The Generation of Men that Hit the Diversity Wall

On the whole, white men are doing great in America; our unemployment rate is about 3.5% and we have the highest salaries and the most wealth.

But when it comes to a certain set of elite jobs, the number of white men really has declined. If you look, for example, at the staff writers for top publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, there are many fewer white men. Ok, that's fairness. But the changes didn't happen at the top; they happened at the bottom. According to Jacob Savage, that meant that one generation of young white men suddenly found themselves shut out of a bunch of jobs:

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.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé 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. . . .

In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

And at the bottom of the ladder:

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.

In Academia, where professors often teach into their 80s and turnover is thus very low, schools have  to work even harder to achieve diversity:

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).

According to Savage, it's even worse in Hollywood.

This is just math; if institutions want to shift the racial and gender makeup of their staffs, without firing a bunch of senior white guys, they must shift their hiring of junior staffers strongly toward minorities and women. Which means that young white guys get shut out.

And then they get angry and vote for Donald Trump.

There is no way to shift from a workplace dominated by white men to a diverse workplace without hurting somebody; this is especially true in a stagnant industry like magazine publication or higher education, where the overall number of jobs is static or shrinking. You may think, who cares, we need to achieve greater equality, and if a few thousand white men don't get professorships or plum jobs in journalism, that's a price we have to pay. But, again, since there was no mass firing of older white men, that means the price was actually paid only by a younger generation. And anyone who thinks that wouldn't turn those men against DEI and toward a hard-edged conservatism is living in la la land.

For most Americans, DEI has made no difference whatsoever. But in certain fields where jobs are scarce, it has radically reshaped the hiring landscape, and we are going to be dealing with the political ramifications of that for a long time.