This is a follow-up to my post They Got Suffrage And Now We All Suffer…
I have been hashing this idea over for a while to build on that post about women’s suffrage and the impact of women voting but then I saw a fun video with Tucker Carlson and Mike Rowe and it inspired me to finish it up:
What I always appreciated about Mike Rowe is that he understands that talking about dirty jobs and doing little TV segments about them is not the same thing as doing them day in and day out. He respects people who actually work for a living, and I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that not every “real” job means working in sewage or dirt. To me, a “real job” is one that is actually providing a necessary good or service. An engineer at a nuclear power plant probably isn’t getting dirty but his job is very necessary and provides a critical good (electricity). A surgeon who performs open heart surgery isn’t getting dirty, in fact his workplace is insanely sterile, but he is providing a very real and necessary service. Nor is there something particularly noble in low pay work. There are plenty of bullshit “jobs” that don’t pay well.
I liked what Tucker said, if I may paraphrase: you know a job is real because if people stopped doing it, lots of other people would suffer and die.
No one will suffer if a TikTok influencer stops doing videos about make-up tips for faggots. No one will suffer if some rando at Twitter loses their job. Truth be told, and I know of what I speak, bank branches would run just fine for the most part without a bank manager.
Of course Tucker and Mike won’t point out that these bullshit jobs tend to be staffed mostly with college “educated” women and further that these jobs were created, in part, as a direct result of thrusting half of the population into the workforce after conning them into obtaining a useless but expensive degree. The percentage of women graduating from college skyrocketed in the last 80 years…
In 1940 less than 4% of women and only 5.5% of men graduated with a four year degree. As of 2021 more than 1/3 of women have a college degree. Keep in mind that this still includes lots of Boomer and older women who are still alive but did not graduate from college. According to NCES, the National Center for Education Statistics, 44% of women ages 18-24 are enrolled in college, a full 8% higher than their male counterparts. The disparity is even more significant when you look at black and mestizo male-female ratios.
Almost half of young women are enrolled in college degree programs. What is not mentioned very often are the very poor outcomes for those that do enroll….
Asian females have the highest graduation percentage and even it is only a little over 50%. Every other group is under half and some are way under half. I have brought this up in a few places, most notably in Participation Ribbon Egalitarianism Has No Place In Education, but however you slice it an awful lot of people enroll in college, take on debt and lose several years of work experience and still don’t end up with a college degree.
Even still, with over 40% of women attending college and around half of the White and Asian girls getting a degree, that creates an awful lot of demand for jobs from people who generally speaking have failed to obtain any sort of actual marketable job skill. As the percentage of women attaining a degree has increased there was also a commensurate increase in the percentage of women in the workforce. Two more charts, both from the U.S. Department of Labor….
In 1948 women were only 28.6% of the workforce. I assume that doesn’t include women who stayed home but helped on the farm, just women with “jobs”. By 2021, women were almost half of the workforce while men as a percentage of the workforce continues to decline. Something else Mike Rowe talks about all the time is the sheer number of men of working age that have simply dropped out of the workforce.
While the U.S. labor market remains incredibly tight — with the economy adding another 263,000 jobs in November — around 7 million “prime age” men between the ages of 25 and 54 are reportedly sitting it out.
“They are affirmatively not looking for work. They’ve punched out. They’re done,” TV host Mike Rowe said on The Brian Kilmeade Show, citing research from economist Nick Eberstadt.
“So what’s really happening in the country now that scares me right to my core fundamentally is that we’ve never had so much unrealized opportunity and so little enthusiasm for it.”
https://archive.vn/vKzWN
Look at this chart…
Right now around 1/3 of men are just not working. That is more complicated than it sounds, I don’t show up in those statistics because I am self-employed and don’t report wages (rather we show our income on a Schedule C so I am pretty sure that makes me not part of the “labor force”) but 7 million men who are flat out not working or even looking for work is worrisome.
What is causing this, at least in part, is that the jobs that men, especially men without college degrees, used to do are gone. Very few people are actively farming any more and much of our manufacturing base has moved overseas. The jobs that remain for men without a degree are generally meaningless service industry jobs, although in the last couple of years there has been an explosion around these parts of high paying jobs in manufacturing that no one seems interested in taking. On the other hand, it also seems that a lot of men just don’t really want to be bothered with going to work, preferring to live at home with mom or shacking up with a girlfriend, playing video games, watching porn and getting high.
Off my soapbox and back to women. As feminism mutated from the vote and simple legal protections like property rights and into a philosophy that can only be described as anti-male and anti-family, women were convinced that doing what they are best suited to do and happiest doing, raising kids and keeping the home, were somehow letting down the team and being oppressed. And of course there were millions of women now having colleges degrees that were accompanied by the promise of a lucrative and rewarding career.
Rather suddenly three things happened.
One, there were now millions of women who were demanding office jobs as befitted their newly minted B.A. degrees. Not crappy jobs, but fancy office jobs!
Two, the total workforce rapidly expanded as the women who traditionally stayed home were flooding the market. It didn’t double the available workforce but it certainly increased the worker pool by a huge percentage.
Three, automation was eliminating all sorts of jobs, from typists to farmers to factory workers. For example, while many businesses used to have whole floors full of girls typing documents, first photocopiers and then word processors made those jobs obsolete. Or switchboard operators, with multiline systems and phone trees allowing you to enter a few digits and get the person you wanted, businesses no longer needed a woman to answer the phone and transfer calls.
So we have a problem, we have lots of extra women who want jobs, more specifically they wanted “careers”, but we didn’t really need all of those extra office people. As an aside, one of the dirty secrets of the recruiting and hiring process is that very few jobs in corporate America that require a college degree truly need a candidate with a college degree. My last job was one that no one would be considered for that did not have a 4 year degree and yet what we did had nothing to do with anything you would learn in a typical degree program. Most of the positions at my level, and all above me, were staffed entirely with people who had 4 year degrees but with a few exceptions none of them needed a four year degree.
What happened over the course of several decades starting in the 80s was the explosion of office jobs that didn’t really do anything. While perhaps not the largest in number, the most egregious expansion was in human resources, including staffing. Whole departments of women that do nothing but make life more difficult for the rest of the company, especially the people who actually make money for the company. Female dominated jobs in things like HR and customer service add very little value to the organization but they pay reasonably well and unlike a lot of jobs dominated by men, they are very safe and clean. I wrote about this in a prior post: The Parasite Class
At the risk of sounding sexist, not that I care, that helps explain why more and more of the parasite class jobs are held by women. Men are task-and-goal oriented. We like to have some goal to achieve and then be able to see the results. Women are more emotion-and-feelings oriented and that is the core of parasite class environment. A lot of women are perfectly content shuffling papers around because it makes them feel like they are doing something but men doing the same work eventually realize they are just going through the motions. HR departments are full of women who feel self-important because they have some bullshit title and they can push people around. They are cheerfully smiling while simultaneously being self-important and imperious. They don’t really do anything significant but that is OK because their jobs are designed to make them feel important and significant. I am sure if you asked most HR chicks about their jobs, they are completely convinced that they are critical and essential to the success of an organization, while most of the men think they are a pain in the ass and an impediment to getting the job done.
My last job as a “relationship manager” overseeing hundreds of millions in retirement assets was a position where I mostly got complaints from clients and in turn passed those complaints on to someone else to fix. It was a “good” job in that it paid well and the benefits were crazy but it didn’t actually accomplish anything of value. It was also a job that was mostly held by women. From the time I started in that general account/relationship management role in financial services way back in January of 2000 until I left for good in 2014, the percentage of my co-workers that were female rose rapidly. I found the job immensely frustrating as it increasingly revolved around doing stupid projects, conference calls and meetings and ticking off boxes on checklists instead of doing anything productive. That lack of accomplishment didn’t seem to bother my female co-workers as much.
Today we have companies like Twitter where the employee in the video with Tucker and Mike Rowe above thinks nothing is odd about a “job” where she apparently doesn’t do anything but the occasional videoconference and taking “breaks”. How does one take a break when you haven’t done any actual work? This is really common in a lot of industries. Government jobs are full of women who do absolutely nothing of any value. So is “education”, this is one of my favorite charts to whip out when people complain that we don’t “invest” in our schools.
Those additional employees are not classroom teachers but are instead all sorts of administrative positions that never step foot in a classroom. There are jobs in school districts dedicated to making sure the district gets all of the gubmint money it can get. Another place we see this is in medicine….
Why is medical care so expensive? In large part because so much of the money we spend on “medical care” is absorbed by non-clinical administrative staff rather than doctors. I would bet that 75% or more of those administrators are…chicks.
Hopefully my point is clear. With the rise of new waves of “feminism” following the 19th Amendment, more women each year entered the workforce and in order to absorb all of these women, millions of make-work paper shuffling jobs have been created. This is turn watered down the workforce so that it is very difficult to make ends meet on one salary, although it absolutely can be done. Wages are subject to supply and demand just like prices and with millions of women shipping their little ones off to daycare so they can work, the supply of workers outpaced the demand for employees. Over the decades this has acted as an anchor on wages while prices continue to rise. It was very common for a working class family to have a stay at home mom but that has changed as price inflation has outpaced wages.
It has become a vicious circle. Women think they need to work to make ends meet but the more women join the workforce the more it skews wages. Now women believe, with some justification, that they are trapped into working and can’t get out even if they want to and believe me, a lot of them want to. Sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lights doing some mind-numbing job while thinking about your small child in a daycare kills a lot of these women.
It is another result of feminism. Bullshit jobs to make work for women that also devalues men’s work. Men aren’t happy not being able to be the breadwinner, women aren’t happy in these “careers” instead of caring for their home and kids. No one is happy and that is really the goal of feminism all along: making normal people as unhappy as the homely harpies that pioneered “equal rights”.
I am certain that the federal “workforce” could be reduced by at least half without anyone but those newly unemployed noticing the difference. In corporate America I dunno if it’s much as half but it’s still a lot. The guy working the grill at McDonald’s contributes greater value to society than easily 1/4 of white collar “workers.” Maybe even 1/3.
There’s a larger economic point to be made here. If all these people are making all this money while performing absolutely no productive work, then something like UBI can actually work at a large scale. One way you can look at this hypothetically is all these useless white collar people keep collecting the same paycheck but stop showing up for work. This has no negative effect on the economy.
Of course it won’t happen that way, but it illustrates the point. We like to scoff at UBI but clearly it can succeed. For some reason the current system demands that the purely performative facade of showing up must still be maintained, but the showing up part, for a huge number of “jobs,” is 100% cosmetic.
I should say, it has no negative effect on the economy beyond the negative effect their non-productive “employment” has already had.
You think teaching and banking are bad, try STEM. Despite the rock-solid, undisputed fact that females, in general, are significantly less interested (and demonstrably less capable) in the “hard” sciences, including electronic and computer engineering, employers such as the megalithic rainbow-besotted defense contractor I toil for insists on 50% female employment. What this means is that since core engineering is 90% White and East Asian males, our “management” from project leads up to CEO is better than 75% female and non-East Asian minority.
A few years back, some corporate “manager” several stratospheric levels above my grade put out a heartfelt, treacly digital bulletin once a week, intimately detailing all the interesting things going on in her world of unearned entitlement. I never read it, but I do recall the headline from one week’s publication, to wit, “Sometimes I cry at work.” I am not shitting you. She burned company time and earned corporate pay to put out her little confessional pout about how the burden of acting affirmatively all. day. long. sometimes just (*sigh*) overwhelms her. Even the women in my office rolled their eyes.
How many women and non-Whites did it take to put a man on the moon? NONE. Watch Apollo 13, which even for its time was a remarkably White, male and woke-free movie. How many women and minorities will it take to send a (wo)man back to the moon?
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You think that’s bad, I’m a mercenary for the DNR and with two exceptions, THE ENTIRE LEADERSHIP OF THE DNR IS WOMEN. Commissioner, Deputy, Assistants, and all but two of the Division heads and assistants are all women.
HR is so fucked up there’s more than 500 applications in the hopper for positions, most of them fieldwork and low paying, for three major reasons:
1) Lots of Boomers retiring with 30+ years of experience (only a few deaths);
2) Captain Trips triggered a hiring freeze and WFH for those that aren’t in the field and quite a few decided to stay at home working for someone else (US Forest Service and NGOs mostly); and
3) Almost all the jobs are either entry-level ($15-17 starting) or so niche that a MS/PhD and 15 years down a specialty rabbit-hole will garner you $53000 a year.
The guy that runs the little (2 man) polyp in the colon that I work with has a PhD, a couple kids, ex-wife just won the clot-shot lottery over the holidays, and came in second place to a woman for the forest biometrician position he went for.
The boss-man told him straight out “one candidate scored an 81 on the interview, the other a 61 but was DEI so guess who I was told to hire…”
I’ve said from the day I was hired I was a mercenary, and everybody else I talk to has stopped all the “above-and-beyond” shit, works only what their Position Description says, and are looking for other work if not close to retirement.
I’m trying to be as gray as possible while flipping hearts and minds over to reality, while collecting a paycheck.
My job can be done away with by legislature, but a bad woods program ends up in California wildfires forever.
Doesn’t DNR stand for Do Not Resuscitate?
On of the reasons that a degree is required is likely a result of the “You can’t demand that a candidate passes an aptitude test” before employment legislation.
OK, if I cannot set or demand standards before I employ someone, then let me boot it back onto someone that can provide at least some sort of guarantee that they can at least do the three “R’s” (reading, writing and ‘rithmatic) and have the stamina and mental discipline to turn up and apply themselves by demanding evidence of a college degree completed successfully. The cost of compliance has been removed from the employer and the cost and risk transferred to the applicant for the job.
Of course, nowadays we have evidence of college graduates that cannot read, write or string a coherent thought together but they graduated because … reasons. So likely the base qualification demanded will be boosted a Masters or a PhD.
The laws of unintended consequences WILL bite your backside, every time …
Good stuff Arthur. I concur with your assessment.
I spent the last 14 months dealing with two “homely harpies” that were from a made up, feel good nonsense City gov’t division, forcing the City’s “green initiatives” upon us.
I tried to play nice, at first, but then turned openly hostile toward them, referring to their jobs as “useless”, and their program as “one of the dumbest things government has done, in a long line of dumb things.” I tried my best to break their spirits, but as all worthless bureaucratic drones do, they kept coming back and shoveling more shit on us. I once, out of sheer frustration, asked them to explain to me HOW what they were demanding of us made ANY sense whatsoever, and their super genius, college educated selves came back with, “well, that is how the code is written.” They literally could not explain any positive benefit of the initiatives they were shoving down our throats, with the threat of massive fines for non-compliance.
Now anytime I hear anything about “government created jobs”, I instantly think of those two worthless idiots.
The only silver lining is that it’s unlikely either of those idiots will reproduce.
Arthur: You hit another one out of the park. The more women and the more money involved in anything, the less well it works and the less it has to do with its original purpose. Other than in the home, women really do ruin everything. They need to be given productive channels to properly direct their empathy and need for a cause. That channel used to be their children and families and churches. Ensuring compliance (often by being busybodies, but ultimately useful nonetheless) with social mores. Now – they slather their feelz all over non-Whites and aliens from all corners of the globe, while lavishing affection on their damned ‘fur babies’ while their empty wombs shrivel up.
My husband never stopped going into the office throughout covid, although most of his coworkers (almost exclusively male) worked from home. But the office building complex where his employer is located housed lots of other companies employing thousands of women. They were always in and out the front doors, taking smoke breaks, getting lunch, browsing the booths or whatever ‘show’ was put on in the atrium. Now, the place is about half empty and much more peaceful – and not a single important bit of work is being left undone. But if one were to tell any of those women they were wasting their lives and fertility and helping destroy civilization, they’d be morally indignant. A pox on them all.
A little bit off topic…..but I could not help noticing in the picture you included of a huge room of female typists (circa 1950’s?) ALL of them were White, and NONE of them were fat.
The female office workers that I see today are almost all fat, and a lot of them downright morbidly obese.
I know my job is important because everytime i try and take holidays they break something and i get called in to design the repair and make sure it gets fixed correctly so the plant keeps running. If i disappeared i figure maybe 6 weeks before enough items broke they would shut down.
Refreshing as always Arthur! The reply poster in regards to room of typists got a sad smile from me. I was an airline pilot for 40 years…Most of our Flight Attendants were fat. Lots of them really fat.Captain Ahab would have been salivating! A country with no standards ceases to be a country… State supreme court rulings by the way.. Minnesota and Washington most guilty parties… Love your work! Harpoon that Whale!!!
Imagine, if you will, a world where HR departments consist of one person who pays for the health insurance bill and keeps track of the paperwork for who got fired and hired.
Holy faaaack your italicized quotes hit home sir! 29 years in technology I did a 12 year gig managing and as well working projects as automation test engineer keeping on top of often time 4 projects at once pulled in 5 different directions to the point you’d understand iffen you stroked the faaack out.. Adjacent to our test lab was the mighty HR department chock full of the types you mention who did not do jack in the course of an 8 hour day. Of course they could dial up legal if say you had an worthless employee you wanted to gas but that’s a whole other problem created by this worthless division known as HR. Reason I will contract to the day I punch out ain’t interested in being a full timer at any org having their “woke” bull crammed down your cranium.
Articles like this are one of the main reasons Dissident Thoughts is at the top of my morning reading list every day. You laid it in the X-Ring today, Arthur, thank you!
Anyone who has a few years on them and been in the workforce – the past 40 years especially – has seen the content of this article materialize day in, day out.
“A truth that disheartens because it is true, is still of far more value
than the most stimiulating of falsehoods.”
– Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
I will say that I’ve worked with more than a few very good female engineers. Worked with some really bad ones too, male and female, for what it’s worth. But the good female engineers have always been the ones who made sure to check everything twice, get their sign-offs in order, the construction packages correctly issued, etc. like you’ve never seen before. And scheduling. They could schedule to a cat’s ass. Plus they usually kept a bowl of candy on their desk and occasionally brought cookies to meetings. But I digress. Where they faltered, if at all, is in the imagination dept. When something broke or just didn’t work, they tried the same thing 10 different times and it still ain’t working, it was usually one of us guys who picked up the 10 lb sledge and “well, you ain’t gonna like it but I got an idea”. Innovation seems to be a male trait, but still pretty rare among both the sexes.
The HR dept is one place, but I’ve also seen over my career that the women either flock to, or are driven to, the HSE dept. Health, Safety, and Environmental. If there’s a place with more useless contradictory rules, non-sensical requirements, and petty bureaucratic infighting and despair, I haven’t seen it. There’s a bit of chicken and egg there, as I’m not sure where HSE is that way naturally which attracts women, or whether women make it that way which then repels men. Nothing scares a work crew more than seeing a soft, fat, pampered womyn stuffed into fresh nomex overalls and wearing brand new steel toed boots waltzing into the work area to conduct a safety audit. My God, the number of times I’ve had a project stall out over some idiotic requirement or vague ruling that should never have been applied is staggering. Simply projects we used to slap together and push threw in a few weeks (late 80’s timeframe) now take months, years, or simply don’t happen. I’m so ready to retire.
I will agree that you could probably take 30% of the engineers, 50% of the admin, send them home and not see a difference in the field. During Covid work-from-home BS, I’d do my necessary work in less than 20 hours at home, skip meetings, and usually started drinking around 11 am. In the office, it would take 50+ hrs per week to get the same amount of work done. So at least 50% of my daily job is nothing constructive, just crap added by others to waste time. I’ve offered to take a 25% pay cut if I could WFH until retirement. They just laughed.
I left my last W2 gig from a very large medical device company that had a stated goal of having 50% female managers and 25% “diverse”. I got a lecture from HR (talk about useless jobs for chicks) when I asked why we cared about the paint and plumbing and didn’t just hire the best candidate.
I finally said to hell with it, walked out one day and went “consultant” and only work contracts that I want to work. Only have to do the minimal training needed to meet legal/regulatory requirements and none of the bullshit diversity crap.
Agreed Bob working contracts is “the way” in the woke corp world
Hi,
I’ve been reading your site for a good bit if time but your old format wouldn’t allow me to post, so I’m trying it again with this new format.
I’ve been saying for many years that while men and masculinity are under attack in the west, and have been for some time, femininity has been under attack much longer and it has done much more damage. The creation of Bugmen was a byproduct of destroying motherhood. Feminism, by design, has destroyed men by first destroying what makes good men, which has ultimately always been good mothers.
If we could ever get women to truly understand that they have always been pawns, then we might gain some headway.
One of the things I strongly disagree with is those in our circles who badmouth modern women without understanding the unwittingness of the role they play.
I just commented on another entry about the possibility of civil war. But it seems that my comment may be applicable to this thread as well. Everything in nature is self-correcting. But mother nature sure can be a bitch.
“It seems to me that the starbucks-quaffing, transgender, homo-positive, gov’t/union worker, marketing executive, grievance-studies, social media, virtue-signaling, fat-body-positive, welfare-leeching, millennial-snowflake, aging-boomer-hippy, spiritual, fast-food-drive-thru-eating, feminist, extinction-rebellion, main stream media consuming NPC, baby-daddy, get-your-vax, looting, insouciant half is not gonna last past three weeks without clean water.
And then, what?
Tell me the last nation/society to have a genuine water crisis. Where fresh water was truly unavailable. I’ll hang up and listen.
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