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I'm not sure where you're seeing a "somewhat sticky # of jobs": https://www.statista.com/statistics/192356/number-of-full-ti... , https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons

As for "a brief search": I literally went to Google, typed "number of jobs" with the first suggestion being "number of jobs in us by year". The very first link has the answer.

May I suggest that when you ask inflammatory question, you invest a tiny bit more in research? Otherwise, one could come to the conclusion that maybe you're more interested in the inflammatory than in the thought part.

I'm sure that's not what you intend. But if you care about "togetherness" in political discourse, it's imperative to temper inflammatory requests with more than an absolutely cursory search for facts.

I was unclear with my "sticky jobs" statement; and referred primarily to the initial rate of change of women entering the workforce. I did try to look at the data for that, but while there is a spike of labor participation rate (per capita/% seems a much better metric than absolute #) during the male/female convergence in the 50's/60s as womens rights progressed, it seemed primarily externality driven. [0]

That being said, I'd try and better make my main point: As a sister post states, there's the intuitive fact that remedying discrimination is by definition going to cause the previously elevated party to lose that. This is the core of what I was trying to get at; that I'm not sure "it's not a zero sum game" is going to convince people who focus on this aspect of it. Maybe there's an argument that you don't need to/can't convince someone that opposed, but that's the heart of my pessimism about the aformentioned togetherness.

(Another sister post made the explanation of the lump of labor fallacy, which I had learned at one point and unfortunately forgotten as it far better responds to the hypothetical I posed)

[0]https://dqydj.com/the-male-female-unemployment-gap/ (Ignoring the writing, the data is from stlousifed)

Ah, that makes much more sense, thank you.

> there's the intuitive fact that remedying discrimination is by definition going to cause the previously elevated party to lose that

I think it's more than an intuitive fact. There's at least one study I can think of - "Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man"[1]. And it seems to support the idea that there's a loss, at least in the short term, for the previously elevated party.

I still don't think it's a zero-sum game in the long term. But that is at the core of the problem - people feel threatened now, they don't always care that in the long run, things might turn out well.

Which prompted me to write my reply in the first place - anything that reinforces the notion of a zero-sum game is incredibly toxic to resolving this issue. And even if we'd all be at our most level-headed selves, it's a rather hard issue to solve.

(It's worth noting that we're off on quite a tangent. None of the above really relates to sexual harassment that much. That is an abuse of power. While I'm an avowed feminist, I'm not convinced that simply having more equality in the work force will solve the issue of harassment. That likely requires a huge cultural shift to our basic mode of thinking)

[1] http://perseus.iies.su.se/~tpers/papers/Draft170122AER.pdf

> [...] sticky total # of jobs. As women further enter the workforce, the mean household income will trend towards double income, and the labor pool will be contested with more applicants, in both cases rendering a male applicant at a substantial disadvantage (comparatively to history).

Isn't this the lump of labor fallacy [1]?

I think the economic theory leads to a different description: As more women enter the workforce, the aggregate income goes up. Some of it is spent and becomes someone else's income. Some of it is saved in a bank which loans it out or invests it. The receiving business then spends it and once again the money becomes someone else's income.

IOW, as more people work, both aggregate demand and aggregate income rise. The economy shifts into a higher gear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Hypothesis: this was the major cause of the productivity gains on the late 20th century.

It seems a little sketchy to me that apparently labor is exempt from the basic laws of supply and demand. Fundamentally, enlarging the supply of workers, through the entry of women, ending systemic discrimination against minorities, elimination of early retirement while reducing demand should have an effect on the price of labor.

I’ve worked for large institutions that have been performing the same work for decades and I’m familiar with their employment statistics. By any measure, they are using fewer person-hours of labor annually. About 40% less since 1997, about 60% less than 1987. One subdivision in particular replaced about 3,000 workers with 50 IT guys and about $10M in annual IT spend circa 1995. Those labor costs are held in check by a constant stream of cheap contractors.

The basic laws of supply and demand have two sides, but you are just looking at supply. The post you are replying to contains a suggestion as to why the demand side may, at least in some circumstances, mask or compensate for supply-side effects.

Large institutions that have been performing the same work for decades do not fully represent the economy as a whole.

Where’s the evidence for a big increase in demand for labor? All signals suggest the opposite.

The article and post that I replied to talked about aggregate income, which isn’t the same as demand. Aggregate income is a particularly weasel-ly and misleading stat, as wages across the board have been falling in real terms, and usually excludes the people out of the labor force. When you eliminate midrange and low end jobs, and don’t include the people making $0 in the average, the average goes up.

Even in tech, specific verticals are in high demand. Once things get stable, the relentless pressure of offshoring and *aaS deflates labor value.

> ...in both cases rendering a male applicant at a substantial disadvantage (comparatively to history).

The reduction of inequalities tends to have this sort of effect on those who benefitted from inequality, more or less by definition. I will go along with your stated intention of wanting to provoke thought by saying that I think it is a bogus argument against equality, that ignores the unjustifiable harm done by discrimination. Furthermore, by itself, it does not establish the 'zero sum' part of 'zero sum game'.

BTW, grammatically speaking, the 'it' in the question you pose appears to refer to the 'sexual harassment' of the title, but your comment seems to be about something else altogether.

more qualified women in the workforce => greater efficiency, increase in net jobs created, lower prices => increased benefits for everyone