The Illusory Battle of the Sexes

By some measures, men in the United States today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, men are doing worse than women of the same age. The data on men over time show troubling trend lines such as falling prime-age labor-force participation rates, stagnant wages (despite growing national income), and, for some subsets of the male population, stagnant or falling life expectancy (despite gains for others). In their K–12 schooling, girls on average do better than boys do; in higher education, women participate at greater rates and with greater success than men; women have more friends; and women live longer.

It certainly matters that life is in some ways getting harder for men than it used to be, and it is certainly worth noting that there are some components of putting together a good life that men are struggling more than their female peers to achieve. But when diagnosing the ills and prescribing the remedies, we lay a trap for ourselves if we put too much emphasis on gender and leave class as a secondary consideration. In fact, we prime ourselves to fall into either of two different traps: the trap of a reactionary battle-of-the-sexes framing on the one hand, or the trap of a counterproductive “cry me a river” eye roll on the other.

Take the following facts about performance in school, for instance: In high school, boys make up a majority of students in the bottom half of the GPA distribution; in the bottom tenth of the distribution, they outnumber girls two to one. Conversely, in the top half of the distribution, girls are a majority, and in the top tenth, girls have a mirror image two-to-one advantage. After high school, men are less likely than women to enroll in college, and among those who do give college a try, men are less likely to complete a degree.

There’s an obvious, misogynist battle-of-the-sexes reaction to this data, which says that if girls are doing better in school, it must be that women have somehow skewed schools to their own advantage such that they systematically discriminate against boys. My male undergraduate students told me that in their feeds, the social media algorithms regularly coughed up content from Andrew Tate and others of his ilk, conveying a targeted message to young men warning them off of college ambitions. More caring and careful observers point out that the pop-culture messaging boys get about masculinity (aggression, activity, individualism) and the behavioral demands made in school (cooperation, calm) are so at odds that schools end up failing to serve boys well.

There may be something to that, but focusing so narrowly on gender cannot explain why the female-favoring gender gap in high school graduation rates tends to be much larger in low-income school districts; some school districts, more often high-income ones, graduate boys at higher rates than girls. The fact that girls make up two-thirds of the students in the top tenth of high school GPAs can explain why Ivy League colleges have an applicant pool that is two-thirds female. But if we have already leaped to the conclusion that the education system is actively discriminating against boys (or even just inadvertently failing them), we cannot then explain why the boys in the Ivy League applicant pool are about twice as likely to be admitted so that, in the end, these most selective colleges admit and enroll a class that is roughly 50 percent male. (If anything, that looks like a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of boys.)

Insisting on a battle-of-the-sexes lens despite its explanatory failures lends support to a political project of mustering the male troops and launching an offensive campaign to take back the power that women have purportedly seized. Such a campaign might bring women down, but it can’t lift men up. What is there to “take back,” after all? Women, on average, still have lower wages than men, still experience higher poverty rates than men, and still do more unpaid domestic labor on men’s behalf than men do for women (or for themselves).

The cry-me-a-river reaction says: plenty of boys do just fine in school, so why should we trouble ourselves so much about the ones who dick around and waste the opportunities given to them? Moreover, men without college education earn more than women without college education. And when they do get their acts together to go to college, men maintain their wage gap advantage over their college-educated female counterparts. Sorting the gender wage gap data into groups based on the competitiveness and prestige of the post-high-school training and education pursued reveals more or less the same gap in every bin: when we compare like to like, women earn roughly 25 percent less than men, whether we are looking at those who have earned vocational certificates, associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees at not-so-selective colleges, or bachelor’s degrees at highly selective colleges.

Women are not outperforming men academically because they are “winning.” Women have on average committed themselves to academics because they are losing in the labor market. Women must aim higher than men in school if they want merely to match men’s earnings. This is even truer for women who may want to have children. The pay gap between mothers and fathers is markedly wider than the overall average pay gap between women and men.

So, our eye-roller says, if men want to maintain their economic advantage over women, all they have to do is quit bellyaching and do their homework. But that interpretation is a trap too. No one wins a comparative victimhood contest, and “suck it up, bucko” isn’t a political agenda that can win widespread support or improve life for anyone.

The All-Too-Real Class War

Something has been taken from many men, but it clearly wasn’t women who took it. (Unless the “something” in question is broad social permission for men to kick women around, in which case, yes, every wave of the women’s movement has aimed at taking that permission away.) Who is responsible for the dire situation of many men today, then? The answer to that is also clear: the rich.

The evidence is plentiful. Exhibit A: the labor share of national income has fallen. From the end of World War II to near the end of the twentieth century, labor captured somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 percent of the value added in production each year. There was a slight downward drift in the years approaching and immediately after 2000, and then the Great Recession hit. The labor share plummeted to somewhere around 57 percent and hasn’t bounced back. This amounts to thousands of dollars per person per year lost by the vast majority of the population who don’t live on asset income alone.

Relatedly, exhibit B: what isn’t getting paid to workers is piling up around the superrich. In just fifteen years, from March 2008 to March 2023, the highest 0.01 percent of disposable personal incomes swelled 43.4 percent. We’re talking about 25,100 people — they wouldn’t even fill Fenway Park — who now bring in an average of $25.7 million per year after taxes. The rest of the top 1 percent, those whose incomes are only in seven digits, not eight, have trailed 5 or 10 percentage points behind in their rates of disposable income growth. That 43.4 percent income surge at the tip-top is more than twice the total income growth rate and more than three times the growth rate in income for people in the middle of the distribution.

From a technical policymaking standpoint, we know how to change this. And for about a year, from spring 2020 to spring 2021, we did. Pandemic-era policies such as more generous child tax credits, unemployment insurance benefits, and other forms of social welfare spending provided direct support to many, improved the bargaining position of workers, and held the top 0.01 percent in check. That one year, disposable incomes grew faster in the bottom 50 percent than in the rest of the distribution. Then we let the concentration of income resume with a vengeance.

As income gaps have expanded to Gilded Age proportions, gaps in outcomes when we compare people across differences of income have also expanded. These now dwarf any gaps we can find across differences of gender.

Consider life expectancy. For the cohort born in 1920 or 1930, rich men outlived poor men by about five years, rich women outlived poor women by about four, and when we look at men and women within groups with similar incomes, women outlived men by somewhere between three and six years. For those born just a little later in the century, the gender gap stayed about the same, but the class gap in life expectancy roughly doubled. A rich man born in 1940 is likely still alive today and can expect to hang on for three more years yet — a rich woman for five. On average, the women born in 1940 who lived at the opposite end of the income scale have been dead for five years, and the poor men have been gone for almost a decade. May their memory be a blessing.

Class disparities in years on Earth only widened for the baby boomers. For the cohort born in 1960, men and women at the top are thriving now that they are sixty-five and are projected to live longer than any cohort before them. Meanwhile, men at the bottom are not expected to have gained anything, and women at the bottom are expected to die younger than women born poor a little earlier.

If you line up Americans by income, then, you are also lining us up by probable age at death. The difference between top and bottom life expectancies is reached by a steady gradient across the whole domain of incomes — but the gradient is steeper for men than for women.

Being a man is not on its own a source of hardship. In the absence of money, however, it does seem that maleness functions as an accelerant for some of the injuries of class. Women have not been spared from the effects of class war from above, and poor women are of course harmed by poverty too. However, for now at least, they survive it a little longer than their brothers.

Maybe what allows women to cope better in some respects is that there is no historical precedent that led women to expect better for themselves in the labor market, whereas within living memory, men could more easily get jobs that were considered appropriately masculine and get a bigger slice of the national economic pie than they get now. Instead of considering their class injuries to be an insult to their manhood, men would do well to consider class injuries an insult to all who bear them. Whatever the reasons, on average, women endure the injuries of class a little longer than men. To do more than endure and directly combat class oppression, men and women will have to work together.

Who’s the Boss’s Bitch?

The oppressive, exploitative treatment of women in the workplace has repeatedly served as a pilot project for how capital will later treat men. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution in the United States, the first wage-labor force in the textile factories was almost entirely female. Later, intrusive factory discipline was imposed on men. Later still, when capital wanted to wriggle out of the commitments to labor that the twentieth-century union movement had pressed them into, they experimented with putting women into “flexible” labor arrangements through temp agencies such as Kelly Girl. (That is, flexible for the employer, not so flexible for the worker.)

Having figured out how to avoid long-term commitments to women workers while keeping them always available, capital then weaseled out of commitments men thought they had won. And here we are.

When working-class men express a feeling of being “feminized,” or when manosphere influencers tell men they are being emasculated, there is a kernel of economic truth. The dominant model of mid-twentieth-century male adulthood was the breadwinning head of a household, and a decent fraction of the jobs available to men made that role achievable. Some men were excluded, especially most black men whose gains from the civil rights movement arrived right around the same time that income distribution trends turned back toward increased income inequality. But for many men whose prime working years fell in the few decades after World War II, it was not necessary to start with a lot of assets or education to get a respectable slice of the economic pie.

With the shift of economic rewards steeply upward, the precarious, dead-end structure of work that was for a while mostly reserved for women and non-whites is now imposed on a bigger share of the male workforce too — including white men, especially if they do not have college degrees.

Women have always had to go above and beyond baseline requirements to prove that they are qualified for employment; the phenomenon of credential creep means that employers now often demand effortful and personally costly demonstrations of worthiness and commitment from men too. Get a degree, a certificate, a license to get your first job. Then if you want to advance, don’t expect an on-the-job career ladder. Go get more formal training at your own expense. Breadwinning is harder, so anyone who holds onto that as the measure of manhood is set up to feel like a failure.

No one wants to be overworked, underpaid, disrespected, and treated as expendable. In that sense, men are increasingly being treated similarly to how women have traditionally been treated. And being treated like a woman, in that sense, is bad for anyone. In short, no one wants to be the boss’s bitch. The problem isn’t that men are misgendered by degrading and insecure employment; the problem is that, with few exceptions and even fewer lifetime immunities, workers are degraded and insecure.

Meanwhile, even as the economy-wide share of “bad jobs” grows and an expanding share of the workforce is consigned to work them, women and non-white racial groups are no longer categorically barred from the dwindling share of “good jobs,” the high-pay, high-status work that used to be explicitly reserved for white men. But as a classic 1981 article about women in the professions by Michael Carter and Susan Boslego Carter put it, “Women get a ticket to ride after the gravy train has left the station.” As good jobs get scarcer, the demands they put on workers get more onerous — more entry requirements, more always-on availability — meaning that just when women and non-white workers get their first toehold in the “good jobs” section of the labor market, the good jobs that remain are worse than they used to be. The accelerating concentration of wealth and incomes at the very top of the distribution leaves most men and most women milling around on the platform together, the rumble of the gravy train receding in the distance.

What’s the Agenda?

Even for those stuck in a mistaken lost-battle-of-the-sexes diagnosis of men’s ills, the follow-up demand isn’t usually to combat exclusion so that men can have access to the kinds of lives that women are leading. There isn’t really any structural exclusion to combat; just, perhaps, some cultural squeamishness about shifting gender norms. (For example, employment is growing in the caring professions like education and health care. Many men may be refusing to enter, but the relevant schools and employers aren’t barring the doors against them.)

Demands to knock women down don’t deserve consideration. So what is an agenda that could win some dignity and economic security and pare back the class gaps in school achievement and life expectancy? Just about anything that reduces income inequality will help. Improve housing affordability in areas with strong labor markets and strong union movements so that workers can move to take advantage of economic opportunity. Raise labor’s share of pretax income by strengthening workers’ bargaining position with a strong social safety net, a robust public jobs program, and protections for unions’ collective action. Reduce the yawning gulfs in posttax income with more steeply progressive taxes. (There was a time when the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent!)

These eminently doable options for making men’s lives better — affordable housing, wage growth at the bottom, progressive taxation, and so on — would of course make women’s lives better too. Sharing gains across lines of gender makes the gains bigger, even for men; past experience shows us that leaving women out only keeps alive a degraded status that threatens to swallow men again too.