The Lost Generation
"The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I
might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it
wasn’t possible.”
We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much
he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained
apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They
couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another
season, they’d be able to bring us on.
They never did.
The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to
anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every
announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on
gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when
you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder,
and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate
people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and
you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s
deliberately rooting against you.”
As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray
DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules.
“Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is
intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker.
“But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to
increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should
be fair and open to everyone.”
This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for
white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a
profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet
practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about
diversity have considered the issue by cohort.
This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male
millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who
(mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely
different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974,
beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If
you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.
Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in
many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us...
A decade ago the prevailing critique of American journalism was that it was woefully lacking in gender and racial diversity...
In 2019, David Haskell, who had just been named editor-in-chief of New York
magazine, was asked to respond to staff disappointment that “another
white man” had been elevated to the role. “I understand that reaction.
Part of me shares it,” he told
his staff. “The most effective way to move the needle on diversity
hiring is for a strong, loud commitment to come from the very top of the
masthead. I … plan to do exactly that.”
Andrew didn’t work at New York,
but he watched similar pressures reshape his newsroom. He’d been there
for five years, a beat reporter who couldn’t seem to move up, and
suddenly all anybody could talk about were diversity metrics. Management
was, as he put it, “obsessive about recruiting people of color.” But
the pool was small, and anyone promising was quickly poached by The New York Times or
cable news. “With all the declarations these newsrooms had been making,
the imperatives—‘enough white guys already’—seemed to me to be the
mantra,” he told me. “And you couldn’t help but wonder if that meant you
were being passed up for opportunities, even in your own organization.”
Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would be no
backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or person of color,
the expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of
color. “The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse
candidate,” a senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me. “If there
was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you
could find someone… but if she was any good you knew she would get
accelerated to The New York Times or The Washington Post in short order.”
The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had
already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the
newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.
And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.”...
In 2021, new hires at Condรฉ Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at
least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given
that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would
talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white
men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling
closer to 10 percent of open positions.
Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There
were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one
point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the
identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew
had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected
when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to
demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires
of black people,” he said.
When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a
Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other
women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It
was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.”...
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, had described
his hiring philosophy back in 2019: “By opening up the possibilities of
younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a
deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership.
There’s no quota system here.”
Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable reality. “It’s
really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said in that
same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can
do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white
males.”
With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The Atlantic's hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.
The irony was, where older white men remained in charge, especially
where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. “If
you hired a team of white guys around you, you were putting a target on
your back,” recalled the hiring editor. At The New York Times Magazine (one of the few prestige magazines with a public masthead),
Jake Silverstein, a Gen-X white man, serves as editor-in-chief, and
Bill Wasik, another Gen-X white man, serves as editorial director. But
of nine millennial senior editors and story editors below them, there’s
just one white guy—and he’s been there since 2012, effectively
grandfathered in.
At the very bottom of the ladder, the picture is little different. Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men (in 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post’s intern class had seven white guys—numbers not seen since way back in 2014). In 2018 The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the nearly 220 fellows have been white men.
Other pipelines dried up as well. The alt-weeklies that gave misfit
young men their start have shed them entirely. There are no white men on
the editorial staff of the Seattle Stranger or on the staff of Indy Week. As late as 2017, there were six white men atop the masthead for the Portland Mercury. By 2024, there was just one: the Boomer editor-in-chief.
By the early 2020s, many journalists I spoke to noticed something else:
The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had
simply stopped applying. Gen-Z men had absorbed the message that
journalism was not for them.
“The femaleness is striking,” a well-known Gen-X reporter with impeccable liberal bona fides confided. “It’s like, wow, where have the guys gone?”
In less than a decade, the entire face of the industry changed. The New York Times newsroom has gone from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. Condรฉ Nast today is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. BuzzFeed, a media operation that had been 52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52 percent white by 2023.
But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox,
whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal
demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when
Ezra Klein came under fire for his start-up’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022 the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership was 73 percent female.
The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the stories, but which
stories got told. After George Floyd’s death, Andrew’s colleague Lucas
was assigned a piece about why you should never call the police. “I
remember having to interview one of these abolitionists for a story
about how if somebody breaks into your car or your home, it’s white
supremacy to call the cops—even if you need it for an insurance report,”
Lucas told me. “That always made me feel gross. I think back on that
with a lot of regret.”
“Newsrooms were center-left places in 2005,” the prominent Gen-X
reporter told me. “Now they’re incredibly left places… I imagine one
reason newsrooms have gotten more explicitly lefty is that you have
white guys and white women adopting a kind of protective coloration,
allyship mindset, to get through the door.”
Andrew, for his part, was unable to adopt the performative allyship that
had become expected. “I always thought I was an effeminate nerd growing
up… but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the most masculine
end of men in media,” he told me. “I started to pick up on the fact that
there wasn’t much room for people who even speak in my timbre.’”
He was recruited for a senior reporter position at a more prestigious
outlet, “jumping through hoops every step of the way,” as he told me.
But by the end it felt like a cruel joke: extensive interviews, writing
tests, endless meetings with various editors, only to find out months
later that the job had gone to someone a decade younger than him—a gay
man of color, who’d managed to go from intern to assistant editor to
senior reporter in less than two years.
“If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar,” Andrew told me.
“You can’t help feeling like no matter how good you are, you were born
in the wrong year.”...
There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender,
especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to
agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at
least not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a
millennial professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between
thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” said
another.
So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc
and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had
at a career with a single tweet.
“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a
white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for
all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American
historian.”
The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’
Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White
males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of
faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for
systemic discrimination.”
It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found
that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant
professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral
degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”
As in other industries, what mattered were the optics. When people
looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them...
White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences
faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of
Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the
pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).
The pipeline and the cohorts haven’t changed much—newly-minted humanities Ph.Ds have been evenly split between men and women for over a decade now, and white men outnumber other groups in most applicant pools—but
who was getting hired certainly did. At Berkeley, white men were 48.2
percent of faculty applicants in the Physical Sciences—but just 26
percent of hires
for assistant professor positions. Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of
tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American
men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9
percent).
The white men who do get hired are often older and more established—or
foreign. Several people I spoke with noticed that European white men
don't seem to face these barriers. The reason, one professor suggested,
is they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an
administrative sleight of hand: Federal education statistics (IPEDS)
classify foreign nationals outside racial categories. In other words, a
white European on a work visa doesn't register as “white” in diversity
metrics. Among new Ph.Ds with definite academic employment plans, white
temporary-visa holders are nearly twice as likely as white U.S. citizens
or permanent residents to secure tenure-track positions (61.0 percent
versus 33.1 percent in 2023).
“Senior hiring still is very often white men,” Will, an Ivy League professor, told me. His humanities department had hired
two higher-level white men, then conducted a search for a junior
professor. There was one white man among the finalists. “On paper, he
was so clearly the strongest candidate,” Will remembered. “It really
kind of did feel like, well, we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.” He had been told, “If we’re on the fence here, we should not go with the man again.”
Yale’s history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of
70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in
hiring. Since 2018, they’ve hired four older white men as full
professors—but among sixteen tenured or tenure-track millennials, just
one is a white man. At 84, the Cold War historian John Gaddis isn’t even
the oldest in the department...
Berkeley commissioned
regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would
produce the fewest number of white male job offers. At Dartmouth, the
Mellon-to-postdoc program provided ten tenure-track positions for “new
hires with a demonstrated commitment to addressing racial
underrepresentation in their disciplines.” None were white men.
Cluster hiring, which began in the ’90s as a way to expand interdisciplinary research, was transformed
in the 2010s as a shortcut to achieve diversity goals. Entire groups of
underrepresented candidates could now be hired at once, working around
the often byzantine tenure approval process.
“The way you try to demographically diversify without making it explicit
is searching in areas where the areas are strongly correlated with
[gender or] ethnicity,” an Ivy League professor explained to me. A
cluster hire in Latinx studies will gain you several Latinx faculty. A professor of transgender studies will in all likelihood not be a straight cis man. And a white male assistant professor of black sexualities is closer to an SNL sketch than to any lived reality in 2024.
All this left little oxygen for anyone else. James spent nearly a
decade, first at Yale Law, then at a top classics program, watching his
professional pathways narrow until they seemingly disappeared. He saw
people he knew—as long as they fit the right demographic profile—bypass
open searches and receive tenure-track offers before they even finished
their Ph.Ds. “My own advisors would say, very openly, they’re just two
completely different hiring schemes,” he told me. “They’re just two
completely different categories of person.”
Hanging over it all was an invisible curriculum, the political
assumptions about what should and should not be studied. James recalled a
fellow graduate student he met at Yale, a white man oblivious to the
latest academic orthodoxies. “He went on this long, passionate monologue
about military history. He knew all sorts of details of Roman military
history, he really wanted to study it. And I just thought you are hopeless,
there is no way anyone is going to hire you… He almost wasn’t schooled
properly. If he had been—without anyone ever needing to tell him—he
would just drop all that about military history, because he’d know
that’s white and European and male and dead.”
Only one person from James’s classics cohort wound up with a
tenure-track offer. “He’s gay, Asian-American, exceptionally conversant
in the language of critical theory,” James said. “And he got his job on
the merits. He’s extremely good, but he’s into stuff that’s also very
in.” James, on the other hand, applied to just a couple of tenure-track
jobs in classics before he gave up. “Most people didn’t even try,” he
told me. For young white men doing dead white male stuff, “it was just
totally hopeless.”
“I operated under completely false assumptions,” Ethan, an Ivy
League-educated social scientist, told me. He’d always had the vague and
naive (and frankly privileged) idea that professionally everything
would work itself out. “I was gonna be a tenure-track professor,” he
said. “That was my expectation.”
Like so many middle-class millennials in the Obama era, Ethan believed
he was on the right side of history. He had entered academia after an
unsatisfying stint in the corporate world precisely because he was
interested in issues of inequality—he wanted to make the world a better
place. “I came in wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, but I felt like in the early
2010s, there was good reason to feel that way,” he told me. “Society was
moving in a direction that felt more fair, less caste-oriented.”
After Ferguson and Black Lives Matter and then #MeToo, as talk of
diversity and representation and privilege swept across campuses,
universities responded with a host of new initiatives...
Back in 2016, Brown had pledged
to double faculty diversity within six years. “There is significant
work to do in the coming months and years to implement the Diversity and
Inclusion Action Plan,” Provost Richard Locke, himself a white male
Boomer, said at the time. A diversity representative was installed on
every job search committee. The Office of Institutional Equity and
Diversity reviewed all hiring advertisements as well as faculty short
and long lists (in tenure-track hiring, the longlist is a collection of
potential candidates, and the shortlist is a selection of the most
qualified to consider for the interview phase).
To give a sense of what this meant on the ground:
In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the
humanities at Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the
process the male share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent
male, the short list 42 percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made
it to the interview round were male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were
ultimately offered to men. A similar dynamic played out in the social
sciences: 54 percent of the 722 applicants were men; 44 percent of the
shortlist was male, and just 32 percent of job offers were tendered to
men; in the physical sciences, women were 23 percent of applicants, but
received 42 percent of job offers.
Ethan made it to the final interview round at Brown. After a long
back-and-forth with the search committee—a sign, he believes, of
internal dissension—he lost out. “They wanted everything through the
prism of race,” Ethan recalled. “Unless you place [race] squarely at the
center of your research, you’re vulnerable, especially if your identity
doesn’t fit the desired profile.”
Of the men who managed to pass through Brown’s gender gauntlet, almost none are white. Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).
Over the next three years, Ethan applied to dozens more positions,
including at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. As elsewhere, the UC schools
required DEI statements, in which prospective faculty were asked to
detail “future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.” Ethan
had to write dozens of these statements in the course of his job search.
But the UCs took it a step further. Under an $8.5 million state program
called “Advancing Faculty Diversity,” UC administrators used DEI statements as a “first cut” to winnow down applicant pools before faculty were even allowed to consider candidates.
Ethan didn’t make any UC shortlists—but why would he have? The program had achieved its intended effect. At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine
has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and
social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of
the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science
appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3
percent).
All in all, Ethan was a finalist for a tenure-track position five times. He was
flown out again and again for interviews and meet-and-greets and
departmental dinners—always the bridesmaid, never the bride. At a
certain point, he began to see himself the way the search committees
did. “Other identifiers or other things I valued about myself have
receded,” he explained. Being a white man, meanwhile, “moved into the
foreground in a way that I didn’t expect.”
It’s taken a toll on Ethan’s personal life... “There’s a huge group of talented white men who can’t get tenure-track
jobs,” he told me. “For a set of institutions so obsessed with bias,
they’re completely blind to their own.”...
Matt is the sort of smart, slightly manic cinephile who’s been a fixture
of Hollywood forever—the guy at the bar who can explain why a project
was greenlit (“a buyer with lots of money and little experience”) or why
a director got hired (“background as a playwright—and it was Scott
Rudin”), and dismiss the latest Netflix release with a wave of his hand
(“dogshit… a story that shouldn’t be a movie”)...
In the fall of 2014, the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite was born. The New York Times ran story after story.
The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In
2015, Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story
editor. “I couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate… There was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a while.”
It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As #OscarsSoWhite
bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified. “You could read a
white guy’s script,” a former assistant to a Gen-X white male showrunner
told me. “But there was no way in hell that person was going to get
staffed on the show. Showrunners only had a couple of spots for white
people, and they kept those for the 40- or 50-year-old white guys they’d
known for years.”
A whistleblower sent me a document
from early 2017, an internal “needs sheet” compiled by a major talent
agency, that shows just how steep the headwinds were. Across the grid,
which tracks staffing needs for TV writers rooms, the same shorthand
appears dozens of times: “diverse,” “female,” “women and diverse only.”
These mandates came from some of the most powerful names in television:
Noah Hawley (“prioritizing women”), Dean Devlin (“prioritizing women …
ideally hire ethnic/African American”), Ryan Murphy (“want female and
diverse, emphasis on African American”).
This was systematic discrimination, documented in writing, implemented
without consequence. It’s striking how casual it all was. “Chicago
Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs
[staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers
with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the
entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt
and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were
reserved for others.
“The studios had these quotas they felt pressure to fill,” a veteran
talent manager told me. “It was always the lower and midlevel people.”
Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door. The Writers Guild lists more than a dozen studio-run initiatives for emerging “diverse” writers. The Disney Writing Program,
which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers,
has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over
the past decade—none to white men. Nearly every capsule bio for these
programs is an attempt to communicate, with as little subtlety as
possible, that the writer is not a white man (“a Korean and Polish
American writer from Seattle”; “a comedy writer with Cuban, Puerto
Rican, and New Mexican roots”).
Another prestigious venue for up-and-coming screenwriters was the
Sundance Screenwriters Lab, which proudly lists Darren Aronofsky, Paul
Thomas Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino among its alumni. “The Lab was
just amazing,” Quentin Tarantino recalled
in 2017, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Reservoir Dogs. “They took
us really seriously. I couldn’t believe how altruistic it was. Their
whole point was to just help us… to refine our aesthetic.”
In the 2010s, Sundance came under fire for producing a disproportionate
number of white male auteurs. The organization decided that would never
happen again. In 2016 and 2017, 27.5 percent of applicants to the
screenwriters lab were
white men, but they were just 14.7 percent of participants. That figure
turned out to be relatively high. Since 2018, just 8 of 138 (5.8
percent) of the fellows selected have been white men. Notably, nearly
all have either had some other defining characteristic (disabled, gay)
or were partnered with a woman or a person of color. Today, just one in
ten millennial programmers at Sundance is a straight white man.
These programs, originally established to open a closed pipeline, turned
into their own exclusionary infrastructure. Matt never bothered
applying. “At a certain point you realize the juice isn’t worth the
squeeze,” he said. “You’re doing everything you can to break through,
and the goalposts keep moving.”
After striking out in TV for almost five years, Matt transitioned into features, which were less identity-driven...
By the end of the 2010s, that work paid off: One of his scripts landed
on the Black List, the prestigious annual ranking of un-produced
screenplays voted on by Hollywood development executives. This gave Matt
much-needed momentum—he sold multiple spec scripts and was finally able
to quit his day job—but it was hard to translate into steady work.
Even after he managed to get A-list showrunners attached to a couple of
projects, when staffing season came they never offered him a position on
their own shows. “Hiring me was never even in the conversation,” he
said. In other words: Matt had a better chance of getting his own show
on the air than of getting staffed. (Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance, who sold his pilot in 2016, wasn’t able to land a job in a TV writer’s room until his own show began production.)
In 2020-2021, Matt’s agent submitted him for a prestige series. The
showrunners liked his sample; they wanted to talk about availability.
But the offer was abruptly pulled. One of the showrunners—a Gen-X white
guy—had blocked it. The room already had too many white guys...
Over Matt’s fourteen years in Hollywood, the changes have been
staggering. In 2011, when he (and I) moved to California, white men were around 60 percent of TV writers; by 2025, according to the WGA’s own diversity statistics, they accounted for just 11.9 percent of lower-level writers; women of color made up 34.6 percent. White men directed
69 percent of TV episodes in 2014, and just 34 percent by 2021. But
that remaining third went overwhelmingly to established names, leaving
little space for younger white men. Since 2021, 11 directors under 40
have been nominated for Emmys. None have been white men.
“I saw this graveyard of people not too dissimilar from me,” Peter, the
assistant to the Gen-X showrunner, told me. Peter, who graduated from a
Top-5 college in the early 2010s, watched slightly older millennial men
wait for a break that never came. “They were like: Hey, I’m gonna take
this kind of shit job for two years. Oh, wait, I can do it for three
more years… Suddenly they’re married, having kids. They just didn’t get
the deal—it was never gonna happen for them. Ever.”...
That single episode of network television from 2014 remains Matt’s only
produced credit. When we last spoke, he was commuting to his menial day
job. Newly single, with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card
debt, he has recurring fantasies of changing his name and moving to
Thailand to escape his creditors.
“Sweet one-bedroom, VPN to access American TV/film content,” he texted me. “The Dream.”
For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. Without any actual
quotas to achieve—only the constant exhortation to “do better”—the
diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of
top-down and bottom-up pressure. No one ever said what the right number
of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.
The boundaries shifted depending on the industry and the moment: A white
woman might be favored in some contexts, disfavored in others; an
Asian-American man might face extra obstacles in tech or medicine, but
if he wanted to be a screenwriter or an English professor, the system
worked in his favor. But for younger white men, any professional success
was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.
And solve it they did.
Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America
used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines. Seven
white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013
alone—the same as the total number of white male millennials who’ve won
since.
In 2014, two white male millennials were National Book Award finalists,
including one winner; that year nine white male American artists under
40 appeared at the Whitney Biennial. But of the 70 millennial writers
nominated for National Book Awards in the decade that followed, just
three were white men. The “Big 4” galleries represent 47 millennial
artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which
featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.
The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other
high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or
medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they
were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school
matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024.
The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025,
they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a
decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial
oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs,
chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white
men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”
Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon,
entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were
42.3 percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d
advanced normally over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers
of today. But mid-level Amazon managers fell from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of nearly 40 percent.
“The pipeline was never 50-50,” a former management consultant
explained—elite business schools remained around 60 percent male and
predominantly white throughout the 2010s. “But we were hiring as if it
were 50-50 anyway.”
“For a lot of guys in their mid-thirties, around 2017-2018, it was a
quite dramatic shift,” one tech-adjacent journalist told me. “They’re
all like, whoa, suddenly every door is closed, and I am just not going
to move ahead at this company at all. Because it’s been lightly and
sometimes not-so-lightly communicated to me that there’s just no way the
job I want is going to be given to a white guy.” A whole generation
found their path was blocked.
The refuges that young white men did find—crypto, podcasting,
Substack—were refuges precisely because institutional barriers to entry
didn’t exist. A friend who’s now an executive at a major crypto company
scraped by as a freelance film editor for years. He applied to Netflix
five times; eventually he was told, explicitly, that they didn’t need
more white guys. He didn’t go into crypto because it was high
status—Hollywood, the high-status industry, wouldn’t have him.
It’s tempting to wave it all away as secular decline—white men
abandoning fields that were losing status or economic value. But the
timing doesn’t line up. The sharpest declines in opportunity for younger
white men didn’t happen during the rolling crises of the past few
years—they were baked in during the mid-2010s, when New Media was
expanding coverage, universities were growing, and Hollywood was at Peak
TV.
Which raises some uncomfortable questions: Is the media more trusted now
than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is
academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since
they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning
meritocracy accelerate their decline?
The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced worse
discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the
disenfranchisement of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not
itself an argument. Especially when the entire liberal establishment
insists that nothing actually happened, that the “mild” correction was
in fact no correction at all, and that any white man harmed in the
process was in fact “mediocre.”
Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t supposed to notice.
Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white male
millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and
resentments. To a man, they insisted on anonymity. There were frenzied
pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include,
back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms
to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that
they would end up being that guy...
Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are.
But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting. We
millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy,
which for all its faults—its naรฏvetรฉ about human nature, its optimism in
the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see
that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward
the entire liberal project that won't soon disappear.
“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white millennial men have
had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave liberal
America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me.
“I don't want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone
says, this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”...
Iinstead of settling down, proposing to my then-girlfriend (now wife),
and earning a steady income that might support a family, I spent a
decade insisting the world treat me fairly, when the world was loudly
telling me it had no intention of doing so. I could see what was
happening—I was being told point-blank what was happening—and still I
thought I’d be the exception, that if I wrote one more script, took one
more meeting, I’d slip through. But very few people get to be the
exception."
We're still told that DEI is to ensure that anyone not a straight, white man can get a job
Left wingers claim right wingers are lying when they talk about discrimination against white men, because they're still disproportionately represented at the top. But this is the apex fallacy combined with a failure to look at leading indicators
Left wingers openly announce that they're discriminating against "majorities", then turn around and deny that there's any discrimination and mock people who notice. One cope is that if you include historical numbers as well, then there's no discrimination, which is just another way of saying that historical "discrimination" justifies current discrimination
Related:
vittorio on X
"insane article
this is documented, systematic racism against an entire generation of white men, written down
said out loud in hiring meetings. "we can't hire the best person", "we need diverse, not white guys" for a fucking decade
what's insane is that it helped no one.
not the institutions (they're collapsing)
not the "beneficiaries" (everyone now knows they got the job while being less competent and they are resented)
not society (trust is gone, competence collapsed, everything got worse)
everyone knew, the people implementing it knew and they did it anyway
and now they're scrubbing the PDFs, pretending it never happened, calling it "benign HR modules"
you destroyed thousands of careers, hollowed out every institution you touched, and made the country measurably worse for nothing. for literally nothing
a decade of moral posturing that everyone involved knew was a lie
there is no forgiveness for this. there shouldn't be"
CrazyFawkes on X
"Me inquiring about a position that opened up in management that I was already overqualified for:
"Don't even bother applying, they won't let us promote white men anymore"
This was said to me by one of the managers on the interview panel (in confidence of course)."
Silence_Do_Better_84 on X
"I work in tv. I haven’t worked on a show with a straight white make staff writer/story editor (entry level) in over a decade.
Agents & managers won’t even read them cause they can’t get them a job.
They’re basically blacklisted from ever getting a career going."
will on X
"All of this was also a blatant violation of Civil Rights laws. Whatever your feelings on those laws, it doesn't change the fact that everyone who did this should be in jail."
Jewish Guy on X
"Scott adams said ge was told he couldn't get promoted cuz he was a white guy, in the corporate world in the 80s"
Penny Wise on X
"I saw this first hand at Xerox. We were not allowed to interview college kids if they graduated from a "white college". We were not allowed to hire white men unless we could produce a VP signature saying it was a business necessity. Xerox was run by racists when I worked there."
Covenant of Us on X
"This is what actually broke trust, competence was openly subordinated to ideology, everyone saw it, and then they were told not to believe their own eyes. Once institutions prove they’ll lie about something this basic, nothing they say afterward carries weight."
TheShadowbanned on X
"You talk as if this is over. This is fairly standard hiring practices across most industries, especially competitive ones where there are dozens or hundreds of applicants for each role."
Edward McLaren on X
"'Wow, why are there all these angry extremely talented middle class White men on the far right?'"
Brittany Hugoboom on X
"Yep the biggest agents in Hollywood told me this in the 2010’s. They wouldn’t look at scripts written by white men."
Brotherhood on X
"Leftism cannot produce, it can only capture and destroy
The Right still feels there are some measures that go too far beyond the pale in addressing this and that's precisely what permits it to grow"
Thread by @DavidDecosimo on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
"Since 2015, the year they hired me, Boston University School of Theology has made sixteen tenure track faculty hires.
In over a decade, I am the only white American male they have hired.
My hiring was itself regarded as wholly aberrant - and eventually a system error. In the years that followed powerful colleagues would explicitly & repeatedly attack me for my identity - especially for inhabiting it in a non-servile, non-self-abasing way.
While far from the most serious incident, once on the T, in front of my 8 yr old son, a student saw me & began talking. She'd been admitted elsewhere for a PhD & started ranting on & on about how 'utterly disgusting' white men were & how she hated that they were on their faculty.
Of course, my son was regularly hearing the same noxious stuff in Brookline schools, so it was all familiar to him - but, still, seeing it in such a personal & direct way and implicating me was even more upsetting & left him imagining a future of being hated for his identity.
What was most striking was how incredibly unself-conscious & casual she was in speaking with such deep-seated contempt & hatred - all right in front of my son.
But that was BU School of Theology. And that view was held & enforced by faculty who wielded real power in the school. "
Thread by @DavidDecosimo on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
"On my first day at BU, a colleague took me to lunch & said: “Do you know what the real miracle of your hire is? You’re a white male. Do you know how much better than every other candidate you have to be to get hired here as a white man?" I couldn't believe he'd said it out loud.
At least 3 times, I've been *explicitly told by someone involved in a search* that my identity as a white male was disqualifying. In one BU search, student comments saying "Don't hire another white man!" were read aloud approvingly as part of the faculty hiring decision.
More recently, I was denied a key opportunity explicitly because it would upset the "gender balance." This sort of overt race & sex discrimination has been absolutely commonplace in academia for years now. But there is immense stigma & social pressure around not talking about it.
If you are subject to discrimination in hiring, tenure, or promotion because you are white or male or, worse, white and male - no matter how blatant & egregious - you know you are not supposed to say anything. That it's a bad look & will only damage your prospects still further.
As @a_n_a_berg so powerfully put it, it is an unforgivable sin in academia for a white man to "fail to embrace his own sacrifice as well justified, his own loss as the necessary unsettling of white male dominance."
He must "welcome the cleansing flame" that immolates his career.
I no longer care about the stigma, nor the views of those who impose it. Nothing will change unless people speak up & say, 'No, it's actually not okay to remove people from a search or hold them to a different, higher standard because they're white or, worse, white & male."
I have seen too many truly outstanding white males in my field denied opportunity after opportunity until they give up, despite being obviously & sometimes massively more learned & accomplished than those who get the job. Sometimes, the gap & the quality of the hire are shocking.
It's not uncommon for there to have to be a deal struck like the following, whether among faculty or between faculty & admin: "To be allowed to hire a white male, you have to also hire at least one, two, or even three minorities." More common is "you can hire a URM or no one."
There are still places that largely do *not* engage in discrimination in hiring. But it's rare enough that there's a phrase to describe their practice.
Folks will say, "They hire for excellence." Meaning, they hire on the basis of scholarly & pedagogical merit, not identity.
Is it not clear that this is bad for everyone? It's bad for those unjustly cut out of the field. But it's also bad for those whose hire involves a lie that their work is good. It's bad for those whose work is superb but who bear unjust stigma. It's bad for students & for mission.
I honestly do not know if academics are capable of leaving behind race & sex discrimination in hiring. It's been so deeply ingrained for so long & there are so many ways to keep doing it while pretending not to. And some would rather see the whole ship go down than give it up.
It's possible, of course, that attempted cures could be as destructive as the disease or serve as a pretext for equally illiberal, antimeritocratic projects. But things really are very, very bad on this front. Rigorous, fair federal prosecution in the courts seems the best hope.
For those who've gone along with the lies, bias, & games but don't want the ship to go down, it's time to end race- & sex-based discrimination in higher ed for good. Rejecting bias & hiring for excellence will not only help save our jobs, it'll make higher ed better for everyone. "
David Austin Walsh on X
"I mean, look, at the end of the day saying "I think that the hiring process should discriminate against white men" is both highly illegal and incredibly politically unpopular with the broader public."
Wesley Yang on X
"Affirmative action has always had a supermajority of poll respondents opposing it from day one to the present. Eight out of nine state referenda ostensibly banning it all passed, including in California. Neither the law nor the repeatedly expressed preferences of the broader public have ever interfered with the continued operation of elite consensus on this issue.
We all know that anti-white discrimination is illegal and unpopular. It was "illegal" throughout the entire decade that the Compact piece described.
Is it morally wrong? Is it practically harmful? Is there a critique of it other than the dubious claim "we would be more socialist in its absence?" or "this will feed white supremacist reaction?" (when 'white supremacy' just means -- "opposition to systematic discrimination against whites?")"
Ross Douthat on X
"Part of the problem w/a response to Savage that basically says, "everyone faces some handicaps, don't become a victim" is that this was already how white males were expected to understand diversity programs and affirmative action *before* the age of D.E.I.
That is, there was an understanding in the culture of the late 1990s and 2000s that a white applicant or candidate faced a modest disadvantage, and that you were expected to accept this and just deal with it for reasons of history and white privilege ... and people largely did.
The D.E.I. theory was that this settlement was inadequate for purposes of redress + justice. But there is a big difference between telling young white men that there might be a light diversity-oriented thumb on the scale and telling them to live in this kind of hiring world:
"Suck it up, raise your game, success isn't a birthright" is a good response to modest unfairnesses. It's a message that stops selling when the system doesn't seem interested in rewarding people of your race and sex at all. "
Lee Fang on X
"I witnessed the dynamics described in this piece dozens of times when I was at The Intercept. Coworkers openly said they didn’t care about broadening the job pool for working class writers, that DEI was meant to prevent the media outlet from hiring any more “white men.” Also the demands to discriminate against Gen Z or millennial men came just as strongly from editors, who were largely Gen X white men and women, none of whom of course would step aside to make room for their racial demands. It was always young people who had to pay the price. "
Glenn Greenwald on X
""Newsroom diversity" has meant hiring non-whites, females and LGBTs whose parents are Wall Street bankers and lawyers, went to Ivy League schools, grew up in the same neighborhoods, with the same politics.
Working-class backgrounds or state schools didn't count as "diverse.""
Left wingers hate the poor, after all
Inez Stepman ⚪️๐ด⚪️ on X
"“‘enough white guys already’—seemed to me to be the mantra”
I know so many people who have told me they personally were told explicitly they were passed over, dropped from a project, or not hired because the company “needed diversity.”
This is exactly how it’s been in most offices in America: legacy boomers and to some extent Gen X white guys kept their jobs at the top, but there was absolutely zero room for “another white guy” coming up from below.
This is, ironically, “systemic discrimination,” and it’s very illegal. Yet nothing was done about this (until
The cases the EEOC and @HarmeetKDhillon are working on)."
Megan McArdle on X - "If this reporting is true true, Hollywood not only violeted CRA for years by discriminating against white men, but has been merrily telling the white men this, and writing it down in widely circulated emails in case they wanted to file a lawsuit. No words"
Jeremiah Johnson ๐ on X - "You can tell the culture has shifted because five years ago an article about explicit discrimination against white men would have hundreds of quote tweets saying "Oh boo hoo cry about it white boys", but now it's people belatedly realizing that's fucked up."
