We Can Fix It. But Do We Want To?

International Women’s Day nearly escaped my awareness this year. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one not in the spirit: About a week earlier, the “for women, by women” investing platform Ellevest announced it would be selling and transferring its roboadvisory accounts to Betterment this April. Ellevest explained in the fine print that it had made a decision to focus on “individuals, families, or institutions with $500,000 or more,” shedding 99% of its users in the process. “Enraged” former customers would be forgiven for asking whether this meant its original value proposition—investing for women, by women—was a cynical business strategy smothered with a veneer of trumped-up, marketable girl power all along. But regardless of the company’s motivations, Ellevest’s raison d’être reflected a legitimate fiscal reality: Statistically speaking, women’s financial lives unfold differently than men’s, both for boring, apolitical reasons like longer average life spans, and tricky, entrenched problems like lower average pay after childbirth. This is as true today as it was in 2014 when the platform launched. 

The closure feels ominous. We’ve been wading through feminist low tide for the last several years—not because a movement for women’s progress is no longer necessary, but because it’s less widely palatable now. The popularity of the sentiment that women’s rights have “gone too far” is unnerving, considering the version of liberal feminism that gained steam for years was about as market-friendly and Deloitte-approved as it comes, heavy on ubiquitous THE FUTURE IS FEMALE merchandise, light on meaningful reform. 

That is to say: Even I can admit some of the past hoopla around International Women’s Day felt a little cloying. My brilliant colleague Macy rendered this in stark relief in this role-reversal comedy wishing a “happy International Men’s Day” to all the “boy bosses” and boasting about a donation in honor of the occasion to a “male cultural institution called FanDuel.” The US government began recognizing March as Women’s History Month in 1995, it should be noted, under President Bill Clinton, a man famously respectful of women, particularly young ones! (Was Bill Clinton a feminist? Is this Dove commercial my friend?) 

The tension had been fomenting for a while, but it was most undeniable in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, when anxieties about “men falling behind” escalated to a fever pitch in American media. Richard Reeves declared in the Wall Street Journal that what was actually “on the ballot” was “American Manhood,” a telling sentiment when what was literally on the ballot was a woman (albeit one who, unlike Clinton in 2016, called no attention to that fact). In that sense, this year’s muted acknowledgment feels grimly appropriate. Suddenly, it’s more acceptable to tap out of a sometimes-performative celebration that, in many ways, was “more noise than progress,” as none other than Ellevest founder Sallie Krawcheck said. 

The Financial Times recently reported that 57% of men under the age of 30 in the US “think feminism has gone so far that men are now suffering discrimination.” More distressingly, 36% of women of the same age agreed. How irreparably far-reaching is the Andrew Tate misogyny-slop universe that even one in three young women believe they’re benefiting from some unseen, unfair advantage? I fear we underestimate just how many people, women included, bristle at the idea that gendered economic disparity is still an issue that deserves attention. We’d much rather explain away wage or wealth differences as mere consequences of benign personal preference. The median woman, you see, just chooses to own 55 cents for every dollar the median man owns, because she prefers low-wage work! 

Perhaps the rush of headlines declaring that, “Young women are out-earning young men in several U.S. cities,” as one 2022 report found, are to blame, calling attention to the 22 metro areas where women under 30 are at least at parity with their male counterparts. Excellent! Only 228 more to go. (The city that holds the top spot for the largest gender pay gap is where I went to college in the south; coming in second place is the small northern town where I was born. Chip, meet shoulder.) The fact that this reportage spawned even a minor amount of hand-wringing about a looming “reverse gender pay gap” reveals a deep well of cultural anxiety about women’s material progress, even if we claim (or, once claimed) to believe it’s a worthy goal. (To be fair to the piece in question, its author spent most of the word count gently reminding readers that a handful of outperforming, cosmopolitan childless women does not mean we live in a post-feminist utopia—still, the subtext lurking behind the headline is loud.)

Academics like the aforementioned Richard Reeves are dominant in this “men are not all right” space, and what’s most notable about these discussions is the speed with which the conclusion is drawn that obviously, something must be done—boys should be universally held back a year in school because their brains supposedly develop more slowly, he suggests, and this will give them time to catch up to the girls. Or maybe the entire education system should be changed to address boys’ aggregate underperformance! Really, they’re open to anything.

The concern du jour is that women now outnumber men at the university level, apparently proof that young women are gaining ground, but at men’s expense. Celeste Davis has convincingly argued this state of affairs is not due to women being better at school, needing more education to compensate for the likelihood of lower pay, or because colleges are offering too many Women’s Studies seminars on free bleeding, but because of what she calls “male flight”—the tendency for men to avoid predominantly female spaces. Quoting economist and former president of Northwestern University Morty Schapiro, who noticed this trend studying college enrollment, she writes, “When the number of women hits 60%…the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining. There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.” 

In other words, because education has become “feminine” owing to the presence of women, it’s increasingly perceived as a lower-value pursuit. This mirrors the well-documented historical trend in fields that become “feminized” over time—that is, controlling for education and skill, as the gender composition of a labor pool shifts to majority-female, the average pay lowers. “School is now feminine. College is feminine,” Davis writes. “And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.” Fellas, is it gay to know stuff? In this way, earning potential for women and men alike is sacrificed at the altar of masculinity. (Which is, I suppose, a step up from the original intent behind phrases like THE FUTURE IS FEMALE, which second-wave feminist Sally Gearhart meant literally—she once suggested men should be reduced to no more than 10% of the population. Let it be known these are not the gender relations I dream of.)

The difference is that, in the face of these facts about men’s educational outcomes, systemic solutions and major interventions for gender disparity are suddenly on the table. Even supposed biological differences like boys’ “slower brain development” are no excuse for inaction. The wide-ranging, creative solutions open for serious consideration are astounding to behold, as most biological hurdles that primarily shortchange women (like requiring time off to physically carry and deliver a child, leading to lower pay over a lifetime) are treated as shrug-your-shoulders, immutable realities. But they’re connected to consequences that are harder to shrug off: Women are approximately 65% more likely to report leaving paid work to care for a family member, which might explain why they retire with roughly 63% as much retirement income and are 56% more likely to end up in poverty following divorce.

I want to be clear: The problem is not that we’d entertain adjusting the education system to make it work better for boys—the problem is that we’re seemingly uninterested in applying the same level of imagination and commitment to the working world on behalf of women. 

Education aside, we’re also generally more accepting of government-led intervention to rebuild sectors in which offshoring has disproportionately impacted men’s jobs. Bringing manufacturing back to the United States—an industry that’s 70% male—has been a popular talking point, if not an outright political priority, for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Without manufacturing jobs, the thinking goes, millions of young men will be without meaningful employment, and this is a serious problem for society. (Kathryn Edwards, an economist who’s joining me on the show next week, has noted the conspicuous lack of serious consideration that these young men could be rerouted to professions in chronically understaffed fields like nursing, early childhood development, or teaching, which also happen to be majority women.)

In cases where the market allocates resources or jobs away from men, intervention is assumed necessary, legitimate, and important. But when a sector that’s majority women experiences low pay or enters a state of outright market failure, you’re more likely to hear that this is efficient, if unfortunate; the market is merely pricing the value of the work and allocating it accordingly. At issue here is not that the government is comfortable spending hundreds of billions of dollars in an attempt to reestablish US manufacturing, but that it’s unwilling to recognize a similarly sized intervention might be just as necessary elsewhere. 

My fast-growing female prefrontal cortex’s alarm system, trained on decades of feminine self-policing, has been ringing the entire time I’ve been writing this, alerting me to the eyerolls and emails this essay will no doubt generate. Every time I write about women, I am rewarded with an onslaught of term papers arguing I have simply misunderstood; the data is wrong, or, no, wait, the data is correct, but it’s because of this other factor that, sorry, we actually can’t change. Won’t I at least concede that women could study engineering instead? Won’t I consider the natural differences—that women are the ones who have babies and enjoy being around children and choose lower-paying jobs? Suddenly, unlike with the speed of brain development or the predictable results of global free trade, a commitment to our “natural” limitations or current market outcomes is cast as unavoidable; a desire to balance the scales to correct for suboptimal realities, naïve. 

A phrase became popular during the Women’s Rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s when it was used as the title of an essay: The personal is political. It was intended to widen the scope of what we considered “political” problems, that is, problems shaped by broader power structures. Most people at the time saw issues like marriage, children, and work as individual, personal problems to be sorted privately, and this phrase expanded the public’s consciousness about what might be possible if we dreamed bigger. Today, you’re more likely to hear the phrase interpreted in its inverse: to encourage the individual to embody political principles in their personal life. 

The “men are not all right” discourse proved we know how to recognize the limits of personal choice. We know how to treat problems like crumbling job opportunities or gaps in educational outcomes with the appropriate level of concern and serious consideration for who’s being left behind; to engage in thinking that treats gendered disparities as structural questions of political will, not issues of personal failure and alleged biological inadequacy. These conversations often—rightly!—sidestepped debates about whether it’s culture or biology or free markets, and jumped straight to solutions, taking for granted that we owed men better outcomes.

Surely we can look at women’s current set of outcomes—55 cents in median wealth, meaningful overrepresentation in low-wage work and poverty, more precarious retirements—and extend the same level of resolve and legitimacy. I hear there’s a new book coming out in June that deals with exactly this.  

An aside: We’ve gotten a number of emails from former Ellevest users understandably expressing concern about their assets being transferred and asking questions about Betterment. We’ve been big fans of Betterment’s investing platform for years, so if you’d like to stick with a roboadvisor, you’re in good hands.