Almost everyone is aware of the
statistics-based morality on race and ethnicity: if any admired group does not
contain the correct proportion of African-Americans and Hispanics, bias can
reasonably be inferred.
The same bag of statistical assertions which
animated much appropriate (and some inappropriate) legal and social change has,
of course, migrated over to discussions of sex. The problem here is that there
are no real interesting biosocial differences between the races but there are
major discernible and definable differences between the sexes. So we have
incubated a new, prosperous and irritated industry of people scouring the
community looking for any departure from the 51% number of females in the
population to the workplace of, say, CEOs, professional hockey players, or lumberjacks.
Everyone from the President on down recites the mantra that women earn only 77
cents to the male dollar. However, a Dept of Labor report in 2010 concluded
unambiguously that the principal reason for economic difference was personal
choice – perhaps not a free choice but one made by persons in the economy. One
huge example: some 85% of women have children and the average mother tends to
leave the labor force for 5-8 years and is much more likely than a male to work
part-time. Both lead to reduced income. Add that males take the higher-paying
jobs such as commercial fishing, which are dangerous and lead to much higher
fatality and injury rates, and we begin to derive a picture different from the conventional
statistician’s view that if there’s a discrepancy it must be imposed not
chosen.
Now the statistical moralists have a problem
they are eager not to see: the perception that males are not doing well in the
system of education. Allie Grasgreen in Inside Higher Education reviews a book
published by the Russell Sage Foundation, certifying that women outpace men in
college action in a ratio of 1.4 to 1. Grasgreen delineates the conclusion of
the authors (Thomas diPrete and Claudia Buchmann) that there is inadequate
gender integration in higher ed and that males are unrealistic about what they
need do to become effective men. But there is also a cultural problem here: the
now conventional anti-male attitude on campus. I know from my own teaching
experience that the pervasiveness of this attitude, launched on the first day
of class with a stark rape seminar, causes males, especially of blue-collar
origin, to flee a community they quickly come to see as suffused with the gender-studies
rebuke of men now built into college life.
A consistent failure
of the school system is reflected in its failure to educate males and females
equally effectively. If the problem category were race or religion it would be
politically intolerable. But boys and men–no problem. Where, for example, is
the White House Council on Boys and Men, still non-existent years after the
nifty one on girls and women was proudly brandished? Presumably lost somewhere
in electoral politics and some dingy acceptance of payback for that vaunted
5000 years of patriarchy. We can do better.
Lionel Tiger is Darwin professor of
anthropology emeritus at Rutgers University and author of The Decline of Males and The Pursuit of Pleasure.
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