I recently had a very long discussion about income mobility and I came across several alarming observations:

  1. The gender education gap has increased dramatically (i.e. more women are getting into college than men) and is hurting minority men more than anybody else[1]: the "gender gap in college... is widest among blacks (63% women to 37% men in the latest figures), Hispanics (57% to 43%) and... lower-income whites (54% to 46%)."
  2. Inter-generational median lifetime earnings for men has declined by 10%–19%, as measured from income-rank cohorts between 1967 to 1983. For women, median lifetime income increased by 22%–33% from the 1957 to the 1983 cohort.[2] This is a huge gap!

As far as I can see, there are several factors which contribute to this gap:

  1. Affirmative action programs, designed to "empower women" in both education and the labor force [3][4], have resulted in not only the biggest share of the benefit going to white women, but they've resulted in the biggest share of the drawbacks from going to minority men.
  2. A natural shift in the economy from manual labor, which favors physically fit young men, to cognitive labor, which favors those with an accumulation of cognitive abilities (i.e. training, education, etc).[5]

It seems that the redistributive approach that social constructivists (like feminists) take, has not resulted in more pie being made, but simply the redistribution of the pie. Despite the claims of feminists that redistribution helps everybody, the above-mentioned facts seem to show the opposite: their approach relies on one group being harmed, rather than all groups being helped. What do you think about the situation?

[1] http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,90446,00.html
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w23371.pdf
[3] http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-helped-white-women-more-than-anyone/ [4] https://www.bustle.com/p/who-does-affirmative-action-benefit-white-women-are-some-of-its-biggest-opponents-74034
[5] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20140118_FBC169.png