by Liz Plank
Later, when Mau enlisted in the military, his first assignment was to Misawa Air Base, Japan, where he ended up spending four years. That’s where he met Sergeant Weston, a 34-year-old master sergeant originally from Jamaica. He was almost ten years older than Mau, who was only 25 at the time, but he would seek Mau out to teach him how to do things like change a tire, fix a car stereo or something as simple as making sure he knew how to refill the windshield wiper fluid. “Those were formative lessons,” Mau said. “It took away some fears I had about things I didn’t know how to do as a man, never had grown up with a father.” Mau explained the sergeant would show him how to do things before he even had to ask. “He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself and emphatically wanted to share his knowledge of those skills with me.”
These role models gave him something he could touch and minimized the distance between what he was and what he could be. Mau stressed the importance of his mentors being a tangible source of guidance, each laying the blocks for what he started to understand he could build. “In underserved communities, there is a plethora of disappointment, so you become comfortable with disappointment,” he explained. “I don’t believe anything before I can touch it.” Without the involvement of Mau’s mentors, he’s remained convinced that he would have ended up on a very different path. What if more boys had that, too?
If you lose your job, you will lose your woman.
—CHRIS ROCK
10 The Mancession
If there’s one thing that’s defined men over the last one hundred years, it’s work.
One of the most poignant and cruel ways that racism operated beyond the Jim Crow era was to exclude black men from certain forms of paid employment and segregate them in the worst-paying jobs, with inhumane and dangerous working conditions. This was central to the last speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ever gave. He delivered it on April 3, 1968—the day before he was assassinated—in front of hundreds of Memphis black male sanitation workers who were holding signs that read: “I am a man.” King was encouraging them to remain on strike and peacefully protest subminimum wages and dangerous working conditions. His speech, which prophetically made references to his potential imminent death, was also surprisingly hopeful. “I’m happy, tonight,” he told the crowd. “I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.” Although his speech was all about defending black male workers’ rights to higher wages and better working conditions, this has sadly largely remained unchanged. The history of the state’s collective attempt at the emasculation of black men through exploitation continues to have ripple effects today as the racial wage gap between white and black men continues to get bigger and is larger than the wage gap between white and black women. Today a white man without a college degree is as likely to find a job as a black man with a college degree.
Despite the deafening lack of progress for black men in America, the “I am a man” signs that men held that day have had a lasting impact on the course of history. The expression became an iconic rallying cry in the struggle for black workers’ rights and one of the most memorable slogans to put an end to segregation in the United States. It illustrates just how central work has been in the defining of masculinity in a postindustrial America.
To be clear, work has historically been a central characteristic of the female and male experience. Women have always worked. But the difference is that now women actually get paid for it. The myth that work is a new phenomenon for ladies always cracks me up. “Our grandmothers fought for the right to work,” reads Ivanka Trump’s synopsis for her 2017 book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success. Of course, no one “fought” for immigrant’s and black women’s rights to work. They were coerced to labor as slaves and later as domestic servants, long before white upper-middle-class women were hired as part of the “productive” labor force. And women, across races and ethnicities, have long been expected—and continue—to bear the burden of domestic and reproductive work, or what economists have adorably called unproductive labor. If you ask anyone who’s ever had to grow another human being inside of herself for nine months or change the diaper of a newborn baby after it ate solid foods for the first time, “unproductive” is probably the last word that comes to mind.
To be fair to Ivanka Trump (and the people who will spend $17.99 on her book), it’s true that overall female participation in the official labor market has radically changed. It’s more than doubled since 1945. This makes women’s entry into the workforce one of the most defining social and economic shifts of the last fifty years. The female influx beginning in the 1960s was due in large part to policy changes, such as the greater availability of birth control and childcare, but a seldom-discussed factor is the shift from manufacturing to a service economy. Sure, it became easier for women to work, but their skills were also in higher demand. So it might have been a man’s world, but someone needed to serve them coffee, and women rolled up their sleeves. Due to changes in trade, globalization and automation, the jobs that were primarily done by men, like mining and manufacturing, have been moved overseas, leaving those men with fewer options. Fewer and fewer jobs require skills that men traditionally brought to the table.
The economy is changing, and it’s revealing a new way that idealized masculinity hits men where it hurts: in their ability to earn a living wage. We often talk about how these changes in work patterns have unparalleled impacts on women, in terms of giving some women more economic independence and opportunities, but the impacts on men and their collective identity are far from insignificant. Young men were raised by fathers whose defining characteristic was being the provider. But fewer and fewer of the men in this generation are becoming primary breadwinners. Men’s identities are still wrapped up in financial contributions, and their male currency in how much they bring back home. This jostles the masculine ideal their fathers modeled and taught them to emulate. What makes them men if the main organizing principle of the provider is not available to them? In addition, the jobs that are increasingly available, like nursing and eldercare, are not being taken by men because they are seen as feminine. This creates a continuous cycle of men’s choice of jobs being entirely too tied to their gender identity and an inability for them to choose jobs that would ironically allow them to fulfill the central role as breadwinners.
While men have traditionally been expected to provide “brawn skills” (such as physical strength), in this new economy, women have had a comparative advantage. Given their ease with so-called brain skills, like interpersonal abilities and communication, they have experienced a slow spike in working hours, whereas men’s have dropped because their skills are less in demand given the shift to a service economy. Since most new jobs require skills that women more stereotypically exhibit, women have had a leg up. Because of an aging population, the largest job creation is projected to be in the realm of personal and home health aides as well as nurse practitioners. What do these jobs have in common? They’re traditionally done by women.
Although women still make less than men and bear the largest burden of domestic labor, most of the job losses in America have occurred for men. Economists like Mark Perry from the University of Michigan started calling the recession the mancession, due to the fact that men were disproportionately affected. The truth is that for many of them, the recession didn’t end in 2009. More than 80 percent of the jobs that were lost between 2007 and 2009 belonged to men in industries like construction and manufacturing, and female-dominated industries like health care, education and service were where the most jobs were created, prompting some experts to posit that the mancession could have longer-lasting effects on men than the Great Depression did.
Although some politicians have instructed men to blame women or immigrants, they should be blaming robots: they’re the ones taking men’s jobs. The United States reverting back to being mainly a manufacturing economy is as unlikely as One Direction getting back together. Even if some politicians were to keep their unrealistic promise of
magically keeping all factories in the United States, 85 percent of the loss of factory jobs was due to changes in technology and automation, not due to factories moving overseas. In other words, we are producing more with less, which leaves low-skilled, non-college-degree-holding men with fewer opportunities. Men have every right to be angry. But they shouldn’t be afraid of women or immigrants; they should be afraid of robots.
The numbers don’t lie. One in six American men between 25 and 54 either is unemployed or has stopped looking for work, or so the government classifies them as such because they have stopped receiving employment benefits. That means there are roughly 10 million men of prime working age who are literally missing from the economy. And that number has not been going down; in fact, it’s been steadily increasing. The number of men who are unemployed has more than doubled since 1950. The number of men not looking for work has more than tripled. Opportunities for less-educated men have experienced the most significant drop and could be the most important factor explaining the exit of so many men from the workplace. The rise of men who are incarcerated also plays a role since it not only cuts them off from economic opportunities while they are serving time but also limits their ability to participate in the workplace after they get out of the system because employers may not hire them. Because 9 million men of prime working age have been incarcerated at some point in their life, their chances of finding work are much slimmer. In fact, research points to the fact that being incarcerated lowers your chance of finding a job by 30 percent, especially if you’re not white.
Despite these economic changes, men are still viewed as workers before they are seen as fathers. The men who are participating in the labor force often rely on women’s unpaid labor to do so and women still bear the brunt of it and get severely penalized financially when they have children. This explains why the gender wage gap between men and women is smaller than the gender wage gap between mothers and non-mothers. Men don’t experience the same dip in pay and opportunities when they become fathers; in fact, they experience an advantage after having a child, coined “the daddy bonus.” According to Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, fathers are more likely to be hired by employers and even experience an increase in salary. In fact, men with children are viewed most positively by employers, whereas women with children are seen most negatively, despite no evidence that they are less productive. Because the standard is so low for fatherhood, being a dad is seen as noble and a sign of a good character and work ethic. Mothers, although doing the same or more work inside the home, are not viewed so positively. The irony is that research on workers’ actual productivity shows the exact opposite. In fact, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows the complete opposite: mothers are the most productive employees.
This is not to say that being a father in the workplace is easy. But very often being a mother in the workplace is even harder. The same behavior exhibited by both a mom and a dad is judged more harshly when it’s coming from her. For instance, one study from Cornell University found that having “PTA” on your résumé if you’re a woman makes you less likely to have a job interview, while for men it makes them more likely to get a callback.
But this reluctance to see mothers as productive is not just observable in bosses; it’s visible in society. Staggering Pew data from 2007 shows that only 22 percent of adults in the United States believe that mothers working is good for society, compared with 44 percent who believe it’s bad. The irony, of course, is that giving women equal pay would have the greatest positive impact on children across America. According to a paper from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, equal pay would be one of the most cost-effective ways to end child poverty. Their data shows that women making as much as men would lift 2.5 million families with children out of poverty. Women don’t need to stop working, they need to be paid fairly.
Being aware of this tendency to view mothers less positively than fathers is important, not just for the managers reading this book but also for men whose coworkers include mothers. As more fathers become engaged in parenting and take on bigger familial roles, this impression should change and in turn not just liberate women from those tasks but also normalize men’s involvement in the home.
But as I mentioned in the introduction of this book, the fact that President Trump didn’t even envision fathers as part of his original parental leave policy proposal when he was a candidate says a lot about how we view men. No wonder he argued in a 2005 interview with Howard Stern that fathers who change diapers are “acting like the wife.” Or that two years later when he had Barron, he bragged that his current wife, Melania, “takes care of the baby and I pay all of the costs.”
As a candidate, Trump didn’t offer a modern alternative to approaching the changing roles of men; he promised to uphold a fixed system where they would be able to preserve a model of masculinity that no longer exists. He brilliantly capitalized on the gendered shift from manufacturing to the service economy and earned the support of white working-class men largely because he validated their anger. He masterfully made himself into a champion of men, more specifically white blue-collar male workers, with his strong emphasis on trade and keeping factory jobs at home, despite literally riding a golden-plated elevator and starting a trade war his first year in office. Even though Trump cannot magically solve these men’s problems, his strategy worked flawlessly. It produced the largest electoral gender gap in history (or at least since we’ve been keeping track) and experts predicted the largest gender gap in midterm history in 2018. He used coded gender language throughout his campaign, promising American men that he would “bring back jobs,” so much so that numerous white women I interviewed justified voting for him because he could guarantee their husbands’ jobs and ensure their white sons’ economic security, too. In fact, one of the largest bases of support he received was from women without a college degree—62 percent of them voted for him, the vast majority of them of course being white. One white female Trump supporter who admitted to me she hated Trump confided that she voted for him because “the white man has been completely forgotten.” Her well-being as a white woman depended on the white men in her household. She said she was worried about her husband’s job and her son being unemployed once he’s out of college. I think white women wanting to guarantee their own safety and their families’ because of Trump’s promises about bringing back their jobs was one of the least-discussed motivations for white women’s huge support for Donald Trump at the ballot box despite so many of them saying they disapproved of him as a man and as a candidate. It doesn’t make them tolerating his racism any more palpable. But, in addition to exploiting racism, Trump shamelessly played off gender stereotypes to garner votes from both men and women, to further entrench the very norms that have left men unemployed in the first place.
WHAT’S A “REAL MAN’S” JOB?
These outdated stereotypes about what a “real man’s” job looks like are keeping men inside a structure that is limiting their opportunities to capitalize on the successes and growth areas of our economy. Yes, many industries are declining, but due to these gendered myths men aren’t participating in the industries that aren’t. Although low education and incarceration certainly have had an impact, they can’t fully explain why so many men are missing from the workforce, because there are millions of jobs available to them. Are they not taking those jobs because they can’t or because they won’t? The question remains: If so many men have become unemployed because their jobs are becoming less and less relevant, why aren’t they taking new available jobs? Harvard economist Lawrence Katz calls this phenomenon “retrospective wait unemployment,” where men are looking for jobs that they used to have, not a job that they could have. He says that what may seem like an economic problem at first sight might also be a social one. Men don’t see themselves taking jobs that are primarily done by women because their model of masculinity doesn’t allow for it. They may even feel like they wouldn’
t be hired if they were to apply for those jobs. And because jobs performed by women are consistently devalued, it makes them underpaid, which ultimately makes them less appealing to men, too.
The lack of options we present to men are so grim that they remain attached to traditionally male jobs like coal mining despite arduous, dangerous and increasingly deadly working conditions. After a stunning investigation by NPR in 2018, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health revealed it found the biggest cluster of advanced cases of black lung disease in its history in Appalachia, the epicenter of the coal mine industry. Their report noted that one in five long-tenured miners have contracted the deadly illness. “We can think of no other industry or workplace in the United States in which this would be considered acceptable,” the authors of the report warned. Although more than seventy-six thousand coal miners have died from black lung since 1968 according to the US Department of Labor, the number of reported cases is higher than in the 1990s, due to several factors, one of which is the decline in unions, who ensured the enforcement of safety regulations and screening for miners. While men are being infected with the deadly disease at dizzying rates, Donald Trump doesn’t just want to send more men to coal mines; he also is actively seeking to crack down on protections, many of which were specifically set up to protect men’s health in the industry. For instance, the Trump administration announced it would be revisiting the “Regulatory Reform of Existing Standards and Regulations: Retrospective Study of Respirable Coal Mine Dust Rule,” to make it “less burdensome.”
