The End of (Working Class) Men*

American women earn only 78% of what men do. We’ve all heard this cause celebre. It’s utterly bogus. Women’s pay averages less than men’s because they do different jobs. But for comparable jobs, women who work as long as men earn virtually the same. And women tend to have different careers not because of discrimination but mainly because they’re different from men, with different temperaments, proclivities, talents, and goals. (If businesses really could hire equally qualified women cheaper than men, why would they employ any men?)

Meantime, all the nonsense about underpaid women misses something very important happening to men: their elimination from working class families.

Another cause celebre is inequality. But resentment against the 1% similarly misses the real problem, the growing societal divide between the well educated and the less educated. The former group tends to be affluent, and married, with stable families whose children repeat this. The less educated do not.** There’s your real inequality.

This story is complex. The pill, and entering the workforce, freed women from a lot of social and economic constraints toward getting and staying married. Unwed motherhood lost its stigma. Divorce got easier. And, while among the educated affluent, men remained attractive marriage partners, working class men did not. Indeed, lower income women can lose government benefits if they marry.

More: with educational opportunities equalized, females are proving better than males at school. That difference of temperament again. And a recent piece in The Economist showed how misleading is the idea of a pro-male pay gap, when it comes to the blue collar world. It profiled a Louisiana town where a lot of conventional “man jobs” have disappeared, leaving many males as unemployed layabouts. Yet, The Economist observes, plenty of the town’s women are working (and getting by, with no help from men): in motels, restaurants, shops, clinics, hair salons, government offices, etc. Unskilled, poorly educated men are unlikely to get, or even seek, many such jobs; less apt to be punctual, or pleasant to customers.
This drains the pool of marriageable blue collar men. Jail drains it further (especially among blacks). And that marriage market imbalance between the sexes gets magnified because “when women outnumber men, men become cads” (according to a study quoted by The Economist). That is, men in this social milieu, in a seller’s market, sensing they have the upper hand and access to sex, tend to treat women more abusively and less faithfully.

Further, whereas educated affluent males have gotten with the program of gender equality, helping with housework and child care, typical blue collar guys haven’t received this memo.

All this makes working class women get fed up with them (recalling Gloria Steinem’s line, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”). Even when they do marry, they report significantly less marital happiness than better educated and affluent couples, hence they’re more likely to split.

So it becomes a vicious circle in which mothers without husbands raise sons to predictably repeat the syndrome: no education, no job, no wife, no family, no nothin’. A much bigger societal problem than that phony 78% pay gap.

What can be done? The Economist suggests making school more boy-friendly. Certainly it’s criminal how many don’t even finish high school. For those, all other public policy ideas are probably futile. I’ve noted, too, how kids can be educated to pass the marshmallow test – imbuing a personality trait shown to be critical for life success. And, of course, we could at least correct the daft welfare and tax policies that, to this day, still penalize marriage.

But in the long run, men are probably doomed, with science enabling women to procreate without them.

* Hanna Rosin has authored a book called The End of Men. This recalls a riff in David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise, chronicling the rise of an imagined public intellectual, whose first book is always titled “The End of” something. It’s indeed remarkable how many there are: The End of History; Faith; Blackness; Plenty; College; Poverty; Self-Help; Stress; America; Nature; Fashion; Socialism; The Suburbs; Normal; Science; War; Dieting; Illness; Everything. That’s just a sampling.

** A recent news story reported data showing marriage raises incomes, with married men earning much more than bachelors. Surely this has causation backwards: higher earning men are the more likely to be married.