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.