Elite overproduction, managerial feminism, and the death of mobility
Elite surplus increases competition, fuels feminization of work, and kills merit
Welcome, and I’m grateful for your time spent chasing signal with me in a noisy world. I recommend catching up on the first part of this argument, in which I name feminized competition as one killer of merit.
I. Too many elites, not enough jobs
If society produces too many people who aspire to elite status and does not have enough jobs to absorb them, what happens? We’re living through one such period, and it isn’t the first time since the Industrial Revolution. This time, however, women are the overproduced elites, which we know because women have outnumbered men 60:40 in BA attainment since the 80s.
For this argument, ‘elite’ isn’t the one percent but the top twenty percent of earners, broadly the professional middle class. There’s a distinction between the professional middle and the managerial class, but the throughline is the gatekeeping of white collar jobs through credential requirements.
Stemming from this structural condition, institutionally enforced feminism leads to soft totalitarianism and fuses with credentialism and class anxiety to create the political instability we’re now seeing. Trump arose from institutional rot and elite corruption, and women have played a significant role.
This is the story of when material status becomes highly competitive, making (fake) moral capital the social battleground. Women compete for moral capital and symbolic status because they’re primarily in jobs that do not require analytical skills, which would lead to actual capital. These jobs also shouldn’t require college degrees.
Separately, women have also evolved to be more concerned with morality and behavioral norm enforcement, leading to toxic feminine enforcement of ideological programs at work and socially. These conditions make competition even more intense among women and between the sexes. It’s no accident that we’ve seen social justice ideology and status anxiety rise in tandem. The nature of competition among elites happens according to rules that women make.
Most writers are outsiders looking into this system, while I live inside it. I’m in technical consulting in the B2B software space and have worked in recruiting, teaching, marketing, and product management before this. Most writers on these topics are academics or professional writers with no corporate experience, so they miss much of what I diagnose.
Elite surpluses are cyclical and have generally led to instability. The economist Peter Turchin shows a relationship between four sets of indicators in his paper “Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability”.1 Given sufficient pressure on any combination of these factors, revolutions and civil wars may result; we’re living in such a time.
But observant readers will have noticed without my showing this diagram that most of these pressures feel close to blowing up and taking society down with them. This is why I consider Trump a symptom rather than a cause, and why I blame Democrats for his existence. It’s why I can’t even muster anger about anything he does. It’s atrocious, but elites are agents and make choices, even if they’ve convinced themselves that they have no agency.
Elites act more groupish based on class status than do people across classes who are of the same ethnicity. An elite white woman has more shared quotidian experiences with a PMC black woman than the latter does with a black working-class woman. Today, however, the elite are feminized, whereas in past periods of overproduction, they have been primarily male.
Women’s entry to the professional world has changed its nature, whereby they now diffusely exercise power that can’t be named through structures we’ve been told are patriarchal. But as the professional class has become more feminized, it self-justifies and controls behavior covertly, in the manner women have evolved on average to do.
Turchin considers elite numbers to be the most crucial factor in determining their behavior, which follows because increasing numbers means more intense competition. They are further affected by social mobility; theoretically, too much mobility is a destabilizing force. In a time of oversupply, Turchin says the most talented have more of a hope of climbing; I have found this true for myself, having come from a working-class background despite being part of an elite-coded diaspora. Elite-aspirant labor has flooded the what Musa Al-Gharbi called the symbolic professions, or what David Graeber has called ‘bullshit jobs.2
II. Credentialism, overproduction & class consolidation
Degrees serve as proxies for class membership, which means more than whether you have money. Degree-holders from families with two professional-class parents move through the world differently from someone like me. There are social graces and communication norms one absorbs outside of the college experience, and one must have both to succeed in corporations and fit into professional-class social groups.
Requiring degrees for unrelated jobs while giving graduates of elite colleges a leg up entrenches the class advantages of already wealthy, networked people. We know that people of poor and working-class origin tend not to go to college or otherwise struggle to graduate. Thus, degree requirements doubly gatekeep the highest-paying jobs for those with degrees from elite colleges, even if working-class people with non-elite degrees or no degree are equally capable.
Non-elites don’t even get to enter the arena; the only reason the Google recruiter contacted me in 2013 was the elite signaling of Teach for America on my resume. I haven’t removed Google, either, because I know it’s a status signifier. While I was there, the only potential software engineers I could send through the interview process were from pools of elite degree holders, culled by the rank of their school. I had scant state or non-elite graduates in the hiring pool for men or women. As a ‘diversity recruiter’, I mainly recruited elite white and Indian-origin women.
Most of the overproduced elites without skills are women, so degree requirements also suppress competition for jobs that don’t require hard skills. Performance in the jobs going to elite women can’t be measured by tangible outcomes, like in HR, marketing, nonprofits, and other people and process-oriented professions that require only communication and administrative skills. These professions, furthermore, often can’t be tied to actual value generated for a company. I was pushed to think about this because of thinkers like Al-Gharbi, Rob Henderson, and Graeber, but I see gender composition as the missing piece in the discourse on elites.
I know many women who have been recently laid off from these professions, and they never developed analytical skills because competition was artificially suppressed for their jobs. On top of this, in the wake of the financial crisis, the professional class bloated due to the large amounts of money created by the Federal Reserve from thin air, which companies invested in over-hiring. Women were beneficiaries of this bloating of ancillary, communication-oriented positions, and now are primarily affected by layoffs.
Because many of these women already came from relative privilege, they will likely feel entitled to equivalent positions that will be automated in short order. AI will negatively affect working-class men and professional-class women without analytical skills.
III. DEI as a class gatekeeping mechanism
DEI compounds the suppression of merit because it creates incentives to hire mediocre people to fill implicit quotas, as I saw firsthand as a recruiter. At minimum, they give certain groups a leg up while finding ways to hold men back or otherwise silencing them. We see this happen in our workplaces, but we aren’t allowed to name it.
Separately, the push to hire more women and women of color in particular has led to an increase in people- and process-oriented jobs, which we now see disappearing. And that’s just as well, because no one is entitled to a job program without having fundamental skills, not men or women. Specifically, departments saturated with women tend to be more risk-averse and slower to make decisions, leading to much organizational paralysis. When I worked at Indeed, the marketing department was bloated, with primarily women in jobs that didn’t seem necessary. They moved tickets around or created marketing materials that I had to build the technical campaigns for; my team had the most significant amount of work as the skilled builders. It was unclear what most others did other than sit in meetings and shuffle Google Docs.
Feminism becomes the moral armor to justify hiring a bunch of women without skills into bloated departments; more women at the table is the goal, rather than rebuilding the table to be meritocratically determined. As I’ve previously written, women tend to compete covertly rather than openly, which means a contest plays out under the surface that doesn’t lead to the most competent woman being elevated. I know because I’ve lived it.
Being cut down by women threatened by my competence has, therefore, slowed my progress despite my having hard skills; women ancillary to my technical job tend to become insecure when I’m around and thereby make me a scapegoat or otherwise try to police my personality. Whenever I critique this tendency of women, all I hear in response from women is that they acted out of internalized misogyny, absolving them of accountability for behavior that hinders class mobility for women like me who aren’t from wealthy parentage.
The elite class constantly crows about how degrees and skills are the path to social mobility. In practice, women often block this mobility, and you can’t even name it because it happens behind closed doors via reputation destruction and innuendo.
The most absurd argument I’ve heard in favor of credentialism was that ridding degree requirements would hurt women and people of color. But in practice, it would be already elite people of color who would be subject to more competition from those who independently developed skills or didn’t go to elite colleges. Elite people of color and women in particular have every reason to suppress competition for the few spots among the wealthy they feel they’ve earned.
I know several women who entered the technical field like me, with or without a degree. In practice, these women have faced barriers from gatekeeping women in HR, so they don’t get their foot in the door for an interview to begin with. For example, I’ve fared far better now because my resume is undeniable, so my degree no longer matters. But how many working-class origin men and women have been shut out of opportunity who have the skills but not the degrees? How many state school grads never get the chance to work for the most prestigious companies because the elite signaling of the school filters them?
The overproduced elite class claims to want social mobility, but only for already elite women to enter the fold. If they’re black or Latina, even better. Indians are, of course, already part of the elite, so our joining is seen as a threat to white dominance more than a win for diversity. White elites will never admit this, but I suspect they feel status threat from East and South Asian people, which is also a motivation for affirmative action, devaluing those groups in comparison to blacks in particular.
IV. Ideas to fix the system
First, all jobs should require skills assessments, and we shouldn’t require degrees at all. For communication and process-oriented jobs, it’s not difficult to write a test requiring the candidate to work through scenarios before advancing them to an interview; this is how many interview questions are already structured. The portion to be made truly competitive is who gets the interview in the first place. For someone like me, testing my ability to navigate scenarios and apply technical skills would suffice as a culling mechanism.
Many technical jobs already don’t require degrees because the technical functions can be assessed separately from credentials, opening these jobs to people who didn’t happen to choose the correct major. This is an equitable method to determine who passes the first gate for a job.
Second, initial hiring steps should be blind to the candidate’s identity categories. I contend that the EEOC form should be abolished because it creates perverse incentives to fulfill quotas for identity categories, despite the claim that it has nothing to do with who gets the job on the form. Until a recruiter meets the candidate, the candidate's race and gender should be masked by applicant tracking systems to prevent bias. This is especially crucial because the flooding of every job with a million candidates with Sanskrit names, implying they’re Indian, prevents qualified people with Sanskrit names like mine from breaking through the noise.
Third, all jobs should require writing assessments. The higher I get, the more shoddy writing and intellectual laziness I encounter. Even people with technical jobs should be able to communicate their ideas in writing; a software engineer should be able to explain what the product or function does for a human being. We’ve separated soft skills from technical jobs, leading to intellectual impoverishment in these functions. I am actually at a higher level than most of my peers simply because I studied the liberal arts and am a generalist, but being a generalist is still viewed as shallow by many. People vying for communication and process jobs should be required to prove they can, you know, communicate. Interview questions aren’t enough to assess a candidate’s intellectual rigor.
Fourth, performance assessments shouldn’t include peer reviews. We’ve all been burned by them, and women have especially burned me. If your personality deviates, you are punished through peer reviews. A ‘360 review’ isn’t a comprehensive assessment of performance but a method of surveillance. Furthermore, high performers who make others look mediocre are punished in practice because their peers are incentivized to cut them down. It is possible to assess performance in terms of outcomes, and if not, the job or person is superfluous. Peer reviews are soft control, another mechanism women can use to defeat a rival.
Credentialism, feminism, and elite overproduction have produced perverse incentives to stifle excellence and prevent social mobility by status-obsessed people. There’s a caste system based on class that is rendered invisible. I’ve managed to climb despite the elite women around me who have often suppressed merit-based recognition at work.
The soft control of the new aristocracy (both men and women) justifies exclusion via a fake morality. Moral capital is currency because real capital is scarce. It punishes dissent by stealing people’s livelihoods for deviating. I didn’t write under my own name for a year until I decided I’m cancellation-proof; I have skills, and I exist outside the cancellation-prone sectors. I am no longer dependent on recruiters to get my foot in the door.
If you want to get where I am, my best advice is to develop analytical skills. This doesn’t mean coding; this can mean something as basic as data analysis; you’d be surprised how few people can truly do it. This could also mean thinking in systems, which is my true edge in the labor market. Whatever you do, don’t depend solely on communication and process skills for the new world we’re seeing form.
Now that jobs are shedding, true merit must be the north star, and may even get the professional class its legitimacy again if they can adhere to it. They like to say things like “merit isn’t possible in capitalism,” but I disagree. People do have different levels of talent and skill that can be measured; we’re just using the wrong yardsticks.
The professional class has no legitimate future unless it abandons moralizing in favor of merit and pragmatism. It must let go of its ideological dogmas to earn its place. We hear thought-terminating, nihilistic clichés in our circles like “there is no ethical work under capitalism,” but this justifies mediocrity. Mastery creates systems that produce the comfort in which we live, and competition for scarce jobs must happen based on talent to be legitimate. The current system coddling entitled but mediocre elites will eventually eat itself and everyone under it.
I’m building a post-ideological structure for a life of depth. I write because I want to help others reach a post-ideological self; I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear. If you want to read that which others are usually too afraid to name, join me.
Turchin, Peter. 2013. Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability. Cliodynamics 4: 241–280.
See also, We Have Never Been Woke by Al-Gharbi.
"DEI compounds the suppression of merit because it creates incentives to hire mediocre people to fill implicit quotas, as I saw firsthand as a recruiter. At minimum, they give certain groups a leg up while finding ways to hold men back or otherwise silencing them. We see this happen in our workplaces, but we aren’t allowed to name it."
That last part is important. Most elites now exist in large, hierarchical institutions. They're status-conscious and ambitious, and so they learn to subordinate their own instincts and impulses and opinions to the collective. Or rather, they learned to do this when they were in grade school.
That's a major tragedy of our time, which is rarely remarked upon: people have been trained to be cowards. In most cases this isn't apparent, but when the time comes and bravery or nonconformity or risk (of promotion, popularity, EMPLOYMENT) is warranted, people shrink from the call in almost every case. Feminization is a big part of that, I suspect, since women are more concerned about social desirability bias (and they're often creating the rules and HR policies and trainings for these organizations) but it would be inaccurate to say that man are less cowardly. EVERYONE is cowardly because it's the rational way to be. In a society which values only money and status and comfort, there's no place for courage or honor. There's also no place for analytical rigor or integrity, ultimately. The thing I wish I could tell these professionals isn't something that can be conveyed through words, unfortunately. It is: if you live with integrity and originality your life will probably be better (more interesting, more fulfilling, more WHOLE) even if your career suffers. I know that they wouldn't believe me though. The idea of having a better life and a worse career outcome is incoherent to most people. That's kind of the problem, I guess.
Working for large organizations is one thing. Giving them ownership and control of your soul is intolerable. You might wake up in a nice Upper West Side apartment with a spouse and privately educated children and a great job... and find that you're not happy. You've been pursuing the wrong things. Previous cultures understood this intuitively and encoded it into their norms and values. We've deleted all of that code.
The most dangerous class in any society are surplus elites.