This is, I hope, the first in a series of columns; an arcade if you will. Now, you may ask, why the title? or merely, why? Well, in part perhaps it is counter-reactionary to post-modern feminism.
Guilty as charged.
As someone who believes in equality in all its forms, I feel sometimes feminism (but not all feminists) can run counter to achieving this balance. So perhaps this is an attempt to provide a counterbalance to that.
I mean no disrespect to our esteemed TT Feminist Round-Upper, who regularly provides a veritable smorgasbord of food for thought and warmth for debate. Similarly I hope to fill this column with not only issues which may concern the unfairer(?) sex, but also broader issues of gender equality, and gender recognition.
Perhaps I should have called this column Post-modern Parity Person, and perhaps history (and readers in the present) will judge me for that decision. No matter.
In the podes.
Last week, I discovered via The Guardian a curious thing about Britain. Women are out-earning men. Not in all age groups, except for in Northern Ireland, or in all professions. But men seem to be more unemployed across the board, and there is certainly a general trend of women closing the gap where men are ahead, and women widening the gap where women are ahead.
The age where women start to earn less than men seems to correlate with starting a family, as apparently suggested by other studies comparing the income of women with and without children. Policy surrounding this area is still going back and forward in Australian Federal Parliament between the “minister for women” and the senate.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_385428.pdf
Much of the commentary still focuses on the areas where men are ahead. But some reasons for these revolutionary changes in favour of women have been bandied about.
One is the larger numbers of women in higher education which one may dub ‘women out-learning men’, something women are ahead in here in Australia as well, although here this hasn’t yet flowed on to women out-earning men.
This trend in education of course begs its own questions as to how much of it is women doing better, and suffering less discrimination, and how much of it is men doing worse, and if so what has changed for men? Are they less interested in furthering their education? Are they facing barriers, Or have they somehow become dumbed down?
Another reason proposed is that affirmative action has tipped the balance. If this is the case it would certainly explain the difference in Australia where quotas have generally been frowned upon as a real solution. We still like to think of ourselves as a meritocracy.
A third popular reason, is that people are employing young women (as the groups ahead in the UK in general are 20-39) because most executives are lecherous old men. I’m not sure which this idea does more disservice to, old men or young women.
Although I won’t deny it could very well be a possibility in some cases, I’m not sure that the same old caveman types are necessarily going to be putting what they see as merely eye candy into more highly paid positions of responsibility.
A fourth reason may be that women are seen as being more friendly and personable to clients or customers, this can certainly be a thing on occasion, and can lead to the assumption that men are not quite so much. The idea still abounds in the often-held assumption that men are by default less nurturing as primary caregivers.
It doesn’t seem that a great deal of analysis has been done of these quite broad, general statistics as yet, but it’s interesting the sort of possible reasons that are thrown about, and trying to think about why it is that things are quite different in Australia. Is it just that we’re further behind on this one, or are we also approaching our problems in different ways?
Man-slaughter
In the midst of the lively chit chat which arose ‘neath this story. One chap made the very excellent point that not all equality is good.
“Men die more often in workplace accidents or in battle” he related, and went on to remind all gathered that in general they just tend to die violent deaths more often, and asked if women would wish to be equal to men in that also. I think it was meant as rhetoric, not an invitation or a threat. The truth is that this is just historical inequality from the male perspective, and those men not willing to march into battle have been labelled as cowards by both men and women.
It might not happen quite so much here but I’d wager it still happens, and this insistence of not backing down can have profound implications not only in matters of life or death, but in everyday situations where the best route might be to compromise.
The debate over domestic violence and psychological abuse in Australia has included accusations of the downplaying of male victims, and questions over the legitimacy of the statistics used in the “1 in 3” campaign trying to draw attention to male victims of domestic violence.
I have heard the catch-cry that while men die more often, they die more often at the hands of other men. It might be a point, but it’s not a very good one. If we truly believe in human rights and equality, we should be trying to deal with violence in all its forms. No matter the perpetrators or the victims.
When you give violence a face and a name, you very soon start to blame something other than the problem itself. You start to blame the religion, or the race, or the gender, and while these may face crises at times, the core problem isn’t any of these. The problem is violence, we have a good clue about the different ways it starts, we’re pretty sure about how it gets passed on, there’s some quite good ideas about how to fix it, but damn if some of them aren’t expensive and time consuming. It’s easier to just go back to locking people up after the fact.
*Ben Cannon is a lapsed writer and musician originally from northwest Tasmania. He is presently living in Melbourne with … an adopted cat and the possum who may or may not reside somewhere in the roof and who has a penchant for apricot leaves. Ben is studying a Bachelor of Health Science in Naturopathy. He also enrolled in a gender studies unit once during his first attempt at higher education, and has heard about Germaine Greer.
• Chris Harries in Comments: Ben, you are brave writing this. Statistics generally are very lop sided. It’s a bald truth that men are the primary cause of wars and terrible domestic violence and women have been the predominant victims… and the last four decades of debate have attempted to redress the many imbalances that patriarchal power has brought about. And I’m totally on side with that movement. At the same time, I do get rather annoyed by any signs of smugness or reverse discrimination that happens from time to time and feel the need to point this out when it is apparent …
