A New York Times op-ed explains the difference between the imaginary end of men and the real problems men face.
Call me a cynic, but somehow it’s always a breath of fresh air to open a New York Times op-ed piece and find something other than recycled conventional wisdom. That’s why I enjoyed Stephanie Coontz’s well-researched piece “The Myth of Male Decline“, in which she addresses the current trend of articles and books about how women now run the world and men have all been reduced to emotionally crippled adolescents as a result. Well, “addresses” might not be the word I want. “Beats the living crap out of” might be closer.
She spends the first part of the article addressing the notion that women now have all the economic agency in the world, and again “address” may be the wrong verb. You can check out her well-supported arguments and citations yourself, but short version: that gender earning gap is still quite real.
What we are seeing is a convergence in economic fortunes, not female ascendance. Between 2010 and 2011, men and women working full time year-round both experienced a 2.5 percent decline in income. Men suffered roughly 80 percent of the job losses at the beginning of the 2007 recession. But the ripple effect of the recession then led to cutbacks in government jobs that hit women disproportionately. As of June 2012, men had regained 46.2 percent of the jobs they lost in the recession, while women had regained 38.7 percent of their lost jobs.
Emphasis mine. Tom Matlack’s written about this before, but in case you don’t want to click, I’ll just repost this graph, and then keep reposting it until someone notices.
Kindly stop acting like movement toward equality is some godawful gender disaster, opinion-havers.
What’s better than just her economic analysis, though, is where Ms. Coontz goes with the social role of men. For example, that whole idea that men are becoming loutish, uncivilized adolescents? Ms. Coontz proves you should never bring sitcom jokes to a hard-data fight:
Most men are in fact behaving better than ever. Domestic violence rates have been halved since 1993, while rapes and sexual assaults against women have fallen by 70 percent in that time. In recent decades, husbands have doubled their share of housework and tripled their share of child care.
Wow, dumb gender stereotype fails to be supported by real-world evidence. Golly, didn’t see that coming.
The real payoff, to my mind, comes on page three of the article, when she gets into the underlying emotional reasons so many people seem so eager to buy into this end-of-men scenario: we’re butting up against the narrow, confining edges of male gender performance.
One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood.
Preach it, sister!
The masculine mystique is institutionalized in work structures, according to three new studies forthcoming in the Journal of Social Issues. Just as women who display “masculine” ambitions or behaviors on the job are often penalized, so are men who engage in traditionally female behaviors, like prioritizing family involvement. Men who take an active role in child care and housework at home are more likely than other men to be harassed at work.
Amen!
Men who request family leave are often viewed as weak or uncompetitive and face a greater risk of being demoted or downsized. And men who have ever quit work for family reasons end up earning significantly less than other male employees, even when controlling for the effects of age, race, education, occupation, seniority and work hours. Now men need to liberate themselves from the pressure to prove their masculinity.
Yes, yes, and hell yes. This is a case I’ve been making for a while. The crisis facing American men today is not that we are somehow “losing” to women. Times are hard for both men and women economically, so that’s not the crisis facing men either. The crisis is that the roles we have been taught to play are inadequate to the lives we live. It is that we do not learn the vocabulary to talk about our pain and where it comes from. It is that we are still just starting to fight our way free of the straitjacket of all the things we’re “supposed” to be, and taking our first steps to discovering who we actually are.
Stephanie Coontz gets it right. Men aren’t ending—we’re finally beginning.
Photo—Young businessman kneeling on a cliff from Shutterstock
About Noah Brand
Amen! Thank you for injecting sanity into the conversation.
Let’s assume that women enter college and outperform men because both sexes realize that men have a man premium when it comes to work. How does this explain the educational performance gap in secondary and primary education? When I was in school, I never considered that I’d be making more than a woman so I could slack. I doubt most 10 or even 15 year old boys would. Does it make sense that women are outperforming men in college because girls are outperforming boys in primary school? If boys learn a dislike for education at the primary and secondary level, does that lead to them not wanting to pursue it at the post secondary level? Could it be that the educational system especially at the primary and secondary level disadvantage boys? Could that be because women make up the overwhelming majority of the educators?
It was a well written article on the whole, but I’m always concerned that when people dismiss the end of man trope, they use it as an excuse not to address the issues of men and boys. The achievement gap especially in primary school and secondary school, but also in college is a legitimate concern. Men are killed at 4 times the rate of women. Men commit suicide at 4 times the rate of women. Men die in workplace accidents at about 5 times the rate of women. The death premium was never even mentioned in the article and those stats don’t even include soldiers where men are killed and maimed in much larger numbers than women.
Even the wage gap doesn’t take into consideration wage redistribution. They don’t look at the earned income tax credit as income nor do they count government assistance. If the government gave me X amount of money if I earned less than Y, would I put in the extra hours to earn Y? Some economists factor in the reduced hours, but they don’t count the income received for not working those hours. They don’t look at the child tax credit or alimony / child support paid to an ex spouse.
We have a society where large swaths of the population no longer value education. It’s very unfortunate. Boys are rewarded for being good at sports and for adopting aggressively masculine attitudes and behaviors. Boys who are shy and excel in school are reviled as nerds or possibly gay. How do we change these attitudes? I think it is a long term societal problem we need to come to grips with.
One thing to keep in kind is that women are not exactly dominating the highest paid professions in the U.S. I live in Silicon Valley and despite a few female outliers like Marissa Meyer or Carli Fiorina who get a lotof press coverage, high tech is still dominated by men. A large percentage of those men are from Asia or are first generation Asian Americans, where there is no stigma against doing well in school. In fact, it is the opposite in those cultures. Families expect their children to study and get good grades. Men also still dominate Wall Street, finance and the upper echelons of corporate management in American companies.
I’ve read that much of the gender difference in rates of college degrees awarded to women vs. men is because more women get degrees in nursing and other health care fields that require technical certifications. Most of those jobs — physician’s assistants, nursing assistants, home health care aides etc. – are relatively low status jobs and don’t pay that well, but for the average woman, it is a lot better than a retail job making minimum wage.
Where I think we have a real problem is in finding jobs and careers for the average guy who doesn’t have the inclination or resources or connections to become a Facebook engineer, financial analyst or corporate executive. Those types of guys used to get decent jobs in construction or manufacturing, but what are they going to do when those jobs are gone?
You make good points, but I don’t think that paints the total picture. The last time I checked boys outperformed girls on the standardized SAT test yet they are rated much lower by educators.
“Average scores dropped 5 points for females and 2 points for males. While females represent more than half (53.5%) of test takers, their total average score (1496) is 27 points below the average score for males (1523).”
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-08-25-SAT-scores_N.htm
I know that I (granted Asian American) was considered the 7th or 8th best math student in my grade school (6th to 8th grades). The top 5 or 6 students were girls, who actually got additional math coaching after class. In high school I was ranked 130 / 140 something out of a class of just over 300. When we took the Iowa exams, the top 2 or 3 scorers were boys. I outscored the top girl by double digits. On the SAT, I scored in the top 2% in both math and English and the top 1% overall.
I see a problem when educators consistently rank boy’s ability as less than girls, yet boys seem to have comparable abilities. If you tell a child he’s not as good he might start to believe it. If an educator believes it, will they invest as much in that child? I know my grade school math teacher didn’t.
Yes, society values boys for the athletic ability, but society also values girls for the beauty. Yes, family values and support can overcome societal expectations, but girls have as much to overcome as boys. I think the difference is the support girls get within the educational establishment. It’s definitely worth looking at.
FYI: The gender gap in higher education is lowest among Asian Americans at 49% male and 51% female.
I think you hit it on the head J.A.. After sheapearderding 3 girls through high school , where at any hiccup, there was an army of mentors, phsycologists ever availble at a moments notice, it was quite disheartining when my son was in high school and I couldn’t even get help finding a tutor for math(Which I was willing to pay out of my own pocket). I mean , if state aid wasn’t attached to attendance, I really do’t think that they’d give a shit if he showed up at all!
Thanks for posting, Noah. I missed this article and am glad you called attention to it. Stephanie Coontz is a good researcher and writer, and her work on the history of marriage and families is enriched by her historian’s rigor and fact-based analysis. I especially recommend her book “Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage” for a historical look at Western marriage throughout a long span of history and how it is intimately tied in practice, convention, and value to political, economic, and religious trends. She is very fair in covering gender roles as well as class differences, and as you stated, she is a breath of fresh and critically thinking air after all the “lifestyles of the rich New Yorkers” pieces that seem to be written by “writers” who surveyed a couple of their NY friends and extrapolated to everyone everywhere.
Yup. On your last point, that’s why I’ve stopped reading gender/relationship articles from Hannah Rosin and others in the Atlantic….too white/wealthy/hetero-normative, and instead of being honest and saying “this is what’s true for me and people I know” they make over-broad generalizations & put style over substance/data.
+1 on your recommendation – Marriage, a History – I just started reading this and it’s very interesting.
I just can’t help but wonder if the article in the NYT is simply a counter to the end of men articles in order that the gov doesn’t start taking the end of men seriously and actually start doing something about it.
What would you think the gov’t would do about End of Men’s theses? That men are inflexible and not adapting? A TON of other researchers across the board have talked about the education gap as well as the problems young Black men in particular are experiencing. That’s not the problem anyone has with Hanna Rosin.
Hanna Rosin paints men as whiny, clingy spineless guys who need women to do everything for them and are going to crumble during all this change. No one should be a fan – feminists or masculinists.
I think Coontz goes a little farther than that. She seems to suggest that men have an advantage in society, men (and women) realize the fundamental advantage, and that this has resulted in men underachieving and women overachieving in education relative to each other. Coontz also seems to imply that men’s underachievement is irrelevant since it has little impact after college. If the gender gap is irrelevant to men’s financial success, why bother addressing it? I think that’s where the feeling that this can be construed to avoid addressing men’s issues in society comes from.
And, Joanna, how is that different from most of the pieces on Jezebel which, last I checked, has vastly greater readership than this site?
What would you think the gov’t would do about End of Men’s theses? That men are inflexible and not adapting? A TON of other researchers across the board have talked about the education gap as well as the problems young Black men in particular are experiencing. That’s not the problem anyone has with Hanna Rosin.
But even still when it comes to trying to get something going on a larger level for men, as men, its still considered a no no. There is still this idea that being a male means that you are straight up immune to what is considered “real” oppressions and -isms.
Hanna Rosin paints men as whiny, clingy spineless guys who need women to do everything for them and are going to crumble during all this change. No one should be a fan – feminists or masculinists.
And I’m glad folks on all sides are figuring this out. Too long men have been getting painted up as what you say here, or as thinking that women somehow own them something when at best it’s small subsets of men that engage in such damaging thought.
Men suffered roughly 80 percent of the job losses at the beginning of the 2007 recession. But the ripple effect of the recession then led to cutbacks in government jobs that hit women disproportionately. As of June 2012, men had regained 46.2 percent of the jobs they lost in the recession, while women had regained 38.7 percent of their lost jobs.
Let’s say 1,000,000 losses, 800,000 female, 200,000 male.
369,000 men got their job back, 431,000 men remained without a job. 77,400 women got their job back, 122,600 still without a job. So basically men lost 4x as many jobs, got back 4x as many jobs yet still remain jobless at 4x the rate of women and no one sees a problem here? Or is there additional data not being shared? Did the 80% drop in the next year?
“Most men are in fact behaving better than ever. Domestic violence rates have been halved since 1993, while rapes and sexual assaults against women have fallen by 70 percent in that time. In recent decades, husbands have doubled their share of housework and tripled their share of child care.”
And sadly women are behaving worse than ever, the rate of sexual abuse perpetrated by females against men has risen sharply, rates of domestic abuse have also risen sharply so what’s the point here? Men behave better, women behave worse? Or does increasing your power in society also increase the rate of abuse your gender inflicts?
I am kinda wondering the same.
What we are seeing is a convergence in economic fortunes, not female ascendance. Between 2010 and 2011, men and women working full time year-round both experienced a 2.5 percent decline in income. Men suffered roughly 80 percent of the job losses at the beginning of the 2007 recession. But the ripple effect of the recession then led to cutbacks in government jobs that hit women disproportionately. As of June 2012, men had regained 46.2 percent of the jobs they lost in the recession, while women had regained 38.7 percent of their lost jobs.
I am hoping this bit was meant to mean, “Women aren’t doing too well either.” but a part of me wonders if this is actually supposed to mean, “But look, women actually do have it worse!”.
I took it as deceptive math.
“But the ripple effect of the recession then led to cutbacks in government jobs that hit women disproportionately.”
What was the proportion? 48% to 52% would be disproportional, but would come nowhere near 80% to 20 %. Would that support her position though? She leaves out the proportion in hopes people would assume that they were equal.
Yeah looks like men copped it 4x worse, were there any programs made for men or women to get them back into jobs after that?
Archy,
1. That was why Coontz was so careful to equate an actual percentage (80%) with a undefined number (disproportionate). It was intellectually dishonest.
2. “Or does increasing your power in society also increase the rate of abuse your gender inflicts?”
Well, isn’t history replete with examples of one set of humans who become empowered (having been previously abused), who then inflict abuse on others? I don’t think it is gender-specific. It may not even be species-specific. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Not going to debate the statistics or what they mean. I’m just glad that a woman has decided to fight the zombie known as the “End of Men” meme. Could someone also clue Hollywood that the “Dufus Dad” stereotype also needs to be given a rest, and while they’re at it the “Attack On White Men” theme of politics can also be shelved.
I’m e-mailing this post and the story from the NYT to my friends.
Nothing to add… just noting there’s good stuff all around on this one. Well done, folks.
Can I add that I find it encouraging to see a woman stand up for men in such a public and generally respected forum as the NYT?
I feel like in this day and age, it can be challenging as a woman to speak about men and the issues facing men without being accused of switching sides, so to speak. Feminism’s effect is so widespread that I’d hazard a guess that most modern women, even if they don’t call themselves feminists, have feminist-influenced opinions re: women’s rights, ability to earn as much as men, and sexist treatment of women (at the very least, this can be said for many liberal women).
So when a woman starts saying “No, seriously, what about teh menz?” and speaking earnestly to their issues and difficulties, she risks being looked at as a traitor to the sisterhood. I can only assume men have a similar experience when they take up feminist causes and stances.
On that level, I’m gratified and appreciative to see this article.
@jOANNA: The problems facing African American males are at least partially related to a host of interrelated issues which affect all men. The idea that it is because he has failed in some way to adapt as well as say the almighty, all powerful, African American women is suspect at best. I am black and have raised two boy’s and a girl. The reality is that my sons were treated very differently than she was.They had much shorter behavioral limits than she did. For all of the black woman’s reputation for strength and independence( like most women) she still imposes upon him standards of maleness that are based almost solely on the protector/protector thesis; he can’t win that fight. Even when he does adapt, like I did becoming a stay at home dad because it was best for the family, he is seen as not masculine enough.And there are no bold black men in the public sphere offering anything different. Some of the most damaging words I heard about black men growing up came from my mother, other black women, and from films,plays,movies by black women.