Kitabı oku: «Of Boys and Men», sayfa 2

FIGURE 1-3 Women more educated, around the world

Share of 25–34-year-olds with tertiary educational attainment, by gender

Note: Select OECD countries. Year available varies slightly by country.

Source: OECD, “Educational Attainment and Labour-Force Status: ELS—Population Who Attained Tertiary Education, by Sex and Age Group,” data accessed November 15, 2021.

It is true that some subjects, such as engineering, computer sciences and math, still skew male. Considerable efforts and investments are being made by colleges, nonprofit organizations, and policymakers to close these gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). But even here the news is generally encouraging. Women now account for 36% of the undergraduate degrees awarded in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.⁶⁴ But there have been no equivalent gains for men in traditionally female subjects, such as teaching or nursing, and these are occupational fields likely to see significant job growth. (I will be saying more about how to get more men into these HEAL jobs in chapter 11.)

In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree.⁶⁵ Figure 1-3 shows the gap in some selected nations. As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BY STEALTH

Almost every college in the U.S. now has mostly female students. The last bastions of male dominance to fall were the Ivy League colleges, but every one has now swung majority female.⁶⁶ The steady feminization of college campuses may not trouble too many people, but there is at least one group whose members really worry about it: admissions officers. “once you become decidedly female in enrollment,” writes Jennifer Delahunty, Kenyon College’s former dean of admissions, “fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.” In a provocative New York Times opinion piece, plaintively headlined “To All The Girls I’ve Rejected,” she said publicly what everyone knows privately: “Standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.”⁶⁷

The evidence for this stealthy affirmative action program in favor of men seems quite clear. At private colleges the acceptance rates for men are considerably higher than for women.⁶⁸ At Vassar, for example, where 67% of matriculating students are female, the acceptance rate for male applicants in fall 2020 was 28%, compared to 23% for women.⁶⁹ You might be wondering if this is because Vassar was a women’s college until 1969. But Kenyon, which was all-male until the same year, has a similar challenge.⁷⁰ By contrast, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of students, are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex. This is one reason they skew even more female than private institutions.

You might think that this discrimination on the basis of sex by private colleges is illegal. But read the small print of Title IX, Section 1681 (a) (1), which contains a specific exemption from sex discrimination provisions for admissions to private undergraduate colleges. To be clear, this provision was made to protect the small number of single-sex colleges, rather than to allow discrimination in favor of men in the other institutions. The evidence for the gender bias was so strong that in 2009, an investigation was launched by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, despite the Section 1681 loophole. Gail Heriot, the commissioner who instigated the probe, says that there was “evidence of purposeful discrimination.”⁷¹ But two years later, the matter was dropped, ostensibly on the grounds of “inadequate data.” Nobody knows for sure what happened behind the scenes. But I think Hanna Rosin’s assessment is right. “Acknowledging the larger dynamic that would give rise to such discrimination was a whole other kind of threat,” she writes. “It meant admitting that in these realms it was in fact men who needed the help.”⁷²

As Kenyon’s Delahunty put it candidly in a September 2021 interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely. The question is, is that right or wrong?”⁷³ My answer is that it is wrong. Even though I am deeply worried about the way boys and men are falling behind in education, affirmative action cannot be the solution. (Or perhaps I should say, not yet.) To a large extent, the gaps at the college level reflect the ones in high school. Differences in early attainment at college can be explained by differences in high school GPA, for example. Reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, and these are areas where boys lag furthest behind girls.⁷⁴ Equalizing verbal skills at age 16 would close the gender gap in college enrollment in England, according to a study by Esteban Aucejo and Jonathan James.⁷⁵ The most urgent task, then, is to improve outcomes for boys in the K–12 school system.

STOP OUTS AND DROPOUTS

But getting more men to college is just the first step. They also need help getting through college. With most students now going to some kind of college at some point, the big challenge is completion. Here, too, there is a gender gap. Male students are more likely to “stop out,” that is, to take a detour away from their studies, and they are also more likely to “drop out” and fail to graduate at all. The differences are not trivial: 46% percent of female students enrolling in a public 4-year college have graduated 4 years later; for male students, the proportion is 35%. (The gap shrinks somewhat for 6-year graduation rates.)⁷⁶

In 2019, Matthew Chingos, director of the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, in collaboration with the New York Times, created a league table of colleges based on their dropout rates. To judge the performance of institutions fairly, Chingos took into account the kind of students they enrolled, since “on average, colleges have lower graduation rates when they enroll more lower-income students, more Black and Latino students, more men, more older students and more students with low SAT or ACT scores.”⁷⁷ In other words, colleges should not be penalized for having higher dropout rates because they enroll more disadvantaged students. When I read that article, the addition of “more men” in that category jumped out. It shows that the educational underperformance of half the population is now a routine fact to social scientists, one to be added to the standard battery of statistical controls.

The numbers from Chingos suggest that all else equal, an all-female four-year school would have a graduation rate 14 percentage points higher than an all-male school.⁷⁸ This is not a small difference. In fact, taking into account other factors, such as test scores, family income, and high school grades, male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, Black students, or foreign-born students.

But the underperformance of males in college is shrouded in a good deal of mystery. World-class scholars have pored over the low rates of male college enrollment and completion, piling up data and running regressions. I have read these studies and spoken to many of the scholars. The short summary of their conclusions is: “We don’t know.” economic incentives do not provide an answer. The value of a college education is at least as high for men as for women.⁷⁹ Even a scholar like MIT’s David Autor, who has dug deeply into the data, ends up describing male education trends as “puzzling.”⁸⁰ Mary Curnock Cook, the former head of the UK’s university and college admissions service, says she is “baffled.”⁸¹ When I asked one of my sons for his thoughts, he looked up from his phone, shrugged, and said, “I dunno.” Which may in fact have been the perfect answer.

One factor that gets too little attention in these debates is the developmental gap, with the male prefrontal cortex struggling to catch up with the female one well into the early twenties. To me, it seems clear that girls and women were always better equipped to succeed at college, just as in high school, and that this has become apparent as gendered assumptions about college education have fallen away.⁸²

But I think there is an aspiration gap here too. Most young women today have it drummed into them how much education matters, and most want to be financially independent. Compared to their male classmates, they see their future in sharper focus. In 1980, male high school seniors were much more likely than their female classmates to say they definitely expected to get a 4-year degree, but within just two decades, the gap had swung the other way.⁸³ This may also be why many educational interventions, including free college, benefit women more than men; their appetite for success is just higher. Girls and women have had to fight misogyny without. Boys and men are now struggling for motivation within.

Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book had a gloomy title: The End of Men. But she remained hopeful, back then, that men would rise to the challenge, especially in education. “There’s nothing like being trounced year after year to make you reconsider your options,” she wrote.⁸⁴ So far, however, there is little sign of any reconsideration. The trends she identified have worsened. There has also been no rethinking of educational policy or practice. Curnock Cook correctly describes this as a “massive policy blind spot.”⁸⁵ With honorable exceptions—go Scotland!—policymakers have been painfully slow to adjust. Perhaps this is not surprising. The gender reversal in education has been astonishingly swift. It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity. Suddenly, north is south. Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls. Disorienting, to say the least. Small wonder our laws, institutions, even our attitudes, have not yet caught up. But catch up they must.

CHAPTER 2
WORKING MAN BLUES

Men Are Losing Ground in the Labor Market

In May 2019 I was moderating a panel discussion on inequality at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve. I asked Melissa Kearney, a top-notch economist, whether she was more worried about women or men. She took a moment. I’d sprung the question on her in front of a highly influential audience. “I am really worried about the extent to which men in the U.S. are being pushed to the side of economic, social and family life,” she responded. “For 20, 30 or 40 years . . . scholars focused on women and children. Now we really need to think about men.”⁸⁶

Kearney was brave to say it, and she is right. If we want a more dynamic economy and a better future for our children, we need to help the men who are struggling. In chapter 1, I described the challenge they face in schools. Here I turn to jobs. Growing numbers of men are detaching from paid work. For most of those who are in a job, wages have stagnated. In fact, one reason that the gender pay gap has narrowed is that median male pay has fallen, surely a suboptimal way to achieve equality. But while women have been catching up with men, workers on the top rungs of the economic ladder—men as well as women—have been pulling away from everyone else. The deepest fissures in the labor market are not those between men and women. They are between white and Black workers and between the upper middle class and the middle class and working class, the subjects of chapters 4 and 5.

“Many in the women’s movement and in the mass media complain that men just ‘don’t want to give up the reins of power,’” writes Susan Faludi. “But that would seem to have little applicability to the situations of most men, who individually feel not the reins of power in their hands but its bit in their mouths.”⁸⁷

I describe and explain here the declining economic fortunes of these men. It’s very important to see how these result from the fracturing of the labor market, rather than the frailties of the men themselves. It’s a structural problem, not a personal one.

MISSING MEN

“Over the last three decades,” write economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.”⁸⁸ If that sounds bad, it is. Labor force participation among men in the U.S. has dropped by 7 percentage points over the last half century, from 96 to 89%.⁸⁹ Even before COVID cratered the economy in 2020, there were 9 million men of prime working age who were not in employment. (Economists define the “prime” years as beginning at the age of 25 and ending, unnervingly, at 54.) A technical but important point is that most of the men who are not in work don’t count in official statistics as “unemployed,” because they aren’t looking for work. One in three men with only a high school education are now out of the labor force.⁹⁰ That is 5 million men, a reserve army of labor twice the size of the People’s Liberation Army of China.⁹¹

If you think of a man hit by economic trends, chances are that you have a middle-aged man in mind. But the problem is not just one for older men. The biggest fall in male employment has in fact been among young men, aged between 25 and 34, as figure 2-1 shows.⁹² (Now that is prime age.) Scholars are not sure why. Standard economic models struggle to explain it. One popular explanation is the attraction of video games, and it is easy to see how Assassin’s Creed could seem like a better way to spend your day than in a poorly paid, unappealing job. But there isn’t really any good evidence for this. A careful analysis of time-use data by University of North Carolina economist Gray Kimbrough finds that hours spent gaming have increased the most among men in their 20s, but from just three hours a week in 2005, to six hours a week in 2015.⁹³ Based on my own experience as a father of three sons, I honestly had to double-check that these numbers were really for hours per week rather than hours per day. The figure does not strike me as justification for a moral panic. Kimbrough also shows that men who leave employment do not increase the hours spent gaming, or at least not immediately.

Figure 2-1 Fewer men, more women at work

Change in employment to population ratio, 1979 to 2019

Note: Seasonally adjusted; ages 25–54; 1979 Q1 to 2019 Q4.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment-Population Ratio series.

The economic downturn of 2020 obviously caused employment levels for both men and women to plummet, as lockdowns put the economy into a state of suspended animation. In the space of just a few weeks, female employment fell by 16%, and male employment dropped by 13%.⁹⁴ The difference was partly the result of more women taking time away from employment to care for children, especially as schools and childcare providers closed, and the downturn was quickly dubbed a “she-cession.”⁹⁵ Certainly the 2020 recession was a departure from recent economic downturns in which “women’s employment declines were barely perceptible,” as Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson observes.⁹⁶ Most previous recessions have in fact been he-cessions, hitting male employment hardest.

But since the 2020 downturn was generated artificially by a pandemic, rather than by the usual economic cycle, the recovery was extremely rapid too. The CoVID-19 recession was very sharp but very short, lasting just two months, less than any previous downturn in U.S. history. The gender gap closed very quickly too. By october 2021, the 1.2 percentage point decline in labor force participation rates since the start of the pandemic was evenly divided between men and women.⁹⁷ There was some good news too: the proportion of female senior executives rose to 24% in 2020, up from 21% in 2019.⁹⁸

ROBOTS AND TRADE

Male employment has not fallen because men have suddenly become feckless or work-shy, but because of shifts in the structure of the economy. Simply put, male jobs have been hit by a one-two punch, of automation and free trade. Machines pose a greater threat to working men than to women for two reasons. First, the occupations most susceptible to automation are just more likely to employ men, as my colleague Mark Muro shows. “Men . . . make up over 70 percent of production occupations, over 80 percent of transportation occupations, and over 90 percent of construction and installation occupations,” he writes.⁹⁹ And these are “all occupational groups with current task loads that have above-average projected automation exposure.” By contrast, women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education.

Second, men often lack the skills required in an automating world. According to Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, “the high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future may involve skills better measured by EQ (a measure of emotional intelligence) than IQ.”¹⁰⁰ There is already evidence that the female advantage in “soft skills” is giving them an additional boost in the U.S. labor market, and that they are switching more quickly than men to “robot-proof” occupations.¹⁰¹ It is important to note, however, that there is a lot of uncertainty about the likely impact of automation. empirical estimates vary widely.¹⁰² Fears about automation have been around for a long time, and they are often a proxy for broader pessimism about economic trends.

One thing is certain. The long-run shift away from jobs requiring physical strength is going to continue. Fewer than one in ten jobs now require what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “heavy work,” which requires “occasionally lifting or carrying 51–100 pounds or frequently lifting or carrying 26–50 pounds.”¹⁰³ As the muscular demands of work decline, men are becoming physically weaker; one study of grip strength, a good marker of overall strength, shows a sharp decline among men.¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, and perhaps more surprisingly, women are getting physically stronger. In 1985, the average man in his early 30s could squeeze your hand with about 30 pounds more force than a similarly aged woman. Today, their grip strength is about the same.

The goal here is not to bring back brawny jobs for men, it is to help men adapt. Most of the occupations set to grow the most in coming years are female dominated.¹⁰⁵ There has been a commendable and largely successful push to get more girls and women into jobs that require STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills. But it is now even more important to encourage men into what I call HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) jobs, which are dominated by women.

Male workers are challenged on one side by robots, and on the other by workers in other countries. Free trade has become a hot political topic in recent years, especially in the U.S. and the UK. It is hard to untangle the empirical knots here. There is no doubt that Chinese imports caused declines in U.S. manufacturing employment, of around 2 to 3 million jobs.¹⁰⁶ Arguments continue, however, over whether there were offsetting increases in other kinds of jobs; how much the impact was restricted to certain places, especially the Midwest; whether the shock was short term, for just a few years after 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organization, or has had longer-lasting effects; and whether the reduced geographical mobility of workers has made matters worse. In other words, it is complicated. It is also very difficult to get a good economic measure of the benefits of cheaper Chinese goods for tens of millions of consumers (as well as for workers in China, of course—but that is a different argument).

I will say that the political elite spent decades complacently arguing that on net, and in the long run, free trade is good. And so it is. By definition, however, this means that some people, in some places, are being hurt right now. Not much was done to help these people, even by center-left politicians who claimed to be on the side of the working class. The assumption in policy circles that some of the winnings from free trade would be redistributed to the losers proved mostly false. The victims were basically left behind, told to buck up their ideas, engage in some “lifelong learning,” and get with the program. Up until 2017, for every dollar the U.S. government was spending on Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers, $25 were being spent on tax subsidies toward the endowments of elite colleges.¹⁰⁷ (The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 imposed a tax on the biggest of these funds.) In the populist backlash, the technocratic elite largely reaped what they sowed.

For men who are in work, pay levels are typically lower than in the past. The median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since. While women’s wages have risen across the board over the last four decades, wages for men on most rungs of the earnings ladder have stagnated. Only men at the top have seen strong earnings growth. Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less, in real terms, across their working life than those who started out in 1967. For women, by contrast, life-time earnings have risen by 33% over the same period (these numbers are at the median).¹⁰⁸ In the dry words of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The long-term trend in men’s earnings has been quite different than that for women.”¹⁰⁹

BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT GENDER PAY GAP?

When I hire a new research assistant, I ask them to read two books. The first is How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark, an excellent guide to sharp communication in a world of blogs and tweets (and yes, I am aware that the book you’re holding is rather long). The other is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, who is something of a hero to me. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a Swedish physician who became obsessed with statistical illiteracy. In Factfulness, he describes various biases, including the “straight line instinct,” an assumption that a historical trend line will continue unaltered into the future; the “negativity instinct,” which is a tendency to think things are likely getting worse; and the “gap instinct,” which is a “basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between.”¹¹⁰ As Rosling puts it, “We love to dichotomize.”

The gap instinct leads to two errors of perception. First, we fail to see how much overlap there is between two groups. Second, we fail to see the bigger gaps that typically exist within groups, rather than between them.

The gender pay gap is a case in point. A woman at the middle of the female wage distribution (for full-time, year-round workers) earns 82% as much as a man at the middle of the male one: in 2020, $891 and $1,082 a week, respectively.¹¹¹ When we hear about this gap, the thought that naturally gets generated is “women earn less than men.” But in fact, the distribution of women’s wages looks strikingly similar to the distribution of men’s wages, and a lot more similar today than just a few decades ago; figure 2-2 shows the wage distribution for men and women in 1979 and in 2019.

As you can see, the distributions now overlap rather tightly. In fact, 40% of women now earn more than the typical man, up from just 13% in 1979. That two in five women are earning more than what 50% of men earn seems counterintuitive to many people. In June 2021, I polled my Twitter followers, asking them what proportion of female workers they thought earned more than the median man: 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40%. The poll got just 264 votes, so I’m not going to make any scientific claims here. But my followers, being an academic kind of crowd, are likely better informed on this kind of thing than most. But still the votes were, in order, for 20%, 10%, 30% and, finally, the correct answer of 40%. The gap instinct is strong.

The wage charts in figure 2-2 illustrate the other danger of gap-instinct thinking, which is to miss the extent of differences within groups. The wage distributions of men and women overlap more than in 1979, but they are also much more spread out. The gap between high-wage women and low-wage women, and to a lesser extent between high-wage and low-wage men, has widened dramatically. The closeness of the male and female wage distributions is of course stupendously good news on the gender equality front. The last half century has seen what Claudia Goldin calls a “grand gender convergence,” with a dramatic narrowing in the gap between men and women, not only in earnings but in employment levels, hours worked, and occupation type.¹¹² It is also true that in recent years, however, progress on closing the pay gap has slowed, despite women’s successes in the classroom.

FIGURE 2-2 The shrinking pay gap

Male and female wage distributions 1979 and 2019

Note: 2019 dollars, adjusted for inflation with CPI-U-RS. The figure shows a smoothed line with the share of workers in each hourly $10 wage bin as displayed on the x-axis. Source: Current Population Survey, author’s calculations.

So, what is causing the remaining gap? The answer to this question matters a lot, especially when it comes to potential solutions.

The basic facts are not in dispute. As I have already said, the typical (i.e., median) full-time female worker earns about 82% as much as the typical man. The question is why. Here things quickly get heated. For the feminist Left, the pay gap proves patriarchy. “The wage gap is a blatantly unfair vestige of a patriarchal labor system that haunts women’s economic potential throughout their lives,” says Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women.¹¹³ Conservatives, meanwhile, dismiss the idea of a pay gap as a feminist myth, used to create the impression of inequalities that simply do not exist. The wage gap is a “massively discredited factoid,” says Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute.¹¹⁴ Sommers is not alone. In a 2019 survey, 46% of men and 30% of women said the problem of unequal pay was “made up to serve a political purpose.”¹¹⁵

The pay gap accurately describes the difference in the economic resources available to individual men and women in the middle of their respective wage distributions. It is not a myth. It is math. The real disagreement is not over whether the typical woman earns less than the typical man but why. Conservatives point to studies showing that once a range of factors influencing pay are taken into account—hours, industry, experience, seniority, location, and so on—the pay gap almost evaporates.¹¹⁶ Various studies of this kind put the adjusted gender pay gap at around 5%. In a foreword to a 2009 study commissioned by the federal government, Deputy Assistant Labor Secretary Charles James concluded that “the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct.”¹¹⁷

There is certainly very little evidence that women are paid less than men for doing the same work in the same way. Women are paid less because they do different work, or work differently, or both. But, of course, that is not the end of the story. Women may earn less because they occupy fewer senior positions, but that fact itself may be the result of institutional sexism. Similarly, it is true that women tend to be more clustered than men in lower-paying occupations and industries, which explains perhaps a third of the pay gap. But that may reflect socialized gender roles, not least in terms of family responsibilities, or a devaluation of work that is done by women, or both. In any case, while there is a pay gap between occupations, there is as big a gender pay gap within occupations.

THE PAY GAP IS A PARENTING GAP

The one-word explanation for the pay gap is: children. Among young adults, especially if they are childless, the pay gap has essentially disappeared.¹¹⁸ “There’s remarkable evidence that earnings for men and women move in sync up until the birth of a couple’s first child,” says economist Marianne Bertrand. “This is when women lose and they never recover.”¹¹⁹ To make matters worse, the crucial years for wage gains are from the mid-30s onward, which, as Michelle Budig, another top economist in the field, points out, is “the same period when intensive family responsibilities, particularly for mothers, are in full force.”¹²⁰ The earnings trajectory for women who do not have children looks similar to that for men. The one for mothers does not. The more children women have, the further behind they fall in terms of both employment and earnings.¹²¹

Some of the best proof that the gender pay gap is mostly a parenting pay gap comes from innovative studies in Sweden and Norway comparing new mothers in same-sex relationships with those in heterosexual relationships. Ylva Moberg, from the Swedish Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, shows that the impact on earnings for the birth mother is almost identical in both family types.¹²² Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones. Over time, the inequality seems to balance out in the lesbian couple if they have more than one child, as each takes their turn at being the birth mother. For heterosexual couples, by contrast, the gap gets wider with each child.

A study of bus and train drivers working for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel, a duo of Harvard economists, provides some strong evidence here too.¹²³ Women account for 30% of the drivers, and on average earn $0.89 for every dollar earned by their male peers. By focusing on men and women doing the same job for the same employer, Bolotnyy and Emanuel can tease out the various factors contributing to wage differences. They conclude that the pay gap “can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices.”¹²⁴ The men were twice as likely to work overtime (which pays extra), even at short notice. They also took fewer hours of unpaid leave, and so on. Among train drivers with children, the gaps were even wider. Fathers wanted even more overtime pay; mothers wanted more time off.