I interviewed a Georgetown expert about the rise in women getting college degrees, outpacing young men, and he had an interesting point: For women to earn the same as men, they NEED a college degree. Basically, white men without a college degree can find jobs in construction or the trades (both of which are predominantly STILL male) and earn a middle-class salary.
Women without a college degree earn bupkis — they work in retail, restaurants, etc. He said for women to just get to the same earnings level as a man without a college degree, they need a college degree. In his view, this is what is fueling the majority enrollment of women in college today — that they understand, without a college degree, they are looking at a lifetime of low wages. Not so for men. Depressing.
I think there’s also a component of how things like ADHD and ADD are diagnosed differently depending on the person’s sex - highly organized and overachieving girls are seen as being good students, not as people overcorrecting for struggles just to meet expectations. I also suspect that’s a component of the late 30s-40s burnout women are experiencing. We’ve been overcompensating for so long just to maintain expectations instead of getting the help we need.
Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
Thank you so much for this. Ive been listening to Reeves with a healthy dose of skepticism. I also want to add that girls are raised to be more conscientious and to have a desire to be "good", and are thus more likely to listen to the teacher and go the extra mile at work. "Boys will be boys" mentality cuts boys a lot of slack. Reeves doesn't talk about how children are parented, which is obviously a huge factor. A glaring omission.
Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
My younger brother will turn 30 this year. He took what I refer to as "the scenic route" to his bachelor's degree. He dropped out of a prestigious graduate program last year and moved home for the fourth time (I think? I've lost count). He recently got a service industry job and is now working full-time for the first time in his life. Without a trace of irony, he told me he can save a lot because his expenses are so low.
This all feels very related to an article I read (title based on a tweet): ARE YOU OKAY OR ARE YOU AN ELDEST DAUGHTER? I'm a classic Type A, people pleaser, control freak, teacher's pet, enneagram 1, whatever you want to call it. I started working at 15 and have been unemployed for a grand total of 3 months since. I've been supporting myself since I was 22. I guess I didn't know there was another option.
Here’s my personal perspective that might explain some part of this trend, because that’s all I know: My white boomer dad was rewarded heavily for his ambitions, so he became more ambitious. My three brothers, however, were raised for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Trained for jobs that no longer provide financial stability. I was the only girl in my family and the only one that went to college. I think overall, things were easier for me because I was less boxed-in by gender than they were. So it was easier for me to adapt to the changing world in the 90s when we all became adults. What’s more, during childhood I learned skills that helped me adapt too. I learned language for feelings. I was taught it was okay to ask for help. That failure was okay.
Whenever I see anyone who might seem “unambitious,” I always wonder what mental health challenge is causing it — because I’ve found that's usually the case. And I think about this a lot because my oldest brother died last fall at 52. Natural causes, including despair. He’d never hurt anyone. Never thought he was better than anyone. But he felt lost and lonely. And there are so many people like that.
I also think some of this is men have never been expected to be of service to others in the way women have. The PeaceCorps and other high intensity volunteering type efforts focus so highly on the moral imperative to serve others, especially if you have privilege, but that seems to fall flat when it comes to the most privileged group of white men.
And I wonder if part of the study abroad issue is that study abroad is generally considered a "safe" way to travel, and so women (or women's parents) are only comfortable with their daughter traveling in a larger structured group, whereas men can more easily take off and travel at will and people will not bat an eye.
The end of this essay reminds me of the Toni Morrison quote that goes, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” I think this also applies to sexism, ableism, etc.
Just think about how much time and energy women, particularly BIPOC women, would get back if we did not have to spend our entire lives doing the mental labor of ambition and society’s infrastructure.
I was abut 10 years out of college when I said to someone how it felt like I was watching men and women have totally different career outcomes. Regardless of their degree, regardless of their initial career moves, it was like good jobs were just...waiting for them. Whenever they were ready.
I worked five years at a company where I watched my male peers rack up promotions in a way I saw exactly one woman at the company do. I've seen similar things at other companies where men get farther, faster even if it's not as explicit as that first place. And I don't think it's because men want it more. Because I wanted more, and it took years to get there.
Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
The study abroad thing was amusing to me because I (an ambitious female identified person) didn't study abroad...because I served in the leadership of my class in my junior year of college. But that "if you want to have X you have to start Y SO MUCH EARLIER THAN YOU THINK" is also trickling down into some of the ways that elder millennials parent and it does a number on you.
Sports is one thing (see kids on my kid's soccer team--8/9 year old boys--doing specialized training in the off season at the behest of their parents because if they DON'T they might not get into the good club team and so on and so on...) but it also shows up in places like math curricula. Turns out that if you want to take AP Calculus in high school, which is a) HIGHLY correlated with success in STEM majors, particularly with traditionally marginalized groups and b) close to a prerequisite for admission to many schools, you pretty much have to take algebra in 8th grade, which means you (often) need to be hitting certain benchmarks in math in 6th-7th grade, which means you need really strong arithmetic skills in 3rd-5th grade. It's not unreasonable to think that a decent amount of one's capacity/opportunity to pursue a complicated technical field is laid out as early as the age of 10.
So it's a system that rewards that kind of forward thinking--there are places/programs that can help kids catch up or get ahead, but it's not necessarily talked about, especially if you're in a place where there aren't sufficient academic counseling resources at a school. My thoughts on this aren't super-duper fully formed yet but it definitely fits into the puzzle of "must be organized and competent at all times not just for me but for those around me" along with opportunity hoarding, systems of access, hidden curriculum...
I loved this and think it absolutely describes a ton of the trends in how, as White cis men, our walk in the world is cocooned by so many intersecting cocoons of “not having to notice/having the world work out to our advantage without ambition.” I also love the way you wrestled with the “should we have compassion for the White men dilemma?” One offering I might make (that I love getting to see the benefit of in my work both with White people on race and cis men on gender) is that compassion vs. accountability isn’t a binary. Like you, I don’t think we (here I’m referring to my fellow White cis men) deserve a lot of surface level compassion for the fact that now only 99% of systems are rigged in our advantage rather than 100% and so the evidence of the moments we suck are more obvious now. I do think, though, that for those of us trying to work with/transform communities who share privileged identities with us (so White people with White people, White cis men with other White cis men, etc.), that there is power in sitting together in the bigger/deeper issue— that our particular identity is an identity of domination, that has and will cause harm, and that separates us from humanity. And there is immense grief in there (also joy, in the form of the joy of getting to try to be more connected and less harm-causing, but definitely grief). And I do think that grief is “family work” (meaning it’s the work of cis White men to get into with each other, not one more form of emotional midwifery we outsource to women and non-binary folks in our lives) but doing that work is such an important part of the equation in how we all move forward. And it’s so much better than the alternative of just dozing through your privileged/resentful walk through the world, as it turns out. I wrote about it this week, but it’s been cool (as my White son is getting older) to realize what a joy (and responsibility of course, but joy) for the two of us to figure out a different, more aware way of being White and male together than the one I learned.
This won't add much to the conversation, but WOW all I have to do is put my resume next to my husband's to see this play out in real life. I had four jobs in college, was a three sport athlete, majored in chemical engineering and chemistry, got a masters. He was in a fraternity, majored in computer science, and doesn't have an advanced degree. We work at the same company (I'm a technical account manager and people manager, he's a developer), and he still makes more than me.
As the parent of two kind-of grown kids-a 21yo female and a 19yo male, conversations like these always make me think about how differently I treated them without even realizing it, as a person who really should have known better.
I am a high school English teacher at an International School, and I just have to say that whether the systemic issues are the root cause described here are true: "Only recently — as their power has (very gradually) eroded, and they’ve come to face more legitimate consequences for sucking — has this lack of white male ambition been presented as a problem." 1) This isn't just a white boy problem. I teach mostly Asian boys who are feeling the same sort of decline 2) I do think it is profoundly sad to relegate these kids (little boys if you have been teaching as long as I have) to the dustheap of structural problems that were not their making 3) The climate against actively teaching skills like organization, planning, etc. that Peterson points out helps women succeed because it is now classified under SEL (a new touchpoint in rightist complaints) is another barrier.
I am, myself, an American, person of color born without a lot of means (but a loving family), and I used to pride myself on my own relative success. But, I just feel bad about how many boys are just legitimately unhappy. I'm not saying they should all be automatically risen to CEO, but there is something really wrong in their ability to feel joy. I'm only 39, but I, somehow, have been able to find an amazing partner, started a family, found a modicum of success in a meaningful endeavor even if it doesn't pay a lot. I feel needed and appreciated in ways that they cannot even foresee being possible. I spend too much time talking to boys about how their worries about their calves don't matter (in the big realms of things but also to girls because let's be real). I have spoken to a number about why Andrew Tate's ideas will literally work against you as a Korean/ Filipino/ Japanese/ many other including westerners, etc. I find that we're too easy to judge these kids as they work through their culturally appropriated misogyny. I was homophobic and misogynistic coming out of high school. I am embarrassed by what I thought and believed, but I worked my way out. I was coached by other sensitive men and given things to read and consider, things that were longer than a 3 minute Tiktok. They are judged by their mistakes and dig deeper because there is an easy outlet to assuage that shame, and then they feel alienated for not having the right idea right off the bat. I don't know what the answer is other than compassion and empathy. The boys are not alright. I swear. It's not just about newly sucking. I think they know they suck. I think they think they suck and cannot stop sucking. There's no path that is given for how not to suck.
This rings very true! I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 33 because my fear of being seen as lazy/incompetent and therefore “bad at being a girl” led me to some damaging (but effective) coping strategies. I was already fat, which meant I wasn’t going to be given the benefit of the doubt if I fucked up in other ways. The only way to be seen as a real person - a real girl, specifically - was to be the best performer, the most organized and together and ambitious student and employee. And it worked! But I’m now unraveling all of these horrible beliefs and trying to figure out a different way to live. Like maybe those coping strategies that allowed me to mask for 30 years can help me build a more sustainable life, a kinder and safer community? I’d like to think I can use the tools that were originally developed out of fear to lead me towards something better.
Shiiiit. I'm reading this right now instead of writing one of the million overdue papers I have to submit TODAY in order to graduate with my MA, which has been so very long in coming and is constantly back-burnered because of sick kids, family emergencies, family vacations, and so on and son and so on. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety until I started grad school in my 40s and I'm dying to see the conversation about how being disorganized and 'low achieving' messes with our sense of femininity and ambition. I have so many thoughts, but I have to see if I can get my kids to go be in a different room because they're on spring break and I am not, and my breadwinner husband worked the night shift.
That last paragraph? I think about it all the time, and then I try to shelve it because it’s so damn depressing.
“If the goal is simply matching the success of white men without re-imagining the world that privileged it in the first place, the whole enterprise is a dead end.” This applies to so many things, doesn’t it? If a few less white men are winning in a system built on manufactured scarcity to benefit only a very few--who don’t need an elevator to the 25th floor because where they live is only reached by private helicopter--that still leaves that system intact, still only really benefitting a very few.
I interviewed a Georgetown expert about the rise in women getting college degrees, outpacing young men, and he had an interesting point: For women to earn the same as men, they NEED a college degree. Basically, white men without a college degree can find jobs in construction or the trades (both of which are predominantly STILL male) and earn a middle-class salary.
Women without a college degree earn bupkis — they work in retail, restaurants, etc. He said for women to just get to the same earnings level as a man without a college degree, they need a college degree. In his view, this is what is fueling the majority enrollment of women in college today — that they understand, without a college degree, they are looking at a lifetime of low wages. Not so for men. Depressing.
I think there’s also a component of how things like ADHD and ADD are diagnosed differently depending on the person’s sex - highly organized and overachieving girls are seen as being good students, not as people overcorrecting for struggles just to meet expectations. I also suspect that’s a component of the late 30s-40s burnout women are experiencing. We’ve been overcompensating for so long just to maintain expectations instead of getting the help we need.
Thank you so much for this. Ive been listening to Reeves with a healthy dose of skepticism. I also want to add that girls are raised to be more conscientious and to have a desire to be "good", and are thus more likely to listen to the teacher and go the extra mile at work. "Boys will be boys" mentality cuts boys a lot of slack. Reeves doesn't talk about how children are parented, which is obviously a huge factor. A glaring omission.
My younger brother will turn 30 this year. He took what I refer to as "the scenic route" to his bachelor's degree. He dropped out of a prestigious graduate program last year and moved home for the fourth time (I think? I've lost count). He recently got a service industry job and is now working full-time for the first time in his life. Without a trace of irony, he told me he can save a lot because his expenses are so low.
This all feels very related to an article I read (title based on a tweet): ARE YOU OKAY OR ARE YOU AN ELDEST DAUGHTER? I'm a classic Type A, people pleaser, control freak, teacher's pet, enneagram 1, whatever you want to call it. I started working at 15 and have been unemployed for a grand total of 3 months since. I've been supporting myself since I was 22. I guess I didn't know there was another option.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/eldest-daughter-syndrome-oldest-sibling-family-responsibilities
Here’s my personal perspective that might explain some part of this trend, because that’s all I know: My white boomer dad was rewarded heavily for his ambitions, so he became more ambitious. My three brothers, however, were raised for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Trained for jobs that no longer provide financial stability. I was the only girl in my family and the only one that went to college. I think overall, things were easier for me because I was less boxed-in by gender than they were. So it was easier for me to adapt to the changing world in the 90s when we all became adults. What’s more, during childhood I learned skills that helped me adapt too. I learned language for feelings. I was taught it was okay to ask for help. That failure was okay.
Whenever I see anyone who might seem “unambitious,” I always wonder what mental health challenge is causing it — because I’ve found that's usually the case. And I think about this a lot because my oldest brother died last fall at 52. Natural causes, including despair. He’d never hurt anyone. Never thought he was better than anyone. But he felt lost and lonely. And there are so many people like that.
I also think some of this is men have never been expected to be of service to others in the way women have. The PeaceCorps and other high intensity volunteering type efforts focus so highly on the moral imperative to serve others, especially if you have privilege, but that seems to fall flat when it comes to the most privileged group of white men.
And I wonder if part of the study abroad issue is that study abroad is generally considered a "safe" way to travel, and so women (or women's parents) are only comfortable with their daughter traveling in a larger structured group, whereas men can more easily take off and travel at will and people will not bat an eye.
The end of this essay reminds me of the Toni Morrison quote that goes, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” I think this also applies to sexism, ableism, etc.
Just think about how much time and energy women, particularly BIPOC women, would get back if we did not have to spend our entire lives doing the mental labor of ambition and society’s infrastructure.
I was abut 10 years out of college when I said to someone how it felt like I was watching men and women have totally different career outcomes. Regardless of their degree, regardless of their initial career moves, it was like good jobs were just...waiting for them. Whenever they were ready.
I worked five years at a company where I watched my male peers rack up promotions in a way I saw exactly one woman at the company do. I've seen similar things at other companies where men get farther, faster even if it's not as explicit as that first place. And I don't think it's because men want it more. Because I wanted more, and it took years to get there.
The study abroad thing was amusing to me because I (an ambitious female identified person) didn't study abroad...because I served in the leadership of my class in my junior year of college. But that "if you want to have X you have to start Y SO MUCH EARLIER THAN YOU THINK" is also trickling down into some of the ways that elder millennials parent and it does a number on you.
Sports is one thing (see kids on my kid's soccer team--8/9 year old boys--doing specialized training in the off season at the behest of their parents because if they DON'T they might not get into the good club team and so on and so on...) but it also shows up in places like math curricula. Turns out that if you want to take AP Calculus in high school, which is a) HIGHLY correlated with success in STEM majors, particularly with traditionally marginalized groups and b) close to a prerequisite for admission to many schools, you pretty much have to take algebra in 8th grade, which means you (often) need to be hitting certain benchmarks in math in 6th-7th grade, which means you need really strong arithmetic skills in 3rd-5th grade. It's not unreasonable to think that a decent amount of one's capacity/opportunity to pursue a complicated technical field is laid out as early as the age of 10.
So it's a system that rewards that kind of forward thinking--there are places/programs that can help kids catch up or get ahead, but it's not necessarily talked about, especially if you're in a place where there aren't sufficient academic counseling resources at a school. My thoughts on this aren't super-duper fully formed yet but it definitely fits into the puzzle of "must be organized and competent at all times not just for me but for those around me" along with opportunity hoarding, systems of access, hidden curriculum...
I loved this and think it absolutely describes a ton of the trends in how, as White cis men, our walk in the world is cocooned by so many intersecting cocoons of “not having to notice/having the world work out to our advantage without ambition.” I also love the way you wrestled with the “should we have compassion for the White men dilemma?” One offering I might make (that I love getting to see the benefit of in my work both with White people on race and cis men on gender) is that compassion vs. accountability isn’t a binary. Like you, I don’t think we (here I’m referring to my fellow White cis men) deserve a lot of surface level compassion for the fact that now only 99% of systems are rigged in our advantage rather than 100% and so the evidence of the moments we suck are more obvious now. I do think, though, that for those of us trying to work with/transform communities who share privileged identities with us (so White people with White people, White cis men with other White cis men, etc.), that there is power in sitting together in the bigger/deeper issue— that our particular identity is an identity of domination, that has and will cause harm, and that separates us from humanity. And there is immense grief in there (also joy, in the form of the joy of getting to try to be more connected and less harm-causing, but definitely grief). And I do think that grief is “family work” (meaning it’s the work of cis White men to get into with each other, not one more form of emotional midwifery we outsource to women and non-binary folks in our lives) but doing that work is such an important part of the equation in how we all move forward. And it’s so much better than the alternative of just dozing through your privileged/resentful walk through the world, as it turns out. I wrote about it this week, but it’s been cool (as my White son is getting older) to realize what a joy (and responsibility of course, but joy) for the two of us to figure out a different, more aware way of being White and male together than the one I learned.
This won't add much to the conversation, but WOW all I have to do is put my resume next to my husband's to see this play out in real life. I had four jobs in college, was a three sport athlete, majored in chemical engineering and chemistry, got a masters. He was in a fraternity, majored in computer science, and doesn't have an advanced degree. We work at the same company (I'm a technical account manager and people manager, he's a developer), and he still makes more than me.
As the parent of two kind-of grown kids-a 21yo female and a 19yo male, conversations like these always make me think about how differently I treated them without even realizing it, as a person who really should have known better.
I am a high school English teacher at an International School, and I just have to say that whether the systemic issues are the root cause described here are true: "Only recently — as their power has (very gradually) eroded, and they’ve come to face more legitimate consequences for sucking — has this lack of white male ambition been presented as a problem." 1) This isn't just a white boy problem. I teach mostly Asian boys who are feeling the same sort of decline 2) I do think it is profoundly sad to relegate these kids (little boys if you have been teaching as long as I have) to the dustheap of structural problems that were not their making 3) The climate against actively teaching skills like organization, planning, etc. that Peterson points out helps women succeed because it is now classified under SEL (a new touchpoint in rightist complaints) is another barrier.
I am, myself, an American, person of color born without a lot of means (but a loving family), and I used to pride myself on my own relative success. But, I just feel bad about how many boys are just legitimately unhappy. I'm not saying they should all be automatically risen to CEO, but there is something really wrong in their ability to feel joy. I'm only 39, but I, somehow, have been able to find an amazing partner, started a family, found a modicum of success in a meaningful endeavor even if it doesn't pay a lot. I feel needed and appreciated in ways that they cannot even foresee being possible. I spend too much time talking to boys about how their worries about their calves don't matter (in the big realms of things but also to girls because let's be real). I have spoken to a number about why Andrew Tate's ideas will literally work against you as a Korean/ Filipino/ Japanese/ many other including westerners, etc. I find that we're too easy to judge these kids as they work through their culturally appropriated misogyny. I was homophobic and misogynistic coming out of high school. I am embarrassed by what I thought and believed, but I worked my way out. I was coached by other sensitive men and given things to read and consider, things that were longer than a 3 minute Tiktok. They are judged by their mistakes and dig deeper because there is an easy outlet to assuage that shame, and then they feel alienated for not having the right idea right off the bat. I don't know what the answer is other than compassion and empathy. The boys are not alright. I swear. It's not just about newly sucking. I think they know they suck. I think they think they suck and cannot stop sucking. There's no path that is given for how not to suck.
This rings very true! I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 33 because my fear of being seen as lazy/incompetent and therefore “bad at being a girl” led me to some damaging (but effective) coping strategies. I was already fat, which meant I wasn’t going to be given the benefit of the doubt if I fucked up in other ways. The only way to be seen as a real person - a real girl, specifically - was to be the best performer, the most organized and together and ambitious student and employee. And it worked! But I’m now unraveling all of these horrible beliefs and trying to figure out a different way to live. Like maybe those coping strategies that allowed me to mask for 30 years can help me build a more sustainable life, a kinder and safer community? I’d like to think I can use the tools that were originally developed out of fear to lead me towards something better.
Shiiiit. I'm reading this right now instead of writing one of the million overdue papers I have to submit TODAY in order to graduate with my MA, which has been so very long in coming and is constantly back-burnered because of sick kids, family emergencies, family vacations, and so on and son and so on. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety until I started grad school in my 40s and I'm dying to see the conversation about how being disorganized and 'low achieving' messes with our sense of femininity and ambition. I have so many thoughts, but I have to see if I can get my kids to go be in a different room because they're on spring break and I am not, and my breadwinner husband worked the night shift.
That last paragraph? I think about it all the time, and then I try to shelve it because it’s so damn depressing.
“If the goal is simply matching the success of white men without re-imagining the world that privileged it in the first place, the whole enterprise is a dead end.” This applies to so many things, doesn’t it? If a few less white men are winning in a system built on manufactured scarcity to benefit only a very few--who don’t need an elevator to the 25th floor because where they live is only reached by private helicopter--that still leaves that system intact, still only really benefitting a very few.