Editor’s Note:
I don’t usually wade into culture war debates. That’s not my lane.
But when a cultural moment intersects with a fundamental economic lie — one that erases the contributions of half the population — I have an obligation to speak up.
A recent Netflix documentary gave a platform to a worldview that is spreading fast, especially among young men. And at its core, that worldview gets the history of who built this country — and this world — dangerously wrong. Not just morally wrong. Economically wrong.
My new op-ed in TIME takes that argument head-on. Because the story we tell about who built society isn’t just a history lesson. It shapes who we invest in, who we reward, who we see as an asset to this economy and who we dismiss. Get that story wrong, and we leave trillions of dollars of human capital on the table — and millions of people behind with it.
That’s the argument I make in Capitalism for All, and it’s the argument I make here.
Read on.
— John Hope Bryant
At one point in Netflix’s new documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, one of its central figures, Justin Waller, who founded a construction company at the age of 24, looks out over the Miami skyline and declares that men “literally built society.”
The message is clear: men made the world; women did not.
That claim is not just offensive. It ignores history. It confuses who got the credit with who did the work. Women have always helped build society. They built it in ways the law often failed to recognize, the market often refused to reward, and history too often neglected to record. They built homes and businesses, schools and churches, communities and institutions. They raised children, stabilized families, sustained neighborhoods, started companies, led movements, and carried the invisible burdens that made the visible world possible.
And yes, they helped build the visible world too.
If the argument is about commerce, the numbers alone should end the debate: women own 14.2 million American businesses generating roughly $2.8 trillion in receipts. That is not symbolic participation. It is enterprise and risk-taking. It is wealth creation and building.
If the argument is about buildings themselves, the skyline itself gives the lie away. Women design buildings. Women develop projects. Women work in architecture, engineering, construction, finance, planning, and the civic systems that make cities possible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported about 1.2 million women working in the construction industry in 2020, roughly 1 in 10 workers. That is lower than it should be, but it is still millions of women literally helping build the country. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards says women are 27% of U.S. architects today, and more than 2 in 5 new architects are women, which means women are not only in the profession but increasingly shaping its future.
Read the complete story here at TIME.
John Hope Bryant — founder of Bryant Group Ventures, Operation HOPE, Inc, publisher of the Bryant Journal and author of his coming book Capitalism for All: Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America.
