This is not surprising to me. There is so much effort and funding put into funneling girls into STEM there is not much leftover to help boys do anything. These things shouldn't be zero sum, but that's the unfortunate reality on the ground in some cases.
> These things shouldn't be zero sum, but that's the unfortunate reality on the ground in some cases.
A lot more things are zero-sum than not, especially in the short-term, which the US revels in running on (e.g. the next annual report, the next election cycle, the next super bowl. Everyone is obsessed with the short term) - land, job vacancies, potential dating mates, etc.
I'm not sure why this trope still hasn't died yet. I guess a whole generation made their careers during ZIRP era, so their worldview is extremely skewed.
> there is not much leftover to help boys do anything.
As someone that competed in FRC for all of high school, I don't understand how an informed person could come to this conclusion unless they are trolling. STEM classes and extracurriculars are veritable boys clubs - go look up the team composites for your school's local robotics club and count the ratio yourself. It's a blowout, and while marketing STEM to young women can end up ham-fisted (as it so often is for young men), motivating girls isn't taking any opportunities away from boys.
You are either misinformed or arguing in bad faith. Boys that want to participate in STEM aren't any more impeded today than they were prior.
Also did FRC in HS. It's much more complicated than that. The high achieving boys did FRC and were wildly over-represented, but for every one of them there were five or six boys who just kind of...existed.
We have a real problem here but nobody wants to acknowledge it because the optics given the past couple decades of social progress are uncomfortable. There's nothing wrong with wanting to provide opportunities specifically for under performing young men even if it feels icky. We just need to be intelligent about it.
So... do we train them to work factory jobs in Mexico? I just don't understand what an equitable solution looks like, if you perceive this as a specifically-male epidemic. It seems infinitely more likely to me that people are self-selecting for what they are capable of, or hindered by things like a rough family life or low-paying service job. You're not going to create special opportunities for these people that aren't grossly unfair or outright unhelpful.
I agree that there is an intelligent solution here, but I don't understand why it necessitates scale-tipping because some men are less successful than others. There will always be a 75th percentile.
It's a bit of a weird situation and there isn't an easy answer yet, but it's something that at a minimum bears garnering some research money. If the trend continues and it ends up that being a woman means you're significantly more likely to have career success across the bell curve then yeah, we'll probably need support programs for men just like we had for women in the decades prior.
I have theories about the underlying issues though and I suspect you do too. It's less of an opportunity issue and more of a culture one. Women are being taught they need to fight and men are being taught they need to just exist. So they're doing just that.
Given the salary disparity between men and women and the discrepancies between those of men and women holding positions of importance, I would say “just existing” is a perfectly way for guys to be. Not everyone can be the top and that’s totally fine. You can still do pretty nicely for yourself and your fam by “just existing.”
> Boys that want to participate in STEM aren't any more impeded today than they were prior.
You're making my point for me. This is the line that was said about girls 30 years ago. They were not impeded from entering STEM either, but they also weren't encouraged like the boys were at the time. Boys are no longer encouraged or nurtured to do anything by our public schools (STEM or otherwise). The lucky ones have examples in their lives they can model after.
How recent? I experienced stuff like that from an all female teaching staff around ~20 years ago but I have no idea what it looks like now.
I wanted to learn more about computers but the staff that were savvy were much more excited about teaching the girls, they rightly figured I'd have no trouble exploring that interest. At the time it was fine if mildly frustrating, now I'd be pretty worried about such behavior.
Nowadays? It's so bad and cringeworthy that my young sons picked up on the STEM girlie nonsense and are actively rebelling against it and running with whatever they have. Leaving the coddled scrubs behind.
You think encouraging more people to become more interested in jobs that are essentially the future of civilization is “nonsense”? Don’t you think that’s odd?
Boys don't need to be told by their school what their aptitude is, and neither do women. Getting women into STEM isn't about diverting potential dentists and heart surgeons to be white-collar desk jockeys - it's about stopping them from the same fate you're so afraid of men ending up at!
Dentists and heart surgeons are still STEM. The S stands for science, guy.
As for the "fate" you're fearmongering about for women, what is that to you? I'm not worried about men staying home to raise children. Hurray for anyone that can do that in this economy. I'm worried about men rotting away on drugs, committing crime, and ending up dead or in prison.
You acknowledge that girls need encouragement but think boys will just "figure it out." It's you who must be trolling.
That’s not really what’s at stake here though is it. it would take a HUGE structural shift for men to go from “less actively recruited to be in STEM than before” to “being in jail and on drugs.”
I spent every week of my college career wishing I could be so privileged as to be a woman in STEM. They are preferenced in literally every single thing that involves a selection, and on top of that they get access to tens of thousands of dollars of financial aid only available to women. There are sparse few (read:none) equivalents for young men.
Not three days ago I was four feet from the woman that runs my entire division at a large financial institution, who complained that there were far too many men in our SOC last time she was there. This time she was quite chuffed that we had hired two more ladies - after silently changing our hiring criteria to filter out any men.
I don't think it's possible for the younger generation to appreciate how much better it is for boys in STEM today than it used to be.
Missing in this discussion is what it meant to be a boy interested in STEM socially.
It's cool to be an engineer today. It pays very well, it's easy to make friends, find a mate, etc.
Those of us who grew up as nerdy kids in the 1980s dealt with the kind of bullying and social ostracism that future generations cannot even imagine.
Are boys being downplayed in favor of girls for advancement opportunities? Maybe. But you still have it MUCH MUCH better in a holistic sense than we did, to a degree you'll never know.
I had a chance to read the article, and what bothers me is that it seems to be inserting a form of sex-based zero sum game as opposing forces.
In my experiences, work and its nature has structurally changed since Covid. We're going into a recession, and AI is doing weird stuff to a whole lot of areas.
Basically, this article smells rotten as its initial presumption. There's a great deal of instability with our whole system. Blaming variants of sexism seems intellectually lazy.
There was a lot about this article that was intellectually lazy. It barely qualified as journalism. One stat about suicide without looking at any confounding factors or other correlations? Talk about a hack job.
There are many white collar industries where almost everyone came from universities where you have the freedom to pick your major and 2/3 of the student body were women. In these workplaces you will hear an immense amount of fuss over evening out any lopsided ratios, even pre-Elon Twitter stating they were going to make Twitter's workforce more than 50% women (??).
Never have I heard a peep from these people any of my years of university or the workplace advocating more male representation in university. There is 100x the uproar about making university admissions match national race representation than there is gender representation. Why is that?
Because men are the largest predominant engineering demographic? Increasing male representation homogenizes your workforce and reduces the number of perspectives you're bringing to the problem. A product design team staffed only by men is destined to collapse unless they're only trying to market to other men. A smart board of directors knows that you make twice as much money targeting every demographic instead of just the one you've hired to build the product.
> A product design team staffed only by men is destined to collapse unless they're only trying to market to other men
If this is demonstrably true, where are the hedge funds shorting male-dominant firms and venture funds getting the edge by doing the opposite in the startup land?
Men who are talented still have tons of options, like in finance, sports, writing, STEM subjects, politics, social media etc. They can go the social media influencer route, or the 6-figure-tech route, or the consultant or other white collar route. But those in the middle or worse in the 'talent distribution' have far fewer options, typically limited to the low-paying service sector or the injury-prone blue collar route. So these men are also probably more inclined to drop out of society by living with friends and family instead of slaving away forever for mediocre pay. The value proposition does not justify the extra work of putting in 100% if you're not making much money and there is little hope of advancement.
This is interesting - I think there is a perception that just doing okay is somehow the same as failing. If you can’t be the richest, then nothing else is good enough and dropping out is the better option. It’s a bummer.
Probably not the richest - just reach enough. If you can't get a decent life - and decency of life is very related to the life of those around you, including those who are perceived as more talented - there's a strong disincentive to work well.
As a white male in California when I was 18 my UC advisor advised me to "save the world" by killing myself as if I was an extra object to be destroyed.
You should've recorded the advisor on audio. It is why I record all meetings, as is legal in my state. It's reason enough to get the advisor fired and also to sue.
Make men feel less fickle about competing in the job market with women? Or amplify sexism to the point that society regresses and jobs become correlated with gender again.
Would you volunteer to appear in these photos, for this story? Would you pose for the Wall Street Journal in your socks? I would be mortified to be featured in a piece like this. I wouldn't pick up the phone. Who wants to be the subject of, basically, "take a look at these losers?' How did this happen? Were they tricked?
Statistically speaking, let’s look at the data:
- salary wise, men are still paid more in every profession (even those that are considered “traditionally female”).
- Men hold 92% of CEO positions
- Men hold 70% of executive positions.
- Men make up 70% of Congress. - 80+% or so of engineers are male.
- Men make median 67k a year and woman make 53k.
So, when you look at actual, real data, men are doing fine (and good! It’s good for everyone when good men do well).
The only truly alarming issue, from a data standpoint, is the number of men who somehow believe things are worse for them, and the resentful feelings that belief (however unsupported by the facts) brings.
I wonder where that comes from and who is benefiting from making people feel that way? Could it because of hackneyed journalism like this article? Online influencers? Politicians who want to earn votes through fear-mongering and divisiveness?
These feelings and ideas aren’t good for society. You’re doing well and you should feel good about it. If you’re not, it’s not because of your gender and it doesn’t help anyone to lay the problem there. It’s not productive.
The fact that you're still citing a wage gap that has been debunked for over a decade means you're not equipped to have this conversation.
Among using CEOs and Congress as an example, which is the top 0.001% of men.
For every statistic you cited, you can find one that shows that a vastly higher number of men in the lower quartile are doing both worse than their counterparts in other developed countries and worse than women as well.
I’m not citing a wage gap. I’m just citing the numbers from the department of labor. They’re just numbers and you can’t debunk numbers.
Can you please cite… anything… to support your argument that “men” as a group are somehow in crisis? Because, as a statistical group, strictly based on gender and solely based on numbers, “men” seem to be doing fine.
I don't think there was any trickery or anything. I kept getting this nagging feeling as I read the article that the kids are a little spoiled. The parents appear to be wealthy, and the kids appear to be comfortable, albeit miserable. My impression is that they have not been really pushed, and maybe still are a bit immature and perhaps coddled.
In my humble opinion, I think a lot of the younger generation is waiting for someone to give them something. To give them a job, give them money, and lost the drive and ambition to go out and seize it for themselves.
> He left college after his first semester when, like his older brother Daniel, he couldn’t figure out what he was doing there.
> Daniel, who left college midway through his sophomore year after indecision about his major spiraled into a larger existential crisis.
Perhaps the effort to shove everyone and their brother into higher education is a bit misguided?
With schools lowering standards to boost graduation rates, and politicians conveniently promising yet more college affordability every 4 years, it’s hard to avoid perceiving one’s self-worth through the lens of college performance.
This is not surprising to me. There is so much effort and funding put into funneling girls into STEM there is not much leftover to help boys do anything. These things shouldn't be zero sum, but that's the unfortunate reality on the ground in some cases.
https://archive.is/N0YE7
Boys, as a group, are actually doing just fine for themselves - STEM programs or no STEM programs. That article does nothing to indicate otherwise.
> These things shouldn't be zero sum, but that's the unfortunate reality on the ground in some cases.
A lot more things are zero-sum than not, especially in the short-term, which the US revels in running on (e.g. the next annual report, the next election cycle, the next super bowl. Everyone is obsessed with the short term) - land, job vacancies, potential dating mates, etc.
I'm not sure why this trope still hasn't died yet. I guess a whole generation made their careers during ZIRP era, so their worldview is extremely skewed.
> there is not much leftover to help boys do anything.
As someone that competed in FRC for all of high school, I don't understand how an informed person could come to this conclusion unless they are trolling. STEM classes and extracurriculars are veritable boys clubs - go look up the team composites for your school's local robotics club and count the ratio yourself. It's a blowout, and while marketing STEM to young women can end up ham-fisted (as it so often is for young men), motivating girls isn't taking any opportunities away from boys.
You are either misinformed or arguing in bad faith. Boys that want to participate in STEM aren't any more impeded today than they were prior.
Also did FRC in HS. It's much more complicated than that. The high achieving boys did FRC and were wildly over-represented, but for every one of them there were five or six boys who just kind of...existed.
We have a real problem here but nobody wants to acknowledge it because the optics given the past couple decades of social progress are uncomfortable. There's nothing wrong with wanting to provide opportunities specifically for under performing young men even if it feels icky. We just need to be intelligent about it.
So... do we train them to work factory jobs in Mexico? I just don't understand what an equitable solution looks like, if you perceive this as a specifically-male epidemic. It seems infinitely more likely to me that people are self-selecting for what they are capable of, or hindered by things like a rough family life or low-paying service job. You're not going to create special opportunities for these people that aren't grossly unfair or outright unhelpful.
I agree that there is an intelligent solution here, but I don't understand why it necessitates scale-tipping because some men are less successful than others. There will always be a 75th percentile.
It's a bit of a weird situation and there isn't an easy answer yet, but it's something that at a minimum bears garnering some research money. If the trend continues and it ends up that being a woman means you're significantly more likely to have career success across the bell curve then yeah, we'll probably need support programs for men just like we had for women in the decades prior.
I have theories about the underlying issues though and I suspect you do too. It's less of an opportunity issue and more of a culture one. Women are being taught they need to fight and men are being taught they need to just exist. So they're doing just that.
Given the salary disparity between men and women and the discrepancies between those of men and women holding positions of importance, I would say “just existing” is a perfectly way for guys to be. Not everyone can be the top and that’s totally fine. You can still do pretty nicely for yourself and your fam by “just existing.”
> Boys that want to participate in STEM aren't any more impeded today than they were prior.
You're making my point for me. This is the line that was said about girls 30 years ago. They were not impeded from entering STEM either, but they also weren't encouraged like the boys were at the time. Boys are no longer encouraged or nurtured to do anything by our public schools (STEM or otherwise). The lucky ones have examples in their lives they can model after.
My first hand experience with how public schools treat girls vs boys nowadays (often in subtle ways) is:
Girls: You will be an astronaut stem president boss queen with less than $REPLACEMENT_RATE children! Boys: Hey how about be a girl
How recent? I experienced stuff like that from an all female teaching staff around ~20 years ago but I have no idea what it looks like now.
I wanted to learn more about computers but the staff that were savvy were much more excited about teaching the girls, they rightly figured I'd have no trouble exploring that interest. At the time it was fine if mildly frustrating, now I'd be pretty worried about such behavior.
Nowadays? It's so bad and cringeworthy that my young sons picked up on the STEM girlie nonsense and are actively rebelling against it and running with whatever they have. Leaving the coddled scrubs behind.
Shouldn't you teach your sons how to cooperate with the fairer sex instead of assuming that robots have cooties? This is silly.
You think encouraging more people to become more interested in jobs that are essentially the future of civilization is “nonsense”? Don’t you think that’s odd?
Boys don't need to be told by their school what their aptitude is, and neither do women. Getting women into STEM isn't about diverting potential dentists and heart surgeons to be white-collar desk jockeys - it's about stopping them from the same fate you're so afraid of men ending up at!
Dentists and heart surgeons are still STEM. The S stands for science, guy.
As for the "fate" you're fearmongering about for women, what is that to you? I'm not worried about men staying home to raise children. Hurray for anyone that can do that in this economy. I'm worried about men rotting away on drugs, committing crime, and ending up dead or in prison.
You acknowledge that girls need encouragement but think boys will just "figure it out." It's you who must be trolling.
That’s not really what’s at stake here though is it. it would take a HUGE structural shift for men to go from “less actively recruited to be in STEM than before” to “being in jail and on drugs.”
I spent every week of my college career wishing I could be so privileged as to be a woman in STEM. They are preferenced in literally every single thing that involves a selection, and on top of that they get access to tens of thousands of dollars of financial aid only available to women. There are sparse few (read:none) equivalents for young men.
Not three days ago I was four feet from the woman that runs my entire division at a large financial institution, who complained that there were far too many men in our SOC last time she was there. This time she was quite chuffed that we had hired two more ladies - after silently changing our hiring criteria to filter out any men.
More awesome young men for my company to hire!
I used to try and make my team look like a Star Trek crew. Not anymore. Competence over anything.
I don't think it's possible for the younger generation to appreciate how much better it is for boys in STEM today than it used to be.
Missing in this discussion is what it meant to be a boy interested in STEM socially.
It's cool to be an engineer today. It pays very well, it's easy to make friends, find a mate, etc.
Those of us who grew up as nerdy kids in the 1980s dealt with the kind of bullying and social ostracism that future generations cannot even imagine.
Are boys being downplayed in favor of girls for advancement opportunities? Maybe. But you still have it MUCH MUCH better in a holistic sense than we did, to a degree you'll never know.
> It's cool to be an engineer today. It pays very well, it's easy to make friends, find a mate, etc.
One of those things might be true.
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I had a chance to read the article, and what bothers me is that it seems to be inserting a form of sex-based zero sum game as opposing forces.
In my experiences, work and its nature has structurally changed since Covid. We're going into a recession, and AI is doing weird stuff to a whole lot of areas.
Basically, this article smells rotten as its initial presumption. There's a great deal of instability with our whole system. Blaming variants of sexism seems intellectually lazy.
There was a lot about this article that was intellectually lazy. It barely qualified as journalism. One stat about suicide without looking at any confounding factors or other correlations? Talk about a hack job.
There are many white collar industries where almost everyone came from universities where you have the freedom to pick your major and 2/3 of the student body were women. In these workplaces you will hear an immense amount of fuss over evening out any lopsided ratios, even pre-Elon Twitter stating they were going to make Twitter's workforce more than 50% women (??).
Never have I heard a peep from these people any of my years of university or the workplace advocating more male representation in university. There is 100x the uproar about making university admissions match national race representation than there is gender representation. Why is that?
> Why is that?
Because men are the largest predominant engineering demographic? Increasing male representation homogenizes your workforce and reduces the number of perspectives you're bringing to the problem. A product design team staffed only by men is destined to collapse unless they're only trying to market to other men. A smart board of directors knows that you make twice as much money targeting every demographic instead of just the one you've hired to build the product.
> A product design team staffed only by men is destined to collapse unless they're only trying to market to other men
If this is demonstrably true, where are the hedge funds shorting male-dominant firms and venture funds getting the edge by doing the opposite in the startup land?
Seems like an obvious trade.
Men who are talented still have tons of options, like in finance, sports, writing, STEM subjects, politics, social media etc. They can go the social media influencer route, or the 6-figure-tech route, or the consultant or other white collar route. But those in the middle or worse in the 'talent distribution' have far fewer options, typically limited to the low-paying service sector or the injury-prone blue collar route. So these men are also probably more inclined to drop out of society by living with friends and family instead of slaving away forever for mediocre pay. The value proposition does not justify the extra work of putting in 100% if you're not making much money and there is little hope of advancement.
This is interesting - I think there is a perception that just doing okay is somehow the same as failing. If you can’t be the richest, then nothing else is good enough and dropping out is the better option. It’s a bummer.
Probably not the richest - just reach enough. If you can't get a decent life - and decency of life is very related to the life of those around you, including those who are perceived as more talented - there's a strong disincentive to work well.
.
Once again, Krugman said it first: we’re just 20 years behind Japan in everything.
As a white male in California when I was 18 my UC advisor advised me to "save the world" by killing myself as if I was an extra object to be destroyed.
You should've recorded the advisor on audio. It is why I record all meetings, as is legal in my state. It's reason enough to get the advisor fired and also to sue.
California is a two party consent state.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/99621/in-california-....
When the law protects abusers, sometimes you might have to break the law yourself.
I second this. I record all my work calls and meetings; Single notifier state. Primarily for my note taking and recall, but also CYA.
Sorry, what?
Is this hyperbole? That is tremendously disturbing if not. Even if it was presented for illustrative purposes, that is in extremely poor taste.
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It sounds like you are very heavily paraphrasing here, with the placement of your quotes.
[dead]
What can we do to stop the bleeding?
This is alarming and saddening. What can we do as a society to stop this bleeding?
What bleeding? Those three guys in the article do not constitute “bleeding.”
Make men feel less fickle about competing in the job market with women? Or amplify sexism to the point that society regresses and jobs become correlated with gender again.
[flagged]
Would you volunteer to appear in these photos, for this story? Would you pose for the Wall Street Journal in your socks? I would be mortified to be featured in a piece like this. I wouldn't pick up the phone. Who wants to be the subject of, basically, "take a look at these losers?' How did this happen? Were they tricked?
Who cares? And what's the point of bikeshedding around the real issue?
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Statistics confirm the structural issue in the article. So either you're delusional or pushing a narrative to alter my perception of reality.
Which one is it?
Which statistics? You’ve literally cited none.
Statistically speaking, let’s look at the data: - salary wise, men are still paid more in every profession (even those that are considered “traditionally female”). - Men hold 92% of CEO positions - Men hold 70% of executive positions. - Men make up 70% of Congress. - 80+% or so of engineers are male. - Men make median 67k a year and woman make 53k.
So, when you look at actual, real data, men are doing fine (and good! It’s good for everyone when good men do well).
The only truly alarming issue, from a data standpoint, is the number of men who somehow believe things are worse for them, and the resentful feelings that belief (however unsupported by the facts) brings.
I wonder where that comes from and who is benefiting from making people feel that way? Could it because of hackneyed journalism like this article? Online influencers? Politicians who want to earn votes through fear-mongering and divisiveness?
These feelings and ideas aren’t good for society. You’re doing well and you should feel good about it. If you’re not, it’s not because of your gender and it doesn’t help anyone to lay the problem there. It’s not productive.
The fact that you're still citing a wage gap that has been debunked for over a decade means you're not equipped to have this conversation.
Among using CEOs and Congress as an example, which is the top 0.001% of men.
For every statistic you cited, you can find one that shows that a vastly higher number of men in the lower quartile are doing both worse than their counterparts in other developed countries and worse than women as well.
I’m not citing a wage gap. I’m just citing the numbers from the department of labor. They’re just numbers and you can’t debunk numbers.
Can you please cite… anything… to support your argument that “men” as a group are somehow in crisis? Because, as a statistical group, strictly based on gender and solely based on numbers, “men” seem to be doing fine.
I don't think there was any trickery or anything. I kept getting this nagging feeling as I read the article that the kids are a little spoiled. The parents appear to be wealthy, and the kids appear to be comfortable, albeit miserable. My impression is that they have not been really pushed, and maybe still are a bit immature and perhaps coddled.
In my humble opinion, I think a lot of the younger generation is waiting for someone to give them something. To give them a job, give them money, and lost the drive and ambition to go out and seize it for themselves.
> The younger two dropped out of college
> He left college after his first semester when, like his older brother Daniel, he couldn’t figure out what he was doing there.
> Daniel, who left college midway through his sophomore year after indecision about his major spiraled into a larger existential crisis.
Perhaps the effort to shove everyone and their brother into higher education is a bit misguided?
With schools lowering standards to boost graduation rates, and politicians conveniently promising yet more college affordability every 4 years, it’s hard to avoid perceiving one’s self-worth through the lens of college performance.