Monday, October 25, 2010

Gender Equality: If It's Not A Two-Way Street, It's Not Equal (Part 2)

Note: This week's blog is the second part of what I had originally intended to be a two-part blog. But the more I write about the subject, I realize that even two parts are insufficient to address the issue. I have a lot to say about it, having studied gender relations, both personally and professionally, for 30 years, and having read a vast amount of books and articles on both women's and men's issues. Hence, while this is Part 2 of the Gender Equality blog, there will be many more 'parts' than the originally planned two parts. And I will probably intersperse the "Equality blogs" with other issues. So.... bear with me on this.


Readers may feel that I haven't as yet addressed what they consider to be 'equality issues' and while that may be true [even if I cover every issue I can think of], it is partly an issue of there being so much to say about gender equality and equity [or the lack thereof] -- from a men's wellness standpoint -- and a certain limit of what I can say each week [to keep the blogs within a rational length for enjoyment of reading).


Please read last week's blog for the first part, including some definitions of terms used.

Basic Issue of Socialization that makes 'Equality' Difficult

In American society, when females say they want equal relationships with men, there are some basic socialization patterns that tend to get in the way of the achievement of that equality. Females are socialized to seek male partners who are taller and stronger than themselves, earn more money and have greater economic assets, have more education, are willing to be more dominant in decision-making, are willing to physically defend them (and the children they mutually produce, if they have a family), and, to a fair degree, are willing to be proficient sexual lovers, more so than is expected of women. All of which creates a situation whereby desiring an 'equal' relationship is somewhat pre-weighted in an unequal direction. The very partner-seeking socialization (and the opposite is often true of males -- seeking partners who are shorter, earn less, etc.) predisposes an inherently non-equitable relationship. Of course, for females, in part this is due to a hope -- however forlorn in a worsening economy -- that women will be able to either stay home and care for children while being economically supported by a man who has a 'good salary' [an increasingly rare economic circumstance], or at least have a partner who earns more than they do, so that they can have the flexibility to spend more of their non-employment time caring for children.

Some of this is, thankfully, changing: in some segments of the society, women now have better pay than their partners (in about 25% of heterosexual marriages); more women than men are students in college and more women graduate from 4-year colleges than men; and at least some males are assuming a larger role in child-rearing, thereby, in part, balancing the rationale for the traditional female desire for an unequal economic arrangement. But for the majority of the population, these 'traditional socialization patterns' continue to hold true. And as a result, achieving economic and emotional parity in heterosexual dating and marriage relationships is problematic, at best.

In gay relationships, these patterns of course do not hold true. Women seeking female partners are not directly affected by male/female socialization patterns, though (and I am, quite admittedly, no authority on this subject) given that they are socialized in the same society as everyone else, they may replicate some of the patterns with their partners, though obviously within same sex variations. The same would hold true for gay males: being raised in a society with those socialization patterns and that combined with males generally tending to make greater salaries than women in equivalent jobs, their mating patterns would have to be affected by this inequitable partner-seeking pattern, though hopefully not to the same degree as heterosexual couples. While noting this, I need to continue my reading and research to find out how such socialization affects gay male and lesbian female couples -- and feedback, pertaining to this specific issue, from the gay and transgender readership of this blog, would be welcome (as it always is from anyone).

Equality in Heterosexual Dating Relationships

In point of fact, in heterosexual dating, women [even many self-identified feminist females] continue to expect men to pay for dates, or at least pick up the bill the greater portion of the time -- partly as a means of 'ascertaining whether this partner will be willing, down-the-road [assuming marriage becomes an option] to support a greater portion of the economic burden'. That this is inequitable is patently obvious, and I have explored this issue in much greater detail on the pages of the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website; there is no need to replicate that here. (For this much greater detail and extensive analysis, look under "Men's Emotional Wellness" on the left-sidebar of the MMWI website -- www.mmwi-stl.org -- for the articles are Equality of the Sexes, Equitable Dating and Equitable Sex.)

Economic Equality in Heterosexual Marriages

I read a statistic some years ago, in relation to the issue of pay equity, that noted, with a fair amount of distress, that women earn about 60% of the income that their husbands earn -- which struck me as sort of an odd statistic. Indeed, there is a basic inequity, between women and men, in salaries for equivalent jobs, and I recognize and am greatly bothered by this pay inequity (that women still earn about 77 cents for every dollar that men are paid). But females, on top of this [and partly because of this] are socialized to seek partners who make larger salaries than themselves; hence, of course their husbands would, a priori, make more income than the women. As Warren Farrell pointed out in Why Men Are The Way They Are, even the small percentage of professional class women who earn $100,000 a year and more tend to seek partners who earn even more than they do. In that economic class, there is hardly the question of 'having enough' -- depending, that is, on one's economic desires -- yet still women seek male partners with greater incomes.

As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out years ago in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, many men are getting tired of being treated as meal tickets and financial objects and want partners who earn salaries equivalent to them; but as she also stresses, this will only be possible with pay equity in salaries. Both as a feminist man and a man who understands the inequity of salaries, I believe it would be wonderful if women had access to equitable salaries. Many women are either single, single heads of households, or in lesbian relationships, and they are not tied into the whole "seeking a man who makes more money" pattern, either by choice or lack of finding what they consider a suitable partner. Plus, when pay equity is achieved (if it is ever achieved), more men will be able to have the option that most women have always had -- of 'marrying up' economically. (In an economy where men generally have greater salaries, as has been true for most of human history, women have 'married up' economically, whereas men have 'married down'.)

Equality in Education

As noted above, females, statistically, now earn more 4-year university degrees than males. While there have been a slew of articles hyping this as a major crisis in male equality, I personally agree with some of the feminist writers I have read who point out that it will still be quite a number of years before women in the workplace have college degree parity with males, due simply to the fact that, until recent years, men earned far more degrees than women. Of course, the additional problem, currently, is that many people, female or male, are finding that earning a college degree not only doesn't guarantee them employment (not that it ever did, but much more so now in this long-term recession), but that, as a result of the economic downturn, achieving college education parity in the workplace is going to take much longer than was previously anticipated.

And then, of course, we get back to pay equity. Even with those greater numbers of college degrees earned, and even with some reasonable chance at employment, many women still earn less than males in equivalent jobs. Sexism is alive and well in the marketplace.

Equality in Professional Employment

'Breaking the glass ceiling' in management circles continues to be a major issue for females. While some high profile women in management prove that it is possible to break that ceiling, for many females such a possibility remains elusive, at best.

On the other hand, employers have tended, in spite of extensive 'sensitivity and diversity training' in larger companies, to hire people who 'look and sound like themselves'. And this continues to be true even as females gain management positions. I have experienced this in social service and nonprofit employment -- which have been, historically, female-dominated professions. In many of the jobs I have applied for, if females constitute the management and hiring authorities, they tend, like males who were managers in the past, to favor the hiring of 'females just like themselves'. Many employment openings at which I, as an applicant, had much more extensive education and experience than female applicants, have nonetheless gone to females when the hiring personnel were also female. Of course it may have been, in part, due to age discrimination, pertaining to persons over 50 years of age (while officially outlawed, it is alive and well in the marketplace). The female applicants hired, even for management positions, were often one-third to one-half my age. And while, as an antiracism trainer, I am quite apprehensive about seeing this as a form of 'reverse discrimination' [which I feel is often misapplied and overused in situations where affirmative action still needs to be given greater credibility], I am aware of the potentiality of such situations being a form of inequality in hiring.

Yet, overall, in most employment sectors, I do strongly agree that women have less opportunities than men in hiring. And I am very much aware that employment inequality continues to be prevalent in the professional employment marketplace, mainly adversely affecting females.

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