I haven’t seen this talked about much although I’ve put the theory out there on occasion before, perhaps because we are such a post-feminist society

Basically in the past, say a family has a daughter and a son. They would put most investment in to the education for raising the son to be a breadwinner, and the daughter would be married to a male breadwinner of this kind.

Today, the same family “invests” the same amount roughly in to both the educations of the boy and girl, and they are brought up genderlessly to aspire after the same amount of income.

So, this has the effect of roughly cutting the investment in men’s education in half, and by women now having an income that they didn’t have before, roughly cuts their appreciation of the man’s income in half; in total, this means a man would have to work about 4x as hard to be attractive like a traditional man would be (cutting education in half, cutting women’s appreciation in half).

Mathematically in a way that just prices a lot of men out of being traditional men, through no fault of their own.

I suppose there are a lot of other more variables to consider, but I was curious if people agree with this analysis or what counter-arguments they may offer about it.