There are a number of reasons at play here why the premise of this article does not make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For years, men have have had a much higher employment rate than women, e.g. 85 million men vs. 66 million women in the US in 2024 [1]. In other words, women are just catching up.
2. Women have a much higher rate of part-time jobs [1]. That is, a certain job would employ more women than men if women typically work part-time while men typically work full-time.
3. Employers are sometimes incentivized to hire women over men in case of equal qualification, e.g. [2]
4. Women earn better salaries than ever before, making it more attractive for them to apply to more jobs.
5. The statistics doesn't say anything about job migration: if I'm a woman who got a good job today but could get an even better one in half a year, will that be counted as two jobs given to a woman?
The premise of the article is exactly the same as the title. You’re making an assumption that anyone pointing out these numbers is claiming men are being oppressed, and then arguing against that. There’s no need. Almost no one is making that claim.
The real issue is the opposite narrative. The idea that men broadly oppressed women across history, preventing them from participating in economic roles, and that modern outcomes are primarily the result of that dynamic being corrected.
There are a number of reasons at play here why that premise doesn’t make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For most of history, labor was dictated by physical constraints and survival needs. Work like hunting, land clearing, construction, and early farming depended heavily on upper body strength and endurance, which skewed participation toward men. That’s a division of labor shaped by biology and environment, not a simple story of exclusion. As technology advanced, much of that physicality became unnecessary, which is a major driver of why participation has equalized in modern roles.
2. Women’s roles were not an absence from work, but a concentration in different forms of labor. Childbearing, childcare, food preparation, and household production were essential to survival, even if they don’t show up cleanly in modern employment statistics.
3. Many of the institutions we associate with modern economic life, including formalized science, engineering, and large-scale industry, were disproportionately created and originated in contexts where men were the primary participants. That’s not a claim about superiority, but it does mean the structure of what we now recognize as “work” and “progress” was heavily shaped by that historical imbalance.
4. The concept of a formal job market is relatively recent. In pre-industrial societies, most people, including men, were not participating in anything resembling today’s labor market. Applying modern employment categories backward creates a distorted picture of inclusion and exclusion.
5. Modern workforce participation is strongly driven by changes in technology and incentives. As physical constraints decreased and the returns to education and careers increased, more women entered and competed in the workforce. That shift is not well explained by a single narrative of oppression being lifted, but by broader structural changes.
> You’re making an assumption that anyone pointing out these numbers is claiming men are being oppressed, and then arguing against that.
I'm sorry but I'm not making any such assumptions nor claims. Sorry if you got that impression. If anything, I'm referring to this part of the title: "What's going on with men?"
Other than that, thanks for your contribution - you're listing a lot of important points. If I may add one: disposable hygiene pads that actually work are a fairly recent invention. Through the centuries, women used all kinds of different measures to handle menstruation bleeding that were, however, often associated with social stigma. Therefore, splitting the daily work load such that women could stay was advantageous also just for this practical reason - I suppose it wouldn't have been so awesome to be out in the fields or in a factory during that one week of the month.
> ... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
In fact, it has started to reverse. When controlled for experience and hours worked, and comparing pay for the same job, young women out-earn young men. The reason for this is simple: the ratio of men and women in college has flipped since the 90s, going from 60:40 in favor of men to now roughly 60:40 in favor of women.
We'll see if that remains true in the long-term, however, as women tend to pay a steep penalty, compensation-wise, for maternity leave.
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
i.e. Nursing jobs mostly go to women not because men can’t do them because “nurses aren’t men”, per our current cultural norms.
There's been a lot of talk about "toxic masculinity" over the years but I've heard of and would worry about the female equivalent if I were considering a role in nursing as a man. Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances. Seems awful
> Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances.
In other words, men in nursing are treated to the same indignities that women experience in most jobs?
Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men. I recall reading a study about harassment in the restaurant industry. Both genders were harassed but harassment towards men was largely ignored in the analysis because it didn't fit the focus or narrative of the authors.
As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.
Out of that list only sexual advances apply to men. So no its not the same. Having worked in mostly female workplace i can confirm the pissing matches there are on a whole new level.
What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"
Many men would rather not work and deal with the financial and social consequences of that than deal with the toxicity both in the workplace and later on if they talk about it.
Yes, the main difference being we have no systems in place to deal with that for men. Or, the broader societal context: men have never had a progressive movement.
sarcasm? most of the people i hang with are nurses and instances of female bullying at the workplace is annoying at worst where their more sinister stories are about men stalking and making sexual advances. both male and female nurses telling me these stories at parties
When a company hires for an entry level public facing position, they always mean a young individual with a welcoming smile instead of a bald middle aged man who has been unemployed for two years. That's something that everybody knows and even the most progressive HR department, overtly or tacitly, will try to enforce. Society is full of small hidden prejudices that people don't really see as harmful.
The job itself caters to the natural disposition of women much more than men. That said, having a some male nurses in every hospital to me is mandatory. You need men in those teams for various reasons. But overall the job caters to women.
I also believe the number of female primary care physicians recently surpassed men. Or at least in Family Medicine, or something like that.
It amazing how the language differ in this kind of article when the roles are reversed. In the past we talked about inclusion, discrimination, and industries that excluded women. Now we have statements like "make girly jobs appeal to manly men.". I can just imagine how well received the statement "make manly jobs appeal to girly women" would had been around 2010.
It seems unlikely that the success of women in STEM was based on making STEM more feminine, and helping women understand that they can have STEM roles and still stay feminine. It seems more plausible that affirmative action, privileged opportunities, exclusive spaces, and preferential hiring practices had more to do in making women in STEM successful than words about femininity and masculinity.
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
read a lot of backward assumptions for why "women hold nearly 80% of jobs" in health care. ill offer that its simply because when men fought in war, women worked as nurses. women used those skills to be nurses professionally. their kids saw women as nurses, making great money, and kids often try to do what they see adults around them do. over and over
theres nothing inherently feminine about nursing. its gritty job
- nursing: I don’t want to work 60-70 hours a week at your horrific body shop of a PE asset
- teaching: unruly kids. Bully’s get protected and those who stand up get punished. There’s some level of societal distrust of men around children not their own.
- social work: you’re exposed to some of the worst most horrific side of society constantly for peanut pay. You’re constantly in a position where you want to help people, but are constrained by things far outside your power.
Yeah I don’t care how “masculine” you try to frame them, just not interested.
It's frustrating that the only suggestion the experts interviewed have here is essentially blue-washing woman-dominated jobs. "For instance, many health care jobs could be framed as roles requiring the strength to lift people. Preschools could highlight the need for teachers who serve as positive male role models." Just reads as that one SMBC comic - "how can we make math pink?" As if the only way they can understand people is through the most shallow stereotypes.
Yeah, you can totally fix the imbalance in the nursing sector by showing ads with a bunch of male nurses driving monster trucks into the ICU and crushing energy drink cans on patients' foreheads! Or have a cowboy ride his horse into the preschool, smoking a cigarette that he lights by dragging a match across his own thick stubble! This isn't a structural problem, it's just a question of marketing!
>Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men.
(...)
>The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall,
How can a part add more than the total? Are pure increase figures being mixed up with increase-reduction in the article? And if so, how is gender balanced in those figures?
Postmodernist movements like DEI were never about objective reality — in fact the idea of an objective reality is outright rejected. It doesn't matter if men are being left out of jobs (statistically) — they're [according to the ideology] the eternal benefactors of invisible, omnipresent systemic privilege. This is of course the complete opposite of the ideals of liberalism and the human rights movement, which is why so many people are fundamentally at odds with common illiberal corporate policy today (although it's often difficult to articulate why without being dismissed as a bigot).
For more on this, I recommend Cynical Theories[0] by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
Here's another explanation. My hypothesis goes deeper than gender imbalance.
Most job interviews are theater nowadays. It's about conformity, performative culture fitting, agreeableness (read, willing to slave away without complaining).
On average, women tend to better suited for such processes. Along with immigrant groups.
> That parity masks the significant gains women have recently made in the labor market. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
...
> Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
The article and journalism research should have been about the absurdity of this number. If there has been a 10% increase in the total number of nurses in a single year in the USA, either there is an on-going health crisis to be covered; or you know, the numbers are just garbage.
140 comments
1. For years, men have have had a much higher employment rate than women, e.g. 85 million men vs. 66 million women in the US in 2024 [1]. In other words, women are just catching up.
2. Women have a much higher rate of part-time jobs [1]. That is, a certain job would employ more women than men if women typically work part-time while men typically work full-time.
3. Employers are sometimes incentivized to hire women over men in case of equal qualification, e.g. [2]
4. Women earn better salaries than ever before, making it more attractive for them to apply to more jobs.
5. The statistics doesn't say anything about job migration: if I'm a woman who got a good job today but could get an even better one in half a year, will that be counted as two jobs given to a woman?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1378067/number-employed-...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4418903/
The real issue is the opposite narrative. The idea that men broadly oppressed women across history, preventing them from participating in economic roles, and that modern outcomes are primarily the result of that dynamic being corrected.
There are a number of reasons at play here why that premise doesn’t make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For most of history, labor was dictated by physical constraints and survival needs. Work like hunting, land clearing, construction, and early farming depended heavily on upper body strength and endurance, which skewed participation toward men. That’s a division of labor shaped by biology and environment, not a simple story of exclusion. As technology advanced, much of that physicality became unnecessary, which is a major driver of why participation has equalized in modern roles.
2. Women’s roles were not an absence from work, but a concentration in different forms of labor. Childbearing, childcare, food preparation, and household production were essential to survival, even if they don’t show up cleanly in modern employment statistics.
3. Many of the institutions we associate with modern economic life, including formalized science, engineering, and large-scale industry, were disproportionately created and originated in contexts where men were the primary participants. That’s not a claim about superiority, but it does mean the structure of what we now recognize as “work” and “progress” was heavily shaped by that historical imbalance.
4. The concept of a formal job market is relatively recent. In pre-industrial societies, most people, including men, were not participating in anything resembling today’s labor market. Applying modern employment categories backward creates a distorted picture of inclusion and exclusion.
5. Modern workforce participation is strongly driven by changes in technology and incentives. As physical constraints decreased and the returns to education and careers increased, more women entered and competed in the workforce. That shift is not well explained by a single narrative of oppression being lifted, but by broader structural changes.
I'm sorry but I'm not making any such assumptions nor claims. Sorry if you got that impression. If anything, I'm referring to this part of the title: "What's going on with men?"
Other than that, thanks for your contribution - you're listing a lot of important points. If I may add one: disposable hygiene pads that actually work are a fairly recent invention. Through the centuries, women used all kinds of different measures to handle menstruation bleeding that were, however, often associated with social stigma. Therefore, splitting the daily work load such that women could stay was advantageous also just for this practical reason - I suppose it wouldn't have been so awesome to be out in the fields or in a factory during that one week of the month.
> Employers are incentivized to hire women over men in case of equal qualification.
You can't say this, unsupported by evidence, in Trump's America, where revanchist 'white guy DEI' is the ordering of the world.
> Women earn better salaries than ever before
... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
What makes jobs that pay enough 'more attractive', generally, is rising fixed costs, like rent and energy, and stagnant wages.
> ... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
In fact, it has started to reverse. When controlled for experience and hours worked, and comparing pay for the same job, young women out-earn young men. The reason for this is simple: the ratio of men and women in college has flipped since the 90s, going from 60:40 in favor of men to now roughly 60:40 in favor of women.
We'll see if that remains true in the long-term, however, as women tend to pay a steep penalty, compensation-wise, for maternity leave.
I've slightly toned down that statement and added a reference.
> ... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
The argument is not about the gender pay gap (which I don't doubt) however.
I do agree though that increased cost of life puts a bigger pressure on everyone to find sources of income.
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
i.e. Nursing jobs mostly go to women not because men can’t do them because “nurses aren’t men”, per our current cultural norms.
> Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances.
In other words, men in nursing are treated to the same indignities that women experience in most jobs?
As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.
> Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men.
I am sure that there's a lot of unreported mistreatment of anyone who represents a minority in a given profession.
Many men would rather not work and deal with the financial and social consequences of that than deal with the toxicity both in the workplace and later on if they talk about it.
edit: said "quite a few" originally but then only counted 3
I also believe the number of female primary care physicians recently surpassed men. Or at least in Family Medicine, or something like that.
It seems unlikely that the success of women in STEM was based on making STEM more feminine, and helping women understand that they can have STEM roles and still stay feminine. It seems more plausible that affirmative action, privileged opportunities, exclusive spaces, and preferential hiring practices had more to do in making women in STEM successful than words about femininity and masculinity.
> Now Reeves says what's needed are policies and programs to draw male workers into fields such as nursing, teaching and social work.
This is also true for an entirely different reason: all three of these fields would benefit hugely from having more balanced gender ratios
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
read a lot of backward assumptions for why "women hold nearly 80% of jobs" in health care. ill offer that its simply because when men fought in war, women worked as nurses. women used those skills to be nurses professionally. their kids saw women as nurses, making great money, and kids often try to do what they see adults around them do. over and over
theres nothing inherently feminine about nursing. its gritty job
- teaching: unruly kids. Bully’s get protected and those who stand up get punished. There’s some level of societal distrust of men around children not their own.
- social work: you’re exposed to some of the worst most horrific side of society constantly for peanut pay. You’re constantly in a position where you want to help people, but are constrained by things far outside your power.
Yeah I don’t care how “masculine” you try to frame them, just not interested.
Yeah, you can totally fix the imbalance in the nursing sector by showing ads with a bunch of male nurses driving monster trucks into the ICU and crushing energy drink cans on patients' foreheads! Or have a cowboy ride his horse into the preschool, smoking a cigarette that he lights by dragging a match across his own thick stubble! This isn't a structural problem, it's just a question of marketing!
Insulting.
Luckily the red flags are usually all over the website and walls of most places so you know not to even interview.
>Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men.
(...)
>The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall,
How can a part add more than the total? Are pure increase figures being mixed up with increase-reduction in the article? And if so, how is gender balanced in those figures?
For more on this, I recommend Cynical Theories[0] by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53052177-cynical-theorie...
Most job interviews are theater nowadays. It's about conformity, performative culture fitting, agreeableness (read, willing to slave away without complaining).
On average, women tend to better suited for such processes. Along with immigrant groups.
> That parity masks the significant gains women have recently made in the labor market. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
...
> Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
The article and journalism research should have been about the absurdity of this number. If there has been a 10% increase in the total number of nurses in a single year in the USA, either there is an on-going health crisis to be covered; or you know, the numbers are just garbage.