At a previous job, my former manager told me that “We needed some more testosterone in this workplace”. The comment sounded like he was mostly kidding, but I quickly realized that he wasn’t. It was an interesting comment to hear at a workplace where the general manager, assistant manager, and two-thirds of shift leads are all male. The regular employees are about 50-50 split between male and female. None of my coworkers or I really understood why he said that at first. 

 

Then I remembered he was about 60-65 years old. He probably got his first high school job when he was ~17 years old between 1979-1983. 

 

In 1979, women made up 42% and men made up 58% and in 1983 women made up approximately 43.4% of the total U.S. labor force, while men made up 56.6%. Now in 2025 women made up 50.1% and men made up around 49.9%.

 

Men held nearly 13 million more payroll jobs in 1979 than women, but now ~78.7 million payroll jobs are held by women vs. ~78.5 million held by men.

 

A Wall Street Journal article by Mary Julia Koch highlights how American women now hold more payroll jobs than men. She claims that male flight from traditional labor markers is driving the shift rather than female gains. However, this is not the primary driver. Structural changes to the labor force — including the rapid growth of female-dominated healthcare industries and the decline of male-dominated manufacturing and tech roles — have reshaped employment metrics far more significantly.

 

Koch contends that many young men are feeling culturally benched, skipping college in record numbers (moving from 31.2% to 29.5% 4 year college enrollment in 10 years), and stepping away from the formal workforce due to stagnant wages and economic pessimism. 

 

You may know the Koch name from the billionaire Koch brothers, the wider Koch family fortune is valued at $157 billion, known for giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Tea Party Movement.

 

Koch previously covered higher education and foreign policy at the New York Sun. A 2023 graduate of Harvard College, she was editor-in-chief of the weekly Harvard Independent. None of this or her billionaire family background gives me a sense of credibility nor genuineness. I don’t know why she feels knowledgeable enough to write an article convincing enough to be disguised as anything other than to make insecure men feel better about their “struggles”.

 

She also primarily, if not solely, uses statistics only relating to payroll jobs and 4 year colleges. Many people in the education system and workforce are moving away from these systems but that doesn’t mean they’re disappearing, they’re just adapting to a universally harsh job market. Many people, especially the men Koch is soapboxing about, are shifting towards trade schools, apprenticeships, gig platforms, or other necessary education and work that aren’t tracked in nonfarm payroll statistics, which distorts her claim that many men are now just videogaming and gambling. 

 

Skipping possible six-figure debt for immediate payoff in apprenticeships or trade schools is both a rational economic move as well as a great benefit to society. Oftentimes it is conservative media and pundits most vocally supporting workers going to trade schools over 4 year liberal arts colleges, but now men shouldn’t be seeking college alternatives? 

 

I’m rather lost on what I’m meant to do after high school now oh wise billionaire WSJ author.

 

This article is one of the most insincere arguments I have heard from someone who has never had to work a day in their life without knowing their paycheck was completely irrelevant.

 

Much like my former manager, who views a room with an equal number of both genders as a shortage of men, Koch confuses structural economic adaptation with attacks on men and personal surrender. When someone grows up in a workforce made up primarily of men, simple equality feels like a crisis. When you understand that men holding 7 million more jobs than women in the 1990s is a glaring issue for a free and equal society, 30 years later women closing that gap and holding 176,000 more jobs than men is a literal non-issue.

 

If Koch actually wanted to talk about the root of the issue then she wouldn’t be talking about men being “screwed over”, she would be talking about how the system her family thrives on screws over everyone regardless of their gender.