Whether it’s for trophies or promotions or dollars, men compete more avidly than women because they’ve always had more to lose. In the distant and not-so-distant past, DNA
research has revealed, the typical woman had a good chance of finding a mate and passing on genes that survive today; but for men, the odds were skewed. The men who won wars and acquired more status and resources (like Genghis Khan) had more than their share of mating opportunities and descendants, while many others died without passing on their genes. To survive in the mating game, men had to
prevail in competitions, and that remains true today.
Women still prefer winners. They’re the pickier sex—on Tinder, they’re much
likelier to
swipe left—and they’re especially picky when it comes to a partner’s income, education, and professional accomplishments, as researchers have found in analyses of mate
preferences, activity on dating
websites, and
patterns of marriage and divorce. Most American women still
want a man who makes at least as much as they do—and wealthier women are more determined than less affluent women to find someone with a successful career.
While some traditional attitudes about wives’ roles have shifted, husbands are still typically expected to be breadwinners. An American couple is more likely to
divorce if the husband lacks a full-time job, but the wife’s employment status doesn’t affect the odds. Studies of divorce rates in dozens of other countries have
confirmed this peril to unemployed men, which comedian Chris Rock has also
observed: “Fellows, if you lose your job, you’re going to lose your woman. That’s right. She may not leave the day you lose it, but the countdown has begun.”
While traditional attitudes about wives’ roles have changed, women still typically expect men to be breadwinners, as comedian Chris Rock noted: “Fellows, if you lose your job, you’re going to lose your woman.” (JOHN ATASHIAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
Equalitarians imagine that they can erase these sex differences by altering society’s “gender norms” and “gender schema,” but they’re ignoring biological realities (brain differences are already apparent in the womb) as well as the results of their own efforts. Despite a half-century of programs encouraging girls to enter male-dominated fields, women still vastly prefer the humanities and social sciences to physics and engineering. In fact, the gender gap in many professions tends to
widen as countries modernize. In less developed countries, educated women are likelier to go into engineering because there aren’t many well-paying alternatives; but in richer countries, they take advantage of the wider opportunities in fields such as the law, social work, communications, and the arts.
These differences won’t disappear, and why should we wish them to? If women don’t want to become computer coders and don’t work as hard as men to publish papers or win Scrabble tournaments, it’s because they prefer to pursue other activities. The women who pay a motherhood penalty in their careers also reap a motherhood reward by spending more time with their children, and that reward typically means more to women than to men. In a Pew
survey of American adults, fewer than a quarter of married mothers with children under 18 said that their ideal situation would be a full-time job.
Men, on average, have different priorities, as American universities discovered when they adjusted their tenure clocks to accommodate parents. After assistant professors were given an extra year to reach tenure for each new child, a
study of the leading departments of economics showed that the tenure rate for women actually declined relative to men because the fathers—but not the mothers—used the extra time to publish more papers.
Some women, clearly, are just as competitive, ambitious, career-oriented, and money-hungry as any man. There just aren’t as many of them. Those women certainly deserve equal opportunities to succeed in their careers—but that’s not what equalitarians seek. They demand equal outcomes, an unreachable goal that provides endless pretexts to discriminate further against men. In their utopia, both sexes are equal, but one is more equal than the other.
The most visible victims of the misogyny myth are male—the boys whose needs are neglected in schools, the men denied jobs, promotions, and awards—but their plight has never aroused much sympathy, even among men. Journalists and scholars have chronicled their woes in books like Warren Farrell’s
Myth of Male Power (1993), Lionel Tiger’s
Decline of Males (1999), Christina Hoff Sommers’s
War Against Boys (2000), Susan Pinker’s
Sexual Paradox (2008), Roy Baumeister’s
Is There Anything Good About Men? (2010), Kay Hymowitz’s
Manning Up (2011), and Richard V. Reeves’s
Of Boys and Men (2022). But the diversity industry continues to rule public policy and shape public opinion.
The more real progress that women make, the more both sexes worry about imaginary misogyny. In Gallup
polls a decade ago, a majority of Americans believed that women had equal job opportunities; today, a majority disagree. Support has also risen for affirmative-action programs for women, which enjoy support from two-thirds of Americans and are especially popular among younger adults. Opposition is dismissed as a “backlash” against women, and those who argue for equal treatment of the sexes are labeled (absurdly) “male supremacists.” In academia and at companies like Google (which fired an engineer who wrote a memo accurately
describing gender research), blaming a gender gap on sexual differences is a bigger career risk than ever—unless the gap reflects badly on men.
“Misandry is not only tolerated; it’s actively encouraged,” Winegard says. “It’s become a form of claptrap: if you go on Oprah and blame men for any problem, the audience will automatically clap. There’s open hostility toward normal masculine behavior. We used to measure people on a masculine scale and conclude that women are failed men. Now men are failed women.”
He and Clark, his coauthor (and spouse), haven’t had much success persuading fellow researchers or the public to recognize the pervasive anti-male bias, but they hope that the evidence will eventually make an impact, if only because misandry ultimately hurts women, too. There’d be more marriageable men with college degrees and successful careers if schools weren’t such hostile environments for males—from the primary schools promoting “girl power” to the colleges that eliminated due-process protections for men accused of sexual assault. Because of women’s reluctance to marry down, the three-to-two female-to-male ratio among college graduates makes it harder for both sexes to find spouses. “Some possible consequences,” Clark says, “include an increasing willingness among successful women to participate in nonmonogamous relationships with the limited number of desirable men and an increasing number of hostile involuntary celibate men.”
Both sexes have also been hurt by the misandrist excesses of the #MeToo movement. With a few exceptions—like the actress Amber Heard, successfully sued by her husband, Johnny Depp—women who wreck men’s reputations and careers with false accusations suffer few consequences in the media or the courts. Police and prosecutors have routinely refused to act, even in clear cases of perjury, as Bettina Arndt has
documented. These injustices, along with the draconian punishments and policies imposed by the (mainly female) managers of human resources, have instilled fear in workplaces, stifling office romances (which, in the past, frequently led to marriage) as well as valuable professional relationships. Most women still
want men to make the first move in courtship, but who wants to risk being reported to HR for subjecting a colleague to “unwanted attention”? Even a purely professional meeting in private is risky if something innocent gets misconstrued—or falsely described by a hostile colleague exploiting the believe-all-women bias.
Many male managers and workers have become leery to meet alone with a woman, a post-#MeToo trend confirmed in
surveys and widely lamented by professional
women and diversity
consultants. (Naturally, the diversity industry blames this on men, expecting them to ignore the new risks they face.) An analysis of junior faculty seeking tenure in economics at 100 American universities
concluded that #MeToo had imposed “unintended costs” on women. After the movement began, fewer research collaborations occurred between male and female professors (and the decline was steepest in blue states, where men presumably felt most vulnerable to #MeToo accusations). This decline didn’t affect the scholarly output of male junior professors, who compensated by doing more projects with other men. But the junior female professors didn’t increase their collaborations with other women, hurting their overall productivity.
The new male skittishness has raised an awkward topic for the diversity industry: the value of male mentors. The industry has long argued that women deserve favored treatment in promotions because, as leaders, they will provide more help to junior women struggling against the patriarchy’s misogyny. But is that true? In 2020,
Nature Communications published a
study of more than 3 million mentor-protégé relationships between the authors of scientific papers. It showed that neither the female junior scientists nor their female mentors reaped special benefits from working together: their subsequent research had less impact (as gauged by citations) than that of the female junior and senior scientists who collaborated with men.
The article, whose lead author was a female junior scientist, prompted so much outrage from senior female scientists that the journal apologized for publishing it and used a transparently cynical pretext (methodological
nitpicks that had not been applied to similar
research with politically acceptable conclusions) to pressure the authors into retracting the article. In their retraction
statement, the authors explained that, while they considered their key findings “still valid,” they felt “deep regret” for causing female scientists “pain on an individual level.”
They also dutifully proclaimed their own “unwavering commitment to gender equity,” and concluded, “We hope the academic debate continues on how to achieve true equity in science—a debate that thrives on robust and vivid scientific exchange.” But how could they possibly believe that? The censorship of their paper demonstrated the opposite: the campaign for “gender equity” thrives by suppressing debate. Journal editors have become so fearful that even researchers with sterling publication records now have a hard time finding any journal to publish challenges to gender dogma. The diversity industry’s survival depends on bludgeoning scientists and the public to believe—or, at least, pretend to believe—in the misogyny myth.
Differences between males and females show up early. (ANNA KRAYNOVA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
The myth hurts us all because it undermines the system that has enabled both sexes to flourish as never before: meritocracy. The principle that people should succeed according to their abilities and achievements, not their membership in a group, is “the intellectual dynamite which has blown up old worlds,” as Adrian Wooldridge writes in
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. The old stagnant aristocracies shielded themselves from competition by enforcing the myth that men of noble birth were inherently superior to male commoners and to all women. But that myth—and the spoils system for male aristocrats—couldn’t survive the meritocratic revolution.
When commoners got their chance to compete in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they transformed the world with innovations in government, science, medicine, public health, technology, and commerce. Women were still mostly excluded, but they reaped enormous benefits from the male competition. The most important gender gap
reversed, as women’s life expectancy rose, equaling and then surpassing men’s. New industries and inventions—textile mills, food-processing companies, washing machines—liberated women from domestic labors that had consumed their days. Once freed to work outside the home in the twentieth century, they shattered the myth that women were too fragile and intellectually limited to succeed in the public sphere.
But now that meritocracy has brought unprecedented opportunities and prosperity to both sexes, it is being replaced by a new spoils system: equalitarianism. Like the old male aristocracy, the diversity industry libels one sex while giving unmerited rewards to the other. It again promotes mediocrity and stagnation, demeaning and demoralizing both sexes by penalizing hardworking men and encouraging women to wallow in imagined victimhood.
The diversity industry has corrupted science and so many other institutions that it has become as entrenched as the old aristocracy—and without even the pretense of the traditional noblesse oblige to the less privileged. No matter how much harm it does to society, no matter how badly it poisons relations between the sexes, the diversity industry will cling to its privilege until we recognize that it, too, is peddling a lie.
