299. Why the Modern Male Is Struggling (2)
2 (12m 34s):
I think 40% of women now earn more than the median man. Now, when I say that to people sometimes they're like, well, and, and it was 13% in 1979, but you started a world where, okay, it's not 50%, right? That would be, that would be full equality, but 40% of women earning more than them average, typical man, that's a transformation in, in the scale in a very, very short order of time. What that means is that 40% of breadwinners are now women and rising, which brings you to the third, which is the role of men and the family and fathers. What does it mean to be a father? And I think in an incredibly short period of time in a generation between my, you know, my dad was lots of things, but he was also the breadwinner and that was just accepted for his generation.
2 (13m 15s):
That was his core responsibility that's changed in a, in a generation. And so the question of what does it mean to be a father, husband, and father used to be a package deal. Now being a, what does it mean to be a father in a world where the women's movement has successfully and wonderfully, in my view, broken the economic dependency of women on men to an incredible degree. So if women don't need men economically, which was the basis for their oppression for the 10,000 years, you mentioned why, what are men for? And I think that question is now being asked with real urgency. And that's the one I try to address in the book.
1 (13m 54s):
Right. So let's unpack some of those numbers. So on income, yeah, 40% of women earn more than the medium income of men. Okay, So this is kind of a statistical technicality, but doesn't it depend on the kinds of jobs or professions or careers? And we still hear this, you know, women only earn 79 cents on the dollar 89 cents or whatever it is now. It's always still, I guess below a dollar, but that's just on average taken across the board. So you're talking about specific kinds of jobs and careers where these differences have shifted.
2 (14m 27s):
So the, the numbers I just cited are for all workers working full-time between the ages of 25 and 64. So that's prime age workers, that's the group that economists will very often look at. Because until then as education, and particularly with the gender gaps in education, that's important. And then after that it becomes, you know, some people are early retiring, so prime age employment and full time is used partly to deal with the fact that part-time workers in many ways do get a raw deal in the labor market. But that's the same basis on which we do calculate that gender pay gap that you've just referred to. So whether, however, depending on how you calculate it, 82 cents on the dollar is my preferred metric for the gender pay gap. But the numbers I just cited are just for all workers.
2 (15m 10s):
And so what that means is what you, if you think about distribution almost always overlap, I think. I think I've heard you on a show Michael saying maybe you're quoting Steven Pink or something. Like the main problem is people can't think on continuous variables or something like that.
1 (15m 25s):
That's right. No, that's exactly right.
2 (15m 28s):
And that's true, that's true in almost everything we're gonna talk about in this, in this conversation. So perhaps we could just, if I could just say now on average and with overlapping distributions, and maybe you could edit that in our everything. I say pain for you, but it would save me lot, save me lot. And so yeah, was what the, the male and female wage distribution used to look quite different, but they now look quite similar. There's still a difference, but they look quite similar. And so you've seen this extraordinary catching up by women of men in part because a lot of men have gone backwards a little bit, right? Which is not maybe the ideal way to get to equality, but this transformation in the economic relationship between men and women, it's just incredibly important to get our head around in order to understand everything.
2 (16m 14s):
I think that flows from that not least, there's really fundamental challenge to what does it mean to be a mature male in modern society.
1 (16m 21s):
So just to be clear, so is it possible that lower working classes, working classes and lower middle class average salaries are tugging down that medium such that the upper middle class and middle class guys are, they're doing fine?
2 (16m 37s):
Yeah, so that's the other thing that's happened in the distribution. So.
