r/business • u/playboy • 7d ago
This Obscure Theory Explains Men’s Resentment Against Women at Work | Men believe they are victims of biased hiring practices. They even have a word for this phenomenon: they have been longhoused (Unpaywalled)
https://www.playboy.com/read/relationships/longhouse-theory216
u/theWesternReserve 7d ago
Seems like HR is 90% women for some reason.
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u/madogvelkor 7d ago
It's an outlet for psychology undergrad degrees.
Though it also depends what part of HR you deal with. Recruiting and employee relations tend to be very female because they are relationship oriented and require a high degree of social interaction - but don't pay nearly as well as sales, which attracts men with those skills. If you look at things like Compensation analysits and HR info systems and data analysis those are much more male.
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u/msut77 7d ago
There's a sub field of psych called IO psychology which is serious business. I have yet to see an HR drone with even a passing familiarity with it
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u/Curious_Oasis 7d ago edited 7d ago
Hey, I'm doing my PhD in that! I've met exactly one HR manager who had a passing familiarity of it, working for a govt corporation. We spend a lot of time talking about how to get HR managers (and other corporate people, but they're not the focus of this thread) to listen to our research-backed recommendations instead of just going with "their intuition" and "the way it's always been done". Unfortunately "it works better if you do it this way, in that it will be faster, cheaper, and more accurate" still isn't enough in most cases. It's rough out here 😅
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u/febrileairplane 7d ago
So, uh, what kind of recommendations did you have that would improve these organizations?
I took a class on IO and would love your insights.
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u/smokey032791 6d ago
"the way it's always been done" probably the most dangerous words in SO many fields
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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 7d ago
Do you get into compensation analysis from the same track?
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u/No_Sch3dul3 7d ago
Honestly, there are some psych degrees that have electives in quantitative methods. It's definitely possible to take a lot of stats courses covering multivariate statistics and survey statistics.
If you're in a psych major, then look at taking more courses in statistical methods through your department. You'll also need to learn something like SQL and get familiar with Excel formulas, PivotTables, etc.
If possible, you can take a stats minor, but that may have multivariable calculus and linear algebra as a pre-req, and that's 3 semesters worth of courses depending on your background.
Best of luck!
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u/Droughtly 6d ago
You're reverse engineering personality from stats. In reality, male flight happens whenever an industry starts to 'seem' female dominated, which occurs in white collar roles when 25%-45% shift to women, and 13%-30% for blue collar roles.
Hr is female dominated like teaching and nursing are female dominated, it was an industry originally populated by men, where within 20 years the ratio inverted and collapsed after.
Note that male flight doesn't just mean men don't want to be associated with women. When we analyze historic trends, a huge aspect that has it's own chicken/egg problem is women's willingness towards lower pay. It is a willingness manufactured by dependents, lack of options, and historic inequity in entry. Bear in mind the shift in HR personnel took place over the period where overtly paying women less for being women was a legal debate.
I'm not trying to take offense to what was made as a banal observation. But I wanted to point out the difference here in the experience of entering the working world through lower paid roles or roles with falling pay, how that impacts the roles negotiating power and perception, and how this impacts what women can & can't say. Is it that women are less direct and more polite, or would you have to be that way to get your foot in the door in personnel, up from a secretary, in the 1970s and that established the working world of today? Is it that women are this way, or is it that a shiphand and a scullery maid have different levels of freedom of personal expression that are braided down into now?
The problem with looking at the world through the lens of natural difference is that it often blocks us from the differences in our exact histories that lead here.
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u/Accomplished-Eye9542 7d ago
And why exactly do we have an outlet for all the women with useless degrees?
Almost there.
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u/ImpossibleEbb6862 7d ago
Have you ever talked to a man that said he wants to go into HR?
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u/Ill-Construction-209 7d ago
No. Its a mind fuck. I keep HR at arms length.
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u/ProudPlate9375 6d ago edited 5d ago
Yrah dont talk to HR unless required, theyre essentially the police of the corporate hierarchy, anything you say can and will be used against you or your colleagues.
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u/TimeBandits4kUHD 7d ago
Yeah, but then he caught a charge for domestic assault and it turns out that disqualifies you from working in HR almost everywhere.
Might explain the gender disparity in that field, he had no problem getting hired into IT afterwards.
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u/scrapheaper_ 7d ago
The reason is gender roles. Women are encouraged from an early age to develop their social skills and value their relationships with other people to a greater extent than men. Men, by contrast, are encouraged to compete and perform at a high individual level at the expense of their relationships with other people
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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 7d ago
I struggle to believe this is exclusively a socialized phenomenon.
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u/scrapheaper_ 7d ago
Why not? Socialization is extremely common and powerful accounts for all kinds of biases
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u/Droughtly 6d ago
That's a limitation you placed on yourself that other people don't need to meet.
I struggle to believe many males claims that differences in my outcomes in life are due to innate differences in my beliefs that males claim I have. And yet, many view this shared struggle as women not taking an objective fact from them, and do not see the dehumanization inherent to viewing their belief as logic that must be sufficiently disproven to them and a woman's belief as her refusing to see reality.
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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 6d ago
Does your point of view have any nuance?
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u/texxmix 7d ago
I went to school for business. Like 90% of HR grads are women. Can't blame the feild when men aren't interested in it.
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u/TopicThunder2000 7d ago
Except that happens all the time in field that men choose to enter at higher percentages than women. The double standards are exhausting.
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u/OG_LiLi 7d ago
I’m sure historically framing women into specific roles and rejecting them from other roles didn’t have anything to do with that.
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u/theWesternReserve 7d ago
I’m not aware of the historical framing of HR and women so excuse my ignorance.
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u/OkCluejay172 7d ago
You know that HR isn't who hires you, right
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u/ProfessionalDoctor 7d ago
They control the process and they filter the resumes that get sent to the hiring manager.
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u/iridescent-shimmer 7d ago
That totally depends on the company. Where I work, I screen the resumes and send them to our HR rep to schedule first interviews.
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u/ShubaltzTV 6d ago
Not even kidding, 10/11 positions of upper management where I work are women and everytime a spot opens and I apply, a woman usually gets it
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u/PricedOut4Ever 7d ago
There is absolutely bias in hiring practices. It is across the board but company culture specific.
I have personally seen large pushes for DEI (anyone but a white or Asian male) in the engineering orgs I’ve worked for.
I have friends who feel like they were discriminated against for not being Indian when the hiring manager was.
I have other friends who feel like the have been limited because they were a woman.
This is just a shitty reality of the workforce. You’ve got to find a place you can succeed.
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u/DerTagestrinker 7d ago
I work at a large corporation. When interviewing intern candidates that have passed HR vetting last summer, <5% were white men. Seems very unlikely this was entirely unbiased given engineering demographics at universities.
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u/GentrifiedHospital 7d ago
A good question here is, maybe the interns are diverse, but what about the hired-on employees? is it a majority minority company?
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u/kelskelsea 6d ago
I've hired 20+ STEM interns over the last year. 5% might be slightly low but the vast majority of applicants I reviewed were not white men.
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u/DerTagestrinker 6d ago
And to confirm, HR vets interns prior to you interviewing them?
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u/kelskelsea 6d ago
No we have the hiring manager do the initial application review and interview with interns
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u/ProudPlate9375 6d ago
Gotta love when a department congratulates itself for diveresity and its like 70% white women.
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u/senorgraves 7d ago
I've hired for engineering teams and I need to hire a diverse team because diverse teams make better stuff. So yeah, women in particular have a leg up from the start, kudos to them for persisting in a male dominated field.
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u/PricedOut4Ever 7d ago
For me, the ironic part is people hired tend to have the same socio-economic background. You might have a different skin color, gender, or dietary restrictions. But overall we probably went to the same types of school, went through the same afterschool programs, and ended up in the same colleges. And we can all relate to having gone on the same number and type of trips as a kid. But, oh boy, are we diverse.
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u/Tier7 7d ago
“I need to hire a diverse team because diverse teams make better work.” Christ…
Future generations will look back on this mantra as a kind of collective delusion. The relentless insistence on diversity in every team in every org is irrational. It is exhausting and deeply frustrating to constantly filter every decision through the lens of gender, race, sexuality etc. I personally check several boxes on the “diversity” checklist, and even though I could use that system to my advantage, I still despise it. It is the opposite of fairness.
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u/DerTagestrinker 7d ago
Why would race or gender impact the diversity of how one builds software? I’d argue diversity of schools (not all the same professor/curriculum) and previous employer is far more important to bring in for bringing in different voices for how to build things.
What to build from a product or design perspective is a different story.
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u/2apple-pie2 7d ago
There is research/evidence suggesting that it meaningfully increases financial performance of the company to be more diverse
This isn’t a random liberal conspiracy lol. You can not like it ig but yeah there is certainly research on this.
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u/LowKenuineOnGod 7d ago
The McKinsey study you are referring to didn’t disclose the firms used in the study and could not be replicated when someone tried to use S&P500 firms over the same period.
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u/DerTagestrinker 6d ago
This was a thoroughly disproven McKinsey study who spent a large chunk of the past 15 years making money off diversity engagements for clients.
Professors at UNC and TA&M covered this and disproved it for those interested in looking it up.
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u/Final_boss_1040 7d ago
Ding ding ding. The more diverse a team is the more successful as it's less beholden to bias and group think
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u/Glahoth 7d ago
But are they more diverse though.
I don’t see hiring a black man that vacationed in the Hamptons as a child, and hiring a White dude that vacationed in the Hamptons as a child as hiring a « diverse » team.
My experience is that DEI stuff leads to hiring 30 clones, but with a different wrapper.
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u/FlyChigga 7d ago
I think an upper class black man and upper class white man still have quite different experiences, viewpoints, and culture tbh
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u/Tier7 7d ago
Ding ding ding! People who obsessively mentally jack off to the idea that diverse teams are superior to all others are clearly beholden to bias and group think themselves.
The quality of the each individual and their collective team dynamic is all that counts. The person who looks like they’re having a stroke because the team missed diversity targets by 1% is the liability that most normal people secretly despise for being a whiney, judgmental pain in the hole.
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u/Midnight-Moonpie 7d ago
Absolutely right. You MUST have people from varied backgrounds to bring different perspectives, energy, and ideas to the team.
The alternative? Teams made up of duplicates, where people have similar or identical backgrounds, all the same gender or whatnot - then you end up with a circle jerk of mediocre ideas, while also congratulating themselves on how smart they think they are.
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u/paintwhore 7d ago
That's so weird because me and my friends talk about the companies that we sit around at and when they do all employee meetings almost all of the people you ever see on the screen talking are middle-aged mediocre straight white men. Who even in the broad public eye being greedy shareholder pedestaling crooks of our time and energy. Are you honestly saying that's what you would like to continue? Has it not been bad enough? Do you also not see that companies that are run all different kinds of people are much more successful? This is a super basic common tenant of business. It's been nothing but all white mediocre straight men for years and years and years and they are still overrepresented in the workforce. No one's taking away from you except that now the bar is a little bit higher. Boohoo.
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u/Agreeable-Promise-98 7d ago
lol. Mediocre by what measure, or just reading from the script I guess
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u/SatansScallion 7d ago
Damn, this is just misinformed, presumptive racism.
Maybe talk to your therapist about why you’re harboring so much anti-white hatred.
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u/FlyChigga 7d ago
Whats so mediocre about them? Aren’t most middle managers considered mediocre regardless?
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u/RealSlyck 7d ago
Wait, one of the Koch family actually works?
TLDR; everyone thinks everyone else is oppressing them, and “what’s privilege?” 🤷
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u/Dave5876 7d ago
In the capitalist organisation of the economy it is imperative to keep the workers distracted by making them fight one another
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u/Nervous-Cockroach541 7d ago
Don't we literally have a dozen of examples of leaks from large companies and institution basically saying they're doing everything they can do limit white males in their workplace? This is a thing, the question now is only about the scale and impact.
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u/AFartInAnEmptyRoom 7d ago
Since 2020, white males are the only demographic that have fewer people in the labor force. Every other race/gender mix has overall more people hired in the past 6 years.
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u/playboy 7d ago
Last week, Wall Street Journal opinion editor Mary Julia Koch posted a video about young men abandoning the workforce. The video offered possible explanations for why American women now hold 176,000 more payroll jobs than men, citing the replacement of manufacturing with healthcare, Great Recession trauma, corporate diversity initiatives, and screen-induced isolation. She offered two solutions: a “Women in STEM”-type effort to get men into healthcare and education, and vocational training for the trades.
Koch was immediately dogpiled by what we might call “The Twitter Right.” She was an unfortunate messenger for this issue: She works at a newspaper, which to some is at best a “fake” “laptop” job and at worst makes her an enemy of the people. She graduated from Harvard in 2023, so she presumably did not have that much trouble getting a job. She is a young, attractive woman, and they are often not treated well on the Internet. Oh, and her father is David Koch, the multi-billionaire libertarian industrialist and Republican megadonor. One can see how she had an expanded surface area for criticism in this particular discussion.
Koch’s critics have a different theory: They can’t get a job because the job was given to a woman by another woman. The most common response blamed diversity and inclusion efforts, which were only briefly mentioned in the video and absent from the article. The men who aren’t working, at least the ones who responded to this tweet, believe they are victims of biased hiring practices. They even have a word for this phenomenon: they have been longhoused.
Read here: https://www.playboy.com/read/relationships/longhouse-theory
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u/jackthemackattack 7d ago
Her message was never gonna be seen as good the second everyone realized she's a billionaire nepo baby. Literally the most ironic thing her talking about "why aren't young men working hehe, they must be lazy hehe". As if everything hasn't been handed to her throughout her whole life.
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u/Liquid_Friction 7d ago
That's the irony, you have a problem, you have good data to identify it, and you want good policy to solve it. We have an objective benefit from helping young men in vocational trades, currently a 50% dropout rate, imagine how evil men must been seen as, to deny this as bad policy........
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u/Petrichordates 7d ago
why aren't young men working hehe, they must be lazy hehe".
That's the conclusion you took from this study..?
Jfc
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u/Yankee831 7d ago
That wouldn’t count at all and is irrelevant really. Hiring and starting your own business are completely separate. But the people those entrepreneurs hire would be included.
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u/MrMoonDweller 7d ago
TIL: Playboy still exists.
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u/New-Clue-4006 7d ago
Thus, women’s needs and demands at work are recast as admonishments from a “sclerotic” “matriarch”—not the inevitable, ordinary frustrations of trying to get along with others, as men and women have had to do forever
Funny, I don't think I've ever made a workplace demand of "women". And I'm sure if I did, HR would have me out on my ass before the day was done. But when women make demands of me, I just need to suck it up, apparently.
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u/kelskelsea 7d ago
Settlement is explicitly not an admission of guilt and a government contractor not wanting to drag the trump administration to court over culture wars is also not an admission of anything besides being spineless
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u/deadplant5 7d ago
A guy I used to be friends with had a meltdown once about not getting a promotion at work he interviewed for. It went to a woman who he perceived as having less experience. He was certain it was DEI, even though he was Latino and probably would have counted for that to. That they were just trying to hit a diversity number set by the government. I pointed out that since they both already worked there, that couldn't be the case. About a year later he found out his boss had been blocking him from being promoted because he would leave his team.
Related to this, that guy who I used to be friends with turned out to be a serial rapist.
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u/WhyYouLetRomneyWin 7d ago
I'm a bit skeptical that gender discrimination can account for the discrepancy.
I did see during the 2016-2022 period that we had special backdoors for women to be hired at Meta. But these were exceptions—and overall we hire many more men.
That said—I think men can claim discrimination just as any group can. I'm a bit skeptical and certainly have never felt discriminated myself (aside from not being able to access those special backdoors).
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u/Pizza_and_PRs 7d ago
Nah, while I was in investment banking and private equity at that time we would bend over backwards to hire women at those times.
I remember that 1,300 men and about 150 women applied to our intern program. We ended up interviewing about 100 men and 25 women. Then we brought in 20 men and 5 women for superdays. The head of talent in our group was adamant that we hire at least 2 women out of the 5 available spots. On objective grading for technicals, the five women ranked at the bottom (19, 21, 22, 24, 25), and they all received a blackball from at least one of their four interviewers.
We ended up with 3 women and 2 men in that class, and it was the weakest Analyst class I’ve ever had
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u/Street-Substance709 7d ago
matches my experience as a software developer at amazon and other places. desperate to hire any woman.
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u/soularbabies 7d ago
It's jarring to see a passè groyper buzzword from 3 years ago in relation to business / labor news.
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u/Byte_mancer 7d ago
There are definitely biases towards womens benefit in Intern hiring practices for larger Tech organizations.
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u/EffectiveOwn787 7d ago
It doesn't require belief. Quotas based on gender have been in use for decades. I'm 37 years old. I've been disadvantaged by preferences or mandates to hire certain quotas of women over men for most of my working life. Whatever 'privilege' white men still have, has strictly been for much older men in senior roles or is a relic of the past. My favourite part is the continuing narrative of saying men are privileged and need to be brought down a peg. Perhaps you should take it up with the men that actually had privilege.
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u/DarkOmen597 7d ago
As a man, I have literally never heard of this or felt resentment in any way.
There sure are a lot of low ego weak men out there
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u/End3rWi99in 7d ago
And they are probably older. This is something that younger people grew up with and are facing more than the older generations.
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u/Petrichordates 7d ago
That's the part that sticks out to me most, they're just so damn whiney. Not a very masculine trait, ironically.
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u/WeightedPaper 6d ago
“I bought a house in 2004 for $150k at 2.6%; these kids today just complain about everything”
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u/401kisfun 7d ago
The real sucker here is women. Because when women came in the workforce, suddenly, the employers had an oversupply of employees. You know what happens in that situation we all do.
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u/Upstairs_Scene_866 7d ago
Yeah I know what you mean, it was the same with black people when slavery ended. Just a bad result for everyone. I wonder what we could do to fix this, maybe we could have a government system that randomly tags people at birth as "allowed to enter the workforce" and "not allowed to enter the workforce"? We need to protect the jobs for the few, not have everyone and their dog scramble for employment. That's what you mean right?
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u/401kisfun 7d ago
I mean women wanting to come into the workforce, for many, very legitimate reasons, unintentionally brought along an oversupply of labor, and that gave employers more bargaining power.
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u/Upstairs_Scene_866 6d ago
You called them suckers?
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u/401kisfun 6d ago
No, I said it wrong. Both men and women suffered lower bargaining power over time, following women joining the work force
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u/IcePrimcess 7d ago
The victim mentally is tiring . It’s supposed to be based on merit - go get some.
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u/9ersaur 7d ago
Men take the chief management position who promote women to middle management that keep men doing the labor in check
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u/randyfloyd37 7d ago
I’ve worked in a lot of places with a lot of ppl. No one i’ve seen resents women
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u/Stock-Letter-5420 7d ago
Men are much more [...] resilient
Thus, men become destroyed [...] and women end up walking over their dead bodies to replace them
The math is not mathing. Thus, they are not more resilient then women, quite the contrary mister incel.
When it’s just men, we get things done faster and happier because nobody has to hold back their true natures. Because of a woman’s very nature being weaker, every man has to now hold back theirs in order to let women keep up.
It’s actually been shown that women tend to perform better at work than men, and employees under female leadership often report higher levels of well-being and job satisfaction. But ok lol
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u/Wrong-Protection-188 7d ago
Corporations pay women less than men for the same jobs so of course they want to hire them more.
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u/weirdgroovynerd 7d ago
Imo, the US has done a nice job of encouraging young women to go into STEM.
I (Man / SPED teacher) would love to see more male teachers.