Philip Cohen took a quick scholarly look at the Conservative Partnership Institute with an eye toward workplace demographics. What he found was, perhaps, structural mysogyny on display. This phenomenon deserves more attention from researchers of work and gender. Cohen points out that CPI’s gendered structure is far different from average workplaces. Is this structure (gendered age differences, gendered job distribution, etc.) unique to political organizations, or can it be seen in other organizations as well? How does this structure vary across not just industries but political leanings of upper management? In what ways does this structure reflect or direct workplace tenor and the political attitudes toward gender held by the workers and managers?
The women’s median age is 27, the men’s is 43. Only two women are 40 or older, compared with eight men. Looking at the titles suggests that both my explanations might by correct. The young women are concentrated in jobs with “relations” in the title (as well as development, communications, and marketing). So they might be both women who haven’t dropped out of the labor force yet and the kind of person that helps attract the kind of men who donate to organizations like this. The other way to get this kind of age gap, of course, is just sex discrimination, where you mostly hire male executives, who are older than the “relations” people.
For what it’s worth, a 16-year difference in median age is very big. I checked the median ages by industry using the American Community Survey from 2022, and among large industries none with older men have more than an 8 year median age gap (found in beauty salons and veterinary services), followed by dentists and doctors, with men 7 and 6 years older, respectively. An industry is not the same as a single workplace, but this helps put the big age spread at CPI in perspective.
I wonder what these organizations are like, as workplaces.
Philip N. Cohen. 2024. “The Trumpist right, where young women work with old men.” Family Inequality. Retrieved July 23, 2024.