Not only are the majority of students women, but I feel now academic careers also now show more and more favouritism to women both for early careers and tenure.

I can not only speak anecdotally, but also from the numbers specifically in STEM. It may differ for other disciplines. Vast majority of promotions to full professor are female to "close the gender gap" where I am, a rich western European country. Our biggest national research fund has public numbers that indicate between 80% and 85% of STEM starting grants go to female PIs, which they have also marketed as a win.

I've personally been looking to start my academic career as an asst. prof after multiple top tier first-author publications, a full resume page of teaching experience, half a million in grants acquired and a research internship at big tech. Climbing all the way up from poverty I thought perhaps I would get some of that sweet fabled "DEI" credit for being from an actually disadvantaged background, but I am not the diversity and equity they are looking for. Instead, I am gaslighted at every turn and I started to notice a staggering trend.

The Trend?
Not a SINGLE young man was hired as asst. prof right out of their PhD in my entire university. I searched for it but simply couldn't find it. No matter the background or potential, none. All of them have at least 4 years of postdoc experience, and afterwards almost none of them get tenure track. Most men leave for industry after recieving constant discouragement and lack of support. Meanwhile even in my research group, both female researchers who graduated the year before me landed tenured asst. prof posistions right after completing their doctoral exam at the same university. Both of them did the standard fare: publish 3 first authors, teach one class per semester and nothing else. I even asked my PI about this and asked for advice, and all she could tell me is to keep applying and not to give up. While I have a lot of respect for my PI, but I feel a lot of the old guard in academia simply don't care any more what happens to the young and we are left to the whims of administration and their politics. If you know your statistics you know it doesn't add up, even though this is of course purely anecdotal and not empirical proof.

I've talked to more of my peers in different countries and they also noticed the same trend. Some of my old tenured peers, both male and female, have reviewed my profile and are shocked I wasn't getting any faculty positions, even non tenure track ones. Back in their day they would straight up hire me to their lab because they know I can bring in funds and perform high class research, but now everything requires comittees and processes that have only increased bias, instead of reducing it. So the only thing that awaits me is to become a postdoc slave, uprooting my life every 2 years and then hope after half a decade I am "granted" a non-TT faculty position that will also end up teaching all the classes that the more fortune don't want to do.

I think this isn't for me any more, and I feel many men in academia are in the same boat. I also very much fear for the future of the academia if I see this happening in a very wealthy western European country. This isn't some corrupt small nation without any research impact. I can only ask, what will science look like in 30 years from now? Sure, the super stars and top scientists will always remain, but how many top scientists do we discourage whose name we will never know?