Labor Day’s Glass Cellars and Women’s Wisdom

By Warren Farrell, Ph.D.

One American construction worker dies every workday hour.

For the past 40 years Labor Day has emphasized the celebration of a crucial change in the labor force-the addition of women. The first Labor Day after 9/11, though, reminds us that one aspect of the labor force has experienced no more change than the “Glass Ceiling.” That might be called the “Glass Cellar.”

When I did the research for a book called The Myth of Male Power I discovered a Glass Cellar that holds far more men than the Glass Ceiling. The Glass Cellar consists of the hazardous jobs and the worst jobs (minimum security, low pay, bad conditions). The hazardous jobs-or Death Professions-result in 93% of the people who are killed at work being men. Of the 25 professions that the Jobs Rated Almanac rates as the worse professions, 24 have in common the fact that they constitute 85% or more males (welders, roofers, etc.).

The Glass Cellar allows us to predict that virtually 100% of the firefighters and police officers who gave their lives at the World Trade Center would be men; that 100% of the recently trapped coal miners were men; that in the Gulf War, though men outnumbered women by 9 to 1, they were killed at a ratio of 27 to 1. Virtually no large office building or bridge is built without a man dying in its construction, whether as a coal miner, lumberjack, trucker, welder, roofer, or construction worker.

To this day, the more a profession is a “Death Profession,” the more it is comprised of men. This is not because women cannot do the job. Most women can drive a cab or a truck, but few apply. Driving a cab is slightly safer for a woman than a man, but still, few apply.

If affirmative action required women to share equally in the Glass Cellars, what would the impact be? If no home could be built that did not have 50% women participating not only in its direct construction (roofers, welders), but in its indirect construction (lumberjacks, coal miners, truckers), imagine what it would cost to get 50% of the people who are building our new homes to be women. The near-impossibility would lead to a short supply of housing. The cost of housing would soar. We would have to pay these professionals at first twice, then three or four times their current pay, until we attracted 50% female lumberjacks, coal miners, etc. We could expect to pay at least twice as much for a new home.

Why are men willing to die so cheaply? The psychology that perpetuates this Glass Cellar includes calling our firefighters and police officers “heroes.” “Heroes” comes from the Greek word “serow,” from which we get our words “servant” and “slave.”

We think of a hero as someone who has power. In fact, a servant and slave possess the psychology of disposability, not the psychology of power. Many men have learned to define power as “feeling obligated to earn money that someone else spends while he dies sooner.”

Real power is best defined as “control over our own lives.”

Why do we praise men as heroes when they compete to be disposable? Virtually all societies that have survived have done so by socializing men to be disposable.

The question to probe on Labor Day is whether the incentives and laws that produce male labor are producing the men most capable of loving. Often not. To be successful in war, or as a CEO, it helps to repress feelings, not to express feelings. But to be successful in love it helps to express feelings, not repress feelings. To be successful as a dad, it helps to be with children, but the Father’s Catch-22″has been to receive the love of his family by being away from the love of his family (whether at work or at war).

The more a man values himself the less he wants to die. To teach a man to value himself by dying– to give him promotions to risk death, to tell him he’s powerful, he’s a hero, he’s loved, he’s a “real man”– is to “bribe” a man to value himself more by valuing himself less.

It was part of our genetic heritage to socialize both sexes for disposability. Although women have complained they are not part of the glass ceiling, maybe it is because they possess a deeper wisdom– that working the 90 hours a week it takes to break through the Glass Ceiling looks too much like falling into the Glass Cellar.

Women have questioned their genetic heritage; men have not questioned theirs. The result is that women are still falling in love with a sex that is less well socialized to love. Is that good for our children’s genetic future?

***

Warren Farrell, Ph.D. is the author of the international bestsellers, The Myth of Male Power and Why Men Are The Way They Are, as well as Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say and Father and Child Reunion. He is the only man in the US ever elected three times to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City. He has taught at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and currently resides in Carlsbad, CA. He can be visited virtually at http://www.warrenfarrell.com.

From Drone Strike Policy to Campus Rape Awareness Campaigns: Musings on Male Culpability in the 21st Century

By Jason Garshfield | The Daily Nexus | February 25, 2013

On Tuesday, Feb. 19, two Nexus articles caught my eye. The first was titled “Campus, Community Groups Run Campaign Against Sexual Assault.” The second was a “Left Said” opinion piece on drone strikes. Although these two articles seem unrelated at first glance, a closer examination reveals a subtle and worrisome theme tying the two together.

In “Left Said,” Michael Dean wrote an article critical of American drone strikes in foreign countries. He criticized the racism implicit in our drone policy which allows the government to “reduce” the civilian death toll by writing off “combatants” as all young men killed by drones “who fit a certain phenotype” (i.e. who are Arabs).

But while Dean and others have pointed out the unwritten racism of such a policy, they fail to point out the written misandry. U.S. policy lists young men as combatants. Imagine, if you will, what would happen if it were to become known that U.S. policy called for killing women of military age. People would riot in the streets and drone strikes would be halted tomorrow.

What does the drone example teach us? Men are warriors and men are disposable. Even in 2013, we are still expected to die in wars. Just as the Selective Service Act requires all American young men to register for the draft, Pakistani young men are indirectly “drafted” by our foreign policy.

Drone policy also reveals our society’s presumption of male culpability. Men are guilty. This presumption is the reason why men receive longer prison sentences for the same crimes. It is why black men in the Jim Crow South could be lynched based solely on a white woman’s accusation of rape. It is why we can ignore male domestic violence victims, and dismiss male victims of crime by saying that “men committed the violence.” (Would we dare say the same thing about minorities or the poor?) And this ties into the second article, the one concerning sexual assault.

Just as young Pakistani men are seen as terrorists, young American men are seen as rapists. Of course, sexual violence is a very serious problem, and I do not believe that the people who are trying to stop it have anything other than the noblest intentions. But I worry that they may be doing more harm than good.

Take, for instance, the signs by the bike paths — the “excuses” used to justify rape. What exactly do these signs hope to accomplish? What good will it do to remind students of rape every day while biking to class? I doubt the signs will stop a single sexual assault, but they will constantly remind female students of their supposed vulnerability and powerlessness — while at the same time wagging a finger at male students, reminding us of our potential violence and criminality.

The article says that the signs are meant to “open up conversation on sexual violence,” so allow me to add an alternate perspective to the conversation. Do with it what you will.

One sign says, “She said no but meant yes.” The problem is, a 1988 study by Texas A&M University found that 39.3 percent of college women had at some point said “no” when they meant “yes.” Another excuse reads, “We were both so drunk.” This one is even more problematic; if we extend the definition of rape to include consensual sex while drunk, then I suspect the majority of Isla Vistans are guilty. And what if both the man and woman are drunk? Do they simultaneously rape each other? If the woman is not responsible for her actions while drunk, why should the man be? And, most importantly, does the woman feel raped? In many cases of consensual drunk sex, I would suspect that the answer is no.

In the words of Dr. Warren Farrell, “Laws against date rape with broad definitions are like 55-mile-per-hour speed limits — by making everyone a violator, they trivialize those who are real violators.”

American men do not live in the shadow of drones, but the principle is the same. We are the guilty ones. At the dawn of the 21st century, we live under a burden of original sin more subtle than anything the Church ever concocted.

Jason Garshfield is a first-year undeclared major.

The article appeared online only at dailynexus.com on Monday, February 25, 2013.

Men don’t have it all, either

By LZ Granderson | CNN.com | March 13, 2013

LZ Granderson

(CNN) — Can women have it all?

That seems to be the question of the moment.

And it is a rather ridiculous question if you ask me, because it implies that men have it all.

But we don’t. Not even close.

If we’re married, then we don’t have the freedoms that come with being single.

If we’re single, then we miss out on the comforts of marriage.

For every hour that is spent late at night in the office trying to make partner, there is another hour in which Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” creeps from being a song to being our biographies.

On average, men earn more money.

We hold most of the executive jobs.

We don’t get pregnant.

Believe me, I recognize the cultural and anatomical challenges and respect the sacrifices women make in order to balance family and a career, or family with no career, or career with no family. But constructing this entire conversation around the premise that men are exempt from this balancing act minimizes the role of fatherhood, discounts our stake in romantic relationships and blinds us all from this greater truth: No one who needs to work has it all.

Working women, know your value

Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte has fame, World Series rings and millions in the bank and he doesn’t have it all. The season is 162 games long — half of which is spent in hotels, away from his wife and children — and that doesn’t even include spring training. He’s been doing this since 1995. Imagine how many once-in-a-lifetime moments he has missed.

George Clooney has good looks, model girlfriends, fame and fortune, but no wife and kids to come home to.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey became a billionaire before 40, and worked 80-hour weeks to get there.

So, I don’t know where this notion of having it all in the workplace came from, but very few people with jobs have it.

Women may think men have it all, but only because we’ve been socialized to express the emotions that are tied to this reality differently, which is to say, men are not to express the emotions that are tied to it.

But that antiquated code of silence comes with a price, like not being home to see our newborn’s first steps. Not to mention how internalizing stress contributes to heart disease and depression and negatively affects our mortality.

As much as women worry about the affect maternity leave will have on their careers, so do men worry about taking paternity leave. America is the only first-world country that doesn’t have a mandatory paid family leave policy. That is why some working parents feel worried when they actually do take a leave.

Last year, the National Partnership for Women and Families found that only 14 states and the District of Columbia have laws that help new fathers and mothers who work in the private sector. Another 18 states only help new mothers or state employees. Considering how far behind the United States is compared to other developed nations with regards to parental leave, that’s shameful.

Instead of this fruitless debate about having it all, men and women should focus on what make us happy. Instead of comparing our lives with people we don’t know who are making sacrifices we don’t see, we should try to find the right balance between home and work life. It’s a very personal choice.

There is no way to physically always be there for your children and always be at the office and always be present for your significant other and then take care of yourself. The laws of physics necessitate that somebody or some thing is going to get the short end of the stick.

That’s why it’s more important for women to define their own sense of priorities instead of adhering to someone else’s. At the end of the day, they are the ones who have to live with the choices they make. Same for men.

Last summer Kirk Gibson, the manager for the Arizona Diamondbacks, raised some eyebrows when he decided to skip his son’s high school graduation in Michigan in order to spend more time at the office.

“You’re supposed to graduate,” he said after the game. ”His mom and the rest of the family will be there. He’s coming to see me next week.”

To some, what Gibson did wasn’t that big a deal.

To others, he was an ass.

To me, it’s just another example of men not having it all.

Chances are if Gibson was working in town he would have gone to his son’s graduation before it was time for him to head over to the baseball park. But he was 2,000 miles away and he had to make a choice. It’s not the one I would have made, but then again the work-life balance that Gibson needs in order to be happy is probably different from mine. I suspect the work-life balance that one woman needs for happiness is different from what another may require.

It’s personal, not universal.

“All” is mythical, not obtainable.

So, just because men have been conditioned not to express remorse (or many other emotions), doesn’t mean we don’t have any. The trick is to find the remorse you can live with.

The Pay Gap Is Not as Bad as You (and Sheryl Sandberg) Think

By Ruth Davis Konigsberg | Time Magazine | March 07, 2013 

It’s a galling and often cited statistic: women make 77 (or 81, or 82) cents to a man’s dollar. President Obama campaigned on it last year, announcing in an ad that “women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn’t just unfair — it hurts families.” Everyone from Lilly Ledbetter to Marlo Thomas has repeated it. And there it is on Page 6 of Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In:

Progress also remains equally sluggish when it comes to compensation. In 1970, American women were paid $.59 for every dollar their male counterparts made. By 2010, women had protested, fought and worked their butts off to raise that compensation to $.77 for every dollar men made.

Then Sandberg drops the topic of the pay gap altogether (although she later tackles raises and promotions). For someone writing a book on how women hold themselves back — “by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning forward” — this is a big missed opportunity. As it turns out, about two-thirds of that supposed pay gap can be attributed not to institutional discrimination but to choices that women make.* Here’s why:

Let’s first dispense with the fallacy that the pay-gap ratios so often cited are for women and men doing the same job. They are not. If they were, then a female marketing account manager making $77,000, while her male colleague with the same title and work experience makes $100,000, would have a very good case to sue her employers under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which protects men and women from sex discrimination in pay rates. The pay-gap ratios don’t even refer to men and women in the same occupation.

Take 77 cents to the dollar: that figure is actually the annual median earnings of women to men for 2010, based on data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The other figure you often hear, 81 cents to the dollar, is the average median weekly earnings of women to men for 2012, based on data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In both cases, the comparison is on an extremely broad level “that doesn’t account for differences in occupation, in experience level and a lot of other things that affect income,” says Tom Nardone, the associate commissioner for employment and unemployment statistics at the BLS, who makes a point of adding such a caveat in the second paragraph of a 91-page report on women’s earnings. ”We at statistical agencies try to be very careful about defining our data, but we can’t control how other people use the information.”

The weekly earnings data are for wage and salary workers only and do not include self-employed workers. That means most of them work more than 35 hours a week, which minimizes the difference in the number of hours men and women work in general. (Yes, men work more.) However, some argue that the annual earnings number would be more accurate because it includes bonuses and other types of compensation not captured in the weekly earnings. What kind of jobs get bonuses? Well, investment banking for one, where, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, women make up only 35% of all employees and 15% of executives and senior-level executives.

Which brings us to the bringing-it-on-ourselves part. Your occupation greatly dictates income, and women disproportionately enter low-paying fields such as teaching, nursing and social work. One could argue that those fields are low-paying because they’ve traditionally been occupied by women who were denied other career paths and were therefore devalued by society and in economic terms, but regardless, if we truly wanted to narrow the pay gap, women need to enter more lucrative fields.

To be able to do that, women must choose to study subjects that lead to more lucrative occupations — information technology or economics over art history, for example. But they are not. Amazingly, the percentage of undergraduate computing and information-science degrees earned by women has actually dropped from 37% in 1985 to 18% in 2009, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. No wonder the Labor Department also reports that from 2002 to 2012, the percentage of female programmers dropped from 25.6% to 20%.

If you control for things like college majors and occupations, the pay gap, or the discrepancy between men’s and women’s earnings that can be attributed to bias and discrimination, shrinks down to about one-third of its size. This is what the American Association of University Women determined when it surveyed male and female college graduates one year after graduation and found that, absent all explanatory variables, even including a graduate’s GPA and how selective their school was and how long they were unemployed after graduation, the women made 93% of what the men were making. In other words, 93 cents to the man’s dollar. Not 77 cents. Not 81 cents. Ninety-three cents.

Sandberg is absolutely right that women face internal as well as external barriers in reaching parity with men in the workplace. But one of those barriers may be misinterpreting statistics in such a way that we underestimate how much those external barriers are actually within our control to change.

_________________________

Here’s an example of a choice that Male Matters thinks perfectly illustrates why even in the same professions women average a lower income:

“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm

Raising a Son Within the Princess Culture

 Dresden Shumaker | February 25, 2013

 

I grew up the daughter of a feminist. Mom was always involved with local association of women chapters and always made sure I knew that girls could do ANYTHING.

I went to an all-girls school for grades 8, 9 and 10. Those were prime years for defining a sense of self. I was surrounded by teachers and staff that were empowering. I never once had a moment in my life where I paused and thought, “I can’t ____ because I am a girl.”

When I found out that I was going to have a son, I was so surprised. A boy? What?

Immediately, I had visions of this super-aggressive and dominant child. Isn’t that what they are? They are The Man. They are the ones oppressing women. And now I was going to have to parent one. No opportunity to continue the “girl power” culture that I loved so much.

But a funny thing happened when I met my son — I started to realize how destructive girl power can be to boys.

Let me be clear — I absolutely know that there is a need to make sure that girls and women know that what is between their legs should not limit them to achieve anything that their heart is guiding them towards.

But here is what I sadly realized: Within modern girl power, there seems to be a message that girls are better than boys. Boys are BAD. Boys are MEAN. Boys are silly, weak, stupid, clueless, rough.

There are also a lot of double standards when it comes to proclaiming, “girls can do anything!” I have seen parents celebrate that their daughters play with trucks or pick out boxers as underpants. Look! See! Nothing holding this girl back!

This sort of celebration does not happen when a boy picks up a doll or Dora undies.

The modern princess culture seems to be that you can wear a pink dress and still climb a tree. You can love to dance and twirl and still play baseball. You can wear a crown and overalls. I think this message is fine. And I agree with it. Kids — you can do it all!

Except the point isn’t “kids, you can do it all,” it is GIRLS can.

I have a son who lives within the princess culture. He has fallen in love with pink skirts. He likes to serve tea. He has been in awe of the transformative effects of makeup. He likes to have dolls drive his firetrucks. He most certainly has a meltdown when he sees that there are Dora pullups for girls but not for boys. (If the pullups didn’t have special absorption locations for front wee wees as opposed to middle wee wees, I would absolutely get him Dora pants.)

W loves music and rhythm, running around the track at school, reading stories to his animals, and being FIRST.

W’s favorite color is pink. W’s favorite sport is twirling. W’s favorite tv show is “Sofia the First” on Disney Jr.

He watches each episode multiple (MULTIPLE) times to the point that he can recite most of the dialogue. A week ago, he snuggled into me and proclaimed, “boys are not nice.” I asked him which boy and he told me ALL boys. All boys are not nice. They are mean.

He was right. In almost every “girl triumphs” story there is a slew of “mean boys.” Or there are boys that have to be told to be kind.

Disney Jr has an “I am a Princess” video that they play before and after the “Sofia” episodes. After the fifth viewing of this video, W let me know that boys cannot be princesses. I told him that he was right — princess is a title for girls and prince is a title for boys. I looped it into a familiar talk we have about how “mom” is usually for a woman parent and “dad” is usually for a man parent.

W proclaimed himself a prince and continued watching his show.

The “I am a Princess” video aired again and he stood up and got close to the TV. He started shaking his head. He told me, “I don’t see a prince! Why can’t they play too?”

I flubbed something incredibly absurd and said they were probably there — they were just getting a snack! Or MAYBE they are filming the princesses twirl and then they will take turns.

The funny thing is that I probably would not have raised an eyebrow at all over the princess video if I had a daughter. Watching my son watch the video is sad. It made me realize that we can do better. Boys are not better than girls and girls are not better than boys.

I am raising a feminist son in the sense that I want to make sure he knows that women and men can be and are equal. I have written before about chivalry — I believe it is a courtesy to extend to all. We don’t hold open the door for a woman just because she is a woman — we hold it open because we can and because it is the kind thing to do. We also hold the door open for men — because we can and because it is the kind thing to do.

I am curious what other parents of sons feel about girl power. Does it still have a place? Is there still a need?

Follow Dresden Shumaker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dresdenplaid

Shattering myths about male love and passion

Edge.com 2013

Helen Fisher

Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love

Men

Scientists and laymen have spent the last 50 years dispelling myths about women. I worry that journalists, academics and laymen will continue to perpetuate an equal number of myths about men. Annually in 2010, 2011 and 2012, I have conducted a national survey of singles, in collaboration with a US dating service. Together we designed a questionnaire with some 150 queries (many with up to 10 sub-questions) and polled over 5,000 single men and women. We did not sample the members of the dating site; instead we collected data on a national representative sample based on the US census. All were “never married,” divorced, widowed or separated; none were engaged, “living together” or in a serious relationship. Included were the appropriate number of blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals, rural, suburban and urban folks, and men and women from every age group (21 to 71+) and every region of the United States. These data paint a different portrait of men than do America’s chattering class.

Foremost, men are just about as eager to marry as women. In the 2011 sample, 68% of men in their 20s wanted to wed, along with 71% of women; and 43% of men (and 50% of women) hoped to have children. Journalists have suggested that men want children because they don’t have to change diapers. Moreover, men universally confront an intruding thief and men generally drive the family car through a raging blizzard. Men do their variety of childcare.

Men aren’t “players” either. When asked about their approach to dating, only 3% replied, “I would just like to date a lot of people.” Men are just as eager to find a partner; indeed, men find loneliness just as stressful. And men are far less picky in their search. In the 2011 sample, only 21% of men reported that they “must have” or find it “very important” to have a mate of their ethnic background (versus 31% of women); only 18% of men (as opposed to 28% of women) “must have” or find it “very important” to have a partner of the same religion; men are less interested in a partner of the same educational background and political affiliation; and 43% of men between ages 30-50 would make a commitment to a woman who was 10 or more years older. Women are the picky sex.

Men fall in love faster, too—perhaps because they are more visual. Men experience love at first sight more regularly; and men fall in love just as often. Indeed, men are just as physiologically passionate. When my colleagues and I have scanned men’s brains (using fMRI), we have found that they show just as much activity as women in neural regions linked with feelings of intense romantic love. Interestingly, in the 2011 sample, I also found that when men fall in love, they are faster to introduce their new partner to friends and parents, more eager to kiss in public, and want to “live together” sooner. Then, when they are settled in, men have more intimate conversations with their wives than women do with their husbands—because women have many of their intimate conversations with their girlfriends. Last, men are just as likely to believe you can stay married to the same person forever (76% of both sexes). And other data show that after a break up, men are 2.5 times more likely to kill themselves.

In fact, women seek more independence when in a committed relationship. Women want more personal space (women 77% vs men 56%); women are less eager to share their bank account (women 35% vs men 25%); women are more eager to have girl’s night out (women 66% vs men 47%); and women are more likely to want to vacation with their female buddies (women 12% vs men 8%).

Two questions in these annual surveys were particularly revealing: “Would you make a long term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but with whom you were not in love?” And “Would you make a long term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for, but to whom you did not feel sexually attracted?” Thirty-one percent of men were willing to form a partnership with a woman they were not in love with (as opposed to 23% of women). Men were also slightly more likely to enter a partnership with a woman they were not sexually attracted to (21% of men vs 18% of women). Men in their 20s were the most likely to forego romantic and sexual attraction to a mate; the least likely were women over 60!

Why would a young man forfeit romance and better sex to make a long term partnership? I suspect it’s the call of the wild. When a young man finds a good looking, healthy, popular, energetic, intelligent, humorous and charming mate, he might be predisposed to take this opportunity to breed—despite the passion he might have for another woman, one whom he knows he would never want to wed. And when the “almost right” woman comes along, the ancestral drive to pass on their DNA toward eternity trumps their sexual and romantic satisfaction with a less appropriate partner.

The sexes have much in common. When asked what they were looking for in a partnership, over 89% of men and women “must have” or find it “very important” to have a partner whom they can trust, someone in whom they can confide, and someone who treats them with respect. These three requirements top the list for both sexes in all years. Gone is the traditional need to marry someone from the “right” ethnic and religious background who will fit into the extended family. Marriage has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. Men, like women, are now turning away from traditional family customs, instead seeking companionship and self-fulfillment.

In the Iliad, Homer called love “magic to make the sanest man go mad.” This brain system lives in both sexes. And I believe we’ll make better partnerships if we embrace the facts: men love—just as powerfully as women.

Obama’s Missed Opportunity: A White House Council on Boys and Men

A Male Matters note: I don’t know if the good-intentioned Warren Farrell realizes it or not, but President Obama likely doesn’t see it as a missed opportunity. From the president’s view, to use even the smallest resource to help men is to fail to show complete and utter loyalty to women, the majority voters who sent him to the White House, then reelected him. I believe nothing will change until huge numbers of men find the courage to form a “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” march on Washington. Please don’t hold your breath waiting for “the fearless sex” to make that happen. See “Why so few men protest anti-male sexism (Or: Why men fear women)“

by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.

When Barack Obama became President, he immediately created a White House Council on Women and Girls. Shortly after, I got a call from the White House inquiring of my interest to be an adviser. I added to my enthusiasm the need for a White House Council on Boys and Men. To accomplish that, I created a multi-partisan coalition of 34 prominent thought leaders to discover whether the government had a valid role in transforming the boy crisis into our sons’ opportunities.

Our report met with interest at the White House—but three years of effort have resulted in nothing. This is a missed opportunity because as President Obama has been extremely sensitive to women’s issues, he’s acted as if boys and men who are not African American have no issues at all. Sensitivity to our sons and their dads is not only morally right; it is politically wise.

Notice more than the gravity of these issues for boys and men; notice how they would be addressed by different departments of the government, resulting in the likelihood that without a coordinating White House Council on Boys and Men that the left hand wouldn’t know what the right hand is doing…

Education—and Motivation

Most of us have heard the statistics regarding males going from 61% of college graduates to a projected 39%. But few of us know that our sons will be the first American generation to have less education than their dads. And the problem is not just education—it’s also motivation. We’ve heard about the impact of video games and video porn. But few know how plastics leaching into streams and lakes simulate estrogen and accelerate female maturity even as it retards male maturity.  For a president interested in our environment, overlooking this impact on virtually every family is egregious.

Emotional Health

Item: Boys’ suicide rate goes from equal to girls’ prior to adolescence to five times girls’ between 20 and 24.

Item: Among the elderly, men over 85 have a suicide rate 1300% higher than their female peers.

Adolescent male emotional challenges range from ADHD to violence, crime and the 5 D’s: depression, drinking, drugs, disobedience and delinquency.

Physical Health

Why has the male-female life expectancy gap grown from one year in 1920 to more than five years today? And why do boys and men die earlier than girls and women from nine of the 10 leading causes of death?

Fortunately, our daughters’ and mothers’  health challenges are addressed by seven federal offices of women’s health. Our sons’ and fathers’ are not addressed by a single federal office of men’s health.

“…[T]he mere suggestion that men need their own health bureau or that they must advocate for their rights like a victimized minority rankles some women’s health advocates, and some politicians are reluctant to take men’s health on as a cause, for fear of alienating women.” -Roni Rabin, The New York Times [Inserted by Male Matters]

Work

One of every five men 25 to 54 is not working. The areas of future job growth (e.g., health; education) are areas our daughters are preparing for; the areas for which uneducated boys have typically found jobs (e.g., manufacturing; agriculture; construction) are in decline. And the mostly-male jobs requiring more education are being outsourced overseas.

A White House Council on Boys and Men would examine the potential for restoring vocation to education, and for developing our sons’ (and daughters’) skills to match employers’ future needs. It can expand the concept of a “man’s work;” and study other countries’ successes. And when men do work, it can recommend ways to increase safety (92% of workplace deaths are men).

Solutions?

A White House Council on Boys and Men can coordinate potential solutions. For example…

Father Involvement

One out of three children in the U.S. live in father-absent homes, yet most of the above problems would be significantly addressed with one solution: father involvement. To say nothing of how the more fathers are involved, the more crime and poverty are defeated.

How do we get more father involvement? Take a look at how Sweden restructured its paternity leave so that 85% of its fathers would participate. And what about a male birth control pill? And educating boys in school as to their value as future dads? And…

In Conclusion

The latest articulation of the crisis facing boys and men is Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men. If our sons see the “end of men” as their future, they will have little inspiration for life’s journey.

With some help, we can transform the end of men to the beginning of men—of men as human beings rather than as human doings. In the past, we taught our sons to consider themselves “real men” if they made themselves disposable—disposable in war and in work. Being a “real man” and dead is a bit of a paradox.

Calling our sons heroes if they risked being disposable was often healthy for the society, but it is unhealthy for our sons.

The Council can provide leadership to sustain the respect for firefighters and soldiers that allows us to recruit protectors for our homes and country, even as we also encourage alternative paths to becoming a valued man. Leadership for the future must both question and honor traditional masculinity.

As our history of male-as-sole-breadwinner fades as downsizing and outsourcing burgeon, both sexes will need to be prepared to raise money and raise children. Our daughters have learned to do both; our sons have not.

A White House Council on Boys and Men can end the era of boys and men as a national afterthought. It can provide leadership to raise young men that our daughters are proud to love.

President Obama, you have daughters. You respect the family. You love our country. What are you waiting for?

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Dr. Warren Farrell has been chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world’s top 100 thought leaders. He is the only man ever elected three times to the Board of NOW in NYC.  His books are published in over 50 countries, and in 16 languages. They include two award-winning international best-sellers, Why Men Are The Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power. His forthcoming book, with John Gray, will be Boys to Men.

Dr. Farrell has taught in five disciplines, and been featured repeatedly in Forbes, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He currently chairs a coalition to create a White House Council on Boys and Men. Warren has two daughters, lives with his wife in Mill Valley, CA, and virtually at www.warrenfarrell.com.