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.
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