Was the homepage editor at The Australian Financial Review trying to make a subtle point last Friday? A tipster got in contact to point out an interesting combination of stories. Firstly, “How men lost their ambition” — a harrowing account, republished from The New York Times, of how “masculinity has reached a crisis point”. Reviewing Richard Reeves’ new book Of Boys and Men, NYT columnist David Brooks finds out women are absolutely trouncing men across a range of metrics:
Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started a generation earlier. Over the same period, women’s lifetime earnings have increased 33%.
Most chilling for the AFR readership: “In 2020, at the 16 top US law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor-in-chief.”
We are informed this is happening in the US “and across the globe”. But if Brooks had any say on the placement of the story, he might have asked that if be moved from its current company:
Yep, beneath Brooks’ assessment of how much better women are doing than men worldwide comes an account of one woman’s experience of “a year under the Taliban”, whose notable moves include essentially banning girls from attending high school. And beneath that is a piece about the protests in Iran, which you may recall started when 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini died in custody after being arrested by the country’s “morality police” for violating the strict dress code enforced for Iranian women.
OK, sure, you can scan the globe and pick a few examples of horrific conditions, but what about in the corporate milieu, surely more relevant to Brooks’ argument? Let’s scroll down a bit further for evidence of this male decline in confidence …
Ah.
