What now for men?

As readers may know, I have just been on vacation. On one sunny day in beautiful East Hampton, I was sitting on a street bench waiting for my companion (described in one comment by a reader of this blog as ‘my long-suffering wife’) and was watching a group of children who were playing on the pavement as they also waited. They were all probably around 8 to 10 years old. Two boys, rather big for their age, moved in on a rather pretty looking but smaller girl and started taunting her, calling her a ‘dwarf’ and pushing her once or twice. I was just contemplating whether I should intervene when the girl raised herself to her full (but not substantial) height, fixed her eyes on the boys in a steely gaze and said, ‘Imbeciles!’ I am certain the boys had no idea what the word meant, but they both suddenly backed off, looked sheepish, and sat down on the ground almost disoriented. I relaxed again. She didn’t need my help. In fact, what I had just witnessed seemed rather symbolic.

In a post I wrote about a year ago, I commented on the growing insecurity of men and asked what it might mean, in social terms. It is an ongoing issue, and today again we had confirmation of that in reports that girls are out-performing boys in Leaving Certificate results in almost all subjects. Nor is this a phenomenon typical for or unique to Ireland: similar trends are known to exist in the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Pakistan, and pretty much everywhere else.

Some commentators – wrongly, I believe – conclude that what this means is that the feminist agenda, or the policy to achieve equal opportunities for women, has gone too far and that men are now the disadvantaged. When we look at who occupies key positions of influence and power the picture is not much different from what it was 20 years ago; most corporate board rooms are overwhelmingly occupied by men, as are government ministries, religious prelatures, and so forth. The changes that have taken place have had their greatest effect at lower levels. But that is not to say that there isn’t a problem. It is clear that young males in particular are now disproportionately chronic under-achievers and as a result are often alienated from society; some of them drift into anti-social behaviour or worse, particularly in lower socio-economic groups.

There are a number of causes and so also a number of measures that should be taken. But one of the key reasons for this trend appears to be the lack of male role models for young boys in their formative years. Men are often not sufficiently visible in the home, as they are either excessively absent at work, or absent in bars and other such establishments. When children go to school, they will sometimes only ever experience women as teachers in their junior schools. These are trends we do need to take seriously and to try to reverse. Perhaps one place to start is to tackle student preferences regarding teacher training – we need to persuade more young men to think of a teaching career, so that there is a greater gender balance and more of a chance that boys will see that learning and intellectual achievement is not something peculiarly female and possibly ‘unmanly’. We need to do this urgently.

Concerns for the equality agenda in a recession

In the current recession, and with significant issues of funding hitting almost everything, new priorities quickly emerge and old ones can suffer. Monday’s edition of the London Times newspaper reported as follows:

Plans to axe new laws that would increase costs for businesses, including enhanced maternity leave and tougher equality legislation, are threatening to blow open a Cabinet rift over how Labour should respond to the economic downturn, The Times has learnt.

The proposals, outlined in the Queen’s Speech just two months ago, and championed by Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, are at risk after Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, and the Chancellor called for a moratorium on any measures that would add to the current financial pressure on businesses.

In Ireland, funding for the Equality Authority was reduced very significantly a few weeks ago, and as a result the Authority’s chief executive resigned. 

It is of course exceptionally difficult to undertake dramatic cuts to public expenditure while still maintaining strategic priorities. However, it is to be hoped that one of the casualties of the recession will not be the equal opportunity principle. As conditions worsen, it may be tempting to regard equality as a luxury, and some may even consider it a bureaucratic cost; but in the end equality of opportunity is what marks out a civilised society, and it is an ideal that should not be sacrificed. It may well be that its implementation should be monitored to ensure that it takes account of the tricky conditions in which many employers and other bodies now find themselves; but respect for people regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and other grounds should never be compromised.

No future for men?

When I first started to take a professional interest in gender equality – back in the 1970s – the agenda was very clear indeed. We had only just left behind us the idea that it was lawful to pay men and women different rates of pay for the same job (outlawed only in 1974) and the notion that you could reserve posts for men or for women (outlawed in 1977). There were still large female ghettos and areas of male exclusivity: nurses and secretaries were all women, while engineers, senior managers, priests, architects – and frankly any other groups that had leadership status – were all men. The equality agenda was simple enough: get rid of all that disadvantage for women.

Thirty years on, some things have changed dramatically, others have not. The areas of apartheid are still there, though not necessarily the same areas, and while the glass ceiling has been broken for some women, it remains for others. But what has really changed is that we no longer have a clear consensus as to what the equality agenda now is. Alongside what I might call ‘traditional’ feminist concerns (with significant continuing validity) are now the male concerns – about loss of status and self-esteem, lack of parental rights, juvenile male under-achievement, anti-social conduct, and so forth. What is creeping in is the notion that women are on their way to being the privileged group, with men standing on the fringes hurling beer bottles at them on a Saturday night. Journalists and public commentators have made whole careers out of the call to soothe and caress these broken men so that they might feel respected again.

So what does it all mean? It certainly is not the case that women are now everywhere in key leadership positions. When I meet the other six Irish university Presidents there isn’t a woman in the room. If I look not just at those in leading positions in industry, the public service and education, but also at those one level below who will be the next generation of leaders, women are still wholly under-represented, and there isn’t even a trend in the opposite direction. On the other hand it is true that young men are woefully under-achieving in education, and in some professions – legal practice, for example – the next generation of superstars will be women.

An interesting analysis of all this was contained in yesterday’s Sunday Times, in an article by Sarah Carey (‘Safer jobs for ladies, higher risks and rewards for men‘). If I am summarising her position correctly, she states that the solution to our problems is not to make special provision for men (of a kind that we never made for women), but that we should relax and let nature take its course; we are unlikely to end up with a female-dominated society and a male underclass.

I agree with her assessment, by and large. I don’t believe we should allow law and policy to follow a half-though-out ‘male liberation’ agenda. However, if there is a problem the key to its solution lies in the environment we create for young people of either gender. There is the business about role models, and the difficulty in motivating young males when only women appear to be tackling their upbringing and education. There is the absence of a proper infrastructure for youth leisure; where are all the youth clubs and other meeting places today, that in the past would have taken juvenile males off streets corners and parks at night?

But in the end we cannot engineer equality for men any more than we succeeded in doing it for women. And more particularly, we should stop imagining that female equality of opportunity is no longer a priority subject because it has been achieved.

 

Sarah Carey also pursues some of these issues in her blog.

Equality and diversity in universities

Twenty years ago I was asked by the Conference of University Personnel Administrators (which covers the UK and Ireland) to address their annual gathering then taking place in Dublin on the topic of equality. I told them that, in my view, universities were full of people with liberal credentials and a commitment to fairness and equality; and yet the evidence was that they were amongst the very worst organisations when it came to equal opportunities. This was not only because of unenlightened management, but also because individual academics often behaved in a way that made real equality almost impossible to achieve. So while academics working on discrimination and equality issues often focused on industry as the place where most change was needed, my argument was that in the case of universities we’re not that different after all.

Twenty years on, and what has changed? Some of the statistics are now better, though nothing to be excessively proud of. More women and members of minorities are making it into senior positions. In DCU for example, half the members of my senior management team are women, including the Deputy President. However, there is still plenty of evidence of a glass ceiling, and of a rather macho culture that tends to pervade the organisation at many levels. An equality audit commissioned by DCU a few years ago revealed a number of issues we have needed to address, while also indicating that at some levels we had made some progress.

There is a good deal of evidence that equality and diversity issues are still a major problem for society – although the problem is much more complex than we would have thought in the 1980s. So for example, we are facing a pattern of serious under-achievement by young males at school and in early adulthood, which may create both gender imbalances and also potentially serious social problems. This phenomenon must on the other hand be set alongside the absence of a sufficient number of women and members of ethnic and other minorities in leadership positions. How easy it will be to maintain a stable and just society in such circumstances is something we have not given enough attention to.

In the meantime, universities often maintain a working environment which is unnecessarily aggressive and intolerant – as academics are used to defending their positions in strong terms. This often produces a particularly stressful environment which is not conducive to diversity. Whether university managements always set the right tone could also be debated.

Equality and diversity are important not just because they are morally right, but also because they are efficient and generate a creative environment. Universities must seek to be role models in this agenda. We are not close to that yet.