I promised last Friday I’d post this week about young professional women’s income outpacing men’s. The original New York Times article is here.
It’s worth noting that this phenomenon is a narrow one: overall, men still out-earn women across the country.
…women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.
Because this trend is confined to a couple of large metropoleis, it’s difficult for anyone to draw sweeping conclusions that apply uniformly across the nation. No major shift in national social policy is called for based upon the narrow experiences of young women in Manhattan and the Metroplex. Still, the numbers themselves are striking, even if they do only apply to a select few regions. And I’m particularly struck by this excerpt from the Times piece, touching on a possible “why” for this shift:
Melissa J. Manfro, a 24-year-old lawyer who was raised in upstate New York, offered her own theory on why younger female lawyers are outearning their male peers: a desire to begin their careers earlier to prepare for starting families.
“It seems that women tend to take less time off between college and law school, and therefore become more senior, and, hence, make more money, at a younger age,” she said. “I would, of course, like to think that means that women know what they want sooner than men. But it probably has more to do with the unfortunate fact that women need to keep in mind biological time constraints and feel a great deal of pressure to build an entire career before refocusing on marriage and children.”
Of course, a great many young women lawyers in New York City are not worrying about biological clocks. Many may not expect to marry or have children at all. But I do think we’ve done a fairly good job in recent decades of raising middle-class young women to be self-reliant, stressing that if at all possible, they should not “have to rely on a man” for support. This doesn’t mean that most successful young women are motivated by a lack of male reliability! It does mean that we’ve managed to impress upon young women something we haven’t managed to impress upon their brothers: that success is usually the result of a good education and a lot of hard work, and the sooner both are embarked on, the better.
The tenured American professoriate is still largely male. Law schools still have more male faculty than female. It’s difficult to find verifiable evidence of blatant discrimination against men in the American academy. (Though it has been widely reported that many colleges now have easier admission standards for boys than girls.) The problem is not that boys can’t do the work, or are being discouraged from doing the work; rather, it’s a kind of “masculine malaise” that seems to have infected a great many potentially successful young men.
To quote my father (and the title of a book proposal I’ve put out), too many young men are “waiting to be struck by certainty.” Too many young men figure that getting a graduate degree, making a decent living, and building a stable and successful life can “happen later” after they’ve “grown up.” (And anecdotally, the number of men in their mid-to-late 20s using the phrase “when I grow up” is nothing short of alarming.) We have a generation of young men who seem to lack the urgency and the ambition of their sisters. They haven’t been shamed out of it, they haven’t been actively discouraged — but they haven’t been sufficiently encouraged, either. They are waiting, waiting, waiting; waiting perhaps for a sudden beam of inspiration from above that will tell them exactly what they are to do with their lives. Until then, they’ll do a little of this and a little of that, they’ll hook up here and move in there, and they’ll put off pursuing a goal until they figure out what the heck it is that they want to do. And as many of the sisters, mothers, and girlfriends of these lads know, some men can put off that “growing up” until they are well into middle age.
Just as this study on wages among urban twenty-somethings doesn’t apply universally, this theory of “masculine malaise” isn’t going to fit every young man my readers know. And let me be very clear that this malaise is not the fault of feminism. Success is not a zero-sum game. Blaming women for male failures is a bit like the trustees of Ivy League colleges in the 1920s blaming a small number of Jewish students for being “too ambitious”. (In more recent years, we’ve directed that antipathy towards Asian-Americans.) As the story goes, in the 1920s, a lot of WASPs who expected to slide through Harvard with the “gentleman’s C” were nonplussed by the willingness of Jewish classmates to work hard. Something had to give — and what gave, thank goodness, was the “gentleman’s C.” Today, a lot of young men don’t seem to be as willing to work hard in school as their female classmates. Just as WASP privilege alone ceased to be a guarantor of success; perhaps now, at least for a few, we are seeing that maleness alone is no longer a similar guarantor.
Our culture is too easy on our young men, frankly. Anxious parents worry about boys’ poor attention spans, and complain that classes today are too detailed-oriented. That ought to send any historian of education into gales of laughter; look at the the young rabbinical students — all boys — who memorize the entire Torah by sixteen; look at the the demanding curricula (Greek, Latin, etcetera) of many nineteenth-century American universities. All male student bodies proved perfectly capable of feats of concentration and hard work, and they didn’t need huge doses of Ritalin to do it. I have no desire to return to the limited and extremely demanding educational philosophy of an earlier generation, but it seems absurd to suggest that “boys can’t concentrate as well as girls.” (Plenty of boys prove to be positive miracles of concentration when playing video games!)
There is a time and place for dreams. But the American middle class allows too many of their sons to dream to distraction. For fear of alienating them, for fear of repressing what we insist on believing is their innate masculine wildness, we allow them to “explore” and “wander” for a very, very long (much too long) time. We all know a lot of handsome, dreamy-eyed slacker boys, a year or two out of college, drifting through their twenties on drugs and theories, waiting, waiting, waiting, to be struck by certainty. And it is these boys — for boys they still are — who are one big whopping reason why, in our urban centers, incomes for young men have fallen so badly in comparison to their sisters.
So…
If a group of women makes less money than a group of men, that means women are discriminated against.
If a group of men makes less money than a group of women, that means men are lazy.
Got it!
*rolls eyes*
Ball, there’s loads of evidence of historical wage discrimination against women. (Even if you don’t believe it still exists, just look at the period, oh, say 1900-1950.) It’s verifiable. There is no comparable evidence of a pattern of historic wage discrimination against men in favor of women in the sectors cited in this article.
Maybe someday our society will advance to the point where young women no longer feel the need to structure their career plans around their parenthood plans–something that most young men never even consider when making their career plans, other than considering how they will financially support children.
Maybe we will advance to the point where both young men and young women assume they will need to work for a living when they grow up, that “growing up” usually takes place sometime between 18 and 25, and that it is not an option–everyone has to do it. No one gets out of it based on gender (”I can either work or marry, become a mother and stay home with my children”), wealth (”my family has money, so I can afford to bum around a bit before I settle down”) or general lack of direction combined with accommodating/timid parents (”Why should I go out and get a job when I have a pretty good life with my folks paying the bills?”). If this were the case, we might see fewer Peter Pans and also fewer women left high and dry when their fantasy of being taken care of by a man falls apart, as it sometimes does.
Ball, there’s loads of evidence of historical wage discrimination against women. (Even if you don’t believe it still exists, just look at the period, oh, say 1900-1950.) It’s verifiable.
I have no disagreement with this at all.
There is no comparable evidence of a pattern of historic wage discrimination against men in favor of women in the sectors cited in this article.
And I don’t disagree with the strict, literal interpretation of this sentence, either. The key words being “comparable evidence” and “historic wage discrimination”. The phenomenon of women out-earning men is relatively new, so by definition there couldn’t be a pattern of “historic” discrimination. And while there isn’t a mountain of “comparable evidence” (comparable to the accumulated studies of pre-1960 earnings of men and women), that isn’t the same as saying there is no evidence that there may be anti-male discrimination occurring today. One UCLA study found that women under 40 were 15 times more likely to become top executives at major corporations, for example (Farrell, Why Men Earn More, p. 86).
I am not here trying to establish that the earnings disparities you cite must be due to wage discrimination against men. What I object to is your arguing — without evidence — that there can’t be any anti-male gender oppression involved. I particularly object to notions that merely ‘being male’ allowed one to ’skate through life on gentleman C’s’ in the way that, say, being rich and white did (and does). I also object to the notion that males as a group are ‘coddled’, when it’s clear that Americans (and that most definitely includes American men) are among the hardest working people in the First World (much to our own detriment, sadly).
Our culture is too easy on our young men, frankly.
Well. I haven’t heard that said very often.
What I’m wondering if the subculture you’re describing is the subconscious (or perhaps conscious) desire to coast on male privilege.
that there can’t be any anti-male gender oppression involved
In the legal profession? No, really, I don’t think there can.
Hugo, that level of speculation and painting with a broad brush is sure to get you a book deal.
What I object to is your arguing — without evidence — that there can’t be any anti-male gender oppression involved. I particularly object to notions that merely ‘being male’ allowed one to ’skate through life on gentleman C’s’ in the way that, say, being rich and white did (and does). I also object to the notion that males as a group are ‘coddled’, when it’s clear that Americans (and that most definitely includes American men) are among the hardest working people in the First World (much to our own detriment, sadly).
Well said, ballgame. What you have just pointed out is a classic example of feminist “scholarship.” Lacking verifiable, reproducible data, feminists often simply make grand assertions based on the scantest of proof, or even no proof at all.
One point you did not raise is the folly of this statement Hugo made:
Just as WASP privilege alone ceased to be a guarantor of success; perhaps now, at least for a few, we are seeing that maleness alone is no longer a similar guarantor.
We could ignore, for the moment, the erroneous, nonstandard use of “guarantor.” Presumably, the word Hugo wants is “guarantee.” Academic feminists are ironically often quite sloppy with their use of language.
If we substitute “guarantee” to try to help Hugo’s argument, that argument remains flimsy. Hugo conveniently ignores the huge benefit of wealth in his comparison. For most of our country’s history, a university education has been a relatively rare exception to the rule of lack of formal education. That one was “white,” of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, and Protestant mattered little if one did not also come from a well-to-do family, especially when one considers the Ivy League universities such as Harvard. For every young man who matriculated at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Brown aspiring to earn his “gentleman’s ‘C’,” how many poor boys lived in poverty in Appalachia or toiled on farms or in factories?
That is the reality and the reason why it is faulty and offensive to compare maleness to the aggregate of characteristics of “whiteness,” Anglo-Saxon ancestry, Protestant creed, and opulence.
However, it is not surprising to see this kind of comment written by a feminist. It’s a basic example of the kind of double-standard feminists routinely employ. If women are experiencing some sort of trouble, they assert that the trouble is rooted in systemic discrimination and must be someone else’s fault. When faced with a situation where men experience problems, the feminist approach is to say that the men themselves are doing something wrong, that it is the men’s own fault.
Put simply, in the feminist mind, women are necessarily victims, while men cause harm to themselves; men are responsible for their problems, but women are not responsible for theirs.
The mildly amusing, but really sad, irony in this way of thinking is that the Hugo type of feminist really looks down on women and treats them as lesser beings who cannot be accountable for their actions individually or as a class. The cognitive dissonance resulting from that viewpoint must be deafening. Perhaps that is why feminists cannot hear men’s concerns and take them sincerely.
Mike
great post
Mike, a blog isn’t scholarship, it’s more like a forum for first drafts, where you toss out some ideas and get some feedback on them. Sometimes the ideas are half-baked, but that’s half the fun of it. It’s disingenuous to expect standards of proof that you’d find in a peer-reviewed publication here, and also disingenuous to judge the rigor of all of “academic feminism” based on a medium that is supposed to be informal.
I study teh computerz and teh digital mediaz, so I can argue about the nature of blogs all day. ::grin::
Now about the post, Hugo, I want to question the assumption underlying it that women’s ambition — if it is indeed driven by biological limitations — is even a good thing. Some ambition is good, but more’s not necessarily better. It’s good if you’re doing it for you, less good if you’re doing it because of external factors. You mentioned an aside about Asian American students being thought too ambitious, but those of use who are ambitious Asian Americans find ourselves sharing stories of parents who put intense amounts of pressure on us. Many of us are struggling in our adulthood to find some balance in life, to forget a bit about fear of failure, to do what we like instead of worrying so much about external measures of success.
Taking time off between college and grad school can be a really good thing. It can give you perspective. Working a dead-end job can help you discover why you want a career. (And yeah, some people can “slum it” and others are stuck in dead end jobs, which is a whole other issue.) Traveling can be the most educational thing you ever do. If a whole class of people are ruling that stuff out as a waste of time, I’m not going to celebrate it.
I’m not a fan of aimless slackers, but the world isn’t divided into aimless slackers and highly educated high earners. Nor are highly educated earners necessarily mature. I think you’re focusing too much on external indicators of success in some fields, while some of the folks I consider most mature, courageous, and just good are high-school-educated, resourceful, inventive and stubborn enough to have found their own way to do something meaningful. By the categorization you’ve posited in this post they’d be slackers.
Mike - just because you use a superior academic tone (which is surely now an outdated one) that doesn’t mean you have the rigour to back up what you are saying.
This is a blogg, and blogg’s are for expressing opinions - as you yourself have done (no hard facts in your argument either). You have made alot of broad brush statements about academic feminism without backing them up with evidence, I would say that were true”irony” considering you were pontificating about the lack of hard eveidence and research attached to a blogger’s opinion.
If you did your research properly, you’d have realised that Hugo’s (and mine for that matter) brand of feminism see gender issues as equally a male and female issue - men suffer as well as women because of traditions and expectations we have built up.
It’s a bit silly to complain about lack of academic rigour in a blogg - especially when the only connection to academic professionalism your own piece has is an unfortunate tone of superiority, my PhD supervisor would have knocked that out of my style straight away.
(To clarify, Mike, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say on a blog “I don’t think you can prove that statement”. That’s valuable feedback. I’m just saying it’s a category error to judge the scholarship of an entire discipline by the speculation on someone’s blog.)
There is something a bit rich about a guy like Hugo complaining that boys need to ‘grow up’ sooner. Likewise, ‘lack of ambition’ from somebody who’s never left the academic sphere is a rather amusing diagnosis.
None of this says Hugo is necessarily wrong. But I doubt it’s anywhere near as simple as he makes it out to be.
btw, and back on topic -In agreement with metamanda I think it’s a real shame that we still see earnings as a measure of success in life. Most of my friends had alot of fallow time of different kinds in their twenties and I’d say it’s done us all good. I think it’s often better to do that than to devote yourself to a demanding career straightaway, especially if you have issues to sort out. Not everone can do as Hugo does and work things out as part of their job. It’d be a shame if women were to stop taking fallow time, for whatever reason. If their reason is biological then it’s a real shame that our society’s emphasis on a particular kind of success puts another block on a healthy, more relaxed way of family life.
Spiritual growth and outer success have not traditionally been entirely compatable - e.g. Buddha, Jesus, and although Ghandi started out as a lawyer - he did give up the outer trappigns of success.
Mike, a blog isn’t scholarship, it’s more like a forum for first drafts, where you toss out some ideas and get some feedback on them. Sometimes the ideas are half-baked, but that’s half the fun of it. It’s disingenuous to expect standards of proof that you’d find in a peer-reviewed publication here, and also disingenuous to judge the rigor of all of “academic feminism” based on a medium that is supposed to be informal.
Who said I was judging all of academic feminism based on this blog? I’ve read enough of the supposedly “peer-reviewed” feminist nonsense to know it is silliness.
Mike - just because you use a superior academic tone (which is surely now an outdated one) that doesn’t mean you have the rigour to back up what you are saying.
This is a blogg, and blogg’s are for expressing opinions - as you yourself have done (no hard facts in your argument either). You have made alot of broad brush statements about academic feminism without backing them up with evidence, I would say that were true’’irony’’ considering you were pontificating about the lack of hard eveidence and research attached to a blogger’s opinion.
One need only look at the silly feminist tripe to see the truth of my comments.
If you did your research properly, you’d have realised that Hugo’s (and mine for that matter) brand of feminism see gender issues as equally a male and female issue - men suffer as well as women because of traditions and expectations we have built up.
That’s not what Hugo said or implied. He’s clearly using a double-standard.
It’s a bit silly to complain about lack of academic rigour in a blogg - especially when the only connection to academic professionalism your own piece has is an unfortunate tone of superiority, my PhD supervisor would have knocked that out of my style straight away.
You don’t like my tone because I dared to criticize the sacred cow of feminism.
I agree with the achievements of men in the past. But as far as the “slacker boys,” my personal experience says you may be too harsh:
1. When I left graduate school (in a very difficult field), I felt like my social and “extracurricular” skills lagged my professional development. I found (perhaps erroneously) that young women were **NOT** impressed with my professional credentials (especially when they often had similar ones, though perhaps in “softer” and lower-paying disciplines). This was a shock to me after growing up
2. Hugo, you’re naturally gifted in academics and have a long history of success behind you. Did you ever consider that many young men are overwhelmed by the new definition of “making it?” High-school graduates in decades past could get good union factory jobs and settle down, but those jobs are in China or being done by Mexicans at wages that will not support an American standard of living. Similarly, jobs that once required a bachelors’ degree (with some generality) now require a specific concentration in graduate school, etc. And, according to this chart, young workers earn much less than older workers relative to 1970 (while housing is substantially more expensive).
http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/04/young_people_of.html
So a lot of young men find that it now takes a masters’ degree or more to have a middle-class lifestyle, and that even achieving that is not considered impressive in a world of “Cribs” and such? Nobody respects a man (especially a white man) for joining the middle class: it’s expected and a bit “boring.”
There is something a bit rich about a guy like Hugo complaining that boys need to ‘grow up’ sooner. Likewise, ‘lack of ambition’ from somebody who’s never left the academic sphere is a rather amusing diagnosis.
None of this says Hugo is necessarily wrong. But I doubt it’s anywhere near as simple as he makes it out to be.
I don’t see a problem with the criticism because its source is “somebody who’s never left the academic sphere.” The trouble is the duplicity Hugo shows here. Girls are wonderful because of their ambition; boys suffer some ill-defined “masculine malaise.”
Notice how you don’t see Hugo saying anything negative about women and girls, but he very frequently berates men and boys.
Sorry, to continue #1, growing up in a very conservative culture where men were expected to be a “good provider.”
I’m not really thrilled with the “good provider” culture of “man as beast of burden,” but my point was that financial and professional success, in the definition you’re using here, is not attractive to young women like it was in more patriarchal days. Dilbert is an anti-sex symbol.
I don’t often like to weigh in on grammatical matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. But since Mike has opened the door to this, I’ll leap to Hugo’s defense (irrelevant though it be) and say that “guarantor” is in no wise erroneous nor non-standard in this context.
Unless, of course, our culture has lost all sense of rhetorical personification. God help us.
I fully expect Hugo to rein the conversation back in - but let’s not give Mike the credit of having an outdated and outlandishly condescending academic tone (”silly feminist tripe” is hardly acceptable in academic circles, as are cliches like “the sacred cow”).
Mike - it’s a real shame you have such a lack of self awareness. You deaning to know why ”I didn’t like your tone” better than I myself might, proves something.Your tone is superior mate - that’s all. Maybe if you’d taken a few years out to get to know yourself a little better…
The rest of your responses are not worth answering.
Mike -
I just want to draw your attention back to this sentence:
Lacking verifiable, reproducible data, feminists often simply make grand assertions based on the scantest of proof, or even no proof at all.
I’m not sure whether you meant it to be an ironic and self-conscious commentary on your own participation here, but it’s brilliant.
Okay, no more feeding the troll, I promise. Back on topic. My brother is the sort of young man you’re thinking about in this post, Hugo. A year out of college, with no goals (unless you count drinking, smoking pot, and sex as goals), he’s recently started a one-year-long travelling salesman job. The night before he left our mom’s house, he planned on simply throwing out all his worldly possessions, to avoid the hassle of storing them; the only reason why he didn’t is because he stayed out until 5 am and had to catch an 8 am flight at an airport an hour away. I was still struck by your description:
They are waiting, waiting, waiting; waiting perhaps for a sudden beam of inspiration from above that will tell them exactly what they are to do with their lives. Until then, they’ll do a little of this and a little of that, they’ll hook up here and move in there, and they’ll put off pursuing a goal until they figure out what the heck it is that they want to do.
In your last paragraph, you seem to lay the blame for this masculine malaise on the way the American middle class has allowed their sons to wander without direction. This certainly wasn’t the case with my brother. In high school, he was an accomplished musician, decent student, well-respected at his part-time job, and was involved with an equally on-track young woman for three years. But in college he abandoned music, stopped caring about school, lived out of his car rather than working to pay rent, and dumped the long-distance, four-year relationship for one night stands.
Throughout his decline, our parents constantly encouraged him to turn his life around — quit partying so much, look into studying abroad, try some jobs or internships to explore his career options, finish college on time. (The last of these was the only one he actually did, and we have no idea how he managed it.) They didn’t tell him that he had to go into this or that industry, but they certainly didn’t want him drinking and smoking his way through college. The problem certainly wasn’t with our parents. Perhaps his malaise came from his friends — the ridiculously wealthy young men of his fraternity, and the similarly wealthy surfer bums of Malibu — and perhaps theirs was the result of directionless parenting. I have no idea.
Finally, is my brother representative of a trend? Again, I have no idea. Pretty much everyone I know is a graduate student, and very serious about a career in academia of some sort. In this world, my brother’s prodigality is the exception, not the rule. I just know that this one case doesn’t exactly seem to fit your thesis in this post.
Who said I was judging all of academic feminism based on this blog? I’ve read enough of the supposedly “peer-reviewed” feminist nonsense to know it is silliness.
You’re entitled to your opinion about that body of work, but your comment wasn’t quoting that. You referred to something that Hugo said but didn’t prove to your satisfaction, and extrapolated from that to the practices of all feminist scholars:
What you have just pointed out is a classic example of feminist “scholarship.” Lacking verifiable, reproducible data, feminists often simply make grand assertions based on the scantest of proof, or even no proof at all.
Ironically, you offer no proof of this assertion. You make “grand assertions” about what “feminists” do. If you want that assertion to be taken seriously, give us published examples of these nonsensical feminists with their poor standards of academic proof, so we can see for ourselves. If you’ve read enough of it, as you say, it should be no problem to toss out a few titles so we can have a better idea of just what you mean.
Hugo’s post, by the way, does not prove your assertion because, a blog post is not scholarship. Please try to get that through your head. We are playing with hypotheses, not drawing conclusions.
Some of us “don’t like your tone”, not because you’re criticizing feminism, but because you’re either being sloppy about it, or you’re making category errors on purpose. You might notice that neither leapfrog nor I are scolding ballgame. You actually made some good points about class at the beginning of the comment thread, so it was extra-frustrating to see it surrounded by stuff that was sloppy, insulting, and generally just missed the point.
OK, I suspect that this argument is going nowhere, so I’m going to try to focus on the actually interesting stuff instead.
K, I think you’ve got a good point. Fewer women are looking for a good provider because we’ve got that covered ourselves, so we’re looking for partners who are kind and interesting and fun (in a responsible sort of way). That’s both challenging and freeing. I’ve seen guys choose lucrative majors like computer science when they really wanted to study art history, and I thought it was really a shame that they felt obligated to do that. At the same time, we all know what being a “good provider” entails, it’s a script we know how to follow. Being a good and interesting person is a much less structured project.
::sigh:: I wish I could see the distribution of the wages reported in the article. It’d be so much more informative than just the averages as to what’s really going on.
re: “gentleman’s C”
That alone really shows your roots, Hugo. I know a lot of people who went to tech/engineering/hard science-oriented colleges where, believe me, there’s no “gentleman’s C”.
I think you may be speaking from a segment of society which has always had a high(er) rate of “skating” on achievements due to wealth — lazy rich boys have always been around. (Gatsby, anyone?)
For most of the country, not having a college degree means spending your life within sight of minimum wage unless you pick up a significant trade skill. Heck, for a lot of people even having a degree doesn’t guarantee you’ll ever see a six-figure salary. Whether you take a couple years off for kids - or don’t - impacts some careers more than others.
Aside from the “what young women want,” let’s go back to Hugo’s emphasis on expectations. What does society expect of young white men middle-class backgrounds? For the record, most of the guys I know are gainfully employed or are in graduate school (almost always in career-oriented stuff like science or engineering, rather than stuff Hugo studied).
My personal story was that I was a National Merit Scholar who did pretty well in a difficult, career-oriented major at a mediocre undergrad institution then failed at top-tier graduate school. About the best I could realistically do would be “Michael Bolton” from the movie “Office Space,” driving to a no-name company in a Grand Am and maybe living in a mediocre one-bedroom apartment (most of my co-workers lived with roommates) and making payments on my loans. This wouldn’t be exciting for me, nor is it very exciting party conversation. And it seems like I’ve “failed to live up to my potential,” and society generally would consider me a “loser.” I also can’t really see supporting or co-supporting a family on that type of pay (unless I somehow marry a lawyer or investment banker…but most of the women I know are working on an MSW).
So, Hugo, what avenues for “success” do a lot of young men really have? Like you, I also wanted to be a professor, but didn’t make it in graduate school. Now the best I can do is be a “nobody.” I guess that’s the main thing about “adjusting to adult live” that I have to go through. But it means most of my dreams are dead by 30.
(and I agree with carlaviii: “For most of the country,” even hard-earned A’s in a bachelor’s degree at a mediocre university make earning $70,000 pretty out of reach)
“adjusting to adult life.” Underachiever or not, I am at least fluent in English.
On the topic of English fluency, it must be noted that both political parties have taken an active interest in lowering the wages of the main occupations of young men (construction and computer programming), having declared them “jobs Americans won’t do.”
So why should a man apply himself in a white-collar job that will soon be done in India or by an Indian locally on an H1-B visa? Or try to compete in construction with an unlimited supply of Mexicans?
(I personally wish residents of India and Mexico the best, but many American men are displeased at trying to support themselves on third-world wages, as well as the extreme disrespect that comes from elites like George Bush and Ted Kennedy say, essentially, that they unworthy to be Americans and undeserving of a living wage)
Well, I have a lot to say on this but will have to wait until I have more time. However, there is one topic that I can address easily, right now:
Metamanda quoted Mike, who said: “What you have just pointed out is a classic example of feminist “scholarship.” Lacking verifiable, reproducible data, feminists often simply make grand assertions based on the scantest of proof, or even no proof at all.” to which she responded:
“Ironically, you offer no proof of this assertion. You make “grand assertions” about what “feminists” do. If you want that assertion to be taken seriously, give us published examples of these nonsensical feminists with their poor standards of academic proof, so we can see for ourselves. If you’ve read enough of it, as you say, it should be no problem to toss out a few titles so we can have a better idea of just what you mean.”
The acclaimed historian K.C. Johnson is in the process of writing a series of exposes on what is called “The G88″ at Duke University (google “G88 Duke” for more info) and many - if not most - of those profs are associated with the women’s studies department and practically all of them can be defined as feminists based on their writings. See Durham-in-Wonderland and search “Group Profiles” for examples of what Mike discusses.
Metamanda continues: “Hugo’s post, by the way, does not prove your assertion because, a blog post is not scholarship. Please try to get that through your head. We are playing with hypotheses, not drawing conclusions.”
Actually some blogs are quite scholarly. See the above-mentioned blog by Professor Johnson for one good example.
More later.
Folks, as I mentioned on Sunday, I’m not around a computer as much this week. Please do not use this thread to launch attacks on feminism. Calling me out on a perceived double-standard towards men is fair game; extrapolating from my post a general anti-male bias among feminists is not. I most certainly do not speak for all feminists, or all male feminists.
Just as the data in the original study pointed to a fairly limiited phenomenon, so too my conclusions. I thought I had made that clear…
My personal story was that I was a National Merit Scholar who did pretty well in a difficult, career-oriented major at a mediocre undergrad institution then failed at top-tier graduate school. About the best I could realistically do would be “Michael Bolton” from the movie “Office Space,” driving to a no-name company in a Grand Am and maybe living in a mediocre one-bedroom apartment (most of my co-workers lived with roommates) and making payments on my loans. This wouldn’t be exciting for me, nor is it very exciting party conversation.
I would really like to know if, and if so, why, you think this is in any way whatsoever specifically a male issue. (I would like to know why Hugo thinks so, too.) All of this depressing stuff you talk about is true for all the women I know, which is why those of us who could escape into grad school did so for as long as possible.
Just as a precaution: ‘women don’t need excitement,’ ‘women don’t mind not having any interesting conversation to make about their jobs’, ‘women like living in crappy apartments’, ‘women don’t fail out of academia,’ are not any of them true, so if you do, in fact, have an explanation for why you are framing all this true stuff as a guy thing, I would like to hear it. If it’s just because you’re following Hugo’s lead, okay.
It seems like the one really bad thing you talk about, that really sucks for young men, is being unable to cope with small failures in life (”small” defined here as anything less than death, disfigurement, divorce, or crippling debt and ensuing poverty. Fucking up your dream career doesn’t count.) I don’t say this as a judgment on you; I am, personally, spectacularly bad at dealing with failure and prone to depression about it. However, I am also a woman. So I still don’t really get it.
Why focus on men?
1. Hugo’s post was about “MALE MALAISE,” and shiftless young MEN, etc.
2. I am a man, therefore, 100% of my experience is from the male perspective
3. 90% of my coworkers and classmates, and 100% of my housemates have been male.
I will conjecture, however, and probably get flamed that:
Society celebrates the professional successe of women (who, as a group, seem to be doing better and better…out-earning men in some parts of New York City, to cite the original article), but does not shame them for taking unprestigous jobs.
I know women working as library interns into their 30’s, and nobody calls them losers (even though one got fired from teaching public school), while women at a club would laugh in a man’s face if he said that. Another young woman about my age gave finally up on college after 5 years or so at a lower tier university. This didn’t seem to interfere with her lavish wedding to a Type-A overachiever guy. Whenever we (fortunately rarely) encounter each other, she treats me with disdain, and is entitled to, as she does outrank me socially.
So it’s true that not all women achieve their dreams. But many do, and those who don’t seem to get by as respectable members of society. In other words, professional success is optional for women in society, but manditory for men. A man is his job.
Let’s talk about the “unable to cope with small failures.” thing.
Personally, I have little problem “coping” with “failure.” The problem is that my career is not “just a game.” It’s my livelihood, and I could not get any financial support from anyone even if I wanted it. Failure did hurt, but the question is “what can I do now without this degree / with this black mark on my resume.” In my case, the answer is “not much,” which is frightening.
But this is becoming too much about me personally. I think there are important issues about how much of this “male malaise” is due to the increasing costs of housing and decreasing wages of young workers, credential inflation, the expectations placed on reasonably intelligent white men, and the habitual insults and systematic attacks on the wages of work that young men do.
And one more thought about the men vs women issue: there seems to be a subset of women who enjoy and take pride in boring, repetitive, low-paying jobs, or are just excited to be “in the workplace” as if it’s some sort of novelty. I met one such young woman who said she really liked her job as a mortgage processor.
There’s nothing wrong with processing mortgages (although the underwriting policies are coming home to roost, it seems), but it sort of flattened me that someone would actually enjoy such a thing. I guess women think the same thing about programmers, but few programmers seem to gush about how much they like it. Most men (and many women) would just say something like “yeah, it sucks, but it pays the bills.”
(for those of you who don’t like my last post, I agree it is stereotypical…it is a very minor point. I mainly wrote about men due to the original post’s content)
Generally, folks, the number of consecutive comments that are permitted is two.
I’m worried about some of my single female friends. Many went out and bought a condo with an adjustable rate mortgage because they really wanted to “own” something. If they lose their job when that rate adjusts . . . it’s gonna be immense pain and suffering . . . . maybe forclosure. I’ve been labelled a bit “Peter Pan” because I rent a 1 bedroom. If I were to have the misfortune of losing my job I would be able to pay the rent for a long time with savings. Actually, most of the single guys I know rent.
Ok, there are so many things completely wrong with this post I can’t address them all, but will provide a point-by-point response on the main fallacies. Hugo in italics, me not.
It’s worth noting that this phenomenon is a narrow one: overall, men still out-earn women across the country.
Hugo, you finally ‘get it’ – the so-called “wage gap” is no such thing, it’s an earnings gap. Using grouped data, men get paid more than women because they earn more. Period.
Of course, a great many young women lawyers in New York City are not worrying about biological clocks. Many may not expect to marry or have children at all. But I do think we’ve done a fairly good job in recent decades of raising middle-class young women to be self-reliant, stressing that if at all possible, they should not “have to rely on a man” for support. This doesn’t mean that most successful young women are motivated by a lack of male reliability! It does mean that we’ve managed to impress upon young women something we haven’t managed to impress upon their brothers: that success is usually the result of a good education and a lot of hard work, and the sooner both are embarked on, the better.
I disagree. Despite our neglect to encourage young men to become more educated (more on that later), they know that success is usually the result of a good education. It’s just that the educational environment in the K-12 system is so dreadfully pro-girl and in some cases outright hostile to boys that by the time our brothers become young men they can’t get away from our education system fast enough.
The tenured American professoriate is still largely male. Law schools still have more male faculty than female.
Red herring. The staff and administrators, who are the people who make the crucial decisions re. admissions, curricula, retention, advancement, etc., are overwhelmingly female. In fact, the only area of academia that is “largely male” is the faculty in science and engineering; everywhere else the faculty have significant numbers of females or are majority female. In some cases, e.g., nursing, education, social work, the faculty is almost exclusively female.
It’s difficult to find verifiable evidence of blatant discrimination against men in the American academy.
Only if you’re not looking. Can you say “affirmative action?”
(Though it has been widely reported that many colleges now have easier admission standards for boys than girls.)
Again, only in certain areas such as nursing (notably at the request of women, who want more men in nursing, so this type of AA is actually designed to benefit women). In most other areas colleges practice affirmative action for ‘girls,’ e.g., in science and engineering, and the advantages given to ‘girls’ throughout academia eclipse those given to a few ‘boys.’
It’s interesting – but not surprising – that you complain about the limitations of the study population cited in the article but rely on selectively-limited populations yourself.
The problem is not that boys can’t do the work, or are being discouraged from doing the work; rather, it’s a kind of “masculine malaise” that seems to have infected a great many potentially successful young men.
Nonsense. The malaise isn’t in young men, it’s found in our educational system, especially the K-12 segment.
We have a generation of young men who seem to lack the urgency and the ambition of their sisters. They haven’t been shamed out of it, they haven’t been actively discouraged — but they haven’t been sufficiently encouraged, either.
Actually, I agree with this statement.
And let me be very clear that this malaise is not the fault of feminism. Success is not a zero-sum game. Blaming women for male failures is a bit like the trustees of Ivy League colleges in the 1920s blaming a small number of Jewish students for being “too ambitious”…Today, a lot of young men don’t seem to be as willing to work hard in school as their female classmates.
Complete, utter garbage. The fact is, today a lot of young men are told they’re not as worthy of our attention, concern and care as their sisters. In other words, from an early age they are browbeaten with the message that girls are more important than boys, and thus they have been completely demoralized by the education system and thus they see no point in working hard in a system that does not value them.
And while this isn’t the fault of women, it is the fault of feminists (there are plenty of male feminists/pro-femininsts), but not all feminists. Indeed, feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers, Wendy McElroy and Camille Paglia are doing the best work towards changing the education gap between boys and girls. As has been said many times, there are many types of feminism, ranging from old-school equity feminists to modern post-Third Wave misandrists, and among the many types of feminists, it is the female chauvinists (what some MRAs call “women firsters” and McElroy and Sommers call “PC feminists”) who are to blame for pushing boys’ interests completely out of the K-12 education system, so by the time they are ready for college they’re no longer interested.
Young men are quite willing to work hard when the work is interesting and engaging, but the modern K-12 system is geared strongly toward girls’ interests. Couple that with a teaching staff that is overwhelmingly female, with many of those teachers being PC feminists, and you end up with boys disengaging, faltering and ultimately opting-out when they are of age to do so. Thus, they never make it to college.
Our culture is too easy on our young men, frankly.
Not so - in fact, it’s quite the opposite (can you hear my gales of laughter?). Our culture is too hard on men and too easy on women, which again sends the message that men are second-class citizens compared to women, especially when it comes to education.
All male student bodies proved perfectly capable of feats of concentration and hard work, and they didn’t need huge doses of Ritalin to do it. I have no desire to return to the limited and extremely demanding educational philosophy of an earlier generation, but it seems absurd to suggest that “boys can’t concentrate as well as girls.” (Plenty of boys prove to be positive miracles of concentration when playing video games!)
Thus proving my point I make above re. the modern K-12 system. Thank you.
There is a time and place for dreams. But the American middle class allows too many of their sons to dream to distraction. For fear of alienating them, for fear of repressing what we insist on believing is their innate masculine wildness, we allow them to “explore” and “wander” for a very, very long (much too long) time. We all know a lot of handsome, dreamy-eyed slacker boys, a year or two out of college, drifting through their twenties on drugs and theories, waiting, waiting, waiting, to be struck by certainty. And it is these boys — for boys they still are — who are one big whopping reason why, in our urban centers, incomes for young men have fallen so badly in comparison to their sisters.
The very same thing could be said for all those “slacker girls” who spend countless years in grad school dreaming away their days, navel-gazing on throwaway topics like, well, I won’t go there, but you probably can guess what I’m thinking. Or “slacker girls” who have a baby so she can get the sympathy and support that goes along with modern single motherhood. For every example of “slacker boy” we can all think of at least as many “slacker girls” - it’s not a gender thing, it’s a human thing. If we treated middle class girls the way we treat middle class boys they’d be opting out of college too.
The actual article is here
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/demographics/20070619/5/2208
Of course, it’s unfortunate in using the word “average,” the NYT reporter did not feel compelled to mentioned Prof Beveridge used the “median” as the statistic for “average.”
There are problems using median that either the reporter and editor either do not understand or choose to avoid explaining. The data presented in the accompanying charts show a surprising pattern looking at the racial component. While the median salary of all New York women in the age group was 17% greater than men’s the gender gap was smaller for each of four sub-groups highlighted in the chart:
Asians - Asian men and women made the same amount;
Hispanic - Hispanic women outearned their male counterparts by 8%
Black - Black women outearned their male counterparts by 7%,
Whites - White **men** made 13% more than white women
Note each of the sub-group women outearned their male counterparts (and just the reverse in whites) by less than the overall figure cited. The data suggest, especially in the narrow range presented, that one should be careful in jumping to explaining a phenomenon when one does not even understand the phenomenon itself.
“We have a generation of young men who seem to lack the urgency and the ambition of their sisters”
Based on the statistics presented, one could argue that we have a generation of black and hispanic men who seem to lack the urgency and ambition of their sisters. I don’t think the NYT wants to go there..
Caveat emptor when using the NYT….
Of course, the simple economist in me wants to say — if we are throwing out hypotheses — is, that to the extent one believes gender discrimination in the work place has been reduced (setting aside the issue of magnitude of reduction), then we are simply seeing regression to the mean.. too boring as news though..
Since the blogosphere is an appropriate place for speculations and gut feelings, let me offer my own alternative diagnosis of the phenomena Hugo describes. I suggest that young men and women are entering their mid-20s and early 30s in a time in which both internal gender expectations and external socio-economic pressures are resulting in a significant shift in career-oriented behavior. Young women may indeed be driven towards early career orientation (i.e., highly ambitious behavior) by virtue of both (a) internal desires to beat the biological clock and also build an early career success, and (b) external factors in which career-oriented discrimination is at an all-time low or even negative. Although the evidence may not yet exist to make such sweeping generalizations, I think the recent studies showing that more women are going to college than men and young women are outearning men in key urban areas is suggestive. The confluence of both (a) and (b), internal and external factors is creating a realignment of women’s expectations and behavior with regard to career. Many of them are becoming anti-slackers.
Young men, on the other hand are faced with both (a) internal “masculine malaise” (just as Hugo posits) and even guilt if they’re privileged white boys who may be afraid to express enthusiasm for achievement because doing so would seem inappropriately greedy, just as the least hungry child may volunteer to stand last in the cafeteria lunch line at grade school, and (b) external pressures which may include economic hardship making it difficult for men to have the earning power of their fathers and grandfathers, increased competition from foreign workers for men’s jobs, and even possibly real anti-male discrimination in particular fields. Thus, increasing numbers of younger men are postponing career power lunches in favor of “slacking”.
Blah
Coming from a rural perspective, albeit one that is fast diminishing…young men and women are not really seen as adults until they are married and building families. This is not usually overtly stated sentiment, but the message came through pretty clearly when I was coming up. Even today, I think we are more likely to find “younger” families with the more traditional structure out here in Podunk.
Bear with me. I’m wondering if the fact that people are marrying at later ages figures into the question? Anecdote is not data, but from what I’ve seen, post-nuptials, young men view their lives much differently, and shift into higher gear employmentwise.
Just a thought.
Ahunt, in the less Podunk areas, I think the same phenomenon also applies. But what I’ve seen is that it’s not the wedding ceremony per se that causes the shift, but long-term couplehood that could lead to marriage. Basically, having found and established a relationsihp with Miss Right seems to allow men the freedom to focus on their careers without the fear of becoming a Dilbert.
Even if the wedding is years away, just having some relationship success with somebody seems to help. I guess those guys figure they know how the process works and have what it takes to attract someone else if this thing doesn’t work out. But the terminally clueless are often underachievers. I think the effect of marriage on earnings (”does marriage make men more serious or are attractive men also more attractive in the labor market?”). But I’m bringing in the internal dialog and motivation inside the man’s head into the picture in a way that few researchers have.
I remember talking with a recently married graduate student approximately my age. He said something like “when my wife’s out of town, I work 90-100 hours a week.” Before I gave up on finding a relationship, I would be afraid to become “all work and no play” or miss out on social activities where I could meet women.
So based on this, I don’t know if the later marrying age has this effect as much as you might think. Many people still marry their high school / college sweethearts: the difference is just timing. Boomers would meet and marry in 6 months, but now you will see 30 year olds marryinig who say “we’ve been together for 12 years.”
“I think the effect of marriage on earnings has been seriously studied in the literature…“
I’m not sure I agree with the ‘men are slackers’/'women are independent and motivated’ analysis.
Unlike other posters I’m not making a political point here, more a sociological observation. Women do partner with men on average three or so years older and this does give them an economic advantage, in that their household income is higher than that of a man in the same position. (With a 3 year age gap either way, you get an income difference of 6 years). I know several women who’ve moved to a city and moved in with an man who’s already established there. I don’t know any men who’s done the same with an already established girlfriend. Men don’t really have the same options to get this subsidy from their partners.
There are good reasons to expect this gendered effect of partnering to have a substantial effect on economic prospects. I don’t blame feminists for this. And I don’t think you can complain about it - people are entitled to partner with and spend their money however they choose. But I do think it happens and is worth noting. Men 21-30 have access to less resources than women do.
Many people still marry their high school / college sweethearts:
Yeah, they sure do!
Also, and again this is for purposes of consideration only…
…an underlying theme of some of the theories put forth for this ill-defined “masculine malaise” does indeed blame feminism. David Blankenhorn, Harvey Mansfield, William Kristol, etc…all seem to imply that without gender-specific roles in society, men will not fully participate. Apparently, various careers and familial tasks lose their “panache” when women enter into the equation, or oblige male contribution. Men simply lose interest and motivation.
Seems to me that it is not the feminists who are selling men short.
To quote my father (and the title of a book proposal I’ve put out), too many young men are “waiting to be struck by certainty..
The “failure to launch” syndrome? I was thinking that more young men living in their parents’ homes might be a factor. Statistics do show
“According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents — a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women” (Washington Post, Mar 06; by Leonard Sax, a family physician and psychologist in Montgomery County, is the author of “Boys Adrift: What’s Really Behind the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys)
Of course, according to Sax, this trend cuts across all demographics (race; location; income level) and the data done by Beveridge clearly shows a racial difference (at least in NYC). Also, the direction of effect, assuming the factor is significant at all, could go either way (young men’s wages falling/remaining constant so their relative housing cost increases hence stay at home or they stay at home (relatively) more so they don’t need/pursue higher wages).
Sax also cites work done by folks here
http://www.boysproject.net/statistics.html
Colonel, I’m waiting for the Sax book to come in the mail myself… and look forward to responding.
Let me just clear something up straightaway here: a person’s income is not a reflection of that person’s worth.
I think there are a number of ways to interpret this study and I highly doubt that it’s a truly accurate reflection of what’s going on.
For example, do you think it included income earners who work in non-traditional professions, such as blogging and gambling? Does it include the young men who are sole proprietors of their own companies? No, it doesn’t even include part-timers, only full-time employees, a dying breed.
Likewise, do you think they compared net worths? Or how about home ownership?
Lastly, look at the Bay Area and Seattle, the mecca of technology development. How are the wage comparisons there?
I think a better conclusion from this report is that (some) women are catching up in the old game while (some) men are moving ahead into a new game. And really, what’s new?
Sax? That name sounds familiar.
Oh, yes, that Dr. Sax.
In general, I consider myself a very good example of an ‘unmotivated boy’, a ‘listless lad’, however you care to describe the phenomenon. It causes a lot of trouble for me in my life and is something that I’ve made struggling with and beating one of the highest priorities in my life.
That said, I doubt that Dr. Sax’s nouveau gender essentialism holds any answers for me.
Leonard Sax has indeed been called on his serious misuse of science, and I am profoundly disturbed by his ongoing refusal to acknowledge the tremendous behaviorial response variations within the genders.
But folks here apparently recognize that if there is a developing pathology of masculine malaise, there are any number of factors that would figure in.
The decline in high wage blue collar manufacturing jobs, and until recently, the higher standards for military recruitment, and the fact the days of “20 and out” in any field are over…all serve to narrow the traditional, family forming career options for men…and might help explain the broad demographics of “failure to launch.”
I Hope nobody cares that I didn’t take the time to write this. I just jotted down some points.
It’s a male driven world. We too are oppressed as men, but at the mercy of ourselves. we live in a system that gives us males priveledge. I also think that these boys who need Ritalin for having energy (which is natural) Is ridiculous and also conditioned. The parents and teachers should put this energy to good use. sports, reading, painting, home work, can all be great channel to divert this so called energy that is the result of a dysfunctional child. I say that this too is conditioned by our culture because money is involved, and we are constantly oppressed and told we need this and that. Who would have ever thought that I needed porn spam sent to my e-mail. I don’t even have to search for it? I wonder why-Money is involved, and when money is involved in America… Morals and standards go out the window.
Not so - in fact, it’s quite the opposite (can you hear my gales of laughter?). Our culture is too hard on men and too easy on women, which again sends the message that men are second-class citizens compared to women, especially when it comes to education.
Our culture is so conditioned that billboards are filled with half naked women, porn is available on your phone. Our culture Is also way too easy on men.You should do some research. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but this is a male driven world. Take a look at how priveledged men are and how under privileged women are and then get back to me. Think of how women are treated as objects. etc.
Fry & Laurie addressed this issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRkYJaBV43I
K
what does this have to do with anything? It is a tv show. Part of the system that shows half naked women on tv and oppresses women. If you think for a second that some tv show is “how it is” you are sadly mistaken. Thats just what they want you to think, so that they can mold you to their society.Sorry if this was your “got em’” attempt of supporting your ideals.
Minnow, I ran across the sketch and decided to submit it simply for on-topic (”male malaise”) comic relief. No sane reader would see my link as an attempt to support my assertions (few of which I made in this thread anyway: I mostly asked questions and shared personal experience).
In addition to being unrelated to my posts, it was also most definitely not a response to yours.
For the record, regardless of the evils of television in general, the link contains no nudity or objectification of either gender.