220A. Gender Economics
Critical analysis of the differences in opportunity and success that are gender related. Prerequisite for rigorous discussion of Dating Economics (in part 2).
The economics of gender in the USA have been a political and cultural stress point my entire life. Here I focus on the USA because my family has been deeply involved in this issue since the 19th century, and first arrived in the mid 18th century back when America was still an English colony. My great grandmother Dorothy and her sister Emma were pioneers in fighting for women’s rights in the late 1800s. Both were champion swimmers, but back then women were only allowed to wear multi-layered dresses when swimming.
When they put on men’s suits and challenged men to race, this created quite an outrage. Especially since my foremothers never lost. My grandmother Marjorie was one of the first women allowed to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at its current location. All of these amazing women had very strong work ethics and just wanted the same opportunities that the men around them enjoyed.
I don’t think they described themselves as feminists, because they weren’t operating from any ideology. They just wanted to do what they were good at. Today of course, they would be considered the quintessential feminists. They certainly didn’t have anything against men, though their boldness probably led to them being unlucky in love. They were a bit ahead of their time.
Today what was originally a movement for equal rights for all genders has split into two primary groups. I will define these thusly:
Feminists: Seek gender equality. Includes men and women.
Gender Supremacists: Seek increased power for their gender. Gender specific.
Those two groups intermingled for decades and were difficult to distinguish as women fought for opportunity parity. After all, the USA was formed in the 18th century as a society led by men. You could call this a patriarchy. I would define this as a society where men enjoy enhanced opportunities merely for being born male, regardless of merit. This also often meant they were paid more for the same work.
When I was a speaker (at their request) for the National Organisation of Women in 1988 at UCLA, I still perceived that there was work to be done to achieve gender equality. The first formal Women’s Studies program was created in Southern California at San Diego State College in 1970. Great strides were made during this time and around the turn of the century it seems that gender parity was achieved.
While the idea that there should be gender equality remained, having achieved that goal feminist activists largely demobilized. What remained were two groups:
Women Gender Supremacists: These people wanted to create a matriarchy, either because they felt it was owed to them, or because they thought women were better than men and should be running the place.
Feminists Who Failed to Demobilize: Likely they heard a lot of people telling them how disadvantaged women are and thus felt compelled to keep fighting.
Universities teaching Women’s Studies exploded to 431 today. Meanwhile there are 0 universities with Men’s Studies programs. These programs do a lot of research and the overwhelmingly pro-women’s interests being studied creates a distorted image of society. I would assume that Supremacists in these Women’s Gender Studies programs are responsible for the lack of Men’s Studies programs. Here I’m primarily interested in clarifying the economic gender situation.
The Gender Wage Gap
In 2009 newly elected President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as the first bill he signed into law. I’m sure this was a signature moment for him. I voted for him, so this isn’t an attempt to dis him. That same year a massive study of the gender wage gap was completed, the CONSAD study. The wiki on wage gap has a LOT of useful information, but I’m going to focus on the CONSAD here because it is the most definitive study.
CONSAD found that all but 5 to 7% of the wage gap was due to the types of work done, the hours worked, the danger of jobs selected, and not measuring the various “benefits” that come with the job. I will detail these below. It also found that “mothers” suffered ~5% wage decrease compared to non mothers. For women who are not mothers, they achieved parity with men on wages.
Factors that CONSAD cited:
Women changed jobs or interrupted their careers more often. This slowed advancement speed.
Women were more likely to choose convenient jobs or those with more work time flexibility. These jobs paid less than more rigid jobs.
Women gravitated to jobs with higher benefits (like insurance or paid time off) that in turn paid lower base wages.
Women chose less dangerous jobs. Dangerous jobs tend to pay more.
Men worked longer hours and generated more overtime pay.
So I’m guessing you’ve never heard of the CONSAD report, why is that? Well Obama made a big deal of passing a law to combat the wage gap. I would imagine that CONSAD was politically inconvenient, especially that year. There were also 431 major universities that depended on the existence of a wage gap, and systemic gender discrimination, to justify the existence of their women’s studies programs. They also needed this to block the creation of any men’s studies programs.
The Normalization of Sex Work Since 2009
I began studying what I call Dating Economics in 2010. This paper is the prerequisite to the next paper on Dating Economics. I noticed that there were huge shifts in society being caused by online dating, and I wanted to know if this was causing changes in the broader economy. This type of investigation was not going to be conducted by the government, and likely not by any universities either. It required a rogue scientist like myself.
I ended up surveying ~25,000 women over a ten year period. The early years were mostly focused on understanding dating behavior and motivations. The later years focused more and more on money transfers (I was the first academic to write extensively on Real Money Transfers in gaming). This necessitated that I interview people who were getting rewarded financially for dating. Thus I ended up surveying a fair number of sex workers just as sex work was becoming more accepted in society.
Here my being asexual really helped me, just as it did in my physical therapy work and in being the trainer for the UCLA and US Olympic Women’s track teams. Normal heterosexual men give off something of a “neediness/hunger” vibe, which I don’t. Prior to this time I had never had any contact with sex workers (since I don’t consume what they are selling) but I quickly learned how to gain enough trust to get the information I was after. I will discuss this more in the next paper.
Since CONSAD was in 2009, all the things that were changing in 2010 and later would not be reflected in the study. Further, most of these real money transfers occur “off the books” and would not be reflected in any government analysis.
The normalization of sex work, even by people who don’t self identify as sex workers but nonetheless engage in money transfers during dating, increasingly caused a lot of money to change hands on a new black market.
Sugar Dating and OnlyFans
“SeekingArrangement” (now just called “Seeking” after I warned Brandon Wade that the word “Arrangement” was creating legal jeopardy) was created in 2006 and had a transformative effect on society during this post-CONSAD period. The purpose of the site, at least initially, was to connect older people with money to younger people who didn’t have money, for “financially enhanced dating”. Sugar dating is what we call it today. Primarily this was men (Sugar Daddies) paying young women (Sugar Babies). Rates were typically several times higher than what one could make in a normal job, and particularly adventurous Babies could juggle multiple Daddies.
These people don’t declare their income, and often don’t like to be described as sex workers. Even though they are. The site used to have more users, but now has a lot of competitors in the space. Still, as of 2024 it reported having 46M users with about 90% of those being Babies, typically aged 21 to 27. Many are college students. Most of SA’s revenue comes from the USA, so we can infer that there are at least 20M users from the USA. There are ~15M women in the USA aged from 21 to 27.
While we have no firm numbers, it seems likely that at least 50% of women in the USA in this age range have tried Sugar Dating at least once. So this is not a fringe activity, it is fully normalized and undocumented. That also means it is not taxed. There are also male Sugar Babies, but they only make up about 10% of total Babies.
OnlyFans was created in 2016 in the UK and quickly spread to the USA. It provided a simple tool for “content creators” to engage in sex work from the safety of their home, typically solo or with a “friend” helping out. This improved safety by excluding strangers from the play space. The site also collected payments from “viewers” and automated the payment process for “creators”.
The ease of use led to an explosion of participation, again mostly from women. There are currently ~4.6M “creator” accounts. There are over 370M “viewer” accounts. Because the service is scalable, one creator could be paid by thousands or even millions of viewers. The highest paid “creator”, Blac Chyna (Angela White), is said to generate $20M a month in revenue. Thus for those on the high end, earning potential dwarfs what is possible with Sugar Dating.
This represents a massive increase in unreported wages, mostly for young women, compared to what was possible in the economy in 2009 and prior to that. My extremely conservative estimate is that women on average in this age group in the USA make 30% more than men do, mostly tax free. That average includes women who would never consider any sort of sex work, and a sizeable number that generate 300%, or 1000%, or even more of the wages that their similarly aged male counterparts make.
Note that since OnlyFans collects money for “creators”, that means they can also report that information to the government. Many creators were quite shocked when they started getting letters from the IRS asking why they weren’t paying taxes on their OF income. American “Viewers” on OF spent $2B in 2025. Note that the vast majority of OF “content creators” make very little income (<$300/month) but still get their content beamed across the internet. This can have damaging income effects later in life when people ask “hey how come my teach/co-worker is on OF?”.
Thus for most, Sugar Dating is the most reliable way to multiply their income (if they are young and female), and can be done discretely.
Additional Economic Factors
So what other gender differences exist in the economy? LinkedIn research showed that in 2019 women were 16% more likely to be hired than men after applying to a job. This metric rises to +18% in more senior roles. If you acknowledge that in the past women were disadvantaged in hiring, then we must admit that this is trending up and is surely higher than 16% now. I would expect LinkedIn to not repeat (at least publicly) this research as it could entangle them in future gender discrimination litigation.
The “education gap” is even more extreme than the “hiring gap”. Here in Australia 61% of 4 year degrees go to women. In the USA in the 2021-2022 school year 58% of degrees were awarded to women. It seems odd that the more recent data is absent. In the age of information, what is holding it up? Women first exceeded men in the rate of higher education graduation in 1982, and it has trended up since then.
1982 … 44 years ago.
99+% of degreed women alive today in the USA workforce have benefited from a gender advantage in education. 99+% of degreed men alive today in the USA workforce have been harmed by gender discrimination in education.
An often cited (but I could not find a link to it) 2025 Lendingtree study showed that men suffer a $2000 a year income transfer to women during early dating. This rises to $15,000 per year in relationships. This is similar to the numbers I generated in my Gender Wars paper last year. There I found the rate to be about $1000 per month ($12,000 per year) but I excluded married couples as I wanted to focus my study on dating.
The cumulative effect of all this progressive economic discrimination against men over the last few decades means that many if not most men are just treading water now financially. Given that hypergamy (partnering with someone with more resources than you have) has been a traditional dating strategy for women for centuries, this puts women in a difficult spot.
When men had significantly better finances than women, there were enough options for women that they could consider other factors (like actually finding the man attractive) on top of hypergamy. Now women complain “where did all the good men go?” because hypergamy options are extraordinarily scarce. Often the choice is between hypergamy and attraction, if they are lucky enough to even have two choices. This is not a situation that benefits any gender.
Of course that’s one of the easier problems to solve if we just reverse hypergamy and have financially superior women support the men that they love. I’ve benefited from reverse hypergamy and lived in a few mansions in my life. It works when the financially superior partner is not abusive, just like traditional hypergamy.
Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy… On Mars?
If we consider a world where men are financially advantaged in society and women are discriminated against “Patriarchy”, then it would be fair to describe the reverse as “Matriarchy”. But both terms are highly charged in the current era. They also are binaries which obscures what is actually going on.
Let’s imagine that humans are colonizing Mars. Mars has an atmosphere, but it only contains <0.2% oxygen (O2). Humans need 21% oxygen and their ability to function decreases the further from that concentration we get. So let’s assume we start building O2 generation factories on Mars. Let’s make 431 of them (like the number of women’s studies programs on Earth). They pump out O2 faithfully and when we get close to 21% then humans can function normally (i.e. have full civil rights) without a space suit or respirator.
But what happens when we get to 21%? Do we turn off all 431 of these factories and declare “Mission Accomplished!”? If we did, and these factories were run by humans that spent their entire lives learning how to run Oxygenizers, you’d have a lot of upset unemployed people. But if we just keep running them we will literally poison the atmosphere of Mars with too much O2!
This is a nasty problem and I can understand people might be tempted to just push the problem onto the next generation of humans. We do that a lot as a species, due to self-interest. I think the best solution would be to stop training new Oxygenizer workers and start building Hydrogenizer Plants (Men’s rights schools). We would train people to work there and we could combine our excess O2 with the H2 and make water or rocket fuel. Once parity is close to being met, we can balance hires to both types of facilities.
It could be a new era for humankind!
Final Thoughts
Many generations in the West have sacrificed to bring Oxygen, er, I mean women’s rights, to society. Now that we are here we should acknowledge the achievement and celebrate. But we didn’t do that. We doubled down. Now we are producing oppression instead of liberty. This is the opposite of what we wanted! Actually, you can see humans doing this a lot all over the world right now with parallel systems. We don’t seem to know when it is time to stop and Maintain Balance.
This isn’t even difficult. We have the means to measure Balance and maintain it. We just aren’t. Many have become ideologically opposed to fairness while claiming they are for fairness. This has to stop and will stop. But if we work together that will make everyone happy. If we don’t work together, some sort of revolution will be the result. Men are biologically wired to Protect and Provide for women.
We just have to let them.
The next paper on Dating Economics will detail how the rapid changes in dating technology and economics in the current generation have altered how we date and what the trend will produce if maintained.