YWHGP Premium Erosion

From Hot Girl Privilege by Thales

For SJWs this is an endless buffet of grievances they can milk for Weaponized Empathy. And yet, I’ve long been aware of the fact that the supposedly-privileged really aren’t. If they ever were, that benefit ended long ago. If anyone on this Earth has privilege, it is attractive women in the West.

If you’re a hot chick in the West, everything you could ever want is yours. Always, there will be some man out there who will take you on free vacations, and buy you things. Or you can strip, or sell your body. Or, as is more common these days, you can post some vaguely Left-wing claptrap about saving the whales or something, and create an Instagram account of endless vacations funded through Patreon, because your scantily-clad bikini pictures in Tenerife attract hordes of thirsty incel SJW “men”. When a hot girl says something stupid, people pay attention to her anyway.

This has the effect of separating the hot chick from reality even more. She might think her stupid poems are beautiful art, because thirsty men will say anything to an attractive woman. She might even think her Lefty politics are edgy and engaging. No, dear, they aren’t spamming your Instagram comments because you attended the BLM rally last week. They are doing it because you’re wearing a transparent g-string in broad daylight, and these guys haven’t been laid since Bush II was president.

Read the whole things for the extended argument. I would modify the tone, hedge some of the assertions, bolster others, etc. but I suspect the core of his argument is accurate. On all but the smallest number of sociometric measures, western women are far greater beneficiaries than men - morbidity rates, mortality rates, education attainment rates, etc. Even on the metric of income, one of the most specious claims, we now know that men and women earn the same incomes for the same work. Women live longer, healthier, safer, more educated lives than men. The fact that this is in aggregate true does not vitiate the corresponding truth that the average masks all sorts of standard deviations of tragedies and setbacks and unfairness.

While a controversial thesis, Western Hot Girl Privilege (WHGP) is at least plausible and there is ready evidence to support the argument.

I don't want to focus on Thales' argument but rather would like explore a couple of corollaries which I have been mulling for a few years.

If you stipulate that there is such a thing as Western Hot Girl Privilege (WHGP) I think there is one key attribute which Thales does not develop. It is a privilege sharply bounded by age. There is about a fifteen year window of WHGP from fifteen to thirty, maybe twenty years. The bounded version might be called Young Western Hot Girl Privilege (YWHGP). From a societal and professional career perspective then, it is roughly a ten year window from twenty to thirty.

As a thought experiment, let's assign a value to that YWHGP, a performance premium. It could be anything from 5% to 50%, but I will assume it is on the order of 10-20% (based on some of the income differentials I have seen reported for otherwise equally qualified single men and women in the 20-30 age in cities). To dramatize it, I will use 20%.

The consequence is that to achieve the same outcome, men have to perform at least twenty percent better than their otherwise equally qualified female YWHGP peers. The dynamic is similar to what we have been seeing for the past few decades where racially discriminatory admissions processes at elite universities require Asian heritage students to have materially higher grades, higher test scores and higher achievements in order to achieve comparable admissions rates.

Men are at an additional disadvantage in the early years because their pre-frontal cortex (executive function) develops a few years later than in women exposing them to even greater risk and lower capacity for life achievement.

Under this scenario, for the first fifteen years of adulthood, women have excess opportunity above their demonstrated capabilities compared to men. Men are competing with one another as well as with young female peers to earn an equal place at the table and with an inherent disadvantage. All of this is a logical consequence if we acknowledge the existence of YWHGP.

I think there are two corollaries to this scenario which are consequential, interesting and little discussed. It has to do with that time boundedness of the YWHGP.

If you are a young woman, the beneficiary of YWHGP, your most formative professional experience is one in which you calibrate an expectation of opportunity and recognition and reward predicated (usually unconsciously) on an unacknowledged and hidden privilege. Your performance at a level of 80 is held to be 100 and you are rewarded equally with males performing at 100. Alternatively, if you are performing at 100, during that magical window, your male colleagues have to perform at 120 to earn the same rewards.

But that windfall sets the stage for disappointment. YWHGP probably peaks around 25 plus or minus a couple of years. From that peak twenty percent YWHGP premium there is something like a five or ten year decline in that YWHGP premium. From 20% it declines to 15% to 10% to 5% until at thirty-five, you are being rewarded and recognized and given opportunities in exact proportion to your capabilities. The YWHGP has disappeared.

But to the individual woman, particularly if they have never acknowledged the YWHGP, the sense is that you are having to work harder and harder in order to keep earning the same rewards as in the past. And as the YWHGP premium disappears, the male colleagues performing at exactly the same level as you in the past, whose rewards were discounted in the past because they lacked YWHGP premium, appear to be catching up and overtaking you. In other words, the YWHGP recipient sees males who she used to think of as behind her, catching up and overtaking her.

My speculation is that YWHGP Premium Erosion is a hidden driver to a lot of feminist thought and sense of oppression.

But there is another corollary resulting from YWHGP Premium Erosion which makes it even worse. At thirty-five a woman is now competing on equal footing with her male peers. Her male peers are accustomed to competing with one another and they are accustomed to competing with women with unearned YWHGP.

But a thirty-five year old woman is now having to learn to compete with male colleagues on an equal footing as well as now having a new source of competition within the enterprise. Young women who still have YWHGP. For a given level of performance a thirty-five year old women is having to work harder than she has been accustomed to in order to achieve the same recognition of male performance peers. AND she is having to compete with young women who still have YWHGP.

Usually this is often put in sociological terms of hypergamous intra-female competition and there is some salience to that issue. I would argue that in professional and economic terms that the greater issue is simply the psychological adjustment to the threat of an unequal playing field arising from YWHGP.

Following from this thought experiment, between 30 and 35, women in professional careers are suffering from two events occurring at the same time - 1) YWHGP Premium Erosion and 2) increased competition owing to a new cohort with YWHGP.

From the center of their world they are having to work harder for the same reward, men whom they previously discounted as under-performers are now reaching career parity with them and the field of competition with other women is getting larger. No wonder there is so much angst, anger and sense of persecution in so much feminist theory.

And then there is the biggest hit in the midst of all that. While they are losing YWHGP premium, and seeing men equalizing and overtaking them and experiencing more competition from younger women with YWHGP, they are also encountering their biological clock in a meaningful way. If they are committed to family formation and having children, they face a hard stop in a fashion that their male peers do not.

Finally, there are the professional consequences attendant to having children, most consequentially the career hits arising from time-off, constrained hours, reduced work flexibility, interrupted career progression, etc.

So if you are a 30-35 year old man, you are accustomed to full field competition from everyone. No one is granting you any privileges and your full valuation rests on your demonstrated performance. You are accustomed to taking the considered risks and investing the necessary time to overcome the YWHGP premiums that exists. That is all you have experienced in your ten or fifteen year career.

For a 30-35 year old woman, you are encountering a series of consequential disruptions to the expectations which your first years in the labor market might have created.

Your YWHGP Premium is eroding putting you at a relative disadvantage to your past expectations.

The volume of equally performing peers is increasing, swollen by actual performance rather than privilege.

The field of competitors is also expanding as young women with still existing YWHGP come on line.

Family formation considerations and pressures become pressing just as you are approach peak performance years (35-50).

The operational impact of having children in terms of time commitments (overtime capacity, sustained duration, adaptability, etc.) are far more consequential than anticipated.

If you are blind to YWHGP, unaware of the necessity for sustained, intense, and adaptive time commitments for peak career achievement, unaccustomed to thinking about hypergamous competition, and have a mis-calibrated sense of the connection between reward and performance, I can understand why you might be prone to a strong commitment to the ideology of victimhood and the existence of an evil patriarchy.

It doesn't make those things real but those five dynamics make it understandable why you might be susceptible to those ideological beliefs.

I have strongly overstated the argument in order to be clearer about its nature. In reality I suspect that there is a YWHGP premium that is greater than zero but also probably less than twenty percent. It doesn't especially matter what the premium is, just whether it exists. The smaller the premium, the smaller the effects but the effects remain real.