Are Tariffs Really About Gender Panic?

Why a manufacturing economy won't actually make us manlier

On Fox News’s The Five this week, co-host Jesse Watters said, with a straight face: “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. And if you’re out working….you are around other guys. You are not around HR ladies and lawyers that give you estrogen.” Never mind that people can’t give each other estrogen, and that Watters himself sits behind a screen all day. Never mind that the highly automated modern factory also requires workers to sit “behind a screen” in order to do their jobs. Watters’s comment reveals a belief shared by many on the right: that a return to a manufacturing economy, the stated goal of Trump’s tariff policy, will make men manlier and finally get those pesky “HR ladies” out of the workforce.

Watters’s comment echoes other sentiments percolating around the internet that the tariffs will usher in a new golden age of manly men. On X, Max Lugavare, a person with the very masculine job of nutritional podcaster,* tweeted out the viral 2024 Australian skincare influencer dance video with the comment, “Tariffs or this? This.” In other words, given a choice between annoyingly perky women in blazers frolicking around an office doing “email jobs,” and men making widgets in a factory, we’ll take the widgets.

Ironically, the very first factory workers were women, “mill girls” in places like Lowell, Massachusetts. Women could be recruited to work for low pay in textile mills because they were not essential to the family farm. Children worked in factories too; their small fingers made it easier to weave and do detailed piecework. Men did the hard stuff at home, on the farm.

Factory jobs eventually became male dominated, but it wasn’t because there was something inherently testosterone-boosting about joining an assembly line. It was because the demand for labor prompted employers to raise pay. In the golden age of manufacturing, factory jobs paid well, well enough to support a whole family on one paycheck. And they paid well, not because they happened in factories, but because the workers formed unions and demanded decent wages and working conditions.

So when people hope that manlier jobs will make a comeback, they’re not longing for the jobs themselves. Given a choice, most people would rather make their living in an air-conditioned office than on a factory floor or deep in the bowels of a coal mine.** Instead, this rhetoric is fueled by nostalgia for a time when men’s earning capacity clearly exceeded women’s.

The close alignment between breadwinning and masculinity is a legacy of the industrial revolution. Before we shifted to an industrial economy, most people earned their living through subsistence farming on family farms, which required grueling work from both men and women. Men, women, and children did different jobs around the farm, but all made economically productive contributions to the household. It was only after men moved into jobs in factories and offices that the spheres of work and home started to diverge, with men assuming breadwinner roles and women doing the unpaid household labor. The concept of masculinity became bound up with the externally-sourced paycheck.

In other words, the “manliness” that Watters is hoping to re-ignite is more about earnings than widgets. Even if we accept the far-fetched premise that tariffs will lead to re-industrialization, it’s unclear that manufacturing jobs will actually boost men’s status in the absence of a union movement to make these jobs desirable. Given that Trump’s chosen head of the National Labor Relations board is a union-busting lawyer and his techbro buddies, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are known for virulently opposing unionization in their own workplaces, it’s safe to say that the administration’s plans do not include full-throated support of workers’ rights. The GOP is the party that opposes the minimum wage and pushes ‘right-to-work’ laws that weaken union membership. With them in charge, there is no guarantee that a return to factory jobs would come with breadwinners’ wages.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the Heritage Foundation’s argument that too much higher education is to blame for dropping birth rates. As I pointed out in my piece, the Heritage report sidesteps the fact that educational attainment has declined among men, even as their fatherhood rates are dropping just as quickly as women’s motherhood rates. Although the authors don’t say this explicitly, the subtext of the Heritage report is that the problem with education is specifically a problem with women’s education. Their solution is to get women out of the classroom, and into baby-making mode.

But this line of thinking reflects the same kind of race to the bottom represented by the tariff policy. When we had a manufacturing economy dominated by male breadwinners, Americans were objectively poorer and had lower standards of living than we do now. I’m all in favor of making our society less materialistic, but I’m not sure that most Americans are ready to trade in the creature comforts of a knowledge and service economy for a chance to get back to the factory. A similar race to the bottom is reflected in the defunding of the National Institutes of Health and attacks on top universities – drivers of innovation and knowledge that represent our economic future, rather than our economic past.

Here’s my humble suggestion. Instead of retrogressive policies that boost men’s relative status by weakening the overall economy, let’s go back to the lessons we learned well before the Industrial Revolution, and recognize that everyone’s household contributions are valuable. Men’s work and women’s work are both essential. Humans are plastic, adaptable, and surprising creatures. We thrive when we jettison strict gender-based rules about who gets to do what kind of job, and instead allow people to exercise their talents to the fullest.

*Although he went full MAHA after publishing it, Lugavere’s book, Genius Foods, is pretty good. I still make his Insanely Crispy Buffalo Wings sometimes.

**Coal is one of the most male-dominated industries out there —its workforce is estimated to be about 93% male. Trump’s love of hard-hatted masculinity helps explain why he has been so fond of the industry – he signed four executive orders to prop up coal just this week - despite the fact that there are currently fewer coal workers (<50,000) than there are people employed by Arby’s or Whole Foods.