisoning our civilization.
“But it's unlikely that you like masculine organisation better because you share it as an impulse (just generally), you like it because it's nice. It's already had decades, maybe hundreds of years of regulation and civilizing. Men have generally learned to play well together in large groups. In its most primitive elements men have been forced to organise into armies etc forever.”
What the fuck, now? So much bullshit on this thread I could be here all night. Fucking hell.
“you like it because it's nice”. ???? Bro you’re so brainwormed, so pilled on male superiority complex that you can’t distinguish between opinion and fact. “Nice”???
“Men have generally learned to play well together in large groups.”
Have they, though? Because I’ve worked in some incredibly dysfunctional organisations led by men, where the mass loss of talent and productivity due to shitty toxic “masculine” attitudes and traits was in our faces every day.
I suppose though, that by asserting that somehow women haven’t learnt to work collaboratively 🙄, you’re at least pushing back against the traditional story of women as the gatherers that worked together in large groups to raise children and source the majority of the tribe’s food supply while the menz were away doing the all important hunting.
Or, and hear me out, are you simply spouting total nonsense without ever stopping to think it through properly, on the basis that you’re a man so your ideas are by definition correct? Because that’s how I read this drivel you’re writing.
He's actually getting at a deep truth that is hard to accept or even discuss. If you want to ignore it, go ahead. But your "these thoughts are not allowed to be spoken" attitude is exactly the problem that occurs in female-dominated organizations.
I have two female bosses, and I don't tell them what I really think because that's not allowed. I tell them what they want to hear. Now to be clear, I have had one female boss I could be real with, but she was the exception. 90% of women require you to keep it fake. All positive all of the time. Its much easier to have a honest, frank conversation with a man.
What is this “deep truth that is hard to accept or even discuss”? If it’s that a lot of men dislike working with women, or even dislike women full stop, that is being discussed very frankly by men all over this comments section, so your point doesn’t really make sense.
What I think you’re getting at, is that this guy, and many like him, try to dress up their misogyny with some kind of biological 🤪 justification (“deep truth”) to make it sound more “rational”.
Reality is, you think men and traditionally male ways of being and acting are superior. Women are inferior and you don’t like taking orders from them or having to do anything that is “female-coded” because it’s inherently status-diminishing to you as a man.
If you’re going to have the audacity to write about “deep truth” you should really be able to call it as it is.
What he is saying is that all institutions in our society have had centuries to create rules dealing with male bad behavior. We have only had female-dominated companies, departments, schools,..., for about forty years. We have yet to "fix" or "constrain" female-oriented problems.
Unless you are saying that women have no problems, or have the same problems as men (violence, duplicity, rage,...). There is no judgment here, simply the fact that we are only having female-dominated work spaces vey recently. We have no idea how they fail, whereas we do know the way males tend to fail (usually related to rage and violence).
Look, I believe in the principle of diversity. I’ve seen the problems arising when organisations are entirely controlled by a homogenous group of people (same race, gender, class, age-group etc.), and I’m certainly not asserting that homogenous groups of women are somehow immune from problems.
However: (a) the idea that society has been finely tuned to deal with all problems caused by men running things is, um, laughable; and (b) it’s only really in the last, say, 20 years that the problems caused by men running things have even been discussed or widely acknowledged.
So, given society has been dealing with the fall-out from fallible male leadership for centuries, I’m not amenable to suggestions that because particular issues might arise in the context of all-female leadership, that means women leaders aren’t competent, can’t be trusted, shouldn’t be followed etc (which is where old mate was going).
i do, and i worked with many women who were amazing. but a degree does not make you that. it's just a piece of paper. Your character does. I have known women with great character. doulas midwifes, herbalists. ER nurses. they took initiative, and were just the kind of people you want by your side when life gets hard. karens, are the opposite of that. anyone can get a diploma. if they want one.
@Grape Soda
Agreed. I don't know how one would quantify it, but I'd wager women managers with a masculine style have statistically signficantly less employee turnover than male managers or women with a women's style.
Men like you are the problem— refusing to work with women.
Don't give us that— if women produce workplace cultures that are unpleasant for men, then clearly it's the women who are responsible, for creating such a hostile environment, not the men trying to get away from it.
You’re blaming women again. You’re taking it as a given that we are producing workplace cultures that are unpleasant for men. Don’t give me that bullshit. As if those poor men are just helpless and can’t get away from all the mean, powerful women … listen to yourself.
Women absolutely dominate HR, which produces workplace cultures.
First, it is not a given that women produce toxic workplaces. I work with "powerful" women now. (They are my bosses; the ceo, and her second in command) I have no problem with them as women, or as my bosses.
Our team is small, five people, that lets us relate to each other as individuals rather than demographics. And we are responsible for different tasks and topics, with clear areas of responsibility.
Second, I have experienced the opposite as well, serving in the Air Force, we had a few women serving in our unit. Most of them left within the year. It could, of course be because of us lads "producing workplace cultures that were unpleasant for women", but their stated reason for leaving was that it just didn't work for them.
There still is a couple of men teaching at my old school, and some of the women in my unit stayed, but both places the majority (of the minority) left at some point. I'm not blaming anyone, but maybe men and women produce different workplace cultures, cultures that are less agreeable to the opposite sex?
Accountability isn't blame.
You can laugh at it, just do not complain about the leftover men raping, robbing and killing people. There has been an enormous cost to opening up opportunities to all, and it has been born entirely by men of the majority group.
The real danger is not that men with nothing to lose will rebel, video games and porn seem to have sedated them, but that a right wing movement will rise up and change everything. That risk is not small. Donald Trump is not that bad. It could be so much worse.
“There has been an enormous cost to opening up opportunities to all, and it has been born entirely by men of the majority group.”
This is so telling. You can’t perceive your own brainworms. You’re still operating from a place where you think “men of the majority group” *deserved all the opportunities as some kind of natural right* and have done the “others” a huge favour by “allowing” them a share.
Of course this is the case. Do you think slaves freed themselves in 1865? Were the concentration camps in Europe freed by Jewish prisoners or by the Red Army? If you think otherwise, you are delusional.
This is how societies collapse. You are so far gone that you cannot observe what is right in front of you. Men necessarily had to allow women to hold these positions. That is why women have more rights here than in say Saudi Arabia. Our society is more productive having better qualified women taking roles above less qualified men, but there has been a cost to this. It has come in the form of greater inequality, broken families, drug addiction and mass psychological distress.
I have no idea what you mean by "deserving." That is a useless term. No one "deserves" anything. With regards to female empowerment, people such as yourself are not contributing anything. If we have any hope of creating a better society, we must recognize problems and attempt to solve them, or at least ameliorate the collateral damage. Screaming that men are bad, or promoting a victimhood religion is counterproductive unless you are shooting for societal collapse or a radical rightwing takeover. Silly posturing and demonizing normal people for existing has created Donald Trump and his kind. Is that your goal?
Your comment is revealing about how you want to categorize me, but it has no connection to reality. But if you want Trump to win and agree with his vision, keep on going strong. People like you will get him in the White House forever, president for life.
I think we’ve seen a lot of hostility directed at men. It’s hurt both men and women.
Boo hoo.
You are the problem.
Thank you.
So if men produce workplace cultures that are unpleasant for women, it’s clearly the men who are responsible for creating such a hostile environment, right?
What is the hostile environment?
Sexual harassment; general hostility; sexist condescension; exclusion from the so-called "boy's club" (ie. just networking) which is key to professional development/paths; invisibility and being passed over for less qualified and/or less experienced men??
These are all *literally* well-known, well-studied patterns in especially male-dominated fields. Where have you been, dude? You can google the studies and see the statistics yourself.
I'm not refusing to work with women - I still work with women. My boss is a woman, her boss is a woman. We work together just fine. But at every workplace there is a woman like you, and the more women, the greater the chance of having several Karens!
And at every workplace, the more men, the greater chance of having several "Chads" (or "Brads," or whatever the male equivalent of a "Karen" is).
Totally - but I am probably less annoyed/off-put by Chads than by Karens. I accept that the opposite maybe true for women. I know how to deal with Chads. I do not have the same tools at my disposal towards Karens.
But again, I totally agree with what I percieve to be your point; the more males gathered together, the bigger the chance that some are dicks.
Well, it sounds like we are basically in agreement -- some people are just assholes, and nobody likes to work with assholes, be they male or female.
It may well be true that you find it easier to deal with Chads, while I find it easier to deal with Karens -- but it's so much nicer to have a workplace where everyone, male and female alike, treat each other with respect and cordiality.
Maybe, but women like you are a larger problem. You invade, and if rebuffed, you fall back on victim-hood or legislation.
I block assholes like you.
That sounds like a physical assault to me
Misandry much?
Sure, let's go with that.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html
Especially ugly ones.
It's unrelated. Education (especially since becoming a female-dominated field) has become increasingly undervalued and experienced insane fund-slashing from every level of government. We've also double downed on the standardized testing metrics/system, despite that just teaching rote memorization and not critical thinking skills.
Correlations are not causations.
Your assumption isn't just a well-known logical fallacy, it's incredibly condescending and gender essentialist (ie. sexist): "Men's strength is that they're generally good at building things, technique and structure. It may be that things that men leave get devalued because they actually become less valuable."
So essentially you're saying that men or "man skills" are inherently more valuable than women or "woman skills," because if they leave a profession it "inherently becomes less valuable" regardless of profession or skills or whatever else?
But that also contradicts your own bringing up of educational outcomes that immediately follows it--education is literally one of the most important contributors to a healthy + stable society. You seriously think it's been devalued just because most teachers don't have penises? That's your thesis statement?
And ignoring how vague "building things, technique and structure" is (like...technique of what? Just technique of doing a thing? Anything? Structure of what? Buildings?)....neither my dad nor my brother are good at anything that you're likely referring to here--are they not men to you? And my mom is excellent with what I think you're referring to--so is she a man, now?
Assuming binary universal traits like this for entire demographic groups is useless and inapplicable to reality. "Black and white thinking" (ie. binary thinking) is another main logical fallacy, so I caution you against it.
I also literally don't understand what men ever mean by saying that things become "feminized." Because none of them can ever seem to give an internally consistent or even commonly agreed upon answer to that.
Can you not just explain it directly, rather than talking around it and using vague words like "feminized" or "substantially different" to refer to whatever it is you're talking about here, that drives you out of female-dominated spaces? Isn't direct + straightforward communication what men like to claim that they're "superior" at?
As you pointed out, women have become incredibly adept at navigating male-dominated spaces, and still have to do so in pretty much all other fields to at least some extent. So what gives? Are they just more resilient? Why can't men handle a space that isn't literally tailored for them and their needs? I'm so genuinely confused with what men are upset about here.
Honestly, I find zero difference between male-dominated vs female-dominated fields or spaces on average. It's far more based on the dynamic of said environment and if extremely gendered behaviors + norms are disproportionately expected or the only "acceptable" professionalism allowed.
Well, that and male-dominated fields have far more issues with both overt and covert sexual harassment/assault and sexism. But women are still there, working their way in? Why can't men stand a more "openly communicative" work environment, or whatever "feminized" means?
Regardless, any gendered behaviors, expectations, or norms are just socialization (including the sexual harassment and sexism). It's not like some baked in, inherent, "essentialist" difference.
So I don't really understand why so many men hate "feminized" whatever so much, or what they even perceive that to be, other than "the women are there" or "the women are doing it." Whenever men explain or talk about it, all I see/hear is an absurdly gendered + overly generalized framing for literally *universal* practices or behaviors.
Like your "women are very good in pushing for their environment to be shaped to reflect their sensibilities"--are you suggesting men aren't good at this whatsoever as well?
Women and men might often appear to do such things in different ways, because of their specific gendered socializations, but it's ultimately literally the same thing.
Like, when men argue and debate on what they want at their workplace, or "directly communicate" what they want or whatever....what exactly do you think that is, except "pushing for their environment to be shaped to reflect their sensibilities?"
What exactly do you think YOU'RE doing, by leaving a workplace that "doesn't reflect your sensibilities"?
I had the same thought reading this piece: obviously men prefer masculine environments, and given the choice they clearly opt for them. I don't think that invalidates the argument about prestige, but it has to be a factor in this.
I would like to think we're talking about being adaptable to change. I humbly ask, why are men always backing away from/hiding from the presence of women?
“Men don't really like the environments that women produce”
Why not?
For similar reasons that many women don't like the environments produced by men?
We have a double standard here. If a woman feels uncomfortable in a predominantly men's environment, it's the men's fault. If a man feels uncomfortable in a predominantly women's environment, it's the man's fault. Maybe both feelings are valid.
The main reasons women don't like certain environments produced by men are:
- the high incidence of sexual harassment/ assault;
- women are assumed to be less competent due to their gender;
- men think it’s acceptable to belittle/ bully/ dismiss women, just because they are… women.
If it were acceptable for women to reverse the above and do these things to men, then I’d 100% agree that a double standard would be at play. But in my experience it’s *not* common or generally acceptable for women to do those things to men.
So, to be intellectually honest, as a starting point we have to examine the actual behaviours that make men feel uncomfortable in a predominantly women's environment, and compare those to the behaviours that make women uncomfortable in a predominantly male environment. You haven’t done that.
It's the part about competence, though I would put it a little differently.
In predominantly women's environments, feminine behavior is considered "the right way to do this", and consequently men are perceived as not doing things the right way, so kinda incompetent. Like, yeah, maybe they are getting the results, but they are still getting them the wrong way.
But what IS "feminine behavior"? What does that even mean?
Because most men can't seem to agree on that, and often can't even seem to individually offer an internally consistent explanation.
Like, this just reminds me of the manosphere's absurd conspiracy about "therapy being feminine/feminized now," just because women are currently the majority of therapists and "talking is a woman thing; men don't want to talk about their feelings like women do."
But talk therapy was literally invented + developed as it's still practiced *by* male psychologists *for* male patients, based on how humans process emotions and how human behaviors stem from deeply embedded + repressed ones. Female patients were literally an afterthought, a sort of "oh hey, it works for the women too."
Way too often, men's use of "feminine behavior" or "feminized" just appears to end up meaning "women like it/do it/literally just exist too." Or widely incorrect + prejudiced sexist stereotypes about "obedience" or some crap.
So maybe you're making a different point here, but the whole "feminine behavior" or "feminized" nonsense is just starting to reek of fragility on a lot of men's part + how they use it.
Might be something you want to keep in mind going forward if you want to keep using those sorts of terms (essentially, there's a subset of men out there actively ruining the usage of these for you--which sucks, you have my sympathy).
Talk therapy was invented by and for fresh-off-the-shtetl Ostjuden in the West who couldn't cope with the fact that it was considered impolite in civilised society to share every lurid facet of their lives with anyone in their general vicinity. And, as Otto Weininger (well-known Freud associate) famously said, "Women are Jews" (or "Jews are Women" I forget).
To your point though, "Feminine behaviour", downstream of female nature, demands conformity, abhors direct conflict, encourages consensus and mitigates volatility. All of these are anathema to the base instincts of any man. This is why men flee them like the plague, and also why any female-dominated field is doomed to haemorrhage prestige and become irrelevant. The opposite phenomenon is just as potent, though. Masculinisation is the telos of prestige. Tailoring becomes high fashion when men start doing it, cooks become chefs when men start doing it, the 'novel' as a discrete literary genre is and was a marketing contrivance intended for and largely dominated by leisure-class women (many of whom are forgotten by the canon) save for the window in time between the period when men divested from poetry/theatre and the period following invention of cinema. Practically every novel and novelist you know of comes from this relatively brief window. Institutionalised misogyny is *literally* the only common thread uniting the Peak Eras of human intellectual achievement. Ancient Athens was the Afghanistan *of its time* wrt the treatment of women. Further, women's participation in politics, science, art, commerce or anything other than clone incubation is largely superfluous, if not decidedly costly. Women's 'emancipation' lies atop a decades long regime of state-mandated lawfare against unsurveilled male-exclusive bonding as well as (probably) hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded transfers, all in the name of 'getting women into education and employment'. We *could* run the Modern West with the same gender norms as Boko Haram without even the slightest hitch to living standards, and it would probably be better for innovation too. We don't for moral reasons, not because women are trailblazing non-fungible geniuses. Some are, but they would be more than ok in a man's world.
Because it's contrary to our ontological nature as men.
Mmm that’s a fancy way to say I just don’t like women.
You’re right about the teaching profession becoming primarily women. This happened when the pay for teachers didn’t keep pace with other professions and the wives had to supplement the family income by teaching AND raise the children so that the husbands could get the higher paying jobs. This occurred in the business field as women left the teaching profession to get better pay. While there are many great female teachers, most women are now in higher paying fields to support their family as men turned to divorce. Women who have worked in largely traditional male dominated fields like IT (I did for 50 years), were severely bullied along the way as I was during my last 10 years. I raised a family and worked my way to get equal pay but it wasn’t easy and for what? So I could accomplish the same thing as my male counterparts in a shorter period of time with higher quality? Evaluations and job descriptions always describe ‘team work’ but that doesn’t happen when both men and women are on the same team. Heaven forbid that a woman is just plain better! Men often don’t see other men as equals so it’s easy to see why they won’t ever see women as equals.
Well I mean what are women supposed to do? Not work?
Yeah that’s where this is going. If we want men to enroll in tertiary education in larger numbers, women need to step back and stop influencing those environments.
We need to go back to “normal” where study and work environments were male influenced and that worked just fine for *everybody* - men and women. Dudes be absolutely as pilled as fuck.
I’ve really enjoyed reading your comments.
An underrated component of the vibe that education is daycare is that it’s so female dominated
Yeah only if you’re a raging misogynist who can only perceive women as child-rearers.
In Australia women are really being pushed down that path, even single mothers are being forced to work mowing lawns and in traffic control for parenting payments and community service.
And high-vis is increasingly bright pink. Same in sporting codes like football and cricket - men are now made to look stupid by wearing a pink uniform.
Hey, I am wearing pink right now!
🤣😂🤣😂
💯
Best comment here.
A relevant book is "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" by Albert O. Hirschman. On how voice impacts universities, see https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
How quickly do you think we could reach the tipping point for Congress and CEOs?
🏃♀️🏃♀️🏃♀️📈📈📈🤞🤞🤞
The first comment could have been a wry joke, yours and other responses not so much. This I think is what makes "feminist" a pejorative term in today's culture. True feminists want gender equality. The proper term for someone who believes women should have all power is a female supremacist and a misandrist.
You do not determine the definition of words. Usage determines the definition. English is a descriptive language, not a prescriptive language.
Feminist means what most people use the word to mean; not what most people say the word means, or what an authoritative source says the word means. There is no 'true feminist', there is no 'proper term'. The word "literally" means both one thing and the opposite of that one thing because people use it that way and the world and all its linguistics don't care if that's inconvenient.
The reality is that feminism has always been used to mean, is still used to mean, and will continue to be used to mean, "advocacy for women as a class, particularly in legal and social activism arenas, especially when perceived as correcting inequality". It doesn't mean equality. It isn't predominantly used to mean equality. It is, as a word, a subcategory of helping women which often has but explicitly does not require a goal of specific or general equality.
The common statement that it means equality — aside from it being obvious evidence that it DOESN'T mean that, else people would not feel the need to tell you what the definition of a common word is, something that is self evident because usage is definition — is a simple defense mechanism used by activists that advocate for women against people who claim their advocacy goes too far.
Feminist is pejorative term in today's culture because a lot of people think feminists go too far.
Feminism is about women's rights and power. Nothing more, nothing less. Feminism don't concern themselves with men's problems. There's no such thing as one sided equality, it's not about equality.
That’s how we fix the wealth gap! Brilliant! More CEOs become women, 60% is reached, the job loses status, it’s no longer a bidding war for “top talent”, the wage drops, the men in the “lower” positions decide that money should be theirs, their wage raises, it now takes months instead of hours for a CEO to earn the wage of a worker. Increased wealth means increased security and people’s minds turn from survival to enjoyment. Creativity flourishes. Quite a few more people now have the bandwidth to worry about the environment and the money to put where their mouth is. Long term survival (saving the planet) is now the focus, instead of day to day or paycheque to paycheque survival.
Damn, white flight could be very helpful indeed!
CEO pay sky-rocketed because so many junior managers were leaving to start rival companies. It was cheaper to pay them more. The same thing can and does happen with large corporations. Women are free to start small businesses, but for some reason, they do not do so in similar numbers. It would benefit everyone if they did. Furthermore, female CEO's are great. There are never problems with hard-charging, successful women. The problem workplaces are filled with unambitious ladies who want to limit work hours and promote work-life balance at the cost of pay. Those are the monsters ruining life for everyone where they work. I will take 1,000 tough, compensation-oriented female managers over any man who gives me BS about work-life balance. I hate that BS. It is a scam to cheat people out of a proper career.
With Women ally themselves with Muslim fundamentalists. Tells more than enough.
How well have female-run societies done in the past? Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.
(I'm going to guess that you won't want to answer the question, because our society is historiphobic--it actively seeks to suppress knowledge of the past.)
An even tricker one—church clergy
How quickly do *you* think?
If trends continue, I believe Gen Z will have their day in Congress and we will see women at the forefront of the medical field, law, and business. Already women are taking a strong lead in opening small businesses and in entrepreneurship. Once women receive the same support that other developed nations enjoy for early childhood care and education and after school care, more women will choose not to interrupt their careers for motherhood and at the same time more businesses will learn to adapt to their greatest workforce by opening up more flexibility for working women. In this way women won't feel guilty when their lives have support and balance between professional and personal. And fewer women will choose to have biological children in order to pursue their goals. Meanwhile, the patriarchal forces that oppress women today will weaken as their supporters age, retire, and enter nursing homes. My guess is 15 years will be the tipping point for Congress. Gen X and Gen Y women (like AOC) will support and guide Gen Z women as mentors and financially to gain ground. CEO positions will follow in 20 or so years, although not in private corporations that maintain their dynasties.
It will take a while to undo horrible mess men have made. Let's pull together and hope against hope that we can force men out of positions of power and somehow fix their misogynistic mistskes.
White women are treacherous and will destroy the heritage bequeathed them through selfishness and laziness. Would you Adam and Eve it...
The genius that's the Puerto Rican ex bartender!Of course prepare for idiocracy
That's a fantasy world love,everything I see in the real world about me and in the world I see via what media I choose to use suggests to me that the old "feminist" ideas have crumbled away and not by activism but just by nature,that Men are regainng their ascendancy.
How it should be. As for women relying on other women as guides and mentors. I don't think so. Watch your back,comes to mind.
My suspicion is that this won’t happen, because there is a minority of men who are willing to sacrifice everything else in their life in order to advance their career or to get their startup off the ground. And people who put more time and effort in to things tend to accomplish more and to gain more experience, skills, knowledge and to sharpen their professional judgement and expand their professional networks. So until young women are killing themselves to get ahead in the same way that the ultra-ambitious minority of men are killing themselves, then men will still probably make up a majority of the wealthy and powerful. I don’t think it is a priori clear if society would be better off if those men worked (and advanced less) and women worked more and advanced more, although I think society would be better off if more women put in that many hours to their careers and therefore more women were founders of high-growth startups and leaders of existing institutions.
Research Sweden's depression 1990-1994. With sufficiently bad government, a country can drive its productive people out. Sweden saved itself, but it got very close. Countries need to realize that there is value in those hard-working people. If not, they can destroy it. Many countries have.
Women have more work flexibility in Canada and fewer women choose to give birth here. But the result has been increased incentives for immigrants, not women. I think it will be similar in the US, though I imagine there will be small gains made with regard to things like ECE, maternity leave, etc., simply because America is a bit behind Canada and Europe.
It will be interesting to see. Women already dominate medicine. In law, women have tended to focus on more high-status, low-pay jobs, or low work, easy money jobs. The intense, high-pay areas are still male-dominated. That does not seem to be changing.
Business is more interesting. Women in many fields (finance, tech, management consulting) are great and doing well. The toxic environments discussed above appear to be concentrated in certain fields (teaching, government, non-profit,...). It will be interesting to see how American society develops. I suspect it will be different from anyone's predictions.
On entrepreneurs and small businesses:
https://x.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1843325522568495355
One problem with a lot of policy is an emphasis on small businesses, rather than businesses with high growth potential. If you looked at "unicorn" companies (start-ups worth over a billion dollars), it's much rarer for them to have a female founder. https://www.affinity.co/blog/number-women-led-unicorns-in-decline
😅🤣😂🥲
Oh, you are funny😄 I sure do hope it is soon
Yeah! We ALL should have plenty of lead in the drinking water! Tax breaks should only go to the folks who don't need it, and wouldn't really notice. We need more pollution in this country, dammit. And get away from my Freedumb Stick sidearm.
When I got into law school and told my mom it was the first cohort that was over 50% female, she said she felt bad for all the men who didn’t get in that should have since there were so many women. When I said it had the highest LSAT and GPA averages of any cohort as well, she said it would have been even higher if more men were accepted. Additionally, she constantly says my husband should have gotten accepted to more medical schools and is worried he won’t match into a good residency because he’s a white man. Not only is college being seen as more feminine, but to justify women excelling in their fields, society feels the need to then put down their accomplishments and say men are still more talented and the only reason we aren’t seeing it is because of female preference. It’s also interesting that the narrative around college (an institution pushing the liberal agenda and brainwashing students) delegitimizes the opinions of educated people, specifically women. Now when women have a voice supported by evidence and education, men can say it’s simply a product of the establishment and that they are still more critical will less education.
I wonder what role the relaxation of entry standards discussed below by Amy Wax has to do with the observed changes.
https://x.com/richardhanania/status/1842716757871522056?s=46&t=U7laPY1hHEa798qtlcpDpA
Wax offers zero real-life evidence of that though, she's just hand-waving.
Every institution that has admitted women enmass has had to lower its admission standards. When the military lowered the physical standards for women it was called Gender Norming.
Welcome to my mute list, troll. Bye
Never fear you will not be missed.
No. Not for elite universities. You are incorrect.
Two different areas. Top universities have ever higher standards while those at the bottom will do anything for money. They are totally unique systems with zero overlap.
Garry: Top university Harvard that hired and promoted plagiarist Claudine Gay? High standards? Don’t think so.
I meant admissions and tenure-track jobs in real subjects, not gift admin jobs. Any job in a Grievance Studies department is a gift as well. You might as well say that Google is a joke because their DEI department has nepotism hires, or Goldman Sachs is a joke because their HR has friends and family hires. I used to work in finance, and we often hired the not-so-bright offspring of important people at key client firms. That does not mean that our analyst hires were stupid, it simply meant that playing the game at that level requires a host of special actions. Vendor lock-in don't come easy in commodity services markets. The same is true in non-profit organizations.
Hiring buffoons is part of playing the game. Universities might have had a golden age after WW2, but that has passed and often one must engage in unsavory actions in order to get the job done. It happens in the for-profit sector as well. I know of a special situation where a bunch of lucrative jobs were given to the children of key World Bank employees who did not want their children to return to their parents' country of origin, but could not determine a way to keep them stateside. A firm took on a few hundred grand in payroll to originate an eight-figure deal. It was a no- brainer, totally unethical and completely legal. I will also say that the American competitors would not do it because it broke US laws, but not British ones. Whoohoo, capitalism! You shop for the right domicile for the right product, even when taxpayers are picking up the tab.
Life is dirty. Clearly running Harvard is even more so.
😔😔😔
Gee it’s almost like lower standards and preferential treatment aren’t good for anyone.
Do you have proof there is lower standards?
"Meteor strike imminent; women and minorities most affected"
“but to justify women excelling in their fields, society feels the need to then put down their accomplishments and say men are still more talented and the only reason we aren’t seeing it is because of female preference”
Bingo - the evershifting goalposts as men grapple with the cognitive dissonance induced by ever-mounting, incontrovertible evidence that undermines their core, unquestioned belief that women are fundamentally inferior physically, intellectually and behaviorally. Keep fighting.
No one has claimed women are intellectually inferior. Men are physically superior in terms of upper body strength, but not intelligence. That is simply incorrect.
Mate, a number of people in this very comments section have asserted that women are intellectually inferior.
It is still ridiculous. That said, I will believe women are serious about remedying performance gaps when they start using them to remedy gaps that favor women (high school graduation, university attendance, university graduation, law school admission, medical school admission, increasingly compensation for younger generations (controlling for industry and university major),...).
I think the pushback on female-oriented preferences has occurred because women are no longer displaying the gaps in achievement and testing results that we saw decades ago, while is is obvious that there is a serious problem with young men in the US. We do not like to hear about it because men are supposed to be tough and not complain, but at a certain point, all the female complaints start looking absurd, such as women complaining about CEO positions in the top 500 public companies, when women are dominating everything for Americans age 30 and younger.
This is not small. I was all-in on pro-female empowerment when I started my career 24 years ago, but when I look at university graduates today, the relative absence of high-performing males is strange. Furthermore, the glaring absence of so many young men from the job market is terrifying. I wish for all young people to thrive, but I worry more about jobless young men with nothing to lose. Those are the ones who will rape your wife and kill your children.
We MUST focus more on them, at least for a few years, then get back to worrying about traditional gender gaps. If someone figures out how to get all of those leftover men angry and committed, the system they create will be a nightmare for everyone. Google "Andrew Tate" for a sample of what we might be seeing going forward. No one wants somebody like that running a country, but it has happened too many times before.
There is a huge gender gap around support for freedom of speech, at least among older generations:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202104/the-gender-gap-in-censorship-support
Perhaps people have *correctly* lost faith in college as an institution that produces knowledge, if university speech is now a popularity contest over what to censor, as opposed to an open and fact-driven discussion.
America had its time. It will either become an empire or die.
The USA has been an empire arguably since the Supreme Court came up with Judicial Review. Google John Glubb's Fate of Empires (under 30 pages) and see that America is past its expiry date.
But I want to think you are wrong. In spite of considerable evidence, I REALLY want to think that you are wrong. Give us at least until the interstate commerce clause was shamelessly exploited to expand federal powers, can we agree on that? It is jut a few decades! Besides, negotiating truth is fun, and intelligent! Yes, intelligent! Definitely not self-delusion. Not at all!
Sounds an awful lot like “it’s rigged!”
I enjoy the replies to your comment, which illustrate your point.
People with the dual income of a lawyer and a doctor lose all rights to speak about social issues as if they are oppressed.
Very true in my experience. On my first day of PhD grad school, back in 1994, our older woman professor warned us that this would be happening. She said that by the time we finished our degrees the easy access to lifetime tenured jobs with high pay would be gone because women were finally outnumbering men in the PhD track. So true. When I finished my Ivy League PhD, there were so few 'real' jobs left. Most of my female cohort has had to make do with temporary jobs, adjunct positions and teaching outside of the traditional academy. When the women showed up, the jobs, pay and opportunities did not rise to meet the increased pool of highly qualified workers.
This kind of specious reasoning is a pretty good example of why some men prefer to avoid female-dominated environments. If there are not enough jobs for which your training is suitable, it’s not that “jobs, pay, and opportunities did not rise to meet supply” it’s that *there wasn’t enough demand for what you spent/wasted your time doing*.
That’s a hard truth but since our society conditions men to deal with their own problems, it’s the kind of truth you can say to a man without serious collateral damage. Meanwhile, it’s been 20+ years since you got your PhD and you’re still implying it was some misogynist conspiracy that tenure track slots at elite universities were kept from you.
No, dear, it's not about the number of teaching jobs. It's about the TYPES of teaching positions which CHANGED from full-time, tenure-track professorships to temporary adjunct roles. Before the 1990s, universities hired more tenure-track professors and a few adjuncts. Since 2000, universities have shifted to hiring hundreds of adjuncts and only a few full-time professors. The ratio is about 30% tenure-track professors to 70% adjuncts.
Yes, that’s what happens when labor supply outstrips demand: compensation falls. Tenure protections being a significant component of total compensation for an academic.
This may shock and appall you, but men are subject to the cruel vagaries of labor markets as well.
Check out Forbes on the universities and mismanagement:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/bureaucratic-bloat-eating-american-universities-inside/678324/
The activist class took over and ruined life for everyone.
Maybe the coal mines in West Virginia were shut down and the manufacturing in the rust belt was offshored as part of a grand misandrist conspiracy? (/s)
Not deliberately misandrist, but since males occupied the majority of jobs in those industries, that was the effect, yes.
Actually, yes. The entire outsourcing of industry to China was a giant conspiracy.
It's called the law of supply and demand. When women flooded the labor market the price of labor went down causing men's wages to fall. In the exact same way that today's college graduates flooded the white collar job market causing the price of labor based on a college degree to fall. Because of the oversupply of workers with college degrees today's employers can be picky in whom they hire and pay far less.
The shift from full-time to adjunct faculty began long before 1994, and actually the 2010s/20s are the first period during our lifetimes during which that trend has been reversed.
Per the US Department of Education, the percentage of full-time faculty at colleges and universities was as follows.
1970: 78%
1976: 66%
1986: 63%
1994: 59%
2004: 53%
2010: 50%
And then you can see the current trend here:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc/postsecondary-faculty
"From fall 2011 to fall 2022, the number of full-time faculty increased by 11 percent (from 762,100 to 842,400) while the number of part-time faculty decreased by 13 percent (from 762,400 to 665,200)."
Do keep in mind, these were female-dominated administrations that created these systems. They were the ones who switched to having graduate students as slaves. They were the ones who hired their friends and had classes taught by adjuncts for $3,000 per class. This was the ghettoization of academia, and it was done by the activist university managerial class, and they had a whole lotta ladies running that show. They are terrible people (male and female), and we need to get them out. That said, none of them did this thinking "let's screw women." They did it to free up funds to hire their friends.
And people went along with it, because supply outstrips demand.
The big drop in tenure-track faculty (as a percentage) occurred in the 70s, even as overall faculty numbers grew. https://philmagness.com/2015/08/whats-really-behind-adjunctification-in-u-s-higher-ed/ For-profit colleges & community colleges are the places with mostly adjunct faculty.
What a weird line of reasoning. You doubled the supply of people trying to fill these positions and expected the number of them available to also just magically double to match that increase in supply? Perhaps your PhD should've been in economics, although you'd only need to take Econ 101 to understand the error in your thinking here.
I was in the academic job market in the 1990s as well. Oxford DPhil. Dozens of publications. My female counterparts would send out three job applicants and get shortlisted for all three; my male counterparts would send out 150 applications and be lucky to get shortlisted for one. I published extensive statistical analyses of university hiring at the time, proving that this discrimination in favour of women was rampant across the disciplines. Men did not "flee" academia; they were actively pushed out.
Should they have created more jobs to accomodate more qualified people or should they have created more people qualified for positions that were in need of thos people?
The shift from full-time to adjunct faculty began long before 1994, and actually the 2010s/20s are the first period during our lifetimes during which that trend has been reversed.
Per the US Department of Education, the percentage of full-time faculty at colleges and universities was as follows.
1970: 78%
1976: 66%
1986: 63%
1994: 59%
2004: 53%
2010: 50%
And then you can see the current trend here:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc/postsecondary-faculty
"From fall 2011 to fall 2022, the number of full-time faculty increased by 11 percent (from 762,100 to 842,400) while the number of part-time faculty decreased by 13 percent (from 762,400 to 665,200)."
Maybe feminism could fix this problem…?
just being a woman entitles your to human respect. being a great person, developing you character, skill at communication, logic and reason, creative problem solving, depth of understanding(knowing a bit of history) negotiations are things all women Should, be good at. I wish i could tell those women at a glance. They still all go to the ladies room together. they want consensus thinking. perhaps they need it. they love bureaucracy. there may be a time and place for that, say in the judiciary, but in real life. real time. this makes a living hell. Like at the Department of motor vehicles, to get paperwork or something. and they can never admit their mistakes or take responsibility. I was just doing my job.
The Department of Motor Vehicles has had a bad reputation since there has been a Dept. of Motor Vehicles. And that includes the decades when mostly men worked there.
Funny, but the jobs disappeared for men as well. I graduated from my undergrad in 2000. I was too scared to attempt an academic career. That is a luxury only rich people can afford.
This was how it had been before the explosion in university slots. ONce again the baby boomers got a good thing and ruined it for everyone who came after. Schools with zero chance of placing PhD's never should have produced them, but that would have destroyed the research economy, so they started importing PhD's. The entire academic world is a scam.
Your findings among teachers, nurses and interior designers are a data point but I’m not sure they are a trend.
Physical therapists in 1990 were 90% female.
Males began enrolling at higher numbers as job prospects increased, wages climbed and the profession’s status increased.
Now, Physical Therapists graduate with an entry-level doctorate.
I graduated in 1992 and was paid $32,000 a year. Now, the median salary for Physical Therapists is $95,000 a year.
Today, physical therapist classrooms are 60% male.
Why did men join these predominantly female classes over the last 30 years? The answer: status and money.
I wonder if your conclusions amongst teachers, interior designers and nurses is a case of reasoning from the specific to the general?
Perhaps those professions were already declining in status and wages?
You simply found a correlation between female enrollment and the decline in wages and assumed causation.
I have no idea why this article ended up on my timeline over two weeks after it was posted, and I was getting a pretty good laugh reading through all the crazy comments. But, here you are with a reasonable challenge to the author's assertions and I am not surprised in the least that the author has no interest in responding. Nor do the more hysterical commenters that seemed to be jumping at the chance to reply to any comment not along the lines of "fascinating article" or "I totally agree". Telling.
Very interesting. Are there any other fields where this has been happening?
Historically, computer programmers. https://studentorgs.kentlaw.iit.edu/ckjip/where-are-the-women-a-detailed-history-of-women-in-computer-science-and-how-it-impacts-the-modern-day-industry/#:~:text=Women%20were%20among%20the%20first,pushed%20out%20of%20the%20industry.
Oh yes! We should definitely be talking about this more!
“Betty Holberton, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas, programmed the ENIAC to perform calculations for ballistics trajectories electronically for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.”
I don’t know, man, the first six of six computer programmers were women.
This is fascinating. Hopefully the same trend continues in other fields as well for more of a “the dynamic changes because most people don’t like to work with all the opposite sex” rather than “men won’t pursue powerful jobs and they’ll all just become more unhappy”
Thanks for bringing awareness to this. Seems like male flight could be very subconscious for many. So many men don’t even know why “they don’t feel like it”. I know this is my straight son’s experience. He is “embarrassed” to be enrolled in college right now and didn’t want me to tell people or announce it. And my gay son is enrolling into college and specifically in the medical field starting January with no embarrassment and is excited for something to be working towards. It’s a social phenomenon that keeps happening in all our institutions. I see it in religion too: We can’t let more women speak, pray, teach, lead etc… because then the men will leave. If it looks like half the leadership is female, the men will stop listening and will leave “cause they don’t feel like staying”. As a society, it seems we keep centering the male perspective and experience as if it’s the “better, smarter way”. Even though the statistics show that women are leaving religion….and men are dominating, we still can’t add more women to the leadership of churches because the men will leave. And we just can’t have that.
Fascinating about your sons Jamee! So crazy how much the perception of college has changed in just a few decades- it used to be embarrassing not to go to college
“As a society, it seems we keep centering the male perspective”
Really? Is this what we are doing as a society?
Yes
I wish we lived in the society you imagine we do lol
It’s not as great as what you imagine. Not everyone benefits.
What a feminine thing to say, as if everyone should always benefit
Yes
And a feminised church is boring so then the hot females start going to the church where the charismatic male preacher looks like he's got a Bad Boy spark in him (charisma is both a gift and a curse).
😂 this made me laugh
Why not just let men have their own churches and colleges, if the thing that they most want to do is spend time with other men? Is there a reason why there shouldn’t be single sex churches or schools?
I think this would be a really good idea. I’ve never considered a single sex church before but 🤯
Ok hang on. Women are 60/40 receiving college degrees and the reason is…oppression by men? Oppression by men evidently can’t be falsified. And what does it mean when a hypothesis can’t be falsified? It means it likewise can’t be proven.
Here’s an alternate hypothesis, offered by a lowly individual with a lived experience in both male-dominated and female-dominated environments: the more women in positions of power, the more toxic the environment becomes.
And men don't create toxic environments? I can tell you stories.
Fucking hell so can I.
Yeah, it's like a restaurant where the food is bad and absurdly overpriced, and when you go there they just insult you. But there is something wrong with the customers for not wanting to go there. Maybe if we just upbraid them even harder, they will want to come and spend their money!
🫤
Fabulous analysis -- very compelling.
One very small point to add -- an outcome of the devaluing of college because it is becoming feminized is that our government is also defunding it. We are investing less money in universities as a society -- I'll bet that the decrease in funding aligns very neatly with the increasing percentage of women students. Just like the increasing percentage of women in a (formerly male) profession leads inexorably to a decrease in the wages in that profession and a decrease in the perceived value of that expertise.
When I taught K-12 in one of the largest school systems in the US a constant half-joking philosophical question was this: The school district has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. It does NOT go toward building maintenance, instructional materials, or teachers' salaries. So where does it go?
Special education?
That answer makes sense but was not the case anywhere in the district I worked. Special Ed classrooms and facilities had rooms, equipment, materials, etc. of the same age, quality, and maintenance as regular ed. The only across the board exception was that kids who had physical issues had a/c in their rooms. Special Ed staff was also paid the same as regular ed in my particular district. My gut is that the money went to administrative positions staffed by people with little or no experience with whatever they were supposed to administer.
This is what I could find on the costs and how it compares to general education:
https://www.nhbr.com/the-volatility-of-special-education-costs/
Why does anyone want to be in school after the age of 14 anyway. I've only ever seen USA high schools and colleges (what we used to call University but now call Uni,in Aussie fashion)in films or tv shows (I'm in UK) and it seems like Americans go to school until theyre pushing 40. Ha ha. Thats because the actors playing the school kids tend to be well mature. But the other day on the radio a young woman was saying how she'd done her degree at University,then she'd done a post-graduate degree,and she said,and ingenuously,I honestly don't think she realized WHAT she was saying ,I'm now starting a research degree (can't remember the exact name but that's what it was) so by the time I graduate from that I'll be just over 40 years old. And when the radio host asked her what sort of job her education would qualify her for she replied,oh I expect I'll do another degree. So I know learning is stimulating and fun but this long drawn out education seemed an end in itself. As for money,she was of an Asian family so of course did not need to work as they supported her.
As a former teacher I agree with you. By age 14 or 15 interests and aptitudes should be taken into account. If a kid is hopeless at biology and loves physics he should be able to take physics to satisfy science requirements.
Another problem is that programs for auto repair, electrician, HVAC, etc. have all but disappeared from American HS's.
It's what me and friends would call a 'Career student'. They never leave formal education.
Oh great point!
When a bunch of women enter a profession, the supply of labor exceeds the demand for that labor, and wages go down.
This is basic economics.
Idk if you’re so pilled you can’t actually see the misogyny in your comment, or if you’re just not that smart.
When supply of labour exceeds demand, wages go down. Well done - correct.
Women have been in most, if not all, professions for decades now. Why* do you assume it’s women who constitute the excess, the surplus that causes the problem? Maybe fewer *men* should enter the oversupplied professions, hey?
But of course you’d never think of that because you’re brainwormed to believe that men are *entitled* to a professional life and women are not.
* Of course I know why. Take as old as time.
Do you know I think what we need is a good old fashioned World War. I don't suppose anyone else,like any people with political and financial power has thought of that.
Are you being sarcastic?
I don't see you providing any numbers on that decrease in funding.
EXACTLY.
Loved the article, but seeing men comment saying “it’s because women are awful to be around” is very dispiriting.
I work in a relatively female industry (market research) which qualitatively I think feels like it is getting more female. I deeply enjoy working with my female colleagues, as communication is more straightforward and there tends to be less hiding / face saving. It is true that you have to be more emotionally engaged; e.g. know when to gossip / reassure / quietly listen to female clients / bosses - but I don’t think it is particularly hard.
In my opinion, the author’s perspective that men drop out if they refuse to lower themselves to femininity is bang on. I have worked with guys who refuse to engage with women on their level and so it ends up not working out. Especially when it is often female clients who are paying us. Ultimately I think to work well with women you have to like women as people and be willing to be associated with them.
It's not that women are awful to be around, quite the contrary, they are delightful and most often bring levity and joy to interactions.
The problem is female-dominated workspaces are unwelcoming and uncomfortable for, I suppose we could say, "traditionally masculine" men. I don't want to couch my language in kind terms in order to avoid hurting feelings. I don't want to gossip. I don't want to be "emotionally engaged". I don't want to learn how to "reassure" other grown adult professionals. I don't want the concept of emotions to exist at all. I want to just get on with the job. I want the task to dominate everything. An I want to be surrounded by other people with this mindset and this attitude: that the job, the task, is the most important thing, the single overriding concern, and we should focus 100% on it. Working in female-dominated spaces is exhausting because it requires focus to be drained away from the mission towards superfluous interpersonal interactions that I have no interest in.
Yes, because male-dominated industries like construction are working 100% of the time and not bullshitting at all.
If you don’t see women as serious people that’s on you, friend. And if you seriously think that male-only environments are free of emotions… keep thinking.
That’s not what he said at all, you made a bad faith, straw man response to his well articulated comment, because you have no ability to reply thoughtfully.
“I don't want to couch my language in kind terms in order to avoid hurting feelings… I don't want the concept of emotions to exist at all.”
FFS:
(a) I bet you’d be the first to take great offence if someone couched their language in a way that hurt your feelings.
(b) You’ve the emotional maturity of a literal *child*. You speak like a self-centred child that doesn’t know how to think about anyone but himself.
Thank you Ross🙏🏼
You're a good egg, Ross.
Is market research a field with clear deliverables and metrics for performance? Is it a field where, at the end of the day, you can say, “the client paid us this much, it cost us this much to provide the service, the client took this decision made on our advice/research, and then their sales of their product increased by 100% (or whatever)”? I work in a field where recent cohorts of new hires have been majority women, but so far it doesn’t look to me like there has been a flight of men so much as a decline in the number of recent graduates, and in addition to that recent graduates being hired into adjacent, higher paying fields when that wasn’t an option 10, 20, 30 years ago. And more men are taking up the option of going into the higher paying jobs than women. But the men in the field and going into the field don’t seem to be uncomfortable with women entering the field. I suspect that has to do with having crystal clear performance metrics (your employer knows exactly how much revenue you contributed and how much it costs to employ you), and client outcomes easily measured in dollars and cents. So there isn’t ambiguity as to what a good job consists of, or who is and isn’t a top performer.
Interesting point. That commercial situation sounds similar to what I’ve seen - I guess like a lot of agency-style jobs it is pretty clear whether you are doing well or not by how much client money is coming in, and at what margin.
In your thinking, do you think that kind of commercial clarity helps address any anxiety? E.g. even if I’m worried that the dynamics will change, I know what doing a good job looks like so that doesn’t matter so much.
I think that it is more that it appears that the dynamics won’t really change, because the commercial clarity is so obvious and overwhelmingly important. That doesn’t mean that the dynamics and ideas of how to behave as a professional haven’t changed, it’s just that the focus has always been so much on the bottom line, and the actions that impact the bottom line so clear, that the changes appear to be marginal. I’m also in a field of professional services where the pay isn’t high enough that people entering the field are willing to pour in endless hours, so that may impact things as well. From what I have read high finance still has a pretty male oriented culture, and my guess is that the high compensation and long hours contribute to that.
I like it!
Fantastic essay. It's like the elementary school playground for adults. The girls have cooties! Run away! I was at the emergency vet with my puppy last month and was looking around at the open floor plan ER where all the providers were in one room, and noticed that it was 100% women. This explains why. Publishing is another industry that used to be aggressively male-dominated and now is majority female. I transcribed an interview with the literary agent Maxine Groffsky years ago where she talked about how she became an agent because at the time, in the 1960s, only men were allowed to be editors, while women were relegated to support roles. Starting her own literary agency was her only way forward. Sidebar: I'm not surprised that the Freakonomics episode missed the main story here. Michael Hobbes has a great takedown of Freakonomics on his podcast, If Books Could Kill.
Oh my gosh I was thinking of cooties as I was writing this! Like any room with mostly girls- boys are allergic to. Afraid to catch our cooties???
I can’t emphasize how wrong and misunderstanding this is of the situation. I worked at a university dominated by women for five years, trying to elevate and achieve a better career trajectory. This was in a red state, and the university was an island in this regard.
This work experience included conversations about tampons and learning and understanding how to work with women, how to adapt and do it. But the whole experience was a sunk cost.
Some men are better at articulating this than others, but I get the sense that most of them have the right idea. That status is a factor. That work environments are differ. The young men need mentors who are men.
And the that the boys have the right instinct to find other lines of work, and that the universities and the departments managed by women will continue to lose prestige. The things that drive the military-industrial complex or however you call this, they’ll continue to be led by men (for better or worse).
I love and respect women, was raised by women, worked in women-dominated work places my whole life, but my fields of study were women-dominated fields and this only set me up to be institutionally, intellectually, and politically homeless after investing time in these things.
There was no cooties business. I worked with and respected the women as human beings. But I’ll start from scratch again.
Probably more afraid of hearing words like "tampons" lol
I think you misunderstand. Men want to work and study with other men. Female dominated spaces are not inherently pleasant for most of us. We avoid these spaces not because of some elementary school aversion, but because they are genuinely uncomfortable and unwelcoming. It's just a matter of style. we have different ways of doing things and different priorities. Female-dominated work and study spaces are simply not desirable or enjoyable for the vast majority of men.
Spaces that are specifically tailored to appeal to women, that are shaped by women, designed to make women comfortable, are going to be inherently to men, by their nature. That's just how things are. There are very few natural cross-gender spaces.
"To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving. - Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality "
I don't think is is accurate, or charitable, or relevant, or remotely true. I don't know who Marilyn Frye is, I've never read her work, but she sounds like a person who has been deeply hurt and needs to heal. Simply making a statement does not make that statement true. I would caution against internalizing this attitude, it will cause you nothing but pain and misery in your relations with men, because it is profoundly wrong.
Nah bro the actual comments of like 50% of dudes on this thread, including, notably, yourself, prove it again and again.
Never thought about it, but I think this statement is correct.
This quote hypes me up so much on being heterosexual! It makes us sound so based. Also supports my hypothesis that gay men are an elite force of chauvinism.
I’m not sure I get where I get chauvinism
From the Chauvin region of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling eketism.
Chauvinism what we would call jingoism, I think it’s a person not a region. My country live or die.
Is there anything wrong with being gay or homoerotic? I mean gay culture isn’t perfect, but I think that there is a lot that is good about it.
🤣🤣🤣 Absolutely nothing wrong with being gay or homoerotic. I read “homoerotic” as a neutral descriptor in that quote. But fucking hilarious and telling that *that* is the point you take away 🙄🙄🙄🙄
I often see in discussions of masculinity gayness and homoeroticism being used pejoratively to suggest both that it is wrong or shameful for men not to fulfill certain expectations of masculinity and that being gay is shameful and makes a person less of a man. It appears to me that you used that quote to suggest that the above commenter engages in homoeroticism and is therefore bad, blameworthy, or less of a man in some way because of that.
Nope - you’re so brainwormed you can’t perceive what the quote is getting at. She is saying that traditional expectations of masculinity themselves are inherently “homoerotic”. Traditionally, men are expected to admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, imitate and idolize other men only. (i.e. not women). That is what she’s identifying as “homoerotic”, or man-loving. So she’s saying that by fulfilling traditional expectations, men behave in a homoerotic way. Which is the opposite of what you are asserting she is saying. Frye is a lesbian herself.
Underrated response.
Yeah, I guess young men just decided that college girls have cooties. That must have been it.
https://youtu.be/hx5x0Ztffm4?si=qyGClwRQ2mynQ6vj
And no doubt the same must be true of the publishing industry.
https://x.com/JoyceCarolOates/status/1551210510389022723?lang=en
Surely there's nothing more to see here.
I was JUST thinking about recommending this podcast episode! If Books Could Kill is excellent.
I love Maintenance Phase, too. 😊
Yes!😊 Anything Michael Hobbes does is great, plus the wonderful and varied co-hosts. I had heard the freakonomics episode on IBCK a while ago, and I actually caught most of the broadcast last Sunday on Freakonomics regarding men’s college rates dropping. I was going crazy while they circled around the issue, but never quite got to the heart of it (sometimes they were so close!). I couldn’t put my own finger on what was so agitating, but it really just felt like they had weird blinders on. It was so nice to see Celeste’s essay in my inbox. Right on time 👍🏻
Maintenance Phase is unreliable https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/ (as are other other things from Michael Hobbes) https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/michael-hobbes-is-spectacularly-wrong
I spotted a news article recently that straight men aren't reading novels anymore, but gay men and women are. Same issue? Probably. Methinks you hit the nail on the head.
Booktok slop doesn’t qualify as a novel
They actually expect guys to read intersectional feminist garbage by Sally Rooney et al.
I find that the topic of many novels no longer interests me, the way novels once did. As a kid, I read so many old novels of adventure and exploration from the 1800s and novels that used memorable characters to tell a deep story about society (think Dickens) that I had huge trouble adjusting to modern literature starting in the 1980s and up till now. Most modern novels are so introspective...I know that is part of our overall times and is important in and of itself, but they are not pleasurable to read, IMO. I would rather read philosophy, and peer-reviewed research in neuroscience and sociology, for insight on the human condition.
It's also my understanding that females are the primary readers of fiction. Non-fiction is primarily read by males, with the one big exception of true-crime.
I have read about the same (Non Jewish white) male flight from a number of professions in NYC post WW2 when significant numbers of Jewish men entered them, such as teaching. Similar flight from a profession populated by those considered “lesser”.
Bingo. Thanks for saying out loud what I've been observing for years. Happened in ordained ministry as well -- as women came to be ordained, they took the small, part-time positions while men got the big, prestigious church positions, and when that generation died out, fewer men wanted to go into ministry.
I believe health, education, and literacy are important. I’d like to see more young men involved, but I wouldn’t recommend it today. when the fields are dominated by women, the odds are against the boys flourishing. DEI-tactics, compulsive identitarianism, and narcissistic women will push them away and try to flatten them
What? I think you are projecting your fear that women will do to men what men did (and are still doing in many cases) to women and people they don’t like.
Do you think that never happens? That where straight cis men are in a minority, that they don’t ever get scapegoated as the representative of “the oppressor” by the majority?
Data shows that they’re actually treated a lot better in female-dominated jobs/spaces and they rise higher in the fields at MUCH faster rates.
More men are willing to work longer hours, it's not because they're treated better. The previous poster is correct. I work in the education system and I have been told in more ways than I can count that I'm automatically an oppressor.
Your anecdote doesn’t discount the actual data on the subject. Female-dominated industries have a tendency to over-compensate to male employees because of the impression that it takes more to retain them compared to the female employees. Women are aware that the male workers are compromising on status, so they do more to make them comfortable. The studies show that the male employees end up leaving anyway because of low wages, not mistreatment.
I probably am projecting a fear, but it does happen and I’ve seen it happen. It doesn’t always happen. I sort of regret commenting here, but it definitely happens and it happens among women, and it happens with women with power over men, and I think it does deter
BINGO. 😂
Felt like you have confirmed what the whole essay was about. Male flight due to sexism.
Maybe. Male flight also happens because men are not well-versed or supported or trained or female-communication-intuitive enough to know how to fight back when a the wrong sort of woman is in the position of power… and there are great women in leadership roles too. There are many of them, doing great things, and they are bringing a lot to the table. So this is a difficult dance to make this argument here in a comments section! On Substack, in education, in many institutions private and public, women are leading in great ways.
Not to pile on, but the evidence doesn't support your theory, Anthony. If anything, in female-dominated professions, the few men in the industry are often promoted to the highest levels faster than the women around them. For example, even though elementary education is heavily female-dominated, men disproportionately hold the highest status administrative positions. It sounds like you may have had a bad work experience that doesn't apply more generally.
It's not a theory, it's a personal observation and lived experience. All of the college presidents who testified before congress in December 2023 were women. And the one who didn't show up was a woman. These were college presidents of the top colleges in the country. The president of where I worked was a woman, the dean and assistant dean also women, and department head and program manager women. The vast majority of my colleagues, administrative and faculty, were women. This is not a problem, but pushing men away from higher education is a problem. Men aren't leaving primarily because of sexism, but because they are seeking a place where they feel validated. Men are pushed away because and they are losing role models and flock whoever sells false promises online or elsewhere. I think this is a big societal problem. Bad behavior is promoted because it sells or gets attention, while cultures in education and literacy are devalued. I think I'm making these comments on the wrong article, though, sorry! I have subscribed to too many Substacks. I think it is important for young men to have role models and they've rapidly been disappearing. I may have misread the main idea here. But that's the point I wanted to make.
It sounds like you're speaking to college administration and I specified elementary education, where superintendents, principals, etc are still more likely to be male even though most teachers are women...
Men have a MUCH higher commitment to the workforce than women. When women get married, their commitment decreases, men's increases. Again, when couples have children, women's commitment decreases again, men's intensifies again. So when men enter female-dominated occupations, they are competing against a pool of candidates for promotion who are MUCH less in search of a promotion, much less committed to the career. This is a well-established truth that feminists just won't hear or accept. They'd rather blame the victims. It's easier and more gratifying.
Superintendents are about 30% women, but I don't think the data show that men hold more high status elementary administrative positions.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percent-of-Female-Principals-by-School-Level-and-Type-by-Year_tbl1_334566584 (suggests women were 64% of elementary principals as of 2012)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120283/number-principals-public-schools-gender-us/ (suggest women made up 54% of all public school principal positions)
That’s just a quick google search so it might be wrong.
It seems you did your research and found a lot of decent explanation for why there is more women in college. It is good but you missed something important: male enrollment in college/university in the last decade in all western countries increased? It is just that for women it increased more. College and universities are getting overcrowded. The return in the investment is getting lower.
Also, have you maybe mentally experimented with the hypothesis than when women enter a field, the law of offer and demand makes it so that wages decrease. And that men really want money when they work so they gtfo in another field that still pays money? (Or least does not cause a lot of debt) Getting a good job is getting more complicated for young people, many men just decide to rot at home playing video games.
The hegemonic patriarchy or unconscious misogyny explanation for everything is just getting too boring.
Women typically shoulder less of the financial responsibility for college as well.
Parents and grandparents will chip in to help girls before they’ll do the same for boys.
The exact opposite is and has been the case for the last few hundred years.
You honestly think all those baby boomer women who went to college weren’t supported by their dads?
Many of the men were, but it was also very common for men to work their way through college because at one point that was affordable.
My dad was born in 1947 and his aunt paid for his books but he paid tuition and living expenses by working summers and part-time during the school year. My mom, also born in 1947, had her dad pay for it all. Both were from a very similar economic background
College enrollment in the United States has declined dramatically in the past decade. It's dropped by a couple million, with mainly men leaving.
My bad, I meant to add an s. Can’t edit comments it is annoying. Some of my other sentences were weird too
Hopefully, this graph goes down even further and further for a while. « Elite » overproduction and young people getting indebted for life is bad
Further and faster*
Boring for those who don’t like the truth