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Posted

I’ve hesitated to post this, but if people want to engage the topic honestly that would be great.

This Jacob Savage essay has gone viral this week and is having a major impact, particularly in right wing and libertarian online spaces. I would encourage those who want to comment here to read the essay before posting. 

The author suggests that efforts to diversify, while well intentioned had the effect of systematically excluding millennial men, and especially white millennial men from hiring and promotional opportunities in high status or culturally elite professional  fields from 2014 through recent times. In other words, that Gen X and Boomer men (almost universally white) got to keep their spots at the top, but millennial white men got frozen out. 

Predictably, this essay has been latched onto by online progressives and online MAGA to signal their respective audiences. For progressives, this means ridiculing the idea that white male privilege took a holiday (which is not what the essay says). For MAGA, this means banging the drum of racial grievance. Neither are responsive to the point, which rang true to me. 

I can’t speak for media, journalism or academia first hand, although it seems observationally true when I look at the compositions of staff. But I can say that it aligns with my experience and involvement in hiring and promotional decisions at global corporations and in tech beginning around 2008. I don’t think we thought about the generational component of what we were doing at the time, but looking back it’s clear to me that it had a significant impact, mostly without mitigating benefit. 
 

Posted
33 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I can’t speak for media, journalism or academia first hand, although it seems observationally true when I look at the compositions of staff.

I just finished the article and want to let it stew a bit, but since I baited you into making the thread I'll chime in about this.  

My wife works for a FAANG firm and showed me pictures from the Christmas party from the firm's headquarters in California and there are virtually no white male faces in the pictures (old or young).  I doubt it's because of DEI (it's preponderantly SE and E Asians that make up the attendees), but it does seem to align to an outcome that has the results described in the essay.  

That said, I think it's interesting that the author's seems to be overly focused on industries that are under a lot of employment stress to begin with.  Education, journalism, and film and tv production have all had a rough decade.  

FWIW, the talk in film circles is that Sundance has gotten swallowed whole by the representation and identity focused programmers, and it's kinda ruined their ability to help promote indie films.  

Posted
9 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

My wife works for a FAANG firm and showed me pictures from the Christmas party from the firm's headquarters in California and there are virtually no white male faces in the pictures (old or young).  I doubt it's because of DEI (it's preponderantly SE and E Asians that make up the attendees), but it does seem to align to an outcome that has the results described in the essay.  

Yeah I don’t think it’s about DEI, which has become sort of an HR catch-all term.
I think the basic thesis is that individual *millennial* white males (again, not GenX, not Boomers) were at a disadvantage without any real population level benefit to disenfranchised or marginalized people or change to the power structure.
That’s hard to disagree with from where I sit, and I can think of some pretty egregious examples. 
The funny thing is that at least based on what I saw during the period, it was a lot like affirmative action at elite universities.  At the individual level the people who benefited most were already quite privileged: usually affluent, well connected top university grads who were themselves the children of top university graduates. 
 

23 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

That said, I think it's interesting that the author's seems to be overly focused on industries that are under a lot of employment stress to begin with.  Education, journalism, and film and tv production have all had a rough decade

Indeed, I think he’s writing what he knows about. Plus media loves to talk about itself. 


 

 

Posted

Some of this is the danger of trying to make quick changes. When a company states of a goal of diversifying in say three-years rather than gradually, you're necessarily going to lock out others from the less favored pile. But there are some things in his statistics that still reek of privilege. For instance:

Quote

The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024. 

Non-Hispanic white men (whom I presume his article intends to address) only make up ~28% of the population.  I get that his point is that those in culture industries didn't move elsewhere, but he also seems to be implying this unfair effect his plaguing other industries too. I'm not convinced of that. I'll also note that he appears to be ignoring a pretty significant data issue: unknown race/ethnicity is common and prevalent choice in the data. And frankly many people that may be described as "white males" when looking at them may be claiming other ethnicities from their family background. I look white (mostly). But my grandmother was from China, and I often rotate between putting Asian, White, and prefer not to say on surveys. 

 

Posted

I also wish this analysis hadn’t been done on such a precious and prestigious and stressed field, as it’s led to some lazy and stupid takes: “poor white man thinks he’s entitled to a TV show” or “all the movies suck because of DEI hiring.” 
 

Factually: from about the mid-2010s peaking in the early 2020s I personally observed hiring and employment practices that were facially illegal and yet aby concerns were dismissed as “not relevant because we are prioritizing diversity.”
 

Eventually, the message was received, processes were changed to silently implement directions without the need for the facially illegal implementation. Specific examples from personal observation, across different orgs and industries. This is anecdotal, but not just one anecdote in one place. 

- Directions to “select the diverse candidate in the event of a tie,” while two diverse candidates in a tie would be given an additional interview or other screening before a final selection. On its face, a direction to use protected status as a hiring/promotion criteria.

- Senior leaders re-ranking short lists based solely on names (gender markers), without also reviewing any other parts of the files or notes. 

- Specific instructions that gay men should not be considered “diverse candidates” for the purpose of advancing DEI principles. 

- Specific instructions to “maintain a diverse balance” or “improve the diversity in the office” when multiple jobs came open.

- In academia, internal decisions by committees that a spot must be filled by a non-white male, with preference for non-white candidate. 
 

Here is the rub from my end: this happened in the absence of legislative changes and instead came down as a mandate to ignore existing EEO law in favor of a greater interest. And maybe, socially, that is the right call. But the net effect was a lot of double talk: “we don’t discriminate on the basis of race or sex, and when we do it’s for the right reasons. And this did lead to a well-founded suspicion that things were not what they were said to be and made it impossible to really measure impact in either a good or bad way. And I think naturally people tend to believe they got screwed and it colors decisions made in good faith as well.

Maybe society did need a few years of positive, re-balancing discrimination that proportionally disadvantaged a population that in earlier generations was privileged. But we didn’t ask that or discuss it or say we were doing it. We just tried (and failed) to gaslight everyone and pretend that we weren’t making important decisions about hiring and promotions based, in part, on race and gender.  And that lack of honesty is creating a lot of resentment. 
 

From my personal experience, the impact did fall mainly on millennial men at the beginning or early middle of their careers. The mandates and decisions were frequently passed down by established white men in leadership. 

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