The Status of Men in A Woman’s World

The “Status of Men in A Woman’s World”:

Educational, Legal, and Demographic Realities vs. Social Inertia, 2011

by Davd

If you’re considering marriage, and you realize there’s some risk the marriage won’t work out—even just because of how high divorce-rates have become—do you have more to fear as a man or as a woman? If you want your child to become successful in life—to be well-educated, “make good money”, and if there should be legal trouble, “come out the winner”—are your chances better with a girl or a boy?¹ If you are a child in school, is that school a friendlier place for you as a boy or as a girl? In a year’s time, what is the risk that you will suffer violence personally? or be charged with a crime you didn’t commit?

How many years can you expect to live?

Those are the kinds of questions whose answers indicate whether it’s “a man’s world” or “a woman’s world” today. The answers all indicate that it’s a woman’s world in 2011. Still, I’ve heard several times this year that someone “on the radio” thinks it’s a man’s world, and one basically good and sensible woman was outraged that I would dare to say women are advantaged.

Last spring, I took notes:

On May 6, 2010, several CBC Radio News broadcasts featured women’s organizations demonstrating on “Parliament Hill” in Ottawa, complaining that Canadian Federal Government funding for their programs was decreasing. Nothing was said about past or present mirror-image funding for men’s organizations—perhaps there is none. No one has hinted to me that, if there is any, there could be even a tenth as much as women’s organizations have received from Governments.

On May 26, several CBC Radio News broadcasts featured reductions in Canada’s teen pregnancy rate, crediting interest in school and career achievements as the reason more and more girls now take care not to become pregnant² . No reports of similar reductions in “social failure” rates among boys, were mentioned. Many reports of increased female and decreased male participation in university study and professional employment, have been published this century.

On June 2^nd, CBC Radio’s The Current interviewed former and present Board members of “Assisted Human Reproduction Canada”, and referred especially to the agency serving women, (not couples, not families, and a fortiori, not men.) Reproduction has become women’s business to the exclusion of men and even children.

The second and third stories contradict the “man’s world” basis for the demands made in the first. As the teen-pregnancy story hints, and the human-reproduction story states “by the way” but explicitly, efforts to improve the prospects of girls and young women have succeeded beyond equality to where, today, Canada is part, not of “a man’s world”, but a woman’s world in which it is advantageous to be born a girl rather than a boy. It has been a woman’s world in that sense for about a generation, perhaps longer; and today the girls born 25-30 years ago are the young women dominating university graduating classes and entrants to the professions. If there is “a man’s world” left on earth, Canada is not part of it, nor is the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, nor much of the European Union. (Since that’s approaching a long list, let me refer mostly to “the Nice countries” in the remainder of this essay.³

Statements alleging a “man’s world” might be out of date, they might refer to Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or warlord societies, or they might even be fraudulent efforts to secure further preferment for women based on past disadvantage that no longer exists in the present. In Canada, in other “Nice Countries”, such statements are one thing for sure: They are false. Today’s “nice world” favours women over men and girls over boys. Any appearance of male advantage in statistics represents social inertia.

Social inertia cannot be eliminated; but in the 1960s it was not always tolerated. Nathan Glazer (1964:34) wrote, and the “Moynihan report” (Anonymous, 1965) quoted, a historic demand which is impossible to meet both rapidly and gently: “The demand for economic equality is now not the demand for equal opportunities for the equally qualified: it is now the demand for equality of economic results… The demand for equality in education…has also become a demand for equality of results, of outcomes.” Such a demand can take two generations to meet (cf. Grant,1969: 115 et passim), even with substantial and concerted effort, and it is an impressive achievement for Feminism, that less than two generations after its resurgence in the 1960s, women now dominate university student and junior professional demographics.

Starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, programmes were put in effect in Canada and the United States, and in many other “Nice Countries”, to preferentially hire women especially in the salaried professions, and to enhance the success rates of girls in mathematics, science, trades, and other areas where boys had historically performed better. Many of these efforts were supported by men whose sons they would disadvantage!—though of course, many men who supported them had daughters, and some had only daughters, or more daughters than sons.

These efforts did bear fruit: Women outnumber men “handily” among young professionals and university students today. What they did not and could not do, is go back in time and change the early years of women who were already “grown up” by the 1970s; nor could they totally overcome “social inertia” (cf Grant, 1969: 115). The best indications of whether it is a man’s or a woman’s world today, are to be found in current student numbers and “grades”, in the work and pay of young adults, and in the legal treatment of the two genders, to the extent they are treated differently. Those indicators, as we shall see below, show that today’s girls and women are advantaged. Having more than caught-up in opportunities in less than two generations time, with substantial male help—will women now help men achieve equality?—when it is girls whose present advantages might have to be curtailed?

To say women and girls are advantaged is not to say all men or all boys are “at the bottom” Many men I know have good jobs. Many older men still benefit from workplace advantages they had 30-50 years ago—but young men and boys today have disadvantages instead. Framing social policy and conducting “affirmative action” as if it were the third quarter of the 20^th Century, even acting as if social inertia did not exist, acts to increase and entrench women’s and girls’ advantages⁴ and de facto, to treat male humans as an inferior gender (as “Black” humans were once treated for reasons of race.)

The disadvantages men are under today, affect us personally when we must be in competition or conflict with women. They also reduce our bargaining power in situations that contain elements of both cooperation and competition. Threats of divorce [or separation] and of departure to another university or professional firm, are more powerful made by a woman than made by a man, because of those advantages. When the salaried workplace and universities were to some extent a man’s world, say in 1955-1965, many individual women still succeeded; and today, many individual men still succeed. We say it’s a woman’s world because overall, women are the advantaged gender; and in so saying, we confront double standards and gender inequality rather than pretend they did not exist.

There may quite possibly exist “a man’s world” elsewhere on earth, at the same time it’s a Women’s World in the Nice Countries. China, Japan and Latin America have been called patriarchal in the past; native Christian missionaries in Asia, active and student, are pictured as mostly male (Yohannan, 2001); I don’t know enough about those regions of the planet to say if girls are becoming advantaged there or not. Buddhism is stricter on women than on men, I have read; and so, the surface story goes, is Islam⁵

Not so in the Nice countries today: Most of the advantages women enjoyed fifty years ago, when a “trade-off” balance existed⁶ —are still theirs. Most of the advantages men enjoyed fifty years ago are gone; and many are now reversed. One could say women remain privileged in the ways that became conventional by 1959, and men have lost the privileges they conventionally enjoyed back then. Sometimes, men’s past advantages have become disadvantages: This is particularly visible in educational and professional attainment among young adults.

Over-all, legally, “morally”, and statistically, men and boys are now the inferior or disadvantaged sex:

• It’s generally agreed that school is much more girl-friendly than boy-friendly;

• Girls greatly outnumber boys among university students⁷ ;

• Young women now have higher average salaries than young men in major American cities;

• In contests-at-law over custody of young children [neither babies-in-arms nor adolescents] mothers win nearly all, even when the children are boys;

• When a violent domestic conflict occurs [with about equal violence on both sides], the police usually arrest and jail the man while the woman is left in possession of the home.⁸

• In many places, if a woman accuses a man of sexual assault or harassment, the man has a burden of proof to bear rather than being “innocent until proven guilty”.

• Abortion is available to pregnant women on their own decision, and neither the sire nor the foetus has any rights in the matter. However,

• if a woman chooses to “have the baby”, she may require by law, that the putative sire pay her for the duration of the infant’s childhood [to age 18, 19, 20, 21, or in some cases past age 21.] In some cases documented by father’s advocate Jeremy Swanson, men have been required to pay support for children who have been proved by DNA analysis, not to be their offspring,

• yet, if there were another Titanic disaster (cf. Martin, 2011, Harlan and Pierce, 2011, Lord, 1955) women and children would be given first place in the life­boats; men, and boys in their late teens, would die in far higher percentages than women and children.

In the “Nice Countries”, some self-styled representatives of women may still claim to be disadvant­aged; but when the claims are tested against facts, they prove to be based on obsolete data or on “social inertia”—or on a crude application of the impossible⁹ criterion of equal “economic” outcomes for the whole population, ignoring both the superior outcomes enjoyed by girls and young women today and the legal advantages women have had for decades and never lost.

For a common example: If¹⁰ women now retiring do have smaller pensions on average than men now retiring, those pensions reflect incomes received before 1980 more than incomes received since 1990¹¹ . If women’s incomes average less than men’s, the averages probably include:

• many women who chose in 1960-75, not to be ambitious for income; and fewer men who saw wisdom in such choice;

• “career inertia” in the form of older women having entered the workforce later at lesser jobs and at jobs with less prospect for advancement;

• career interruption being commoner among women than among men, especially in age cohorts born before 1980;

• social inertia in the form of women choosing to be stay-home mothers when they can, and men choosing to be breadwinners, as their parents did before them.

When we look at such indications of fortune as university attendance¹² , gender-composition of recent entrants to the professions, salaries of big-city full-time workers, and double standards at law—well, it’s true that gender equality “isn’t”; but it’s not true that women are the less fortunate gender: Men are the disadvantaged among the under-30’s; and it is among the young that we see the present situation most clearly. Picture the situation twenty or thirty years hence, when today’s new professionals are leaders and today’s leaders have retired, when today’s schoolgirls are new profession­als and today’s university students are faculty and mid-career professionals. The demographics of a world where men are pervasively and visibly inferior in the best careers, and no longer merely among the young, are already to be foreseen between Grade 1 and age 35. Demographic projection is more valid than treating pay differences whose origins go back before 1965 as indicating present [dis]advantages.

The only logical inference I have noticed, which combines women’s advantages today and their greater prospective advantages in coming decades, with the demands of women’s organizations for continuing Government funding¹³ , is that the Feminists those organizations represent believe that gender equality is unfair to women—that they believe women deserve to earn and have more, and be treated better, than men.¹⁴ It’s high time and indeed long past due for women’s-interest activists to admit, publicly and repeatedly, that they have won more than equality already, and then either turn their lobbying skills to helping men catch-up; or else retire; or else confess that they want a women’s world to persist and that their efforts are not to catch women up but to keep men down.

Much more likely than heavy catch-up funding for men’s organizations and continuing funding for women’s, and more reasonably in a 21^st Century where affluence is ending, not increasing; here are some appropriate “things to happen”:

• Women’s-interest organizations publicly take pride in their achievements: In universities where far more students are girls than boys, in professions where far more new entrants are women than men, they could stand up and say “This university, this profession, is well on its way to becoming women’s territory, where men are very much the minority gender”;

• Women’s-interest organizations publicly renounce any further claims to “catch-up” funding;

• If women’s-interest organizations fail to do so, men’s-interest organizations publicly chide them for the failure;

• Women’s-interest organizations publicly state their positions on the question of gender equality: Is gender equality their goal [or at least, one of their major goals]? Or are they seeking to entrench women’s currently advantaged relative situation for future generations and future centuries? Not all women want a world in which they can’t find an equal man to socialize with!—nor where their sons are second-class human beings—but some seem to; and I doubt that all women’s-interest organiza­tions will take the same stance.

• Men’s-interest organizations publicly formulate catch-up plans for boys, preferably requiring little or no government subvention;

• Governments undertake legislative and regulatory reform to eliminate the current bias against men in cross-gender law enforcement;

• Governments publicly endorse as public policy, that the present disadvantage experienced by boys and young men, is inequitable; and that equal opportunity for all is the criterion by which legislation should be assessed;

• Social policy organizations and universities begin serious and well-designed research on the actual ambitions of boys, girls, men and women, so as to explicate the context of economic performance and legal treatment of citizens by gender;

• Social policy organizations and universities begin serious and well-designed research comparing the social condition of boys¹⁵ raised by still-married parents, custodian mothers, and custodian fathers,

• Social policy organizations and universities compile serious and well-designed research on the actual rates of violence by women in cross-gender encounters;

• The burdens of proof be made to apply equally to men and women, in criminal and civil law.

The above are some ways to make the woman’s world of 2011, more equal by the end of the decade. Today we live in a woman’s world that has been developing for at least a full generation of time; but not openly¹⁶ . Thus, merely acknowledging the favouritism enjoyed by women is one first step toward gender equality. If and when women’s-interest organizations in Nice countries allege male advantage in the year 2010, I can think of two logical interpretations: They are woefully behind-the-times, or they are fraudulent¹⁷ . If they claim special funding privileges while admitting male disadvantage, they are acknowledging that beyond gender equality, they want women’s present advantage to continue for generations, centuries, millennia. So are they living in the past, ignoring social inertia? are they fraudulent? and-or, are they scheming to hold women above men economically and legally for generations to come?

Whatever the case, and it may vary from one organization to another, there is no good reason to fund women’s organizations to redress inequalities that are years out of date. It is time, it is many years overdue, that men’s and boys’ disadvantaged situation be acknowledged and that legal, political, and social policies be based on today’s reality. It is a woman’s world in the Nice Countries; and the relevant questions now are such as:

• If present practises continue, what will society look like in 2020? in 2050?

• who works for gender equality in law and practice?

• who works for an openly gynocentric society?

• what are the wider social implications of a society holding men in general as “no-count”?¹⁸

• if men face pervasive inferiority legally and economically, how might we respond?

Men, let’s wake up to the fact that Nice is a four-letter word, that we have been Nicely “dismissed” from full adult standing, and that the least friendly of those Bossy Girls we remember from school have made the Nice rules we were taught there, false and abusive-to-us. Surely we can do better than play “Mother may I?” for the rest of our lives; and surely today’s boys should have better prospects than to suffer under present inequalities. The first step in “getting out from behind the 8-ball”, is to recognize and publicly admit we are currently, systematically disadvantaged—that we don’t have those advantages some women’s groups are complaining about, and women do have advantages which amount to double standards in their favour.

That acknowledged, we need colloquy: We need to share information, experience, and analysis. The changes in gender relations—social, economic, legal, and educational—since the 1950s have made many “gender arrangements” that suited the mid-20^thCentury, obsolete. What are the “gender arrangements” that enable us to make the best of our current predicament? and what “gender arrangements” should we formulate as goals for our sons and grandsons to enjoy? I may write about those questions in later essays; but the answers are for men in colloquy, not any one man¹⁹ , to choose.

References:

Anonymous, 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

Anonymous, 198x. Oral expressions of Feminist ideology, especially “The world would be a better place if there were no men in it”, and “We women deserve compensation for 3,000 years of oppression.” Thunder Bay, Ontario was the place where these expressions were heard most often and in most extreme form. A Saskatchewan Feminist, who had recently moved to Thunder Bay, remarked to me during these years that the Feminist organizations into which she moved from Saskatchewan were man-hating while she herself was more of the attitude of Elaine Morgan [1973, cited below]

“Archivist”, 2010. “How to avoid a false rape claim”. False Rape Society website, December 10.

“Archivist”, 2011 “Obama Administration Risks Holding Innocent College Men Responsible for Rapes They Didn’t Commit… ” False Rape Society website, April 12, 13.

CBC Radio, 2010. News broadcasts featured women’s organizations demonstrating on “Parliament Hill” in Ottawa, complaining that Canadian Federal Government funding for their programs was decreasing. May 6.

———- News broadcasts featuring reductions in Canada’s teen pregnancy rate. May 26

———- Interviews with former and present Board members of “Assisted Human Reproduction Canada”. The Current, June 2.

Chastain, Connie, 2011. “The War on Women?” False Rape Society website, April 15.

Djilas, Milovan, 1957. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. NY: Praeger.

Glazer, Nathan 1964. “Negroes and Jews: The Challenge to Pluralism,” Commentary, December, pp. 29-34.

Grant, George, 1969. Technology and Empire. Toronto: Anansi & “The weight of tradition carries on in an established university for several generations, with the result that the curriculum may reflect the ideas of a class which is no longer dominant outside its walls.”[115]

Harlan, Pierce, 2011. “When Titanic Sank 99 Years Ago This Week, People Were More Honest About Gender Roles Than They Are Today”. The Spearhead, April 11.

Lord, Walter 1955. A Night to Remember. NY: Holt. Bantam Paperback 1963.

Lupri, Eugen, 2004. “Institutional Resistance to Acknowledging Intimate Male Abuse”, Paper presented at the Counter-Roundtable Conference on Domestic Violence, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, May 7

Martin, Davd, 2011. “Have Times Changed the Meaning of Self-Sacrifice?: AReflection on the 99^th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic.” Everyman website, April 13.

Morgan, Elaine 1973. The Descent of Woman. NY: Bantam.

Swanson, Jeremy, 2009-2010. E-mail anecdotes numbering in the hundreds, of cases of [1] differential law enforcement by gender; [2] differential reporting of criminal charges by gender; [3] differential treatment of divorcing spouses by gender.

Wikipedia entries, retrieved April 28, 2011: “Affirmative Action”, “Canadian Employment Equity Act”

Yohannan, K P, 2001. Revolution in World Missions. Carrolton, TX: gfa books (the publishing part of Rev. Yohannan’s organization, Gospel for Asia. This book is cited not as a classic nor unusually authoritative reference, but as an ordinarily credible one from a disciplined and successful source—which book happens to be in my library.)