Zero Sum Thinking & Gender Equality

Written By Jessica Carson

Why We Need to Stop Punishing Men for the Karma of Their Chromosomes

A Not So Angry Woman

As a woman in America, I’m presented with daily invitations to rage at men; I find this rage-inducing.

It’s not that I don’t acknowledge the centuries of oppression against women. I do. Until very recently, women’s gender roles have been defined along the narrowest of lines, as were our allowances in society, resulting in violence from the physical to the economic. Even in the United States, a country defined by its revolutionary freedoms, it wasn’t until 1974 that one of the most basic financial rights — the right to independently open a bank account — was granted to women.

It’s also not that I haven’t been on the receiving end of reprehensible male behavior. I have. I’ve been sexually assaulted. I’ve lost a job weeks after an executive was found sending flirtatious messages to me. I’ve been talked down to countless times in the vein of “don’t worry your pretty little head.” I’ve been threatened on streets and subways. I’ve been underestimated because I look like a nice girl. 

Instead, it’s that I fundamentally disagree with the tactics being employed to achieve gender justice. A mere hour spent consuming popular culture reveals that women are encouraged to criticize men who behave in traditionally masculine ways, use preferential language towards young women while taking care not to stroke the egos of young men, and perform our victimhood, ideally quite loudly.

What follows is an exploration of why this thinking is broken, practically, morally, and archetypally.

Women’s Gains are (But Shouldn’t Be) Men’s Losses 

In America, we tend to think about equality as a zero sum game. 

My gain is your loss. My rightness is your wrongness. My lessened rage is your heightened rage. We see this thinking in ideologies ranging from affirmative action to eye-for-an-eye perspectives on the Israel-Hamas war. And of course, it is also true when it comes to gender rights: To help women get ahead, we think, men must step aside. 

While the righteous sentiment behind this thinking is understandable — that oppressors, or ancestors of oppressors, should sacrifice something to help the oppressed get ahead — zero sum thinking is impoverished by its nature. True justice should result in a positive net gain for society, not a zeroing of the scales. This tit-for-tat logic is the thinking of playground games, not of advanced societies. 

It’s important to call out the faulty thought-loops of many progressives when it comes to discrimination. If we wish to eradicate discrimination, as most of us do, we must apply anti-discrimination ideals equally. Any immutable characteristic, such as gender or race, should be free from inherent discrimination, even if that characteristic represents a historical group of oppressors, like men and white people. Otherwise, we are parlaying one form of discrimination into another.

This doesn’t spare men from the consequences of their actions. Instead, it offers them a tabula rasa — a slate wiped clean of the actions of those who came before them. Men don’t choose their genes any more than women or racially diverse people do. To be free of moral hypocrisy, Americans must internalize the idea that injustice isn’t a talent show and empathy isn’t earned. Everyone should be assessed by their own moral efforts, not the karma of their chromosomes. 

It bears repeating: The idea that one group's downfall should lead to another’s ascendence is the precise fallacy that caused centuries of oppression against women in the first place. It’s this thinking that needs to be eradicated to have intellectually honest conversations about equality of all kinds, including gender. In the words of Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

The Rise of Misandry

Though it’s seemingly en vogue to talk about American society as misogynistic, emerging research indicates that the opposite may be true.

On the eve of 2025, women in America are better positioned than men to succeed in nearly every dimension. For instance, women have long represented the majority of the college-educated adults, and are now beginning to outnumber college-educated men at work. As a result, women under 30 now out-earn men the same age in 22 cities around the country, including New York City and Washington DC where they earn 102% of similarly-aged men.

On average, employers now tend to favor women over men. Discrimination against women for male-typed and balanced jobs has decreased over time, while discrimination against men for female-typed jobs still persists. National hiring experiments reveal a 2:1 faculty preference for women in STEM tenure track roles over identically qualified males, and the federal government favors women-owned businesses when it comes to grants and funding.

(On a personal note, my own career in STEM, startups, and venture capital — all traditionally male spaces — has been advantaged, not disadvantaged, because of my token gender. I have admittedly received jobs for which I was not the most qualified candidate, and have been told in no uncertain terms by superiors that I landed positions of visibility because they liked my diversity.)

Of course, many of these favorable statistics reflect the perseverance, dedication, and intelligence of millions of women — we shouldn’t discount this hard-earned progress. But much of this success is also due to a diversity push that may or may not weigh women and men’s contributions equally, and may represent its own form of discrimination. 

As much as this female-preference has permeated institutions, it has also permeated our societal attitudes. Research shows that people of every background are quicker to associate positive attributes with women and negative attributes with men. In other words, despite the popular thinking that society is misogynistic, we are in fact misandrogynistic. As a result of this collective misandry, men are trusted less and helped less than women. 

It’s also important to note that over the past few decades, women’s gender roles have blossomed beautifully. We are allowed to be strong yet soft, logical yet creative, business-minded yet motherly. But the same cannot be said for men. Research has shown that male gender roles have remained restrictive, dictating outdated norms that men must be capable, smart, confident, stoic, and powerful providers. And yet, we so often criticize men for exercising these exact qualities.

While women are not leading in every statistic across every domain — for instance, women account for only 10.8% of the construction workforce and continue to face gender pay gaps in red states, like Utah and Louisiana — it is quite clear that we are on a trajectory for rapid ascent.

The Future is Female & Other Problematic Ideas 

It’s a sweet but problematic scene…

Young girls in schools today are adorned in The Future is Female tee-shirts with Girls Run the World patches on their backpacks. They chirp along to lyrics and binge TV shows about girls being powerful, boys being scoundrels (or Ken-like idiots), and God being a woman. While well-intended, this narrative is creating profound psychic ripples among young men. A declaration that the future — or the heavens, for that matter — belongs to one group over another, even if that group has been historically oppressed, is just as toxic as the status quo that one is raging against. 

As young girls receive the benefit of the doubt — think: Believe All Women and Girl Power — what is happening with our young men? Across the board, boys are falling behind in school, with researchers crediting this failure to the fact that traditional schools cater to the needs and preferences of girls over boys. In our era of “gender is a social construct,” we have neglected the well-established science that boys — as a generalized group, which always includes outliers — have different cognitive, social, and physical needs than girls. 

While seemingly innocuous, messages like The Future is Female — to the exclusion of similarly hopeful messages for young boys — can lead to insidious consequences. These preferential messages inevitably result in disillusionment among the rejected class (in this case, boys and men), leading to further entrenched and extreme views. It’s an age-old truth: When shame and exclusion are used as correction mechanisms over empowerment and education, the roots of an issue are driven deeper into the dark underground.

We are seeing this play out in real time in the movement of young men supporting Trump, with men drawing a direct line between their MAGA ideologies and the feeling of being left behind by society. Because we have ensnared young men in a catch 22 — you’re damned if you’re a man and you’re damned if you’re not manly enough — they have turned to figures like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Joe Rogan who offer them a seemingly safe place to land.

In a darkly validating twist, as I was pressing send on this article, news broke that Luigi Mangione, the suspected murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, retweeted several posts about men’s mistreatment in modern society, including a post that said: “It’s sad that the question of “are men important?” can’t be answered with a simple “yes.” What message does this send to young boys when society says that they’re good at nothing?” 

In the words of the African proverb, "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."

A Jungian Take on the Matter

Though it might seem like a sharp turn in our exploration, I’d like to pull in the thoughts of Carl Jung.

Jung is the legendary Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist and pioneering evolutionary theorist who founded the school of analytical psychology. In his day, he had quite a lot to say about the distinct contributions of the masculine versus the feminine, and I like to imagine he would have a field day with this particular inquiry. 

Jung’s work on the essential role of polarities — light and shadow, yang and yin, masculine and feminine — elucidates why zero sum thinking towards gender equality is psychologically harmful and culturally naive. Jung believed that these dichotomous forces represent two halves of a whole; neither is healthy without the equal and opposite influence of the other. A future that is feminine to the detriment of the masculine is just as problematic as the alternative.

Archetypally speaking, the feminine and masculine energies in a society must be balanced; this ensures that a society is equally creative and productive, spiritual and industrious, compassionate and firm. If we can agree that our historically male-dominated society has led to imbalance, why would we think that the opposite would be any better? 

To be clear, Jung was not suggesting that this balance is achieved by submitting to one’s gender role; he did not believe that women should adorn aprons while men march off to battle. Instead, he believed that women must accept the masculine aspects of their psyche (the Animus), just as men must accept the feminine aspects of theirs (the Anima). In other words, it was by deeply relating to the other — not by rejecting or conquering the other — that wholeness as individuals and societies could be achieved.

I am quite confident Jung would say that downgrading the validity of one gender in favor of another is one of the most psychologically damaging strategies we could take as a society. Its consequences will run deep in the collective unconscious, resulting in further strife, until we learn that both genders are equally valid: “The animus and the anima should function as bridges to the deeper self, which is both man and woman.”

An Ask Without Favors

I can’t help but wonder what life will look like for my future son.

Will he have fewer opportunities? Will he face societal rage? Will he be denied the opportunity to “be a boy,” if that’s the path he chooses? Will he be told he is bad because of the way he was born? Will he be scorned for his masculinity and rejected for his lack of it? It’s an impossible set of demands for even the most cognitively bendy adult, much less a child. Frankly, it makes me wonder if it’s fair to bring a child into the world in the first place.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the right idea when she said, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” Of course women should demand freedom from any remaining shackles of oppression, along with the rights and niceties that have been historically afforded to men. However, I fear the zero sum games were are playing with our politics and the “you can’t sit with us” rhetoric we are spreading in our popular culture will come back to bite women — hopefully not with devastating force.

As president elect Trump waits in the wings of the Oval Office, I fear this retribution may be on its way. Which makes now the moment for women to rethink our strategy for protecting our future: Should we continue the narrative of downgrading, excluding, and criticizing the other? Or should we approach the years ahead with the intent of collaboration, understanding, and reconciliation? I have my opinions, but I suppose only time will tell.


References

Jessica Carson
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