By Jacob Savage
Monday, December 15, 2025
For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills.
But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been
in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes,
a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my
best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building
momentum.
Success felt close. Back then it always did.
We’d written a pilot script that a veteran showrunner had
agreed, in a very theoretical, very Hollywood sort of way, to “come on” to.
That project had fizzled, so we were surprised when an executive emailed us out
of the blue to meet. The showrunner explained he’d submitted us for an upcoming
writer’s room he was going to run—the exec had loved our pilot and wanted to
hire us.
This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take
off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make
ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the
slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.
But of course, by 2016, we were already too late.
The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had
initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the
end it wasn’t possible.”
We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who
told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he
explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They
couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season,
they’d be able to bring us on.
They never did.
The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In
2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were
48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted
for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53
percent male and 89 percent white in 2013
to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024.
White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard
in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became
institutionalized across American life.
In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra
consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that.
“With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra
emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And
when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and
gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who
have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the
world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”
As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the
diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray
DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there
has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most
part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while
also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”
This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced
DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a
profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none
of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered
the issue by cohort.
This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story
about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed,
and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant
entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974,
beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were
thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.
Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older
white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.
I. MEDIA MATTERS
It may be hard to remember now, but a decade ago the
prevailing critique
of American journalism was that it was woefully lacking in gender and racial
diversity. There had been hope
that New Media would be different, that the internet might bring in a wider
range of voices. But by the mid-2010s that optimism was waning. “New-media
ventures like Vox, BuzzFeed and Politico are trying to
shake up the way people get their news and entertainment online,” NPR reported
in 2014. “But critics say… those newsrooms and leadership roles are
overwhelmingly made up of white men.”
The critics were mostly right: Gawker
was still 57 percent male and 79 percent white; Vice
was majority male and 70 percent white. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate
Silver complained
about a gender gap so severe that only 15 percent of applications were from
women.
It was into this world that Andrew arrived in 2015. He
took a job at a prominent New Media organization and was put on the general
assignment desk, monitoring breaking news and cranking out overnight write-ups.
“It was rewarding,” he told me. “But if you can imagine working a full-time
gig—nights, weekends—and then, on top of that, trying to build up a beat on the
side that could eventually propel you into something sustainable, it’s always
difficult.”
He enjoyed the work, and developed a beat. There was
still a general optimism in the air, especially around New Media. “I had very
well-regarded deep dives and occasionally scoops,” he said. “I had credibility
as somebody who had come from a more left-leaning perspective, was well sourced
on the left, but was willing to give them a kick in the teeth every now and
then. At the time it felt really about holding power to account and giving new
ideas a fair airing.”
After college, before he’d moved into journalism, Andrew
had worked in the non-profit world. Ambient talk about diversity and power
structures had been part of the general atmosphere, and he’d never much thought
about it. “In any progressive space, there was always at least some concern
about representation,” he explained. “I did not see that in any way impeding my
advancement for … the first six or seven years of my career.”
But that view became harder to sustain. In 2019, David
Haskell, who had just been named editor-in-chief of New York magazine,
was asked to respond to staff disappointment that “another white man” had been
elevated to the role. “I understand that reaction. Part of me shares it,” he told
his staff. “The most effective way to move the needle on diversity hiring is
for a strong, loud commitment to come from the very top of the masthead. I …
plan to do exactly that.”
Andrew didn’t work at New York, but he watched
similar pressures reshape his newsroom. He’d been there for five years, a beat
reporter who couldn’t seem to move up, and suddenly all anybody could talk
about were diversity metrics. Management was, as he put it, “obsessive about
recruiting people of color.” But the pool was small, and anyone promising was
quickly poached by The New York Times or cable news. “With all the
declarations these newsrooms had been making, the imperatives—‘enough white
guys already’—seemed to me to be the mantra,” he told me. “And you couldn’t
help but wonder if that meant you were being passed up for opportunities, even
in your own organization.”
Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would
be no backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or person of color, the
expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of color. “The
hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate,” a senior
hiring editor at a major outlet told me. “If there was a black woman at the
beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone… but if she
was any good you knew she would get accelerated to The New York Times or
The Washington Post in short order.”
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.
Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by
identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate”
assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute
detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had
been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when
negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for
racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he
said.
When he questioned these new priorities, the response was
swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and
other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It
was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.”
Desperate for advancement—he’d had the same job, the same
title, for nearly six years—Andrew looked elsewhere. “I applied for positions
at The Atlantic, Politico, CNN, The Washington Post, three
different desks at The New York Times,” he told me. But newsrooms were
contracting, which only made the competition more intense. “When scarcity sets
in, you start to worry about these things a little bit more,” Andrew reflected.
“This was a business model problem that was exacerbated by the racial [and
gender] preference problem.”
At The Atlantic, Andrew didn’t even get an
interview. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, had described
his hiring philosophy back in 2019: “By opening up the possibilities of younger
people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate
way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. There’s no quota
system here.”
Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable
reality. “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said
in that same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can
do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white
males.”
With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in
hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The
Atlantic's hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of
color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced
that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69
percent people of color.
The irony was, where older white men remained in charge, especially
where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. “If you
hired a team of white guys around you, you were putting a target on your back,”
recalled the hiring editor. At The New York Times Magazine (one of the
few prestige magazines with a public masthead),
Jake Silverstein, a Gen-X white man, serves as editor-in-chief, and Bill Wasik,
another Gen-X white man, serves as editorial director. But of nine millennial
senior editors and story editors below them, there’s just one white guy—and
he’s been there since 2012, effectively grandfathered in.
At the very bottom of the ladder, the picture is little
different. 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.
Other pipelines dried up as well. The alt-weeklies that
gave misfit young men their start have shed them entirely. There are no white
men on the editorial staff of the
Seattle Stranger or on the staff of Indy
Week. As late as 2017, there were six white men atop the masthead
for the Portland Mercury. By 2024, there was just one: the Boomer
editor-in-chief.
By the early 2020s, many journalists I spoke to noticed
something else: The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship
pools had simply stopped applying. Gen-Z men had absorbed the message that
journalism was not for them.
“The femaleness is striking,” a well-known Gen-X reporter
with impeccable liberal bona fides confided. “It’s like, wow, where have the
guys gone?”
In less than a decade, the entire face of the industry
changed. The New York Times newsroom has gone
from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66
percent white in 2024. Condé Nast today
is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. BuzzFeed, a media
operation that had been
52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52
percent white by 2023.
But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox,
whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics
capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came
under fire
for his start-up’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male
and 88 percent white. By 2022
the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership
was 73 percent female.
The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the
stories, but which stories got told. After George Floyd’s death, Andrew’s
colleague Lucas was assigned a piece about why you should never call the
police. “I remember having to interview one of these abolitionists for a story
about how if somebody breaks into your car or your home, it’s white supremacy
to call the cops—even if you need it for an insurance report,” Lucas told me.
“That always made me feel gross. I think back on that with a lot of regret.”
“Newsrooms were center-left places in 2005,” the
prominent Gen-X reporter told me. “Now they’re incredibly left places… I
imagine one reason newsrooms have gotten more explicitly lefty is that you have
white guys and white women adopting a kind of protective coloration, allyship
mindset, to get through the door.”
Andrew, for his part, was unable to adopt the
performative allyship that had become expected. “I always thought I was an
effeminate nerd growing up… but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the
most masculine end of men in media,” he told me. “I started to pick up on the
fact that there wasn’t much room for people who even speak in my timbre.’”
He was recruited for a senior reporter position at a more
prestigious outlet, “jumping through hoops every step of the way,” as he told
me. But by the end it felt like a cruel joke: extensive interviews, writing
tests, endless meetings with various editors, only to find out months later
that the job had gone to someone a decade younger than him—a gay man of color,
who’d managed to go from intern to assistant editor to senior reporter in less
than two years.
“If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar,”
Andrew told me. “You can’t help feeling like no matter how good you are, you
were born in the wrong year.”
As he saw it, the industry had its super-successful white
guys who’d made it before 2014 and so were functionally Gen X—but for everyone
else, moving up in a contracting industry was nearly impossible. (“I was kind
of grandfathered in during one era, and had achieved a level going into
2015–2024 where it just didn’t really affect me,” one of these superstar
journalists told me.)
After surviving years of buyouts, Andrew finally made
senior reporter in 2023, but by then it felt less like recognition than a
consolation prize. He was coming up on 40, unmarried, with little room for
forward or lateral movement. When the next round of buyouts hit, he decided it
was time to leave.
II. THE IVORY TOWER
There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and
gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to
agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least
not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a millennial
professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between thinking something
and making common knowledge that you think it,” said another.
So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a
Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance
he had at a career with a single tweet.
“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite
frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together
and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American
historian.”
The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just
laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have
you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US
population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at
GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”
It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more
likely
to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed
study suggested
that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic
DEI professionals, found
that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant
professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree
recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”
As in other industries, what mattered were the optics.
When people looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them.
“A big part of why it’s hard to diversify is the turnover
is really slow,” a tenured millennial professor explained. “And that’s become
worse now, because Boomers live a long time.” Many elite universities once had
mandatory retirement at 70. But in 1994, Congress sunsetted the academic
exemption for age discrimination, locking in the demographics of the largely
white male professoriate for a generation.
White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts &
Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of
Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the pipeline
for future faculty—white men have gone
from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone
from 39 percent to 21 percent).
The pipeline and the cohorts haven’t changed
much—newly-minted humanities
Ph.Ds have been evenly split between men and women for over a decade now,
and white men outnumber other groups in most applicant
pools—but who was getting hired certainly did. At Berkeley, white men were
48.2 percent of faculty applicants in the Physical Sciences—but just 26 percent
of hires
for assistant professor positions. Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of
tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men.
In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent).
The white men who do get hired are often older and more
established—or foreign. Several people I spoke with noticed that European white
men don't seem to face these barriers. The reason, one professor suggested, is
they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an
administrative sleight of hand: Federal education statistics (IPEDS) classify
foreign nationals outside racial categories. In other words, a white European
on a work visa doesn't register as “white” in diversity metrics. Among new
Ph.Ds with definite academic employment plans, white temporary-visa holders are
nearly twice as likely as white U.S. citizens or permanent residents to secure
tenure-track positions (61.0 percent versus 33.1 percent in 2023).
“Senior hiring still is very often white men,” Will, an
Ivy League professor, told me. His humanities department had hired
two higher-level white men, then conducted a search for a junior professor.
There was one white man among the finalists. “On paper, he was so clearly the
strongest candidate,” Will remembered. “It really kind of did feel like, well,
we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.”
He had been told, “If we’re on the fence here, we should not go with the man
again.”
Yale’s history department, with 10 white male professors
over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide
in hiring. Since 2018, they’ve hired four older white men as full
professors—but among sixteen tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a
white man. At 84, the Cold War historian John Gaddis isn’t even the oldest in
the department. “The Yale history department at the time I arrived in 1997 was
overwhelmingly white and male, if not yet millennial,” he told me in an email.
“Some remedial action was long overdue.”
This remedial action can take many forms. Berkeley commissioned
regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would produce the
fewest number of white male job offers. At Dartmouth, the Mellon-to-postdoc
program provided ten tenure-track positions for “new hires with a demonstrated
commitment to addressing racial underrepresentation in their disciplines.” None
were white men.
Cluster hiring, which began
in the ’90s as a way to expand interdisciplinary research, was transformed
in the 2010s as a shortcut to achieve diversity goals. Entire groups of
underrepresented candidates could now be hired at once, working around the
often byzantine tenure approval process.
“The way you try to demographically diversify without
making it explicit is searching in areas where the areas are strongly
correlated with [gender or] ethnicity,” an Ivy League professor explained to
me. A cluster hire
in Latinx studies will gain you several Latinx faculty. A professor of
transgender studies will in all likelihood not be a straight cis man. And a
white male assistant professor
of black sexualities is closer to an SNL sketch than to any lived reality in
2024.
All this left little oxygen for anyone else. James spent
nearly a decade, first at Yale Law, then at a top classics program, watching
his professional pathways narrow until they seemingly disappeared. He saw
people he knew—as long as they fit the right demographic profile—bypass open
searches and receive tenure-track offers before they even finished their Ph.Ds.
“My own advisors would say, very openly, they’re just two completely different
hiring schemes,” he told me. “They’re just two completely different categories
of person.”
Hanging over it all was an invisible curriculum, the
political assumptions about what should and should not be studied. James
recalled a fellow graduate student he met at Yale, a white man oblivious to the
latest academic orthodoxies. “He went on this long, passionate monologue about
military history. He knew all sorts of details of Roman military history, he
really wanted to study it. And I just thought you are hopeless, there is
no way anyone is going to hire you… He almost wasn’t schooled properly. If he
had been—without anyone ever needing to tell him—he would just drop all that
about military history, because he’d know that’s white and European and male
and dead.”
Only one person from James’s classics cohort wound up
with a tenure-track offer. “He’s gay, Asian-American, exceptionally conversant
in the language of critical theory,” James said. “And he got his job on the
merits. He’s extremely good, but he’s into stuff that’s also very in.” James,
on the other hand, applied to just a couple of tenure-track jobs in classics
before he gave up. “Most people didn’t even try,” he told me. For young white
men doing dead white male stuff, “it was just totally hopeless.”
“I operated under completely false assumptions,” Ethan,
an Ivy League-educated social scientist, told me. He’d always had the vague and
naive (and frankly privileged) idea that professionally everything would work
itself out. “I was gonna be a tenure-track professor,” he said. “That was my
expectation.”
Like so many middle-class millennials in the Obama era,
Ethan believed he was on the right side of history. He had entered academia
after an unsatisfying stint in the corporate world precisely because he was
interested in issues of inequality—he wanted to make the world a better place.
“I came in wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, but I felt like in the early 2010s, there
was good reason to feel that way,” he told me. “Society was moving in a
direction that felt more fair, less caste-oriented.”
After Ferguson and Black Lives Matter and then #MeToo, as
talk of diversity and representation and privilege swept across campuses,
universities responded with a host of new initiatives. While faculty diversity
programs had been in place for decades—Penn and Columbia committed tens of
millions of dollars to address the issue in 2012, Harvard in 2006, and Yale had
launched efforts as early as 1999—these had been mostly ineffective. This time
would be different. The new initiatives may have had ethereal, non-specific
names like Inclusive
Excellence and Toward
New Destinations, but they had very concrete goals.
“Things changed really quickly,” Ethan said. “I think I
was just a couple of years off in terms of what the opportunities looked like.”
In his first year on the academic job market, Ethan
applied to nearly 50 jobs. It was a slog. He was thrilled when he was a
finalist for a tenure-track position at Brown University. He was flown out to
Providence, where he toured the campus and met with faculty. But Brown, like
much of the academic world, had other institutional priorities.
Back in 2016, Brown had pledged
to double faculty diversity within six years. “There is significant work to do
in the coming months and years to implement the Diversity and Inclusion Action
Plan,” Provost Richard Locke, himself a white male Boomer, said at the time. A
diversity representative was installed on every job search committee. The
Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity reviewed all hiring advertisements
as well as faculty short and long lists (in tenure-track hiring, the longlist
is a collection of potential candidates, and the shortlist is a selection of
the most qualified to consider for the interview phase).
To give a sense of what this meant on the ground:
In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the humanities at
Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the process the male
share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent male, the short list 42
percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made it to the interview round were
male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were ultimately offered to men. A similar
dynamic played out in the social sciences: 54 percent of the 722 applicants
were men; 44 percent of the shortlist was male, and just 32 percent of job
offers were tendered to men; in the physical sciences, women were 23 percent of
applicants, but received 42 percent of job offers.
Ethan made it to the final interview round at Brown.
After a long back-and-forth with the search committee—a sign, he believes, of
internal dissension—he lost out. “They wanted everything through the prism of
race,” Ethan recalled. “Unless you place [race] squarely at the center of your
research, you’re vulnerable, especially if your identity doesn’t fit the
desired profile.”
Of the men who managed to pass through Brown’s gender
gauntlet, almost none are white. 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).
Over the next three years, Ethan applied to dozens more
positions, including at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. As elsewhere, the UC schools
required DEI statements, in which prospective faculty were asked to detail
“future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.” Ethan had to write
dozens of these statements in the course of his job search. But the UCs took it
a step further. Under an $8.5 million state program called “Advancing Faculty
Diversity,” UC administrators used
DEI statements as a “first cut” to winnow down applicant pools before faculty
were even allowed to consider candidates.
Ethan didn’t make any UC shortlists—but why would he
have? The program had achieved its intended effect. At Berkeley,
as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track
faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine
has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social
sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59
Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC
Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).
All in all, Ethan was a finalist for a tenure-track
position five times. He was flown out again and again for interviews and
meet-and-greets and departmental dinners—always the bridesmaid, never the
bride. At a certain point, he began to see himself the way the search
committees did. “Other identifiers or other things I valued about myself have
receded,” he explained. Being a white man, meanwhile, “moved into the
foreground in a way that I didn’t expect.”
It’s taken a toll on Ethan’s personal life. He’s been
with his partner for seven years, but they’ve spent much of that time treading
water. They want kids, but without the financial security of a tenure-track
position, it’s daunting. “That decision is on hold and may never happen,” he
said. He’s always anxious the grant money might dry up. “I don’t feel like my
career path is leading anywhere. It feels like a dead end.” Occasionally he
surrenders to anger and bitterness. “There’s a huge group of talented white men
who can’t get tenure-track jobs,” he told me. “For a set of institutions so
obsessed with bias, they’re completely blind to their own.”
As for Richard Locke, the provost who spearheaded Brown’s
Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan? In 2022, Locke left to accept a sinecure
as dean of Apple University, Apple’s in-house personnel training facility. “In
all searches, there has been consistent attention to diversity and inclusion,”
he bragged in a valedictory interview.
His replacement at Brown was—who else?—another 60-year-old white man.
III. PEAK TV
Matt is the sort of smart, slightly manic cinephile who’s
been a fixture of Hollywood forever—the guy at the bar who can explain why a
project was greenlit (“a buyer with lots of money and little experience”) or
why a director got hired (“background as a playwright—and it was Scott Rudin”),
and dismiss the latest Netflix release with a wave of his hand (“dogshit… a
story that shouldn’t be a movie”).
Like me, Matt moved out to Los Angeles in 2011—but unlike
me, by 2014, he’d landed a job as a staff writer on a network TV series. “I
thought I would be one of those mediocre white jabronis who just floats to the
top and works forever,” he said. He earned more money from that single episode
of network TV than he’d seen in his life. He felt he was on a familiar
trajectory: write some specs, network around, get your break, and then work
steadily until you get your own show.
But he couldn’t outrun the culture. In the fall of 2014,
the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite
was born. The New York Times ran
story
after
story.
The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In 2015,
Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story editor. “I
couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate… There
was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a
while.”
It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As
#OscarsSoWhite bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified. “You could read
a white guy’s script,” a former assistant to a Gen-X white male showrunner told
me. “But there was no way in hell that person was going to get staffed on the
show. Showrunners only had a couple of spots for white people, and they kept
those for the 40- or 50-year-old white guys they’d known for years.”
A whistleblower sent me a document
from early 2017, an internal “needs sheet” compiled by a major talent agency,
that shows just how steep the headwinds were. Across the grid, which tracks
staffing needs for TV writers rooms, the same shorthand appears dozens of
times: “diverse,” “female,” “women and diverse only.” These mandates came from
some of the most powerful names in television: Noah Hawley (“prioritizing
women”), Dean Devlin (“prioritizing women … ideally hire ethnic/African
American”), Ryan Murphy (“want female and diverse, emphasis on African
American”).
This was systematic discrimination, documented in
writing, implemented without consequence. It’s striking how casual it all was.
“Chicago Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs
[staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with
experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level
jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of
other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others.
“The studios had these quotas they felt pressure to
fill,” a veteran talent manager told me. “It was always the lower and midlevel
people.”
Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was
suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door. The Writers Guild lists
more than a dozen studio-run initiatives for emerging “diverse” writers. The
Disney Writing Program,
which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has
awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past
decade—none to white men. Nearly every capsule bio for these programs is an
attempt to communicate, with as little subtlety as possible, that the writer is
not a white man (“a Korean and Polish American writer from Seattle”; “a comedy
writer with Cuban, Puerto Rican, and New Mexican roots”).
Another prestigious venue for up-and-coming screenwriters
was the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, which proudly lists Darren Aronofsky, Paul
Thomas Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino among its alumni. “The Lab was just
amazing,” Quentin Tarantino recalled
in 2017, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Reservoir Dogs. “They took us
really seriously. I couldn’t believe how altruistic it was. Their whole point
was to just help us… to refine our aesthetic.”
In the 2010s, Sundance came under fire for producing a
disproportionate number of white male auteurs. The organization decided that
would never happen again. In 2016 and 2017, 27.5 percent of applicants to the
screenwriters lab were
white men, but they were just 14.7 percent of participants. That figure turned
out to be relatively high. Since 2018, just 8 of 138 (5.8 percent) of the
fellows selected have been white men. Notably, nearly all have either had some
other defining characteristic (disabled, gay) or were partnered with a woman or
a person of color. Today, just one in ten millennial programmers at Sundance is
a straight white man.
These programs, originally established to open a closed
pipeline, turned into their own exclusionary infrastructure. Matt never
bothered applying. “At a certain point you realize the juice isn’t worth the
squeeze,” he said. “You’re doing everything you can to break through, and the
goalposts keep moving.”
After striking out in TV for almost five years, Matt
transitioned into features, which were less identity-driven. “I thought not
working for that many years would break me, but it actually made me better,” he
told me. “I had to figure out how to write stuff that would pop and get me back
in.” When we spoke, it was a real point of pride how much he’d been able to
improve his writing, how at least temporarily he’d succeeded in overcoming the
odds.
By the end of the 2010s, that work paid off: One of his
scripts landed on the Black List, the prestigious annual ranking of un-produced
screenplays voted on by Hollywood development executives. This gave Matt
much-needed momentum—he sold multiple spec scripts and was finally able to quit
his day job—but it was hard to translate into steady work.
Even after he managed to get A-list showrunners attached
to a couple of projects, when staffing season came they never offered him a
position on their own shows. “Hiring me was never even in the conversation,” he
said. In other words: Matt had a better chance of getting his own show on the
air than of getting staffed. (Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance,
who sold his pilot in 2016, wasn’t able to land a job in a TV writer’s room
until his own show began production.)
In 2020-2021, Matt’s agent submitted him for a prestige
series. The showrunners liked his sample; they wanted to talk about
availability. But the offer was abruptly pulled. One of the showrunners—a Gen-X
white guy—had blocked it. The room already had too many white guys.
“You’re crawling through broken glass and it’s still not
enough,” Matt reflected. “I kind of just choose to ignore it out of
self-preservation, because if I’m bitter or angry then I’m even further away
from what I want. Nobody wants the guy shaking his fist.”
Throughout our conversations, Matt never blamed the women
or people of color who’d gotten opportunities he hadn’t. He blamed the older
generation of white men who pulled up the ladder behind them. And he was right
to. Between 2004 and 2013, over forty Gen-X white men received Academy Award
nominations for screenwriting. In the following decade (2014-2023), more than
fifty Gen-X white men were nominated—alongside just six white male millennials.
Over Matt’s fourteen years in Hollywood, the changes have
been staggering. In 2011, when he (and I) moved to California, white men were
around 60 percent of TV writers; by 2025, according to the WGA’s own diversity statistics,
they accounted for just 11.9 percent of lower-level writers; women of color
made up 34.6 percent. White men directed
69 percent of TV episodes in 2014, and just 34 percent by 2021. But that
remaining third went overwhelmingly to established names, leaving little space
for younger white men. Since 2021, 11 directors under 40 have been nominated
for Emmys. None have been white men.
“I saw this graveyard of people not too dissimilar from
me,” Peter, the assistant to the Gen-X showrunner, told me. Peter, who
graduated from a Top-5 college in the early 2010s, watched slightly older
millennial men wait for a break that never came. “They were like: Hey, I’m
gonna take this kind of shit job for two years. Oh, wait, I can do it for three
more years… Suddenly they’re married, having kids. They just didn’t get the
deal—it was never gonna happen for them. Ever.”
Peter eventually left for the tech world. “It’s a lot
better to actually know you’re about to get hit by a car than not know,” he
told me. “The tragedy of our generation is just thinking the world is a certain
way and all.”
That single episode of network television from 2014
remains Matt’s only produced credit. When we last spoke, he was commuting to
his menial day job. Newly single, with tens of thousands of dollars of credit
card debt, he has recurring fantasies of changing his name and moving to
Thailand to escape his creditors.
“Sweet one-bedroom, VPN to access American TV/film
content,” he texted me. “The Dream.”
IV. EVERYWHERE ELSE
For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. Without
any actual quotas to achieve—only the constant exhortation to “do better”—the
diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down
and bottom-up pressure. No one ever said what the right number of white men
would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.
The boundaries shifted depending on the industry and the
moment: A white woman might be favored in some contexts, disfavored in others;
an Asian-American man might face extra obstacles in tech or medicine, but if he
wanted to be a screenwriter or an English professor, the system worked in his
favor. But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a
problem for institutions to solve.
And solve it they did.
Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism
liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian
lines. Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013
alone—the same as the total number of white male millennials who’ve won since.
In 2014, two white male millennials were National Book
Award finalists, including one winner; that year nine white male American
artists under 40 appeared at the Whitney Biennial. But of the 70 millennial
writers nominated for National Book Awards in the decade that followed, just
three were white men. The “Big 4” galleries represent 47 millennial artists;
just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45
millennial artists, zero were white American men.
The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t
surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising,
law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than
they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school
matriculants in 2016
to 25.7 percent in 2024.
The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014,
white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025,
they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a
decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist
told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident
positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent
men… The white guy is now the token.”
Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went
from nearly half the workforce in 2014
to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon,
entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were 42.3
percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d advanced normally
over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers of today. But mid-level
Amazon managers fell
from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of
nearly 40 percent.
“The pipeline was never 50-50,” a former management
consultant explained—elite business schools remained around 60 percent male and
predominantly white throughout the 2010s. “But we were hiring as if it were
50-50 anyway.”
“For a lot of guys in their mid-thirties, around
2017-2018, it was a quite dramatic shift,” one tech-adjacent journalist told
me. “They’re all like, whoa, suddenly every door is closed, and I am just not
going to move ahead at this company at all. Because it’s been lightly and
sometimes not-so-lightly communicated to me that there’s just no way the job I
want is going to be given to a white guy.” A whole generation found their path
was blocked.
The refuges that young white men did find—crypto,
podcasting, Substack—were refuges precisely because institutional barriers to
entry didn’t exist. A friend who’s now an executive at a major crypto company
scraped by as a freelance film editor for years. He applied to Netflix five
times; eventually he was told, explicitly, that they didn’t need more white
guys. He didn’t go into crypto because it was high status—Hollywood, the
high-status industry, wouldn’t have him.
The DEI departments have mostly shut down or quietly
rebranded. The mountains of reports and glossy PDFs have been quietly scrubbed,
as if to hide the evidence. What was the justification for gutting the American
meritocracy? No one seems to know.
It’s tempting to wave it all away as secular
decline—white men abandoning fields that were losing status or economic value.
But the timing doesn’t line up. The sharpest declines in opportunity for
younger white men didn’t happen during the rolling crises of the past few
years—they were baked in during the mid-2010s, when New Media was expanding
coverage, universities were growing, and Hollywood was at Peak TV.
Which raises some uncomfortable questions: Is the media
more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and
television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger
since they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning
meritocracy accelerate their decline?
The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced
worse discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement
of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not itself an argument.
Especially when the entire liberal establishment insists that nothing actually
happened, that the “mild” correction was in fact no correction at all, and that
any white man harmed in the process was in fact “mediocre.”
Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t
supposed to notice.
Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white
male millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and resentments.
To a man, they insisted on anonymity. There were frenzied pre-publication
negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over
words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real
names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy.
Even the successful white men I spoke to understood that
something had fundamentally changed. They expressed gratitude and relief—a
recognition that success was contingent, easily disrupted by circumstances
beyond their control. “There was so much fragility to things going well in the
first place,” one tenured professor told me, “that it’s natural to think a
slight perturbation would have meant things went worse.”
Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals.
Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be
disorienting. We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind
meritocracy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its
optimism in the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see
that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the
entire liberal project that won't soon disappear.
“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white
millennial men have had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave
liberal America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me.
“I don't want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone says,
this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”
V. BACK IN THE ROOM
Back in that office in early 2016, after the executive
had explained why he couldn’t hire us, the meeting continued like any other. We
talked about what we were working on; he told us about his company’s upcoming
slate: some Shanghai detective show, an adaptation of a novel about the early
Dutch settlement in New Amsterdam. Like most Hollywood meetings, we concluded
by promising to find a way to work together soon. And then, as we were leaving,
the exec asked if we wanted to go down to the writer’s room and say hello to
the showrunner.
The room was modest, as far as these things go: a big
whiteboard, a long table, people snacking in the back. The showrunner
introduced us to the show’s creator, and they immediately returned to the
debate they’d been having before we arrived: whether two people who take two
different time machines from different points in the past into the same fixed
moment in the future could then switch time machines upon their return.
Were there any hidden paradoxes involved? What were the
implications?
We gave our feeble input. The rest of the staff slouched
silently in the back—three comfortable Hollywood lifers in their forties and
fifties, white guys with IMDb bios from an alternate universe (“His
writing career began on the CBS crime series Martial Law, after which he served
as a writer and producer on several series through the late 1990s until the
early 2000s, including FreakyLinks, Roswell, John Doe, Boston Public, LAX and
Smallville… In 2005, he joined the writing staff of the medical mystery series
House…”), along with the two younger women who’d gotten the jobs we’d
been up for.
Eventually—the time machine conundrum unresolved—we said
our goodbyes. There would be other screenplays, other projects, visits to
studio lots and major pitches, but that was the last time either of us saw the
inside of a writer’s room; that was the moment we came closest to a career. Had
the political environment been different, one job might have led to another,
and today I might have colleagues, work friends, a whole range of professional
and personal experiences—an entirely different life.
At the time, I blamed those women. Of course I did.
They’ve since ascended the TV ladder and work as co-executive producers on
major shows. On some level, even today I can’t help but think: That could have
been me. That should have been me.
But those women didn’t take our jobs any more than the
50-year-old Hollywood lifers had. The lifers were still there. They’re still
there. And I’m not angry at the women and people of color who made it instead
of me—people have the right, in most cases the responsibility, to take the
opportunities that are offered them—or even at the older white guys who ensured
that I didn’t.
Mostly I’m annoyed at myself. Because instead of settling
down, proposing to my then-girlfriend (now wife), and earning a steady income
that might support a family, I spent a decade insisting the world treat me
fairly, when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so. I
could see what was happening—I was being told point-blank what was
happening—and still I thought I’d be the exception, that if I wrote one more
script, took one more meeting, I’d slip through. But very few people get to be
the exception.
It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see
yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in
it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late
at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to
success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve
succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have
networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some
extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in
ordinary times that would have been enough.
There’s a wounded pride here—how could there not be? I
have two sons. I used to imagine, long before they were born, that I would take
them to film sets, that I’d bring them along to exotic locations. Instead their
father spends most of his working day in his bedroom, scrolling through
spreadsheets and ticket listings.
What do I say when my boys ask about my old hopes and
dreams? What do I tell them when they ask about theirs?
