Discriminatory “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies have been enshrined in virtually every major American institution for more than a decade now. While conservatives have made some laudatory progress in turning the cultural tide against DEI, the fallout on the American economy and, even more devastatingly, the American family, is only just beginning.
This week, Compact Magazine published what may be the most important long-form essay of the year. “The Lost Generation,” authored by aspiring screenwriter and odd-jobs aficionado Jacob Savage, describes in specific, heartbreaking detail the economic carnage that DEI has wrought on young men, and young white men in particular.
Savage provides staggering statistics on the race and gender-based overhaul of hiring practices in journalism and academia to highlight how DEI has fundamentally transformed the American workplace:
- In 2011, 48 percent of lower-level TV writers in Los Angeles were white men; by 2024, that dropped to 11.9 percent.
- In 2021, new hires at media giant Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white.
- That same year, at NPR – funded by taxpayer dollars – 78 percent of new hires were non-white.
- Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men.
- In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women, and 69 percent had been people of color.
- In 2013, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white; today it is 37 percent male and 59 percent white.
- White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
- In the Yale humanities department, just six out of 76 (7.9 percent) of tenure-track professors hired since 2018 have been white men.
- UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors since 2020 – just three (4.7 percent) are white men.
- Since 2022, Brown University has hired 45 tenure-track professors in the humanities and social sciences; just three (6.7 percent) have been white, American men.
- In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students; by 2025, that had dropped to 20.5 percent.
As one hiring editor at a major newspaper told Savage, “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” As an Ivy League professor put it in describing how a hiring committee viewed one white male applicant, “On paper, he was so clearly the strongest candidate. It really kind of did feel like, well, we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.”
But, critically, it isn’t all white men who have fallen into the crosshairs of the left’s DEI crusade. As Savage explains, “This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America… 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.”
It’s not that zero older men fell victim to the DEI purge. But many older, more established white men were grandfathered into institutional power structures. To make up for that, Hollywood, newsrooms, universities, and corporations had to be all the more aggressive in discriminating against white and male applicants for jobs. As Savage writes regarding discrimination against white men in Hollywood, “Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door.”