Gender Equality: If It's Not A Two-Way Street, It's Not Equal (Part 1)

(Note: This is the first part of a two-part discussion.)

Gender equality is an issue that I, as a man who is motivated by men's emotional wellness, am very interested in, and there have been a wealth of articles and discussion, in both the feminist press and public media, about it in recent years. One of the problems with the nature of the discussion, though, is that far too often the terms of the dialogue have been solely about how females can gain equality with males, while ignoring how males can achieve parity with females. Readers may sit back from that statement and say "Well, yes, I can understand the first part, but what are you referring to in the second -- in what ways do men need to achieve parity with women? Aren't men in the dominant position in most, if not all, sectors of the society?"

And my answer is: yes, there are many ways in which women are treated as 'one-down' in the culture (as a feminist man, I'm only too aware of that), but there are also areas where men have fewer rights than women (which many self-defined feminist women ignore). In this week's blog, I want to look at the various areas of the society where in some cases men have the advantages, in others where women have the advantages. My objective is to display the ways in which those gender advantages are unequal and suggest approaches to gender equivalency that achieve actual equality (or equity, which I will discuss further) by noting that unless equality is a two-way street, it simply isn't equality.

Rights and Responsibilities

When discussing gender equality, it is important to define some terms. The Oxford American Dictionary defines equality as "the state of being equal, esp. in status, rights and opportunities." It defines equity as "the quality of being fair and impartial." In some areas of gender equivalency, equality is the more important feature, in others equity. Equality is focused on being 'the same as', whereas equity is about 'fairness' and 'functionality', even if the resultant effect of the fairness is unequal in a strict sense. For instance, in employment pay, we often refer to 'pay equity' in salaries, because since many job titles are not actually equal, what is focused upon is "given a difference in the kinds of jobs that men and women have, what would be a fair and impartial pay equivalence that a non-sexist observer would assign to those jobs."

Wrapped up in that discussion is also the issue of rights and responsibilities. If one gender has more rights than the other, then gender equality cannot be achieved; but, also, one must look at who has the greater responsibilities in a given situation. And there must be a determination about whether there is some balance between the rights acquired and the responsibilities being shouldered.

My personal concern, from a men's wellness perspective, is that much of feminist discourse in recent decades has been focused on how women can achieve more rights [equal or equivalent to that of men] without a concurrent acceptance of the responsibilities that men often shoulder along with those rights. (I will balance this discussion by also addressing areas where women have greater responsibilities than men, along with fewer rights. This is a complex issue and not one that can be dealt with in a short one week blog -- hence, the two-part nature of the discussion.)

Hence, equality is, from my perspective, about sharing rights and responsibilities. And, to emphasize my original point again, it is not simply an issue of women being equal to men, but also of men being equal to women.

Let me note at the outset that I see many areas of the society where the conditions I describe are changing, and changing in ways I find positive, but where they are currently unequal and imbalanced.

Equality in Healthcare

The first sector that I want to tackle is healthcare, as regards both physical and mental health. In this arena, there is a clear inequality, for both women and men.

Generally, more healthcare funding is spent on the physical healthcare needs of men than on those of women. As many feminist writers have pointed out, men are often chosen as the 'standard' by which treatments and medications are tested. Dosage amounts and levels, reactions to medications, and treatment plans are focused on males, with the results being assumed to being applicable to females. These writers have clearly shown how those results are often not applicable to the needs of women. Further, healthcare issues specific to females -- such as pregnancy, vaginal health and breast cancer -- tend to get less funding than physical healthcare funding for issues specific to males. While this is often quite true, it is also true that some physical issues specific to males, such as prostate problems, are often ignored in the healthcare funding cycles.

On the other hand, as I have pointed out in many of my blogs, when it comes to healthcare funding for mental health, the needs of men are assigned considerably less value than those of women. Mental health funding for females is significantly greater than that spent on males and, as a result, there are, by a wide margin, many more social service and mental health agencies focused on the emotional issues of women than of men. As I've noted, there are vastly more programs focused on female survivors of childhood sexual abuse than on male survivors, even though the actual number of sexual abuse survivors is very close in numbers (16% of male children vs. 20% of females).

Further, the societal 'concern' and awareness about sexual abuse is far greater and more widespread in relation to the issues faced by female survivors than issues faced by male survivors. In part, this is due to a cultural artifact that assumes that while we can talk about female victimization, the equivalence is not true of males. Males aren't 'supposed to be victims', and it is assumed that when males become chronological adults (over 21 years of age), they have the ability to 'face their issues without assistance', unlike females. Yet, clearly and unequivocally, given the greater preponderance of issues faced by males concerning suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, acting out emotional pain in a violent manner, etc., this is simply not accurate. Additionally, while there are programs available for adult female rape victims (again, an insufficient number of programs and those that exist are insufficiently funded), many rape programs either ignore male rape victims or have few resources devoted to their issues.

When the issue of domestic violence is considered, the number of services for female victims, while still insufficient in comparison to the number of women who need them, are vastly greater than those available to males. In fact, there are very few, if any, shelters devoted to male victims, even though males and females, in heterosexual relationships, share 50% each of the number of perpetrators of domestic violence [for more on this, see The Whole Truth About Domestic Violence, by Philip W. Cook, in Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies], and the shelter system ignores males who are victims of gay male-on-male domestic violence.

Next week, I will continue this discussion (in Part 2), focusing on employment, salaries, hiring, education, divorce outcomes/legal custody of children, alimony, childcare, and other areas where gender equivalency is unequal.