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In Defense of Men
What do the following people have in common:
Aristotle, Plato, Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci,
Beethoven, Monet, the Wright Brothers, Jonas Salk,
Steven Spielberg, 98% of the Nobel Prize Winners
for science, the key scientists behind the
development of every drug from aspirin to breast
cancer breakthrough Herceptin, from anesthetic to
heart bypass surgery, from refrigeration to
heating, from the electric light bulb to the radio,
the television, the computer, and the mapping of
human genome? They’re all men.
And in the five decades since the women’s
movement began, 97% of science, 92% of literature,
and 100% of economic Nobel Laureates still are
men.
Turning to the lower rungs of the work world, do
you want any of these jobs: Fumigator? Prison
guard? Coal miner? Steelworker? Sewer maintainer?
Neither do most women. Almost everyone who does
such grungy, dangerous, life-shortening work is a
man.
Yet today, men are falsely accused of so
much:
ACCUSATION: Catalyst and the National
Organization for Women complain than men have
erected a glass ceiling that causes women to earn
just 75 cents for every dollar men earn.
DEFENSE: According to an exhaustive analysis in
the new book by Dr. Warren Farrell, Why Men Earn
More (Amacom, 2005), when equating for job
difficulty, unpleasantness, hours per week worked,
years of experience, etc., women earn more than men
for the same work. Jobs as computer programmers pay
well but require never ending training in highly
technical material and long, deadline-driven days
cogitating at maximum in isolation. Few women are
willing to do that work, so 75 percent of
programmers are men. Jobs in sweltering, clanging,
carcinogenic iron foundries pay well, but few women
are willing to do that work. According to the Jobs
Rated Almanac, fewer than one percent(!) of
ironworkers are women. Jobs as CEOs pay very well
but require 60-hour workweeks and, usually, decades
of willingness to move themselves and their
families every few years to places like Birmingham,
Alabama or Bismarck, North Dakota to accept a
promotion. Based on my experience as career coach
to 1,500 female and 700 male professionals, many,
many fewer women than men are willing to do
that.
ACCUSATION: Men are too aggressive in the
workplace. They’re just not process-oriented
enough. “Men just don’t get it.”
DEFENSE: Women are allowed to make that
criticism. Yet imagine if a man said, “Women
are too process-oriented. They need to be more
aggressive.” That man would be immediately
censured.
And just imagine if a male employee asserted
that a female coworker’s overemotional
behavior is caused by pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS)
even though there’s a billion-dollar industry
selling products to women suffering from PMS.
Or even worse, imagine if a feminist overheard a
male manager saying,
“I prefer to hire men because they’re
less emotional most of the month and dramatically
so the rest of the time. I also prefer to hire men
because they devote more time to their careers.
More women want to work shorter hours so they can
have enough time for family, friends, and so on.
Yet another reason I like to hire men is that
women, on average, are more devious. Guys are more
direct; you’re more likely to know where you
stand.” Even though there is a reasonable
basis for that manager’s assertions, he would
be fired faster than you could say, “sex
discrimination.”
Yet if that same manager were to say, “I
prefer to hire women because they’re more
interpersonally sensitive and better team
builders,” that equally gender-generalizing
statement would likely be met, not with a lawsuit,
but with praise. There is a new double-standard.
People, the media, and the colleges can attack men
but not women.
ACCUSATION: We must focus more on women’s
health. After all, most medical research is done on
men.
DEFENSE: In decades past, more research was done
on men than on women, but that was not because of
sexism. Drugs companies didn’t want to use
women during childbearing years for fear of
liability if the woman got pregnant during the
study and the drug hurt the unborn child. Also,
men, on average, are bigger risk takers so more men
than women were willing to take the risk of being a
guinea pig. Nevertheless, in recent years, the
situation has completely changed. Dr. Farrell
searched Index Medicus, which indexes 3,000 medical
journals to find that there now are 23 articles on
women’s health for every one on men’s! In
addition, there are 15 federal agencies on
women’s health. None for men, despite the fact
that men’s health needs are profound: Men die
six years younger than women, leaving 4 widows for
every widower.
When women have a deficit—for example, that
there are fewer female engineers than
males--there’s a massive effort to encourage
math teachers to call on girls more, and many
college engineering programs have set up reverse
discrimination admission criteria to reject more
male applicants so they can accept more females.
But when men suffer even the ultimate
deficit—they die younger--it is ignored.
Worse, an ever higher percentage of attention
than ever is paid to women’s vs. men’s
health, which will increase the male-female death
gap further. In addition to the above
disproportionate attention to women’s health,
there are, for example, countless walks, runs, and
other fundraisers and TV awareness campaigns for
breast cancer. I rarely see one for sudden heart
attack, the leading cause of early death among men.
And men die younger of all 10 of the 10 leading
causes of death! Yet I get my phone bill and the
envelope bears a large pink ribbon. Inside,
there’s a pitch for breast cancer. I go to the
post office and there’s a big sign trumpeting
that profits from breast cancer stamps will go
toward breast cancer. I go to my Wells Fargo ATM
and I am greeted by a pink-ribbon breast cancer
screen. I even go to the Oakland A’s game, a
sport predominantly patronized by men, and they
announce Breast Cancer Day. Where’s the Sudden
Heart Attack Day? Men have a right to live too.
And let’s not forget that we send only men
into direct combat. Maybe Warren Farrell is right:
Today, despite all males’ contributions,
“men are the disposable sex.”
© 2007, Marty
Nemko
* * *
Marty
Nemko holds a PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is
the worklife columnist in the Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle and is the producer and host of Work With
Marty Nemko, heard Sundays at 11 on 91.7 FM in
(NPR, San Francisco), and worldwide on
www.martynemko.com
 .
400+ of his published writings are available free
on that website and is a co-editor of
Cool
Careers for Dummies.
and author of The All-in-One College Guide.
E-Mail.
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