The Male Inequality Problem

Great Debates
361

Interestingly those numbers are consistent with what I cited.

People in the top 20% have been happy and remain happy. They have needs met, have most wants met, have enough status and likely haven’t lost much status. They are the most commonly married too. Felt and feel secure.

The lowest 20% has the least happiness. Not all needs met, low status, possibly dropped status, and least likely married.

The middle? That includes the $75 to $100K group. Used to be happier. Used to have more community connections, used to be more people who moved up into their current status than who dropped down into it.

And again these figures are mostly gender agnostic. If you are a person who has become more well educated and more well off, more status, than your parents were in the overall hierarchy then you are likely happier than you are if your place in the hierarchy, your status, has dropped. More women are moving on up than men. The women left behind are just as likely to be unhappy as men are. Those who have lost status are just as likely miserable no matter what gender.

362

What constitutes “actually working” though?

Think how many “bullshit” jobs are currently in any large corporation. I suspect as AI gains traction and is autonomously performing most of the actual analysis, coding, and “paper pushing”, more and more jobs are probably going to seem very abstract and “fuzzy” by our standards. I suspect that most corporate “jobs” in the future will really be a sort of artificial social hierarchy that serves no real purpose besides conferring status and dividing profits. Almost like a modern-day aristocracy. That’s just my theory.

363

Yeah. Up to 33% of my job is administrative work for federal grants management. (The rest is writing grants, meetings, strategy, training, etc.)

A lot of the times what this means is sending emails to people telling them to do things by a certain date.

Some might consider this, at least this part of my work, a bullshit job. It’s definitely some kind of paper pushing.

The thing is, if I don’t do it, people won’t do what they are supposed to do (they often don’t even do these things timely with me breathing down their neck.) We lose money. People in need have nowhere to go when they need help.

While I would love to spend less of my time doing this, it’s a necessary function. And I’m confident AI can’t do it because every automated reminder system has failed. It’s apparently that I have to walk into someone’s office and say to their face, “You need to give me this thing.” Or i have to bend over backwards to spoon-feed them exactly what I need.

Knowing this, I am not too quick to dismiss the value of other people’s work. It’s not that I think executives don’t offer value to their companies or whatever, it’s that I don’t think they offer 200x or more value than the guy sweeping the floor.

Non-profits have less of this inequality, but inequality still exists. It gets very tricky with non-profits though to adjust anyone’s salary because different people are funded by different grants, or no grants at all, and every grant has rules, and federal grants limit how much you can pay staff, etc. If you raise salaries in one department and not another, people will throw a shitfit because they don’t understand how non-profits work.

Not that we’re raising salaries. Trump has ushered in an era of non-profit austerity. That’s assuming non-profits will even be allowed much longer.

364

In my area, medicine, the line is quite bright. At least it seems so to me. The ones doing the work are doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, nurses aides, therapists, pharmacists, technicians (lab tech, radiology tech, etc.), and so on. I’d also include the behind the scenes people like the scientists that develop new drugs and medical devices and so on. Of course all of these positions should be filled based on merit. People should have an equal opportunity to compete for them, but the outcome and the rewards shouldn’t be equal, they should be based on merit.

As far as the other workers, yes, we need a few administrative types to organize these front line workers, and some accounting types to make sure the front line workers get paid for the work they do. What we don’t need is a bunch of executives and stockholders who suck up the bulk of the money and who got their position based on connections rather than a fair competition like the front line workers did.

365

In reference to the comments about men who work in schools being suspected of being predators, I never experienced that personally in 35 years as a children’s librarian and elementary school librarian. That said, I’ve definitely seen it in comments on articles about educators who were predators. There was a teacher at our kids’ school who was arrested not long after they had moved on to middle school. He seemed to mostly prey on immigrant kids, who besides being in the majority were also less likely to speak up. My wife had talked the principal about inappropriate comments (such as telling first graders that his mom had made him eat a pack of cigarettes when she caught him smoking). When the article about the case came out in the Washington Post there were numerous comments about any male choosing elementary education as a profession was likely to be a child molester. I don’t doubt that over the years there were parents who had suspicions about me purely due to my gender, but there were a lot more who regularly thanked me for the work I had done with their kids.

I don’t know that my profession had anything to do with me having trouble getting dates. That was almost entirely due to a deficit in the subset of social skills needed to navigate the dating world. There was the “males librarians are all gay” stereotype, but that didn’t really bother me. Maybe a few women didn’t show interest in me because of that stereotype, but I kind of doubt it.

366

I wasn’t even aware of that stereotype!

I would have assumed male librarians have to beat book-loving women off with a stick.

367

Unless they told me directly they were interested I was oblivious. Ms. P is the only one who did.

368

I assume you are talking about non-profits that receive federal grants? I work for a non-profit and since we don’t receive any federal grants, the allocation of salary is not based on anything external (other than revenue of course). I do agree that it is more equal than other workplaces. I remember when the higher management took a pay cut during a difficult time financially so that they would be able to give non management workers a small bonus. At the same time, I know that some of my peers, both in education and experience, make a lot more money than I do, because they work in the private sector.

//i\\

369

Yes, especially government grants, but even if you don’t receive government grants, there are challenges due to funding restrictions. Most foundations do not want to pay for salary, but if you get one that does, they might only fund a certain area, like shelter staff. So let’s say you score a magical three-year shelter grant. You can maybe give raises to shelter staff, but not your other staff, because funds are restricted to that program.

I think a lot of staff members think we sit around thinking, “Hmm, who are we going to fund today?” But in my experience, it doesn’t work like that. Sure you have priorities, but if a funding opportunity lands on your desk, chances are only one program or project is going to be the best fit for that grant. At least at every nonprofit I have ever worked for, you don’t get to pick and choose.

That said, admin staff are almost never funded by grants (unless you count de minimis allowances on some federal grants - 15% overhead.) Any raises come from individual donations and general operating funds, so that is 100% a choice. We had one of our executives give herself a hefty raise, so yeah, corruption happens.

I’m lucky to be one of the best paid at my agency. But I am not grant funded. In my fifteen years in grants management I have only once seen a grant cover development staff.

370

That’s depends on what the grants are for. At the non-profit where I worked, there were very few unrestricted grants. The majority of our funding (non-governmental) came with strict limits on how much was to be spent on “administration” (which included organizational communications, accounting, development, etc.) and how much was to be spent on programs.

371

Yeah, there are very few unrestricted grants, period.

It’s like pulling teeth sometimes getting certain executives at my agency to understand, “you can’t spend the money that way.”

Which is why they like to say, “Spice Weasel’s job is to keep us out of prison.”

372

Perhaps the topic of another thread but…

Of course it’s a bullshit job. It’s all “administrative” work where some (the government) “gifts” you money that you then allocated to someone else that “needs” it. I’m assuming you don’t even track or calculate anything like an ROI to determine of what they do with it actually produces a net value. And since it’s “government” granting you the funds and those funds come from taxes, really it’s all just part of a complex wealth redistribution mechanism.

It’s not like my old job was any better. Basically my job was advising executives at big banks on coming up with elaborate systems and processes to push paper around.

The only jobs that aren’t “bullshit” IMHO are ones where you are actually making or building, fixing, or designing things or providing real services like a teacher or a lawyer (like one who shows up in court at trials and shit, not one getting paid $400k a year pushing paper for a corporation). But no one wants to really do those jobs or pay them a lot of money.

373

In other words, probably something quite good for the economy, since concentration of wealth is terrible for it.

374

Do you think women, children and men who are violently attacked, beaten and raped don’t actually “need” services? Why the scare quotes?

Of course what I do isn’t bullshit. I help people and I know I help them. Of course we track outcomes. It’s federally required.

375

I feel like you’re almost there. You realize that staking your happiness on status in a capricious, exploitative job market has made you miserable, but you haven’t quite made the leap to recognizing that there are actually fairly reliable paths to happiness that have nothing at all to do with the corporate rat race.

I don’t know if you’ve read this book before, but I forgot to mention it in your thread. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

If a Holocaust survivor can find meaning in his life while working in a concentration camp, literally anyone can. That’s how I’ve gotten through the harder parts of my life, by looking to the people who had it the worst and how they made meaning out of it. My heroes are Frankl, Mandela, Thich Naht Hanh. People who made good work out of their suffering.

More than anything you strike me as someone who’s struggling for meaning. Maybe you had meaning once through this whole status framework and you lost it. Well you’re probably not getting it back anytime soon. It’s time to figure out what your new meaning is going to be.

That’s how life is. The rules change all the time. We have to adapt. To survive emotionally, psychologically, we have to adjust how we think about our circumstances, and to an extent we have to redefine success. I have had to do that my whole life.

And my point was not that I had a bullshit job, my point is that it wasn’t bullshit because it has meaning to me. And I think any work can have meaning. And I mean this with kindness intended, I think you would be better served finding out the meaning of your own life than trying to tear down others’ sense of meaning. It won’t work on me, anyway. I understand my own work, and its impact, far better than you ever will. I am acutely aware when I do or don’t hit the mark.

When my husband started his practice I gave him this framed Frankl quote:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

But my favorite one is this one:

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

376

I don’t think it’s so much about staking my happiness on my career as I need a job to pay my bills, just like most people. Ideally, I would love to get as much fulfillment as you do out of yours but I would settle for some degree of stability in a job that doesn’t drive me insane with stress.

I’ve been talking with a lot of my professional network contacts (both male and female), many of whom are out of work. Many of them share the same experiences. In many cases they were suddenly laid off from jobs they loved of many years without warning.

I think the common theme is feeling powerless while being forced to deal with a capricious, exploitative, indifferent job market that tells you that all the skill and experienced you accumulated is no longer relevant (which is confusing because it’s still there in the job description).

As a man, I tend to identify with the Bielski brothers From Belarus who formed a resistance movement against the Nazis and saved thousands of Jews (basis of the film Defiance) or maybe The Great Escape. That is to say I don’t want to passively endure hardship with zen-like introspection. I’d rather get a band of brothers together and go kill some Nazis (so to speak).

Broadly speaking, I think that’s where men get frustrated. When they feel powerless to change their situation.

FWIW, it was not my intent to insult you or your profession. I do think you have some good insights on the topic.

377

I don’t think that’s different for women, but yeah, it plays to our senses of masculinity in very resonant ways. Many of us have internalized that rising to challenge is how we define our worth. “What is your quest?”

378

I’m not arguing that your personal preferences are wrong, just pointing out how weird it is—and how germane to this thread topic—that you are literally using the concept of maleness to interpret your lack of enthusiasm for the philosophical approaches of three men who were all tremendously successful, influential and honored in their lifetimes.

Mandela led the overthrow of South African institutionalized racist oppression and apartheid, and served as South Africa’s first democratically elected president. Frankl’s survival of three years in Nazi concentration camps was actually a very small part of his long and productive life as an MD/PhD researcher and clinician whose humanitarian efforts reduced teen suicides, rescued patients targeted by Nazis for euthanasia, and substantially reformed the practice of psychotherapy. Nhất Hạnh was a multilingual scholar and professor of religious studies who led the anti-Vietnam War peace movement and organized rescue operations for Vietnamese boat people. (Oh, and Mandela and Frankl were also husbands and fathers, if we’re evaluating men on traditional male roles here.)

If these guys are being considered too “passive” and not sufficiently “manly” for a man to try to emulate, merely because their highly successful strategies to “change their situation” didn’t involve the use of violence, then I think that says something pretty significant about problems with standard stereotypes of masculinity.

379

Good point. And thank you for neatly articulating what I love about those men.

When I read Mandela’s autobiography one thing that stood out to me is that, during the decades when he was incarcerated, he spent the entire time informing prisoners of their legal rights and advocating for them. He transformed that prison. Like that man didn’t miss a fucking beat. And I am so inspired by people who look at every situation in their lives and try to figure out how they can leverage it for other people. I will never be nearly that unselfish but I find it useful to have things to aspire to.