Women Are Out Earning Men (and the Media isn't talking about it)

All right, team, we are going to talk about something interesting and a little bit different than what I normally talk about, which is a recent study by Pew Research. And Pew Research put out this study that showed that women are out earning men and women are out earning men. Specifically in several major metropolitan areas, places like New York and LA and Washington D.C. and in 22 of the main metro areas in America, women are now earning as much, if not more. Now, is it a problem that women earn as much as men? Absolutely not. Does it become problematic when overall women are out earning men? Not necessarily. Except the majority of those women, when you ask them, still prefer to date a man who is earning as much as them, if not more. Now, this becomes an even bigger problem when you start to dig into the data and you start to look at the men exiting the workforce. And so right now in America, we have the lowest rate, the lowest percentage of eligible working men that are in the workforce. So when you look at the data, between 24 and 55 is what they constitute as an eligible working age. And only 85% of men are in the workforce that are in that age range. That is down 8% over the last 50 years. Now, that 8% might not sound like a big deal, but when you're talking about 100 million people, that's substantial, that it's a substantial amount and number of people, number of men specifically, that are not engaging and entering into the workforce. And so that puts more of a burden, I guess you could say more of a responsibility onto the female part of the workforce. And you have the highest amount of women that are currently in the workforce. Again, not a bad thing. But one of the things that I find fascinating is twofold. Number one, I haven't seen mainstream media talking about this at all. The rapid decline of men in the workforce, the rapid decline of men going to colleges and universities, what oftentimes just gets focused in on and fixated on is the rising rates of women in the workforce and this celebration of women out earning men. And again, it's not a problem. I don't have any issue with that. What I do take issue with is a couple of things. Number one, when you look at the amount of men that are going to college and graduating from college or university, that number has significantly declined to a point where you are about to have in America, two women graduating for every one man who graduates. Now, to give you context, that is the inverse of what it used to be before we passed Title 9 back in the 60s to make sure that more women were going to colleges and to incentivize and to create pathways and opportunities for women to go through colleges and go through universities so that they could get into the workforce and become an instrumental part of society. It's the inverse of that, right? Back in the 60s, you had two men graduating for every one woman. And we identified that that was a problem, that was an issue, that that was creating a systemic and economic imbalance within our society. And so we did something about it. And now that that's happening on the inverse, there's almost no conversation about that. And anytime that you bring it up, what's fascinating is that a lot of times you get labeled as a misogynist or, you know, this is a fault of the patriarchy and men just need to pick up their bootstraps. But this is something that I think we all need to be having a dialogue about. This affects everybody, right? This affects a man's ability to provide. This, you know, impacts a man's ability to find fulfillment within the work that he. And again, just because a man isn't going to college or university doesn't mean he can't make a good living, right? You can work the trades, you can be an entrepreneur. You don't need a degree to go do those things. And there can be a tremendous amount of fulfillment in that. I worked in the trades in my late teens and early twenties. Some of it I didn't really like, but some of it I really thoroughly enjoyed and I made a good wage off of. I wanted to do other things with my life, but honestly, there's times where I'm like, that was a much simpler way of being. And I still made very good money and I got to use my body. And so I think for a lot of guys, that track is becoming very appealing because you have university and college institutions that I think a lot of men look at as anti male, as not welcoming for men. And I think for a lot of guys, depending on the pathway that they're looking at going down, they look at that institution and think, I'm not too sure if I want to go down that path. And, and I'll use myself as an example. In the last few years, as I've grown my company to what it is, one of the leading companies in men's work and working with men, you know, I hire therapists and coaches. We have a ton of clients from around the world. We have built a very incredible business. And because of that, I have thought about whether or not I need to go back and get my university degree, Whether or Not I need to go back and get a master's in psychology or a PhD in psychology. And it's something that's interested me. And so I've been thinking about it more and more and more, you know, because sometimes people look at, look at what I do and they say, well, you're not a psychologist, right? You're not a licensed therapist. And those things are true. But I've taken a different path. I've taken the path of mentoring and apprenticing with some of the top therapists and psychologists in America. And that has served me very well from my learning style and my learning modality. But I realized that not every man, not everybody has that capacity, that not everybody's going to have that chance to sit with and learn from some of the best people in the world. And so I've thought about should I go back and get my master's degree or my PhD degree? And it was interesting because as I had those conversations, I had them with friends, I had them with men and women, I had them with colleagues, I had them with people that are therapists and are psychologists. It was fascinating to see and to hear how often it was mentioned that because I worked with men, I would probably have a hard time going into the cycle psychological or therapeutic field at a college campus, already running a company geared towards men's mental health and men's well being and men's betterment. And that was fascinating to me. And the more that I've dug into this, more that I realized that there is this systemic issue that has started to emerge in our culture and in our society that says you are wrong for talking about men's issues, men's problems, and you are anti feminine, you're a misogynist, et cetera. You are against women's issues, if you are talking about men's issues. And I think that this is completely ridiculous, right? It's like a, I mean, it's just ridiculous. I don't know what it is. We could put some label on it, but the reality is, is that we need to be able to talk about these things in tandem, right? If, if the aim really truly is equality, if the aim really truly is that we want people to have equal standing and equal equal opportunity, then we need to be talking about the challenges and the issues that facing. And here's one example that I think is very important. The reality is when you look at colleges, for example, and you look at the economic gains that people have incurred over the last 10, 20 years, the majority of the economic gains have either Gone to the distribution of the people that already have the money, right? So like, as you probably saw with the pandemic, thousands of new billionaires were created, right? Those people were already fairly wealthy before the rich got richer. The other area where massive economic gains happen were to the college elite. The massive amount of economic gains go oftentimes to people who put the effort and the challenge in of going to college institutions and getting some type of degree, whether it's a bachelor's bastards, a bachelor's or a master's. And so what you can start to see is that the distribution of wealth in our country disproportionately, or in our countries, whether it's North America, but in the west generally disproportionately, will go towards people who have college educations. And so that filters down. So if you create a generation or two of men who do not go get college educations, you are very quickly going to create a society where there is a wealth imbalance that is just the inverse of what it was before. And some might say, hooray for that. That's great. Women should run the world. And that's phenomenal. And we have so much further to go for equality and all those other things. I'm not disputing that. I'm simply saying that there are a lot of men who take pride in providing for their families, providing for themselves, for their partners. And there are a tremendous amount of women who still prefer to date, marry, and be with men who earn as much as them, if not more. That is mating, selection, preference for women. And so the truth of our society that I, I think is just undercovered, like, I don't see mainstream media talking about this at all. I think the truth is that we are creating a large gap from an economic standpoint where there is going to be a much smaller pool of men who are viable economic candidates for the women that they want to date and that women are wanting to date. You know, maybe women just need to change their selection preferences and they need to change their standards, right? But I think, you know, the challenge is I hear a lot of women saying men just need to improve. Men need to pick up their bootstraps, men need to get their shit together and they need to change, they need to adapt and they need to learn. But the reality is, is that there seems to be a societal thing going on and we need to be having these conversations again. I'm not saying that it's bad or wrong that women are out earning men in these cities. I'm simply saying Are we creating a generation or two of men who are falling behind in an education perspective? Are we creating a generation or two of men who are falling behind in the workforce, who are no longer willing or wanting to engage in college, which is a very important social system? It's where a lot of people meet their lifelong friends. It's where a lot of people meet potential partners. It's where you get dating experience. It's where you get life experience. It can be a very important part of your development, especially for men who are still cognitively developing. Right? A man's brain is still developing well into his early and mid-20s. And so that's a very important socializing and social development area for a lot of men. And if we don't have a conversation about why aren't more men going to college, should we be concerned about that? Should we be concerned that in a lot of these cities, men are now being vastly out? Not vastly, but are being outpaced and are on pace to be vastly outpaced by women when it comes to college education and it comes to economic security? Again, the last piece I'll say is you can see this in the data. When it comes to dating, a lot of young men are single, right? I did a video on this that showed that something like 66% of young men between the ages of 18 and 29 are single. But that's not the case for women, right? The it was something like, I think, 29% off the top of my head, or 32% somewhere in there of women in that same age bracket are single. So there's a huge gap where a lot of those women are starting to date up, they're starting to date older. They're starting to date older men who are more financial secure and have some more, whatever we want to call it, social status, status, et cetera, because that's what's important for them. And if we continue down this path, we are going to continue to develop men who don't fit into the dating criteria of women, who don't feel like they are contributing to things that really matter. And that is concerning for me. If I was a young man in today's world, I could tell you that I would feel checked out, that I wouldn't feel very encouraged to go to a college institution to go do the hard work and put in the effort to get a bachelor's degree or a master's degree. I would not feel incentivized to want to go and work for a large company because a lot of those companies, again, do not feel very inclusive for men. That's just the reality of it. And so I think we need to have a broader conversation about some of these pieces. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. How do you think this will play out? Do you think this is a hard thing for society? Do you think this is going to affect relationships? So if you're watching this on YouTube, comment below. Don't forget to like and subscribe because 92% of you I see you are not subscribed to my channel. And if you are listening to this on the podcast, same thing. Give this a subscribe and give this a share. Whether you're watching or listening to this, man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you think will enjoy it. Start a conversation, a dialogue about it. Whether you agree or not, whether you think this is drastic or dramatic or not, whether you think this is important to talk about or not. Share this and man it forward until next week. Conor Beaton signing off.