Navigating a Divided Highway: America's Gender Gap
Where are the guardrails of civil debate?
Imagine driving a road you've traveled for years. You know every curve, intersection, and speed bump along the way. You travel it on automatic pilot.
But one day you take this road to your usual destination, stop, get out, and look around. Nothing looks familiar. The landscape has completely changed. And you don't recall how you arrived here.
That's often how I feel when I reflect on the news today. I've lost my bearings when I try to make sense of the direction this world is headed.
For instance, recently I came across a notebook of writings from my high school and college years. These words, written decades ago, jumped out from the page, transporting me back to a familiar, yet strikingly different time and place.
"Boys are encouraged to be doctors; girls are advised to be nurses," I wrote. "Boys are developed into business executives; girls who major in business in college end up as secretaries or bank tellers. An ambitious boy is urged to aspire to the office of President; an ambitious girl is supposed to aspire to be 'Miss America.' "
I recognize this as an accurate description of the social and cultural landscape of my youth growing up on a northwestern Iowa farm. But it offers offer no clue to the roadmap used to arrive at the place I am today. Where are the landmarks I knew so well? The mile markers are different, too.
In 2024, more than half of medical and law school students are women, along with 35% of STEM professionals. We don't hear much about the Miss America Pageant. And yet, our Nov. 5 election confirmed that an ambitious "boy" still comes out ahead of an ambitious "girl" in the Presidential election. In fact, our President-elect owned the Miss Universe Pageant for two decades.
As my Western Civilization professor James Miller often repeated: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Although there's much more to learn from Nov. 5, young men (also known as "the bros") powered the movement to elect Donald Trump.
Ignoring the Caution Signs
Today's unfamiliar scenery didn't sprout overnight. In 2007, I read an article, titled, "Why are Boys Struggling in School?" I have no sons, and it didn't resonate with me. I didn't notice the widening gap in life expectancy between women and men in the U.S., beginning in 2010. From 2009 to 2019, the opioid death rate was more than twice as high for men as women. I overlooked the news in 2016 that boys were dropping out of high school about 40% more often than girls.
As I wrote in a July 2024 column, I attended a lecture series in Sioux City in 2017 with my sister to learn more about J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy. Afterwards we were enjoying a casual conversation with my sister's high school friend who was there with her husband, a graduate of a neighboring high school. When he made a comment that young men were struggling, and seemed to imply that it was the fault of women, I flippantly remarked, "I'm not too worried. Men have had it pretty good for quite a while now." I never had met the man before, but suddenly he grabbed me by the forearm, twisting it, and growling, "Are ya blue?" I didn't understand the connection between my remark and his question. It made no sense.
Then during the Covid 19 Pandemic more men died than women. Women were more likely to be vaccinated, and many men were "essential workers," confined to prisons, or homeless. Between 2019 and 2021, more men than women died by homicide or suicide.
At the same time I began hearing radio show interviews with a guy named Richard Reeves, who had launched the American Institute for Boys and Men. "Lots of guys don't know where they fit in," he said. "They feel useless, worthless." He spoke of a "male crisis".
What? I couldn't wrap my head around it. After 10,000 years of patriarchy, men were struggling? Don't women still only earn 87% of men? What about the #MeToo movement? Only a few years ago mostly male state legislators, the Supreme Court, and Donald Trump aligned to re-assert dominance over American women by taking away their right to decide their own reproductive destiny. I'm supposed to feel empathy for men? The world was built to help men succeed, right?
Then in 2021, Josh Hawley told the Republican Conservative Conference there was a crisis of masculinity. Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt at the Republican National Convention last summer. J.D. Vance derided single cat women. Surely voters would reject such juvenile machismo stunts! But on Nov. 5, a total of 55% of male voters ages 18 to 29 voted for Trump. This increased from 41% in 2020.
How did we get here?
Biden Got the Jobs Done –But Too Late
The signposts were there along the way. But I disregarded them. When I look back at the boys in our younger daughter's grade school class, most were good readers and students. By middle school, their extracurricular participation declined and after graduating from high school, few applied to college. Some succumbed to drugs, dying of overdoses, and even suicide. One jumped into the Des Moines River in Webster County during a night of drinking with friends, and he never re-surfaced. So much lost potential. It still grieves me!
No one's thumb was placed on the scales against them. As Reeves argues, "It's not that men have fewer opportunities. It is they are not taking them."
What's holding them back? I fumed to a longtime woman friend. Later, I began to reflect on the impact of job losses caused by NAFTA. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories in the U.S. closed. Many were good, well-paying union jobs. Hands-on workplace employment was losing ground to the service economy. Today's job growth is in the health, education, administrative and literacy (HEAL) professions. Four years of college isn't everyone's strong suit. But post-election surveys show Trump won the support of two-thirds of white voters who do not have college degrees. The life expectancy of college graduates is 8 years longer than non-college graduates.
Recently a report from the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank studying economic stress in the U.S., showed that in terms of job growth, three out of the four worst years since the Great Recession occurred during Trump's watch. In fact, more growth has occurred in left-behind "red" counties under the Biden administration. These counties have added jobs five times faster in the last three years under Biden than in the first three years of Trump.
Almost half of these counties have regained the jobs lost during the Covid downturn. This is especially true in the Midwest and Southeast, where there's been significant investment and job growth since 2021, in contrast to recent decades. From 2009 to 2016, Bay County, Michigan lost 8% of its businesses. Since 2020, it's gained 12%.
David Madland, author of Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn't Work without a Strong Middle Class, attributes much of this growth to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act.
Trump claimed to be a big infrastructure supporter, and kept promising to spend $2 trillion to rebuild the country's crumbling infrastructure. But he never was able to pass the legislation. Infrastructure Week became a running joke.
So far, Madland, a senior fellow at the independent, nonpartisan Center for American Progress, Â says construction of manufacturing facilities has been driving this growth, but he expects manufacturing jobs will come. Repairing old infrastructure has created jobs, along with investments in industries positioned for future growth, including chips, semiconductor, and green energy.
Joe Biden created 765,000 manufacturing jobs during his presidency. But after 50 years of decline, it was too little, too late. Kamala Harris may have been "brat," but her message was lost in the Cirque du Soleil atmosphere of the 2024 campaign. Trump deceived many into believing he would help them; he perfected his rude and aggressive persona to signal to young men that it's still a man's world.
The shot in the arm from the infrastructure and jobs legislation will require time to produce showy results. In the meantime, we need more tools in the toolbox to fix what's ailing young men. Another significant roadblock to higher education is financial. When I was in college, I received a Federal Pell Grant, but Pell Grants aren't available for short-term, certificate programs. Congress already has bipartisan bills in the hopper to expand Pell eligibility for workforce-related education to gain marketable skills. The CBO estimates it would cost U.S, taxpayers $1.7 billion over 10 years. This doesn't mean cutting back on Pell Grants for four-year college students. Yet the Iowa legislature already is making noises about reviewing the return on investment to taxpayers from college and university funding, casting doubt on the success story of the Iowa Tuition Grant and signaling a focus on workforce development. I am fearful of going down this road too far.
New GPS to Guide the Way
Although women represent more than half of medical students, only 37% are in practice today; they're leaving the profession at higher rates than men. Some attrition is due to an uneven distribution of the workload at home. And, although women spend more time with patients than male physicians, they earn less and are promoted at a lower rate. There's a similar backstory in the legal arena, with men still overrepresented as law practice and equity partners.
Despite the flashing warning and caution road signs about boys and men the past two decades, men still hold the structural levers of power in government and corporations, and many are wielding it to hold women back. It shouldn't be surprising that women are traveling the superhighways of opportunity opened up to them.
The success of boys and men is critical to the future of our democracy. But does the progress made by women necessarily detract from men’s future success? Does it have to be a zero-sum game?
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Lots to think about in this one. Thanks.
When I was a junior in high school, I worked as a Page in the Iowa Legislature. My father wanted me to be the first woman President. He believed in the grassroots participation of the Iowa caucuses, the way they were organized in the 50’s and 60’s. His timing wasn’t too bad: Hilary is only a year older than me. But the nasty behaviour I saw in the smoke-filled back rooms in the legislature even then turned me off.
Eventually I became a group process facilitator, bringing together grassroots consensus in communities and organizations. In that way I fulfilled my father’s dream of leading people’s authentic participation in decisions that affected their lives.
But I wonder how many women have decided not to engage in organizations and structures that are filled with the behaviour of those fighting for power and dominance.