Everyone in media, academia and entertainment knew it was happening. A number of them had qualms. Almost none spoke up. And now that someone has said something, many are pretending they didn’t see it happen with their own eyes. This is incredible, in every sense of the word.
I am talking about how for years, at many institutions, there was a hiring preference for anyone but White, straight men. As Jacob Savage argues convincingly in a recent essay for Compact magazine, this most affected one group: younger White men who hadn’t had time to gain the skills and experience that might have compensated for their melanin deficiency.
Savage cites data that suggest extreme declines in the number of White males getting entry-level jobs at some elite institutions — junior screenwriters going from 48 percent White male to 12 percent, from 39 percent of tenure-track humanities positions at Harvard University to 18 percent. This happened over the last decade.
You may be tempted to argue that this reflects demographic shifts in the hiring pool, but no, demographics don’t change that fast. It took 50 years after the immigration reforms of 1965 for the White share of the population to go from 84 percent to 62 percent. And while for obvious reasons that change is more pronounced in younger generations (people who were White in 1965 are still White today), in 2020, White Americans remained over half the population of early-career workers.
Young White males were about a quarter of college graduates in 2022, so we’d have expected them to average about a quarter of new hires for various elite professions. They didn’t drop to 12 percent of junior television writers because of demographics, or because studios stopped discriminating against other groups. They dropped because employers started discriminating against them to make their institutions “look like America.”
If you want to understand the backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion, you need to understand how bad that math was for a certain class of educated millennial men. You also need to recognize that a lot of this math was bad, period.
For some mysterious reason, people consistently overestimate the minority share of the population, which made the Whiteness of newsrooms, Hollywood studios and academic departments look more unfair than it was. To be clear, there was plenty of unfairness — Black people and women were less likely to be hired in past eras than White men, regardless of qualifications, and that discrimination is reflected in those organizations today. But even if that hadn’t been the case, newsrooms, writer’s rooms and classrooms would have been very White because most Americans born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were White.
I suspect people forgot about these cohort effects because so much of the DEI discourse came up around college admissions, where diversity can be achieved relatively speedily: admit a racially balanced class four years in a row, and voilà, you “look like America.” But a large corporate employer often has a workforce spanning 40 years, not four. Rebalancing that through representative hiring would take decades. The DEI champions didn’t want to wait that long.
So the correction turned into an overcorrection. Upper management too White and male? Offset that with new hires who are neither. But of course, offsetting a few decades worth of employees with a few years’ worth of hiring meant the share of young White males had to fall by a lot. It’s not that literally none of them got jobs as screenwriters or journalists. But in many fields and companies, their odds dropped significantly.
And so what, one might argue. For too long White men were the beneficiaries of discrimination against other groups. Turnabout is fair play. Or, a little more charitably, one could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.
One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.
People who know how hiring decisions were made during the “Great Awokening” nonetheless imply that this is all the fantasy of mediocre White men who can’t admit they didn’t measure up or entitled White men who can’t stand to compete on an even playing field. And sure, in some cases, that’s undoubtedly true.
But it’s also true that as a group, young White men weren’t competing on an even playing field with the rest of us. They were forced to play a much harder game that offered many fewer prizes. It’s one thing to ask them nicely to do this, as an unfortunately necessary sacrifice for the greater good. It’s quite another to make fun of them because they failed to win a contest that was rigged against them. And if you choose the latter course, don’t be surprised if they curse out the referees or decline to keep playing by your rules.
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