Smart, Active Boys: Our Most Underserved Students
Saving Our Young Men
In Defense of Men
The Problem With Boys
The New Double Standard
Why Men Earn More
Why So Few Women Are in the Boardroom
Men's Career Issues
Angry White Boy
Should We Pay More Attention to Men's Health?
Lessons I Learned From My Father, Lessons I'd Teach My Child
Women's advocates have created "Pay Equity Day." They say that women essentially work for free until April 19th because they earn less than men for the same work.
When I was on the Board of N.O.W. in New York City, I protested the apparent discrimination. Then one day I asked myself, “If an employer has to pay a man a dollar for the same work a woman would do for seventy cents, why would anyone hire a man?” And if it were due to male bosses undervaluing women, wouldn’t an all-female business soon put a male-dominated one out of business?
With two teenage daughters about to enter the workplace, I began investigating. I discovered women who own their own businesses earn only 49% of male business owners. So it wasn’t male bosses holding women back.
What does? The answer surprises. When the Rochester Institute of Technology surveyed business owners, they discovered money was the primary motivator for only 29% of the women, vs. 76% of the men.
After three years of research for my new book, Why Men Earn More, I discovered this difference in goals to be only one of twenty-five differences in men and women’s work-life choices. All 25 differences lead to men earning more money, but to women having better lives. (Since real power is about having a better life, well, once again, the women have outsmarted us!)
High pay, as it turns out, is about trade-offs. Men’s trade-offs include working more hours (women work more at home); taking more-hazardous, dirtier, and outdoor jobs (garbage collecting; construction; trucking); relocating and traveling; and training for more-technical jobs with less people contact (e.g., engineering).
Women’s choices balance income with a desire for fulfillment, safety, flexibility, shorter workweeks and proximity-to-home. These lifestyle advantages lead to more people competing for these jobs and thus lower pay.
There are other clues that when women earn less it's much less about discrimination than about the choices women make?
Women who have never been married and never had children earn 117% of their male counterparts. How could that be? When men have never been married nor had children, they take more fulfilling jobs and work fewer hours.
Don’t women earn less than men with the same job—such as doctors? Yes, but we're not comparing apples with apples. For example, with doctors, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) lumps physicians and surgeons together. Men are more likely to be surgeons, working hours that are longer, more stressful, and less predictable, in private practice, for more years. When all factors are considered, women earn the same or more than men!. My empirical experience bears this out. When I taught at the School of Medicine at the University of California in San Diego, I saw that my female students, far more often than males, demanding shorter, more predictable hours .
But don’t female executives make less than male executives? Yes. Because of discrimination? No. For starters, women are 15 times more likely to become female executives prior to the age of 40. So the female executive has fewer years of experience. The men are more frequently executives of larger national and international firms with more personnel and revenues, and responsible for bottom-line sales, marketing and finances, not human resources or PR. Comparing men and women with the “same jobs,” then, is still to compare apples and oranges.
The great news for women is that when everything is really the same—all 25 choices--then women make more than men. And those 25 choices are a roadmap for women, whether to higher pay, a better life, or a personally tailored combination.
Are there fields in which women can, say, travel less or work fewer hours, and still earn more than men? Yes. Some 80 fields, such as financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, funeral service worker, motion picture projectionist.... How much more? Female engineers who sell their company’s product make 143% of their male counterparts; female statisticians,135%. Go figure.
If money is the goal, what are the two most important of the 25 choices? First, choice of field (e.g., engineering and computers rather than arts). Second, hours worked. People who work 44 hours a week make almost twice the pay of someone working 34 hours a week.
Is there discrimination against women? Yes. For example, the old boys’ network. But there is great discrimination against men. In hazardous fields, women suffer fewer hazards. For example, over 400 Marines have been killed in the War in Iraq. All men. (Imagine if only female Marines had died.) In other fields, men are virtually excluded—try getting hired as a male dental hygienist, nursery school teacher, cocktail waiter, or selling clothing at Wal-Mart. Thousands of these opportunities for women were invisible to me until I stopped focusing my binoculars on discrimination against women and focused instead on opportunities for my daughters.
The discovery of these opportunities made me wonder: Perhaps, instead of women protesting lack of equity in pay, men should be protesting lack of quality in life.
Q&A / WARREN FARRELL, author: The flip side of feminism
A new book asks whether lifting women up means taking men down
By Maureen Downey
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/21/07
Warren
Farrell is a leader in the men's movement who contends that the culture
cares more about saving whales than males. James Sterba is a University
of Notre Dame philosophy professor who believes that the feminist ideal
of equality has yet to be realized but remains a moral imperative.
The two face off in a provocative new book called "Does Feminism
Discriminate Against Men?" While the book is aimed at students of
gender studies, most women and men can relate to the topics it
discusses, from who does more housework to who gets custody of the kids
in divorce.
The book is more a friendly skirmish than a war, with both men
agreeing that discrimination based on gender is wrong. They disagree
strongly, however, over which gender suffers the greater discrimination
today.
In a telephone interview with editorial writer Maureen Downey -- who
admits to siding far more with Sterba's position -- Farrell shares his
views on the gender divide.
Q: In questioning women's assigned roles, didn't the feminist
movement also question men's fixed roles? You seem to argue that
feminism didn't try hard enough to answer those questions about men's
roles, but was that the responsibility of feminism?
A: Historically, we taught women to row, metaphorically, on the
right side of the boat, and men on the left. Fortunately, feminism
taught women how to row on both sides. Unfortunately, no one
re-socialized men to row on both sides. Until we do, we also limit
women's flexibility, because when women row on the left, if men can't
also row on the right, the boat goes in circles. And men and women are
in this boat together.
Q: You contend that one of the institutions whose sexism benefits
women is the military, because of male-only drafts and combat exclusion
of women. But can't these exclusions hurt women who choose the
military, since it's through combat that officers win the most
prestigious positions in the military?
A: First, if we registered only blacks, Jews or women for the draft,
we would immediately recognize that as racism, anti-Semitism, or
sexism. When we require only our sons to register, we call it
responsibility. Thus the U.S. Post Office's slogan to register our sons
is "A Man's Gotta do What a Man's Gotta Do"; our slogan for women is "A
Woman's Body, A Woman's Choice."
Women are the only group who get the right to vote without
responsibility. Only adolescents expect rights without
responsibilities. Adults know they go together.
Second, women are 14 percent of the military but only 2 percent of
those killed. Women get administrative and other jobs that are more
easily transferable to civilian life than is killing. They become
officers at equal rates to men. This protect-the-woman attitude is
reinforced by both sexes in all hazardous professions. However, this
protection of women also hurts women. It is hard to place women equally
at the very top of responsibility if we prevent women from equally
sharing the toughest responsibility: death.
Q: You maintain that men die younger than women and that it's really
men's health that's been ignored by the medical establishment. Yet
aren't most of the trials for new drugs in this country based on men's
heath conditions and metabolism?
A: Medical database searches show that during the past 40 years
women have been studied more than men. Prior to that, drug companies
tested new drugs more on men (especially male prisoners) for the same
reason they tested them more on rats. They tested them most on what
they valued least.
Q: You cite the 5.2-year advantage in life expectancy that women
have over men as your best example of discrimination against men in
health care. But aren't many of those early deaths among men due to
higher levels of smoking, drinking and car crashes?
A: Yes, speeding is a symptom of our approval for male risk-taking
behavior: We teach boys playing football to call abuse "glory"; we
teach girls to call the police. We are unaware that men who divorce are
10 times as likely to commit suicide as their wives; so we take the
children away from them, leaving them without purpose and leaving
children without dads. We still expect our successful men to repress
feelings rather than express feelings, yet success is still his best
preventive medicine for avoiding the cancer of female rejection.
Ignoring men's health is like ignoring global warming. We are all interconnected. When either sex wins, both sexes lose.
Q: You maintain that many date-rape policies on college campuses are
unfair to men, specifically those that say a rape can take place if a
woman is drunk and thus incapable of expressing unwillingness. Yet if a
man signed away his car or his home while drunk, would you say that he
should be held to that contract?
A: If a man signs a contract and he is drunk, contract law says he
should be held responsible. He made the decision to drink. But the real
question here is when a man and woman drink together, why is the woman
not held responsible for saying yes to sex and the man is? We either
hold them both responsible or we hold neither. More important, why are
we treating our daughters like children and treating our sons of the
same age like adults?
Q: If men are so powerless, why do they still dominate the nation's
critical institutions -- the U.S. Supreme Court, the Congress, the CEO
positions in most companies?
A: To me power is about control over one's life. I discovered that,
when women earn about $100,000 per year, they say, "I have enough
money; I need time -- for my family, friends, myself, to travel, and
for exercise." Men need to learn this from women. Psychologically, men
are about where women were in the 1950s. We need to help our sons
question the traditional male definition of power -- feeling obligated
to earn money someone else spends while he dies sooner. That's
powerlessness.
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