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Today's Double Standard
We justify devoting vastly disproportionate amounts
of our tax dollars to African-Americans because of
their deficits: low achievement, low income, high
rates of crime, drug abuse, and AIDS,
We similarly justify disproportionate spending
on women. If women are not proportionately
represented in the boardroom and only earn 80 cents
on the dollar—even if it’s because, of
their own choice, they don’t want to work long
hours--advocacy groups, through their mouthpieces
in the media, decry the situation and promulgate an
endless series of efforts to help women, usually at
the expense of men.
So, it would only seem fair that when men have a
deficit, they get disproportionate attention.
What’s that deficit? A crucial one: how long
they live. Men die six years sooner than women.
There are more than four widows for every
widower!
So, it would only seem fair that more health
research and health education dollars be spent on
men than on women. Yet in the budget of every
federal health agency, more money is spent on
women’s health than on men’s. There are
seven federal health agencies specifically for
women. Not one for men. 39 of the 50 states have an
office of women’s health, only six have one
for men. A search of more than 3,000 medical
journals listed in Index Medicus found that 23
articles were written on women’s health for
each one written on men’s. Although a woman is
only 14 percent more likely to die from breast
cancer than a man is from prostate cancer, funding
for breast cancer research is 660 percent greater
than funding for prostate cancer research. Even the
post office has gotten into the act: there is only
one disease for which you can buy a postage stamp
and the profits will go to research to cure the
disease: breast cancer, even though heart disease
kills millions more men prematurely. !
Before the age of 65, men die of heart attacks
at three times the rate of women.
The bias against men is not limited to
government-funded efforts. Even though men die
younger, and men’s last decade is spent in
worse health than women’s, most media and
private sector attention goes to women’s
health: features on menopause on CNN, articles on
osteoporosis in the Kaiser Permanente newsletter,
and nonstop corporate-sponsored fundraisers for
breast cancer: runs for breast cancer, walks for
breast cancer, even go to an A’s game for
breast cancer. Baseball, a game played by and
watched primarily by men, has a Breast Cancer Day,
but not a Heart Attack Day, even though millions
more people—primarily men—die prematurely
of heart disease. Yet when the media pays attention
to heart disease, most of it is focused on women,
even though women get heart disease long after the
average man is dead.
Feminists and other liberals offer excuses such
as, “Men got most of the research money in the
past. Let’s even the score.” The
implication is that researchers were only
interested in making men healthy. The real reason
men were overrepresented among medical research
subjects was because few women would volunteer for
the often dangerous trials. As a result, most
research was done on volunteers from prison or the
military, the vast majority of whom were men. And
did men inadvertently benefit? Men still live six
years shorter than women, a gap that, over the past
four decades, has decreased by just one year.
Another feminist excuse for the underspending on
men’s health is, “Men just need to
organize like we women do.” I don’t hear
women making that argument to other groups. Could
you imagine feminists responding to
African-Americans’ concerns about lack of
funding with, “Blacks just need to organize
like we women do?”
Most often, feminists and other liberals justify
underspending on men’s health by blaming men
themselves for their early demise: “If they
only saw their doctor more often.” Fact is,
far more potent than doctor visits in staving off
the major killers (cardiovascular disease, cancer,
and diabetes) are avoiding overweight and not
smoking. Yet women, not men, have higher rates of
obesity and smoking. Despite that, I don’t
hear feminists or liberals saying, “It’s
women’s own fault. Let’s not fund
research on women and heart disease, cancer, and
diabetes.” They want ever more money spent on
women’s health. Nor do liberals say,
“AIDS is caused by careless behavior so we
shouldn’t spend money on AIDS.”
Only when straight men are involved, do the
liberals sound like conservatives, telling men to
pull themselves up by the bootstraps. With women,
gays and minorities, the message is, “It takes
a village.”
A fair society cannot have it both ways. It
either needs to decide to allocate resources based
on deficits or spend in proportion to the
population: men 49% and women 51%, minorities 25%
and whites 75%, heterosexuals 98% and homosexuals
2%. A double standard that hurts straight men is
grossly unfair.
© 2010, 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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