Female Privilege

Diversity Macht Frei
March 20, 2017

This New York Times article about “The Decline of Men” is well worth reading. Key takeaways from the article are: While men still dominate top positions, there is growing polarisation among men. A small minority of men are doing very well, while a large number of men are not.

In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. …But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates. Since 2000, wage inequality has grown more among men than among women…

Women, in general are doing better from what are deemed to be structural changes in the economy than men.

From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.

Males suffer more from the lack of a conventional family structure than females do.

Among children raised in single-parent households, however, boys performed significantly less well than their sisters in school, and their employment rate as young adults was lower.

“Relative to their sisters,” Autor and his collaborators wrote, “boys born to disadvantaged families” — with disadvantage measured here by mother’s marital status and education — “have higher rates of disciplinary problems, lower achievement scores, and fewer high-school completions.”

When the children in the study reached early adulthood, the same pattern emerged in employment: Employment rates of young women are nearly invariant to family marital status, while the employment rates of young adult men from non-married families are eight to ten percentage points below those from married families at all income levels. Autor and his co-authors conclude that family structure “is more consequential for the skills development and labor market outcomes of boys than girls.”

It turns out that men and women aren’t the same after all.

High-paying, difficult-to-automate jobs increasingly require social skills. Nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations that are relatively social skill-intensive. Jobs that require high levels of analytical and mathematical reasoning but low levels of social interaction have fared especially poorly. What this means, according to Deming, is that the economy-wide shift toward social skill-intensive occupations has occurred disproportionately among women rather than men.

This is consistent with a large literature showing sex differences in social perceptiveness and the ability to work with others. Studies of gender differences, according to Deming, show that Females consistently score higher on tests of emotional and social intelligence. Sex differences in sociability and social perceptiveness have been shown to have biological origins, with differences appearing in infancy and higher levels of fetal testosterone associated with lower scores on tests of social intelligence.

Notice that it’s permitted to acknowledge differences in non-physical aptitudes between men and women as long as the differences favour women. If, on the other hand, you said something like “Men are more aggressive than women on average, being a successful executive requires a certain among of aggression, therefore it’s perfectly natural that more men than women should be company executives”, this would be considered unacceptable; you would be hounded from your job and, in Sweden, maybe even prosecuted for “hate speech”.

These privileged women turn their noses up at unprivileged men.

Women have strong mate preferences such that they do not want to mate or marry men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less successful than they are. And this, Buss said, “creates a surplus of men” at the low end who are not going to get married. Millions of these less well educated men are not going to get the benefits of marriage: Married men live longer, are less likely to become alcoholic, take drugs, commit suicide, etc.

And this is a problem because these unprivileged men are more likely to vote the wrong way.

In a phone interview a number of years ago, Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, was prescient: Men are really going to have to change their act or have big problems. I think of big guys from the cave days, guys who were good at lifting stuff and hunting and the things we got genetically selected out for. During the industrial revolution that wasn’t so bad, but it’s not going to be there anymore.

Asked to confirm his earlier views, Freeman wrote me that what he predicted has occurred and continues, and perhaps is linked to the penchant for some male workers to be more favorable to right-wing populism than might have been the case.