“All men are created equal,” are the opening words of the Declaration of Independence from that annus mirabilis 1776. Male humans ruled the world. They provided our food and other material necessities of life, protected the people, including women, children, and the aged, from foreign enemies and domestic criminals and bullies. They invented new ways to produce things, inspired us with their poetry and philosophy. Our founding fathers (not “founding people”) are rightly venerated even to this day.
But it is also worth recognizing that gains to women have not always been costless to men.
Fast forward a quarter of a millennium to the present day. Arguably, we are in the midst of a War Against Men, now a beleaguered gender of the human species that has lost its dominance. Five morsels of evidence:
- Labor force participation of males is markedly lower than it was a generation or two ago;
- Males are faltering in their primal function of preserving the human race as birth rates decline worldwide, and possibly are even declining in their ability to reproduce;
- Their dominance in future economic leadership likely faces further reduction from their sharply declining presence on the college campuses that prepare our next generation of leaders;
- They are dying off faster than their female companions, and the gender mortality gap has grown over time;
- They are increasingly frustrated and depressed, as evidenced by rising suicide rates, far greater than that of females.
Labor Force Participation
In 1950, when the Korean War began, nearly 73 of every 100 adult males worked, compared with only 32 of every adult woman. In April of this year, the male worker proportion had fallen to just over 64, while the female had increased to 54.5 of every 100. Over 80 percent of the gender gap had disappeared. Put a bit differently, in 1950, only 27 of every 100 adult males did not work, but that has increased by one-third, to 36 while it decreased by the same proportion for women.
As my journalist friend Jason Riley put it recently in the Wall Street Journal, “One in three working-age American men aren’t so much as looking for a job.” Even that understates the changes and ignores the increasing substitution of women for men in high-paying jobs. In 1950, there were few women in lucrative executive, managerial, and professional jobs. Even in 2000, only two of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were female, compared with 55 in 2025; male superiority in employment still exists with respect to worker pay, but the gap again has narrowed meaningfully.
Birth Rates
Even militant feminists mostly admit that to create new children you need both a male and a female. Planetwide, birth rates are plummeting. Absence international migration, a nation’s population will eventually fall if the fertility rate among women is below 2.1. That is the case in virtually the entire world outside of sub-Saharan Africa. China’s population is beginning to plummet as fertility rates decline to almost 1.0, and the rate in the U.S. of about 1.6 means a decline in the American population is approaching unless historically robust net immigration persists, an increasingly questionable proposition.
The sharp decline in birth rates of course is partly a consequence of the rise in the quantity and ease of use of contraception involving both genders. One very male-specific cause, however, has some apparent validity: a 2020 study in a prominent urology journal noted, “There exist substantial data to suggest a decline in sperm counts over time.”
Loss of Dominance on College Campuses
When I entered college in 1958, 65 percent of undergraduate students were male, and some of the most prestigious schools did not even accept women undergraduate students. Within a generation, women had achieved numeric parity on college campuses but continued their relative growth, so today there are roughly three million more women on American campuses then men. While this could conceivably change, a college education today is usually considered almost a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite for future vocational success.
Shorter Life Expectancy
While men are living longer than ever, medical advantages have distinctly favored women. Currently, U.S. male life expectancy at birth is about 76 years, compared with over 81 for women. Comparing 1950, when modern antibiotics were just becoming popular, the life expectancy of men has risen about eight years, compared with over 10 years for women. Looking at the population 65 and older today, there are about 24 percent more women living in the United States than men.
Higher and More Rapidly Rising Suicide Rates
Men tend to be physically more violent than women, and more familiar with the use of potentially lethal weapons like guns (the method used in a majority of American suicides), so it is perhaps not surprising that the incidence of suicide is higher among males. But the time trend perhaps suggests that extreme male unhappiness resulting in suicide has worsened somewhat, while that for women has declined. From 1980 to 2023, the suicide rate rose from 19.8 to 22.7 per 100,000 men, while it fell from 7.4 to 5.9 among women. Put differently, the suicide rate among men was 2.7 times greater than for women in 1980, but more than 3.8 times greater in 2023.
Anti-Male Bias In Public Policy
I suspect that federal government policies have on balance shown an anti-male orientation. Consider two individuals, one male and one female, who have identical work life experiences — same age and number of years of employment at the same wages. Typically, under our Social Security provisions, the woman will earn far more retirement benefits than her male counterpart, simply because she likely will live far longer and thus collect more benefits. Men pay the same rate of Social Security taxes as women and thus are discriminated against based on actuarial realities.
The most vicious and dubious anti-male action undertaken by the federal government was likely the 2011 Department of Education directive issued during the Obama administration. Framed as mere “guidance,” it rested on the premise that American colleges were experiencing an epidemic of sexually motivated assaults by male students against women and that universities were failing to address the problem, thus justifying unprecedented federal intervention in campus disciplinary systems. Yet no substantial evidence was presented to demonstrate the existence of such a widespread increase in male misconduct.
What followed were years of college Star Chamber justice where accused male students were often presumed guilty until they could prove their innocence and where they were denied rights often dating back to the Magna Carta in defending themselves, such as a right to confront accusers. Fortunately, costly and embarrassing court decisions against universities by aggrieved students and their families, along with a reversal of federal policies by the Trump Administration, have largely ended this dubious initiative.
Other campus actions, especially the enthusiastic adoption of DEI, probably on balance were anti-male as “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives were often aggressively led by female power-obsessed campus bureaucrats. The enthusiasm for DEI initiatives spread to the corporate level with calls for greater gender and racial equality. As one who reads a lot of stockholder annual reports, I find it rare to find companies today where corporate leadership does not include a very substantial representation of females.
To be sure, with economic growth, gender roles appropriately change. Physical strength, a strong male attribute, becomes less important economically and even militarily. Improvements in household technology (dishwashers, disposable diapers) make family-related chores easier to handle, freeing up women from traditional family duties to engage in outside work. One can argue that we have had more an era of needed Female Emancipation than a war on males. But it is also worth recognizing that gains to women have not always been costless to men.
READ MORE from Richard Vedder:
The Collegiate Anti-Woke Counterrevolution
Why Does Congress Keep Kicking the Fiscal Can?
Richard Vedder is a distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University and senior fellow at both Unleash Prosperity and the Independent Institute.
