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Key points
- Some men are becoming less generous towards their female colleagues.
- The concept of “moral licensing” may be at the heart of the problem.
- Moral licensing can be a major roadblock for women trying to overcome the prejudices of the past.
Has the generosity of some American men towards their female colleagues run into an invisible wall? Sometimes, the answer seems to be yes.
Author Malcolm Gladwell suspects that many men are in the grip of what behavioral scientists call “moral licensing.” He explains, “When a favored majority group performs an act of generosity towards an outsider, it doesn’t necessarily signal that more acts of generosity are coming. Sometimes it just gives them license to then go back to their old ways.”
So maybe change does not beget more change. Generosity does not beget more generosity. Maybe the opposite is occurring. Some of us are thinking that the progress women have made is permanently reshaping our social ecology. But what really may be happening is that women are being told by some men: We gave you all this stuff, but enough is enough. Time to go back to the way it used to be.
The search for a more perfect union has been a long journey for American women, filled with many interruptions and much backsliding.
Abigail and John Adams, the nation’s second president, have been called “America’s first power couple.” Their correspondence, amounting to more than 1,000 letters written from 1762 to 1801, has been preserved by the Massachusetts Historical Society. In one famous letter, Abigail wrote to Adam about women in the new country the founding fathers were building.
“I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Adams declined to adopt his wife’s proposed “extraordinary code of laws.”
“We have,” he wrote back jokingly, “only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope Gen. Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.” Abigail continued to battle for women’s rights but male supremacy held on tight.
Indeed, Women did foment a rebellion, but it was more than a century after Abigail’s plea. Women did not get the vote until 1920 and male supremacy has never gone of style. It’s a major problem today.
Keegan Hankes, an analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), called male supremacy a “fundamental foundation” of the U.S., not only historically but also of the new alt-right. She said the SPLC decided to create several new categories of bias because “male supremacy had become impossible to ignore.” The group’s efforts to better highlight organized misogyny began in 2018, when “we started monitoring male supremacist hate groups … Those misogynistic beliefs, so depressingly familiar and widespread, have hardened into a more distinct force in recent years, and have been fueled by the election of Donald Trump and the resurrection of white supremacist groups in American political life.”
Male supremacy, according to the SPLC, represents all women as “genetically inferior, manipulative, and stupid beings who exist primarily for their reproductive and sexual functions. Gender-essentializing male supremacists rely on cherry-picked science and anthropology to bolster their claims that men are inherently dominant. Not only do women owe men sex, they believe, but men are entitled to take it from them.”
“You want to reach a point where you have high expectations of a woman but she has little expectations of you,” wrote Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, founder of Return of Kings, in a recent blog post. “She must give you submission while you do as you may.”
A group known as incels, mainly young heterosexual men who have come to believe that society rewards women more than men, is growing. They have created a psychological space in which women are hateful creatures who do not give males what they are due—sex whenever they want it. This idea has led to tragic acts of violence.In May of 2014, for example, a 22-year-old man named Elliot Rodger opened fire near the campus of UC Santa Barbara, killing six women and leaving 14 people wounded. He shot himself in his car after the attacks.
As Jia Tolentino writes in the New Yorker, “Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.”
Still, today our culture serves up a toxic stew; social media offers a universe in which it seems like everybody—male and female—is having fantastic sex. At the same time, the sharp rise in groups that espouse white male supremacy spread the idea that it is only right and proper to return to a time when white Christian men often got everything they wanted. Some men feel that they are losing ground to women, and if they are white, losing to people of color of both genders.
It’s critical that the media focus strongly on what the facts of life really are—that women are facing problematic levels of domestic violence and sex trafficking and lost more ground in the job market than men during covid.
At the same time, misogyny has also had an impact on women’s earnings. Women earn 16 percent less than men, according to the report Occupational Segregation in America from the Center for American Progress. Among those aged 55-64, women earn 22 percent less than men. Women of color earn even less.
Women’s wages start to fall behind men’s fairly early on in their careers. And women are less likely than men to be promoted, despite outperforming men and being less likely to quit, reports the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
The strong support of many men has always been important to the feminist movement. We can't afford to lose our male backers. That being so, it’s time to retire moral licensing to the slag heap of history.
