OPINION:
How to be a man in the first era in history that believes in gender equality? "The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end," wrote Hanna Rosin in The End of Men. Now we need a masculinist agenda, not to fight feminism but to help men adapt to it. Three recent books — Richard V Reeves' Of Boys and Men, Ijeoma Oluo's Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America and Joris Luyendijk's Dutch book De zeven inkjet (The Seven Ticks) — trace the outlines of a new masculinism.
There are now two kinds of men: those at the top who remain dominant, and those lower down who are struggling. At the top, 426 of the Fortune 500 companies had male CEOs as of March. White males from privileged backgrounds usually get to judge whether a candidate is the right "fit" and possesses "quality", by which we often mean white-male attributes such as "experience" and "confidence". We consider ourselves neutral, but suspect senior women of pushing female interests.
Luyendijk describes how elite spaces like boardrooms are designed for privileged white men. Our codes prevail, and everyone else feels an intruder. For instance, men instinctively seek eye contact with each other to establish fellowship and check whether they agree. But a woman who makes eye contact with a man in certain male-dominated spaces risks being misinterpreted.
Privilege goes beyond gender. It emerges from the cocktail of gender, race and class. And as Reeves shows, unprivileged males are being overtaken by females. He notes that whereas workplaces favour men, school favours girls, whose brains mature earlier. In the US, black females now outperform white males in education. The elite pipeline, including all Ivy League colleges, is mostly female. If employers stop penalising motherhood, and social expectations shift, women could come to dominate work.