I love to read long essays in City Journal, the journal of the center-right Manhattan Institute. One of the biggest problems we’re facing as a society right now is the decline of marriage, and the resulting crisis of fatherlessness. The correct diagnosis is very unpopular, because it attacks feminism. Even traditional conservatives don’t want to see the truth. But City Journal gets it right.
Excerpt:
Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.
Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.
I went through kindergarten and public schools before going on to university and grad school. University was OK, but most of my teachers in public schools were women. It was pretty obvious that male students were being treated differently than female students:
The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males—a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.
Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
Women have been a majority of college graduates since 1982 and dominate by many other key measures.
I knew that the majority of health care spending is for women, but they have other advantages over men:
[Women] not only live longer than men but also benefit from a higher share of federal funding for medical research. They’re much less likely to be fatally injured on the job or commit suicide. They receive the lion’s share of Social Security and other entitlement payments (while men pay the lion’s share of taxes). They decide how to spend most of the family income. Women initiate most divorces and are much likelier to win custody of the children. While men are ahead in some ways—politicians love to denounce the “gender pay gap” and the “glass ceiling” supposedly limiting women—these disparities have been shown to be largely, if not entirely, due to personal preferences and choices, not discrimination.
Whenever I bring up women initiating most of the divorces, and the most common reason being “unhappiness”, the universal response I get from Christian traditional women is that women are forced to do this, because the men they freely chose have not changed into what the women wanted them to be. Also, I am told, women only divorce in order to save the children from having an unhappy mother. I wonder if these women have ever looked at the research about what fatherlessness does to children.
I talk to Christians about these issues, and the most common response is ignorance or disbelief. “How could men be victims of discrimination? If they were, I would have heard about it”.
Yet most people still believe in the “myth of pervasive misogyny,” as the social psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard concluded in Quillette after surveying the research literature on gender bias. Noting that a Google Scholar search for “misogyny” yielded 114,000 results, while a search for “misandry” yielded only 2,340, they write: “We suspect this difference in interest in misogyny over misandry reflects not the relative prevalence of each type of prejudice, but rather greater concern for the well-being of women than men. All of the arguments, anecdotes, and data forwarded to support the narrative that we live in an implacably misogynistic society, in fact, may be evidence of precisely the opposite.”
What’s the workplace like for men?
In 2016, the Australian national government launched a rigorous quest to combat its own misogyny. As part of its “Gender Equality Strategy,” it brought in Harvard economist Michael J. Hiscox to address a disparity in the government workforce: women held 59 percent of the jobs but only 49 percent of the executive positions.
[…]The experiment produced an “unintended consequence,” as the researchers ruefully noted in their report, “Going Blind to See More Clearly.” When managers evaluated a résumé with a female name like Wendy Richards, they were more likely to shortlist it than if they saw that same résumé with no name. And they were less likely to shortlist it if the name was Gary Richards. Australia’s public servants were clearly guilty of bias against men—and that was just fine with the architects of the Gender Equality Strategy.
But what about the so-called “gender pay gap”? Aren’t women earning less than men because of discrimination?
In the real world, a full-time female worker over 25 in America earns 84 cents for every dollar a male earns, but even equalitarian researchers acknowledge that this gap is not due to overt sexual discrimination (illegal since the Equal Pay Act of 1963). It’s due mainly to men choosing higher-paying professions, like coding, instead of, say, teaching, and to the “motherhood penalty.” There’s no significant gender gap between childless singles in their twenties, but once they become parents, mothers tend to reduce their hours, switch to a lower-paying job with more flexibility, or drop out of the workforce. To equalitarians, these differences are the result of systemic sexism: gender stereotypes that discourage girls from seeking high-paying jobs and saddle them with an unfair share of child-care responsibilities.
[…]On average, women care more about “work-life balance” and finding a job that seems personally and socially meaningful—typically, one in a comfortable environment that involves working with people rather than things. Men prioritize making money, so they’re willing to take less appealing jobs—work that’s tedious, outdoors, dirty, dangerous—with longer, less predictable hours. The gender pay gap among graduates of elite business schools is due in significant part to their job choices. The male MBAs are likelier to take jobs in finance and consulting, whereas the women tend to choose lower-paying industries that are less competitive and less risky.
What about in the dating world? Well, what we are seeing today when we look at data from different dating apps is that 80% of the women are focused on pursuing men with the top 20% best appearances. The best height, the best handsomeness, the best displayed wealth. Although women complain that men treat them poorly, what they mean is that the men they are attracted to treat them poorly. The men in the bottom 80% (of appearance) are invisible to them.
More:
Women still prefer winners. They’re the pickier sex—on Tinder, they’re much likelier to swipe left—and they’re especially picky when it comes to a partner’s income, education, and professional accomplishments, as researchers have found in analyses of mate preferences, activity on dating websites, and patterns of marriage and divorce. Most American women still want a man who makes at least as much as they do—and wealthier women are more determined than less affluent women to find someone with a successful career.
While some traditional attitudes about wives’ roles have shifted, husbands are still typically expected to be breadwinners. An American couple is more likely to divorce if the husband lacks a full-time job, but the wife’s employment status doesn’t affect the odds. Studies of divorce rates in dozens of other countries have confirmed this peril to unemployed men, which comedian Chris Rock has also observed: “Fellows, if you lose your job, you’re going to lose your woman. That’s right. She may not leave the day you lose it, but the countdown has begun.”
When I’ve raised concerns that I’ve read about in books like Warren Farrell’s “The Myth of Male Power” and Christina Hoff Sommers’s “The War Against Boys”, Stephen Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody” and Helen Reynolds “Men on Strike”, the response from pastors, parents and “traditional” Christian women has been almost universal. They don’t know, and they don’t care. (The lone exception was my Scottish friend Dina, who sadly passed away).
What about the decline in the marriage rate? Surely men are the cause of that, and women are the victims, right?
Both sexes have also been hurt by the misandrist excesses of the #MeToo movement. With a few exceptions—like the actress Amber Heard, successfully sued by her husband, Johnny Depp—women who wreck men’s reputations and careers with false accusations suffer few consequences in the media or the courts. Police and prosecutors have routinely refused to act, even in clear cases of perjury, as Bettina Arndt has documented. These injustices, along with the draconian punishments and policies imposed by the (mainly female) managers of human resources, have instilled fear in workplaces, stifling office romances (which, in the past, frequently led to marriage) as well as valuable professional relationships. Most women still want men to make the first move in courtship, but who wants to risk being reported to HR for subjecting a colleague to “unwanted attention”? Even a purely professional meeting in private is risky if something innocent gets misconstrued—or falsely described by a hostile colleague exploiting the believe-all-women bias.
There were a lot more interested studies quoted in the article. If you are male, or you know one, it’s worth checking out those studies. That way, you can talk about them, and maybe understand why men are making some of the decisions that we’re making.
WINTERY KNIGHT 