Has feminism been bad for men?

How the rise of lady-workers affected economics, employment, and inflation

One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to get into dumb beefs with people online, because I have a bad habit of getting cranky or bored, especially when I’ve got an overdue work project that I really don’t want to tackle, and hitting up the internet to go argue. In fourth grade my best friend Sarah Hammond and I had an Arguing Booth where we’d try to convince people to pay a dollar to argue with us. We’d offer up such spicy topics as the death penalty, free will, gay marriage, and flag-burning (it was the ‘90s). Unfortunately, the booth rarely made money. We had very few customers, so we usually just argued with each other.

That said, argumentative beefs can occasionally be illuminating, because they force everyone to clarify their positions and even learn something new. I had a long back-and-forth a few weeks ago with a character called Rohan Ghostwind, who, from his pseudonym, I picture looking like one of these guys. The conversation started with the broad question of whether feminism has been bad for men.

I think this is an interesting question, and I’m going to try and grapple with it in this essay.

First, I’ll acknowledge that feminist readers will likely be annoyed that this is even a conversation. Men ran the world for thousands of years, a few tables turn, and now men are victims? While recognizing this perspective, I think it’s still worth engaging with this debate, because many men (and some women) think that feminism has been bad news for men, and those folks are leading the charge to roll back women’s progress. Among Gen Z, 59% of males believe that “men are being expected to do too much to support equality,” and 57% per cent of males think “we have gone so far in promoting women's equality that we are discriminating against men.” If you don’t have my zeal for getting mad and wasting time online, I caution you to stay away from the #Repealthe19th hashtag and the marital rape enthusiasts on Twitter.

Anti-feminists have also claimed real power within the current administration. Scott Yenor, who directs The Heritage Foundation’s Center for American Studies, has argued that employers should be legally allowed to discriminate against women in the workplace, for example “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage.”He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.” Heritage is the architect of Project 2025, the guiding document for the Trump administration’s domestic policy agenda.

In this mini-series, I’ll address three claims about how feminism has hurt men: first, in terms of economics and employment; second, in terms of marriage and family formation; third, in terms of education and anti-male cultural biases. Because I’m long-winded, I’m going to focus this essay on the first set of economic claims, and save the second two claims for my next newsletter.

People do NOT like it when working women dance around

Before I get into my arguments, I’ll lay out some priors. I’ll start by providing a definition of feminism. I’ll next define patriarchy and provide examples of how it works in practice. Finally, I’ll address some specific claims about how feminism may have hurt men. I will acknowledge right up front that I consider myself a left-leaning feminist. But I’m going to try to do this fairly and stay open-minded to problems with the feminist position. Commenters are welcome to point out arguments that I’ve missed.

WHAT IS FEMINISM?

Marie Shear wrote, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” I’ve used the complementary definition “Feminism is the belief that women are full-fledged people with internality, inherent worth, and the right to live with agency, access equal opportunities, and make their own choices.” The Oxford Dictionary uses “Advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex” as its working definition. The full human rights of women are the throughline here. Another way to describe feminism is as a movement dedicated to the overturning of patriarchy, which brings me to:

WHAT IS PATRIARCHY?

Patriarchy, in turn, is described by Wikipedia as “a social system in which positions of authority are primarily held by men.” In my back-and-forth with Mr. Ghostwind, I defined it thusly: “Patriarchy is a system within which greater power, status, and freedom is afforded to men solely by virtue of their gender.” This last point is important: Patriarchy is not simply a meritocracy where benefits naturally accrue to men, it is a system that ensures that power flows to men because they are male. What does this mean in practice? Across history and cultures, patriarchal societies have often featured some combination of the following:

Patrilineal inheritance: One’s title, office, or property is passed solely through male heirs. Daughters do not inherit family wealth or status and can only access wealth and status through marriage. May mean that sons are preferred to daughters.

Laws dictating male ownership of wives: These include the law of coverture, which states that marital property is only held by the husband and married women have no property rights of their own; lack of prosecution of marital rape and spousal abuse; laws that women needed a husband’s permission to travel, open a credit card, or obtain contraception;

Prohibitions on women’s political participation: Only men are allowed to vote, run for office, or hold elected office.

Prohibitions on women’s education: Women are not taught to read or permitted to go to school; women are barred from colleges, universities, and libraries.

Prohibitions on women’s professional roles: Women are barred from certain professions (such as medicine, law, academia, business) and professional societies.

Prohibitions on women’s freedom of expression or movement: Women are not allowed to speak in public or publish their writing without using a pseudonym, are prohibited from driving or traveling to certain places, or are sequestered in specific places when menstruating or pregnant.

Patriarchy has many other downstream effects on how we understand and value gender roles and attributes, but these examples are a good concrete starting place in terms of understanding the constraints of patriarchal societies on women’s “right to live with agency, access equal opportunities, and make their own choices.”

Feminism has been an enormously successful global movement over the last 150 years, in the sense that many of these examples of patriarchy-in-action were commonplace before feminism and would strike us as odd and antiquated in most contemporary societies today.

Still, feminism has suffered from persistent image problems. The very first suffragettes were called angry, man-hating “hyenas in petticoats” for demanding the vote, and the claim that feminists are anti-male has persisted ever since. Girlboss Taylor Swift sums this up well: “As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities…What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in society, was that you hate men…For so long it’s been made to seem like something where you’d picket against the opposite sex, whereas it’s not about that at all.”

I found this image on Reddit, but an image search reveals that it is posted all over the internet. I’m surprised that they didn’t make the “after feminism” girl uglier.

Even though most feminists throughout history have been wives of men, mothers of men, and colleagues of men, the idea that feminists are “picketing against the opposite sex” rather than for their own human rights has been a constant theme. But have feminists actually operated at men’s expense?

Claim 1: Feminism has hurt men economically because women’s entry into the workforce has taken jobs away from men.

This claim has a straightforward logic to it - in theory, more jobs going to women mean fewer jobs for men - but is complicated to unpack, because a number of other economic shifts coincided with the entry of women into the workforce, like rising automation, the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, globalization and the outsourcing of factory jobs overseas, and the crumbling of the labor movement amidst the rise of right-to-work policies. Moreover, this claim suffers from a fixed-pie fallacy: the assumption that there are a finite number of jobs to go around, as opposed to the reality that economies can grow. As Jerusalem Demsas has written, this kind of zero-sum thinking is a form of peasant logic, characteristic of pre-industrial societies. In fact, there’s clear data suggesting that in the decades after women joined the workforce, economic output increased and our societal living standards improved. Compared to the prototypical 1950s family, we live in larger homes, own more vehicles, travel more, and enjoy more creature comforts today. Compared to more patriarchal countries with much lower female workforce participation, we live in the lap of luxury. The countries with the fewest working women are Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and I doubt that even the most strident anti-feminists would like to live within their economies. Indeed, an International Monetary Fund report suggests that closing male-female gender employment gaps grows the GDP, in part because gender diversity facilitates innovation: “Increasing women’s employment boosts growth and incomes more than previously estimated, exceeding the improvement that comes simply from adding workers. Among countries where gaps in participation rates are the largest, closing them adds 35 percent to GDP, on average.”

Men as well as women have benefited from the job growth and economic expansion that has occurred since women went to work en masse. As a report from the conservative Cato Institute states, “From 1962 to 2024, males between ages 25 and 44 saw real income growth of around 45%. Even the idea that real hourly earnings for the typical 25- to 54-year-old male with only a high school diploma fell depends entirely on measuring income from the middle of the 1970s.”

Even if you use that middle-of-the-1970s metric, the real economic story in the U.S. in the last 50 years has been shaped like K: men in the highest earning bracket are richer than ever before, whereas men in the bottom 50% for education have seen declining prospects (and also have the lowest marriage and family formation rates). It’s hard to pin this on working women, most of whom are not in the same occupations as blue collar men, instead of the aforementioned economic shifts (automation, declining union participation, outsourcing) and several decades of rising economic inequality and corporate consolidation.

It’s also not even clear that “feminism” is the reason women went to work in the first place. As historian Stephanie Coontz has written, the 1950s were an ahistorical blip, since the postwar boom allowed families to survive on a single income. Before the industrial revolution, most families practiced subsistence farming (and long before that, foraging), and women contributed essential labor and calories. There’s nothing new about women working for material reward. Women joined the post-industrial workforce in large numbers starting in the 1960s because labor-saving household technologies opened up more time, and the changing nature of work meant that physical strength and endurance were no longer needed to perform most jobs. Second-wave feminism was as much a consequence of those shifts as a driver of them.

But what about anti-male DEI?

As I was drafting this essay, the writer Jacob Savage published an article in the magazine Compact, The Lost Generation, that quickly went viral. Savage describes his frustrated attempts to break into TV writing in the 2010s, discovering that writer’s rooms were eager to “diversify” and not willing to hire white men. He cites other data suggesting that within the same time span, fields like publishing, journalism, and academia went from being dominated by white men to deliberately excluding them. This piece has stoked debate: Matt Bruenig looked at census data, finding that white male employment remained steady during the time period Savage focuses on, including at upper income levels and within arts and entertainment fields.¹ However, Noah Smith is unconvinced by Bruenig’s evidence, arguing that aggregate group data cannot tell us about individual experiences of discrimination.

Personally, I think Savage’s piece is very good, well-researched, and worth taking seriously. It comports with anecdata from my own friends in the entertainment industry. Savage is likely correct that within some industries, like entertainment, journalism, publishing, and academia, efforts to correct for existing gender imbalances led to discrimination against men. I think this is bad. I also think it’s possible for two things to be true; it was bad that women were shut out of these professions in previous generations,² and it is also bad that men were shut out of them in recent decades. There are generational as well as gendered forces at play, too. Many of the senior-level executives making hiring decisions were themselves white men, who continued to occupy the highest ranks of their industries even as they tipped the scales against young men seeking to enter them. Efforts to correct white male dominance therefore had a uniquely chilling effect on younger generations while allowing Boomer men to continue sitting atop corporate hierarchies.

Of course, diversity hiring isn’t the only reason that media and academic jobs dried up for young men in the 2010s; amidst elite overproduction and gerontocracy, the financial and cultural power of these industries was shrinking too. Reading Savage’s essay, I was reminded of a recent New York Times story, “The Gen X Career Meltdown.” In Savage’s account, Gen X white men are the winners, occupying the roles that closed to millennial men in the 2010s. They are the showrunners, the directors, and the department chairs who got all the good jobs before the millennials came on the scene. But, as the NYT reports, “If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.” In other words, maybe the Gen Xers didn’t fare so well either, because technology and austerity took over these creative industries. As always, we can blame the boomers for screwing everything up.

Still, my takeaway is that Savage is basically correct that unfair discrimination happened. I think that the pendulum needed to swing, but it swung too quickly and too hard; from overt sexism and the exclusion of talented women, to discrimination against a generation of talented young men. The pendulum is already swinging back, and I don’t believe that most women actually want to work in totally female-dominated industries (I certainly don’t!) any more than they want to go to all-female colleges. Indeed, now that university admissions offices are practicing pro-male affirmative action, it’s harder to get into an elite college if you are female. Male applicants can now take spots away from female peers with higher stats. There’s even anthropological evidence that when women get power, they are more likely to share it with men than to hoard it for their own gender. My hunch is that the pendulum will land in the territory of relative gender balance when the dust settles.

But what about inflation?

As reviewed, there’s little evidence that women’s entry in the workforce dramatically affected men’s employment or earning prospects. But what if having more workers devalued everyone’s wages? According to this argument, the presence of women in the workforce drives up inflation, making it impossible for families to survive on a single income. Indeed, there is a large economic gulf between single-earner and dual-earner families; as Matt Bruenig writes in Jacobin, “In 1963, a family surviving solely off a median married man’s wage would have an income that was 81 percent of the median family income. In 2024, such a family would have an income that is just 55 percent of the median family income.” However, that’s not because of falling standards for single-earners, but rather the rising wealth of dual-earners.

As Matthew Yglesias writes, “This model of household has declined not because people have gotten poorer but because they’ve become less poor. What’s gone up is not the cost of living relative to a single earner’s wages, but the opportunity cost of the second adult not working. Nothing is stopping a typical married American couple from accepting 1960s material conditions in exchange for one parent being a full-time homemaker. It’s just that most people don’t want that.”

Looking across countries, there is no direct link between women’s workforce participation and higher inflation. If anything, the evidence seems to point in the opposite directions: women’s employment is associated with better macroeconomic stability, and lower inflationary pressure, not higher. That’s because prices rise when demand exceeds supply, and working women increase supply more than demand. That is, when we add workers we raise output, and these output gains outpace rising household income and consumption. Larger labor pools also reduce bottlenecks, which can dampen wage–price spirals.

Globally, countries with high and stable women’s workforce participation, like the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany, have not shown notably higher inflation, historically, than places like Southern Europe, East Asia, and the U.S. where women either participate less in the workforce, have entered the workforce in more recent decades, or tend to leave the workforce after motherhood.

In the 1990s-2010s, as women’s workforce participation grew to its current level, inflation actually fell, leading to protracted macroeconomic stability (the “Great Moderation.”) Moreover, women’s employment is highest in sectors like education, healthcare, clerical and professional services, and public services. These sectors are typically less inflationary, often have fixed pricing (or create publicly available services, like K-12 schools), and don’t generate wage–price spirals like commodity or construction booms. So if anything, working women are less of a problem for inflation than your typical finance or tech bros.

However! What if the greater female economic participation spurred by feminism, even if it’s made us richer and more macroeconomically resilient, has actually degraded us culturally, by devaluing the important work of homemaking and childrearing, suppressing marriage and the birth rate, convincing boys that they are toxic and unwelcome at school, and creating a lonelier, more transactional, more spiritually deprived world? Glad you asked! I will tackle these questions next, so tune in.

In the meantime, if you see anyone arguing on here or X that feminism has hurt men economically by taking jobs from men, promoting discriminatory hiring, or driving up inflation, please point them here and then tell them to go argue with me in the comments.

Read Part II of this series!

And here’s Part III!

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

I made a playlist of all my 2025 recs and you can listen to it!

Past recs: Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black // James Mercer // Playboy Carti & Car Seat Headrest // Weyes Blood // Matthew Sweet // Fontaines D.C. // Elvis Costello Spanish Model // Lily Allen // Geese // Olivia Tremor Control // Wake Up Dead Man // Beulah // Rosalia // A$AP Rocky

DIRTY PROJECTORS

How did it take me so long to talk about this band? I love this band. For the longest time I had their album Swing Lo Magellan loaded up my phone, and for some reason my playlist automatically sorted into alphabetical order, which meant that their song “About to Die” would play as soon as I plugged my phone into the car speakers. For someone with a history of paralyzing driving anxiety, “About to Die” is actually a terrible song to auto-play when you’re driving! Luckily I fixed that feature.

I sometimes think of Dirty Projectors as being in the same basket as Vampire Weekend, because they came up in NYC around the same time and also feature speedy, fiddly, vaguely ethnic guitar playing. But they also have a kind of Eastern European close-harmony throat singing thing going on, and there is clearly a Talking Heads influence.

Bitte Orca, the title track from their 2009 album, is maybe my favorite song of theirs - I think the title means “Sweet Whale”?

Did you know that I wrote a book, that it’s good, and that if you pre-order it, you get a free six-month paid subscription to my Substack? Redeem this offer here!

1. Bruenig concludes, “Overall, this data does not really support Savage’s material thesis. Ambitious white men in their thirties have not seen much, if any, decline over this period. Their overall employment is up. Their employment in the arts and media is unchanged. Educational attainment is up.”

2. For decades, women who wrote for the New York Times were placed, by default, in a “dark corner” upstairs from the main newsroom and expected to write for the “women’s section”: “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings.” It wasn’t until a class action lawsuit in 1978 that “DEI” came to the Times, clearing the way for women to take other beats. Many women faced overt discrimination and sexual harassment within journalism, academia, and entertainment, with little recourse. For example, Les Moonves’s tenure at CBS, where he was enormously powerful, was marked by the discounting of female talent and harassment of female writers and producers.