To be clear, this is not saying all men must strive to be rich. It is saying, there is substantial pushback against those of us who have/are doing well for ourselves. As I see it, there seems to be an underlying view that men's role is to support women in seeking financial success, NOT to achieve it ourselves.

It seems that on a societal level there is a pretty substantial push against this. "The future is female" is pretty clear--the future of growth industries like tech is for women. Not men. Working as a software developer I see this play out in small and large ways on a fairly regular basis. Here's how:

  • I got dual bachelors degrees, neither in CS. After I taught myself to code and got a job in the field, a close friend attacked me and spent hours telling me exactly how she felt I got my job only because I was a white man, not due to any skill I possessed. It didn't seem to matter that the only other candidate considered was also a white man.
  • At my current job, emphasis is given to hiring women. Girls straight out of college get jobs men need 5 years experience for.
  • Girls seem to have a strong sense of entitlement to STEM work. I mentored a girl (intern) from the local university. Within 2 weeks of being brought onboard, she told me she thought all men were trash. Apparently 8 months of help and using my code to get out of jams she couldn't figure out didn't make a difference.
  • When a major presentation for development comes up, it always goes to a woman. The team lead and manager is a guy and 2/3 of senior developers are men. They never get asked to present. Our only senior female developer is busy so the next company-wide development presentation fell to the said intern who was hired a month ago. None of the men were asked.

These are a mix of my experiences both at a personal level and society-wide level. It seems to me that part of feminism is demanding men step aside from high-social-status roles so women can hold them.

The idea being that for equality to be present, the outcomes must be 50-50, with no thought given to the personal effect from the fact that substantially more men want to achieve these goals than women.

To me, the functional outcome of this is individual-level discrimination in the name of equalizing group-level metrics. What have others experienced? How do you view this?