This year’s election results will revive discussion of the gender gap, not that it’s ever gone away. In a New York Times full-page discussion last Sunday of the coming chasm in gender-based voting results, Michael Sokolove posited a range of explanations for this enduring and intensifying phenomenon: Women vote for what they think is good for the entire society, men for what they think will be good for themselves; women for policies that enable nurturing, men for policies promoting competition; and so on. All entirely plausible, if not very surprising.

Sokolove notes in passing that there’s also a gap between men with college degrees and men without. What he doesn’t note is that this gap is bigger than the gap between the sexes. He does tell us that in the latest New York Times/Siena poll, just 42 percent of men backed Joe Biden, while fully 58 percent of women preferred Empathic Joe—a 16-percentage-point gap. In a late-September Washington Post/ABC News poll, which Sokolove also cites, Trump led Biden by 8 percentage points among white men with college degrees and 39 percentage points among white men without—a 31-percentage-point gap.

That gap demands its own explanations. It may be a function of the different media and sources that these classes rely on for their news—more broadly, of the widening divide between working-class and upper-middle-class lives. But something more fundamental, troubling, and remediable, I think, is in play here: the devaluation of non-professional and non-managerial work. More pointedly, the devaluation of manual labor and of people who work with their hands.

That’s not a new story. From the 18th century through the early 20th century, craftsmen (they were mainly men) resisted, often fiercely, their replacement by assembly lines and machines that could be operated by lesser-skilled labor. In the middle of the last century, by virtue of their fighting for and winning powerful unions, they at least secured adequate compensation for working on those lines or in those mills, compensation which for a time paid a wage that could support not just the male worker but, if he had one, his family. Now, those unions are gone, and the jobs that pay a family wage tend to require a college degree—and a lot of those don’t pay a family wage, either.

That tends to produce anger—as well it should. With considerable prompting from right-wing demagogues, however, that anger—not just in the U.S. but in most of the postindustrial world—is frequently misdirected at what many see as a feminized and multiracial culture, rather than at the financial powers that have made it so much harder to support their families. Facing daunting challenges to becoming a family breadwinner, some throw themselves into cultures of hypermasculinity. Where a hunting rifle once provided a sense of identity, now it takes an assault rifle.

There’s no easy remedy for this, and it’s sure not issuing an AK-47 to every growing boy. But revaluing manual labor must be the sine qua non of any real solution. Physicists refining string theory are all well and good, but when your pipes bust, what you really need is a plumber.