Welmer

Some time ago, I read Steve Sailer’s theory concerning the disparity in rates of interracial marriage, i.e. why more black men marry white women than white men marry black women, and why more white men marry Asian women than Asian men marry white women. Sailer puts it down to biology, and, using his statistical expertise demonstrates that body fat percentages form a continuum from least in blacks to middle in whites, and then most in Asians. As in many of Sailer’s explanations, the numbers work out very well. However, I think there is something else going on that influences interracial marriage rates more than the simple matter of physique and body composition.

Although there are definitely physiological differences between the races, social differences have the most weight in matters such as marriage, divorce, family creation and lifestyle. In no race is there as sharp a divide between the genders in terms of educational achievement as there is between black women and black men. Among whites, the achievement gap has been growing for some time but is still significantly lower than it is in blacks, and in Asians the genders are nearly even.

Furthermore, we see that black men fare poorly compared to black women on a number of other indices, such as life expectancy, where black women outlive black men by seven years, while white women outlive white men by only five, and incarceration rates, where black men are imprisoned at six times the rate white men are, while black women are only 3.5 times more likely to be in custody than white females.

Divorce rates are also different by race, being highest among blacks, followed by whites and finally Asians, who have the lowest rate. In fact, black men have largely given up on the idea of marrying black women at all, it being such a risky proposition.

So if we look at the big picture, black men have it hardest compared to their women, while Asian men enjoy something closer to gender equality in terms of quality of life and opportunity. Whites, where women clearly have it better than their men, but not to the same degree as black women, are once again in the middle.

When one considers long-term interracial partnerships, there must be something more than simple physical attraction keeping people together. I would argue that for men, a woman from a culture or social class in which men are treated better than in their own has inherently attractive qualities. Black men who prefer white women will often say that they like the more feminine, less challenging attitude of white women (certainly this is changing rapidly). White men will say that they appreciate the fact that Asian women will often behave more like a traditional wife. Both black and white women deride their men when they make these choices, but it would be disingenuous to claim that they are acting irrationally.

On the other hand, women may appreciate being in a relationship with a man whose social class gives them a greater status and degree of authority than they would have in their own. The Asian wife of a white man may find herself enjoying the fact that her husband does not take her efforts for granted, and gives her a wider, more authoritative role in the family. The white woman with a black man, for her part, may revel in the unprecedented power she has over the family, which is characteristic of a woman’s place in black families, which have become so dominated by women that fathers are often absent, marginalized creatures, hounded by the law and driven out of the home.

So I would argue that in interracial marriages, people are behaving rationally according to their self-interest. This is really what skews the rates in favor of black men marrying white women and white men marrying Asian women. In each scenario, individuals of both genders are making choices that they perceive as enhancing their quality of life. Although it may not be great consolation for the black women and Asian men who have difficulty finding partners, they can at least be thankful that their status in their own particular social class is higher than it is for those of the same gender in others.

In any event, society is changing rapidly, as usual, and it is likely that the behavior of different racial groups will change in ways that create new norms, shattering the current trend.

I’ve read Whiskey‘s arguments that advertisers and media companies ignore men at their own peril, but I thought he might be overstating the situation somewhat. I’ll admit that I’m primarily a reader, so TV and film are kind of an afterthought to me — I don’t really know what’s going on in Hollywood. However, when I came across an article written by author and publisher Tom Matlack, co-publisher of the “Good Men Project,” my skepticism was put to rest.

According to Matlack, he took the Good Men Project, an anthology of essays about what it means to be an American man today, to 50 publishers, and was turned down by all of them before he and his business partner, James Houghton, finally decided to go ahead with the project themselves. This despite the fact that Matlack is a successful entrepreneur who has started over 30 media companies, including the Television Food Network, a weekly magazine that has 15 million subscribers. The publishers told him “guys don’t read” and that they were counting on celebrity books, i.e. standard female fare, to see them through the economic contraction. Matlack recounts seeing a positive review of an anthology written by women solely during menstruation that appeared in the New York Times Review of Books while he was struggling to find a publisher for his Good Men anthology.

Despite the wholesale rejection by the publishing industry, he went ahead with the project anyway, and soon found a great deal of interest from men around the country. Matlack states that he is motivated by a double mission: addressing the issues that concern men and demonstrating the new paradigm in book production and promotion. As someone with a great deal of interest in both subjects, I support him fully in his efforts.

Now, wholly disillusioned with the publishing industry, Matlack writes:

We realized that getting a book deal with a publisher who would take 85% of the royalties made no sense to our Foundation. Like a heavyweight fighter who finally woke up to realize Don King is a crook, we bet on ourselves and wondered what had taken us so long.

Perhaps as men wake up and begin to shrug off the weight of a system that has grown increasingly burdensome, we will see more and more examples of new business models, new art and new thought emerging from the cultural wasteland of contemporary media and popular culture.

Matlack’s revelation and other similar stories can give us some hope.

In the course of my foray into psychology, I decided to look into Carl Jung – who was mentored by Freud for some time – for some new material. From what little I have read so far, I have found Jung to be a very appealing thinker.

While conducting some online research, I happened across an article discovered by fellow-traveler Chuck Ross that he incorporated into one of his blog posts. Chuck has uncovered a very rich seam here (read the article online with free registration), as I will presently explain.

The article quotes Jung in its title, in which Jung says: “America [is] facing its most tragic moment. It will either master its mighty forces or be mastered by them.”

Jung expounds upon the theme of mastery, covering the struggle between different races, the elements, and finally the struggle between the sexes. It is the last to which he most conclusively attaches the epithet “tragedy.”

I was pleased to see that, as I proposed in my recent post on the “American Dilemma,” Jung also explains the American character as a result of its religious heritage:

They chose the greatest abstraction of all, the idea of God, and they sacrificed everything to that idea. Countries went down before it, families were broken up by it, armies were slaughtered in the attempt to learn to think of God, and your puritans, the Huguenots, and all those to whom the idea of God was greater than anything else, learned to think so well that they left their own homes, and you are the descendants of those people. An abstract thought is always ruthless. It is the most dangerous one to think, and the most marvellous.

Having established the character of the American people, he sets about diagnosing the ailment:

I study the individual to understand the race, and the race to understand the individual. I ask myself, What influence has the building of America had upon the American man and the American woman of today? I find that it is a good subject for the student of pschoanalysis.

There is only so much vital energy in any human being. We call that in our work the Libido. And I would say that the Libido of the American man is focused almost entirely upon his business, so that as a husband he is glad to have no responsibilities. He gives the complete direction of his family life over to his wife. This is what you call giving independence to the American woman. It is what I call the laziness of the American man. That is why he is so kind and polite in his home, and why he can fight so hard in his business. His real life is where his fight is. The lazy part of his life is where his family is.

The diagnosis is clear: America is the land of the Beta provider.

If Jung appears to be merging with Roissy here, just wait, it gets even better:

I made many observations on shipboard. I noticed that whenever the American husband spoke to his wife there was always a little melancholy note in his voice, as though he were not quite free: as though he were a boy talking to an older woman. he was always very polite and very kind, and paid her every respect. You could see that in her eyes he was not at all dangerous, and that she was not afraid of being mastered by him. But when anyone told him there was betting going on he would leave her, and his face became eager and full of desire, and his eyes would get very bright and his voice would get strong, and hard, and brutal.

Because this was written in 1912, the modern equivalent to the betting parlor would be the TV screen and a football game, where even docile, beta husbands will yell like barbarians.

The final passage of the article, which offers analysis and the cure, is startlingly prescient, predicting decades in advance the wholesale collapse of the American family. In fact, this final passage is so illuminating that I’ll transcribe the entire thing on my blog, so that readers who don’t have time to register with the NY Times Magazine can read it right here:

American Marriages Tragic

You believe, for instance, that American marriages are the happiest in the world. I say that they are the most tragic. I know this not only from my study of the people as a whole, but from my study of individuals who come to me. I find that the men and women are giving their vital energy to everything but the relation between themselves. In that relation all is confusion. The women are the mothers of their husbands as well as of their children, yet at the same time there is in them the old, old primitive desire to be possessed, to yield, to surrender. And there is nothing in the man for her to surrender to except his kindness, his courtesy, his generosity, his chivalry. His competitor, his rival in business must yield, but she need not.

There is no country in the world where women have to work so hard to attract men’s attention. There is in your Metropolitan Museum a bas-relief which shows the girls of Crete in one of their religious dances about their god in the form of a bull. These girls of 2,000 BC wear their hair in chignons; they have puffed sleeves; their corseted waists are very slender; they are dressed to show every line of their figures just as your women are dressing today.

At that time the reasons which made it necessary to attract men to themselves in this way had to do with the morals of their country. The women were desperate just as they are today, without knowing it. In Athens four or five hundred years before Christ there was even an epidemic of suicide among young girls, which was only brought to an end by the decision of the Areopagus that the next girl who did away with herself would be exhibited nude upon the streets of Athens. There were no more suicides. The judges of Athens understood sex psychology.

On Fifth Avenue I am constantly reminded of that bas-relief. All the women, by their dress, by the eagerness of their faces, by their walk, are trying to attract the tired men of their country. What they will do when they fail I can’t tell. It may be that then they will face themselves instead of running away from themselves, as they do now. Usually, men are more honest with themselves than women. But in this country your women have more leisure than men. Ideas run easily among them, are discussed in clubs, and so here it may be that they will be the first ones to ask if you are a happy country or unhappy. [Here Jung is clearly warning Americans that pent up sexual frustration will cause American women to effect potentially disastrous changes through activism]

It may be that you are going to produce a race which are human beings first, and men and women secondarily. It may be that you are going to create the real independent woman who knows she is independent, who feels the responsibility of her independence and, in time, will come to see that she must give up spontaneously those things which up to now she only allows to be taken from her when she pretends to be passive. Today the American woman is still confused. She wants independence, she wants to be free to do everything, to think everything, to say everything, to have all the opportunities which men have, and, at the same time, she wants to be mastered by man and to be possessed in the archaic way of Europe. [Today, since much of Europe has gone down the same beta American spiral, we find women turning to romance novels in which they are spirited away by sheikhs to some desert oasis]

You think your young girls marry European husbands because they are ambitious for titles. I say it is because, after all, they are not different from the European girls; they like the way European men make love, and they like to feel we are a little dangerous. They are not happy with their American husbands because they are not afraid of them. It is natural, even though it is archaic, for women to want to be afraid when they love [here's where Roissy's "shady character game" comes into play]. If they don’t want to be afraid then perhaps they are becoming truly independent, and you may be producing the real ‘new woman.’ But up to this time your American man isn’t ready for real independence in woman. He only wants to be the obedient son of his mother-wife. There is a great obligation laid upon the American people – that it shall face itself – that it shall admit its moment of tragedy in the present — admit that it has a great future only if it has courage to face itself.

The medicine Jung offers as a cure is as obvious as the diagnosis was: American men need to learn gender realism and game.

I have to admit that this article blew me away. I could hardly believe that I’d find a psychologist, ninety-seven years ago, offering the same advice we’re getting from the more lucid segments of the PUA community.

Carl Jung was something of an alpha male himself. He was married for over fifty years, and allegedly had a number of lovers on the side. I don’t doubt it. He also sends feminists into paroxysmal rages, which force them to write long, incoherent treatises on why and how Jung is wrong or should be “revised,” even as he attracts throngs of female admirers. I will certainly read more of Jung, but from what I have seen here, I believe it would be fair to call him the founding father of the theory of game.

Most readers have probably seen Hillary Clinton’s rude display of pique when an African had the gall to ask her what her husband, former President of the United States Bill Clinton, who is widely admired and respected throughout Africa, thought about foreign policy. Now, as you can hear in the clip, Hillary Clinton’s imperious, undiplomatic behavior is cast as righteous indignation over how Congolese women are treated. The newscaster even throws in a couple of submissive statements to his wife and female boss (they’re “always right”) before reporting on the excuse for Hillary’s little fit. Disgusting.

Of course, Congolese women have had it hard during the war, but what of the men? Have more women died? I seriously doubt it, but this is American feminism at work: the men don’t count. Even the young boys who have been pressed into service – some seized from classrooms – are largely ignored. So for the sake of her sisters, Clinton can get aggressive with male students who ask her questions she doesn’t like, or that appear to undermine her authority as The Most Important Woman in the World, and our press outlets can be counted on to offer only cringing platitudes to wives and female bosses as they bow and scrape to the feminist overlord.

Hillary Clinton is now in Liberia to support its first female president. We know nothing about the woman; in fact, I’d never heard of her before. Turns out there’s a good reason for that. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, has been named in the final report issued by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Committee as a political financier and supporter of the warlordism that has plagued the country for decades, displacing well over a million people. She is a former supporter of warlord Charles Taylor, and a key player in various insurrections. Because of these activities, the report recommends that she be barred from office for thirty years.

Imagine that. Hillary Clinton defends her rude behavior on the one hand by suggesting that she’s standing up for women’s (rather than human) rights in the Congo, and then promptly flies over to support a female warlord with the blood of thousands – many of whom were undoubtedly women – on her hands. The hypocrisy is brutal.

What this clearly demonstrates is that feminism isn’t about human rights at all, but rather power — especially for “big women” like Hillary Clinton and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. We should be thankful that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was sent to deal with the North Koreans instead of her. In a geopolitically crucial region such as Korea, where millions could vanish in the flash of atomic blasts, the last thing we need is a second-rate supporter of tin-pot despots calling the shots. Not that the North Koreans ever would have made a deal with her anyway — oddly, even they have proven themselves more diplomatic in person than Hillary.

If the new American foreign policy mission is promoting feminism, i.e. female dominance, let’s get that out in the open and argue its virtues here at home. Despite the fact that there are some serious moral issues with exporting any political ideology, we should at least figure out whether we approve of what our politicians would force on others. If not, there’s a good chance we’ll be making a lot of enemies and losing a lot of friends, and we have only to look at countries like North Korea to see why that’s a bad idea.

I’ve been looking into psychology a bit in my spare time, and of course one cannot leave out Freud in such a study. Although far less influential today than he was in the mid 20th century, Freud, by reputation and accomplishment, still stands over most others like a giant in the field. Therefore, I was somewhat amused and surprised to find that his views concerning some of his most fervent supporters – American women in particular – were far from favorable.

The following quote is especially revealing:

“American women are an anti-cultural phenomenon. They have nothing but conceit to make up for their sense of uselessness. You have a real rule of women in America. You young men go to college with girls, fall in love and marry at an age when the girls are usually much more mature than the men. They lead the men around by the nose, make fools of them, and the result is matriarchy. That is why marriage is so unsuccessful in America — that is why your divorce rate is so high. Your average American man approaches marriage without any experience at all. You wouldn’t expect a person to step up to an orchestra and play first fiddle without some training, but the American man steps into marriage without the least experience for so complicated a business. In Europe, things are different. Men take the lead. That is as it should be.”

–Sigmund Freud, 1934

In “Sigmund Freud” by Helen Walker Puner

Interesting, isn’t it, that the same issues we face now on a far larger scale were already considered a problem back in the early 20th century? I’ve been thinking about rereading Hemingway, that notorious masculinist of the Lost Generation, to get a better idea of what American men were going through at the time.

A couple of weeks ago, a Chinese friend of mine from Beijing was in town, and I spent a couple of evenings catching up with him. He’s an intelligent guy and a real gentleman. His main weakness is an obsession with golfing, but that’s no big deal to me, as this same tendency is very common in my own American family.

He goes by “Charlie” in English, which he speaks very well, having spent some five years studying here in the states. Charlie is what one might call a “junzi” — a Confucian gentleman. In terms of status, a junzi is essentially the Chinese version of a knight, but scholarly pursuits and cultural refinement are far more important than in the Western tradition. Of course, feudal China has been gone for sixty years, but just as in the West, old tradition continues to resonate throughout the modern culture.

As a man, my friend is an admirable person. He is far from what one might consider a brash “alpha male” here in the states, but he has a sensibility and self-confidence that give him a great deal of success with women in China, and I would dare say that these traits would serve him well here — if he cared for American women (he doesn’t).

This got me to thinking about the differences between Eastern and Western gender relations, and what it is about China, which is the cultural center of East Asia, that allows men to maintain a higher status relative to women than they do in Western cultures.

Before I single out China, I should note that China is not the only country in which men have a higher status than they do in the West — in fact, cultures derived from Northwest Europe are unique around the world for elevating their women while affording no special status to men. However, I know a lot more about China than I do about India, the Middle East, Persia and other non-Western civilizations, so that’s what I’ll stick to here.

The difference comes down to Confucianism, which is the philosophy that serves as the basis for Chinese civilization. Confucianism proposes that a proper hierarchical structure of human relationships in the temporal world is pleasing to God (called “Heaven” in most Chinese texts). In this structure, each individual has a proper place. Fathers are above sons, officials above the people, rulers above the officials, etc. Of course, husbands are explicitly above wives.

Confucianism specifies five primary relationships:

• Ruler to Subject
• Father to Son
• Husband to Wife
• Elder Brother to Younger Brother
• Friend to Friend

The only one that specifies the female place in relationships is that of husband to wife. Even friend to friend is about male camaraderie, such as that Confucius himself expresses from time to time in the Analects. A wife’s duty is to submit to her husband, and the husband’s duty is to treat his wife lovingly. This is a very simple arrangement, and similar to Christian ideals concerning marriage.

However, there are some big differences between Confucianism and Christianity, which is the most influential philosophical force in the West. Perhaps most importantly, Confucius does not profess to know the Word of God, but rather suggests that observing the laws of nature can give one a sense of Heaven’s intent. Therefore, there is no real concept of heresy in Confucian thought; however, impropriety takes on far greater significance than it does in Christianity. For example, failing to be virtuous and improperly following rituals can bring down the wrath of Heaven in the form of great disasters and social upheavals.

Christians may be equipped with the Word of God, but they are left to figure out hierarchy and order in the temporal world by themselves through clues in scripture and the structure of the early church. Part of the reason for this is that early Christians came from a marginalized community that had no real hope of ruling the state. To them, the order was clear: Rome rules, leaving their primary concern as the community’s relationship with God. Confucius, for his part, was speaking directly to rulers — he was explicitly trying to influence governance.

So today, when neither Christianity nor Confucius are officially canon, but both have a strong, essential influence on the civilizations they founded, we can find the most confusion in terms of hierarchy in places where the Word of God (i.e. divine authority) has the most weight in relation to concepts of temporal order (including ecclesiastical order). This is why Southern and Eastern Europe, with their respective Catholic and Orthodox sensibilities, have retained more of the traditional order than the parts of Europe and the United States most strongly influenced by the egalitariam Protestantism that democratized the Word of God, sweeping away whatever order may have existed in the barbarous marchlands of Northern Europe and settlements of Colonial America.

A further tendency to identify with the early Christians in Palestine through a common contempt for Rome tends to lend a strong iconoclastic streak to the American nature. This contempt for the conventional has been the source of much American progress – both moral and material – over the relatively brief existence of the American people, but it is also one of the sources of our present confusion in gender relations. America has repeatedly justified itself on divine authority despite a lack of consensus on how divine authority is to be interpreted, and even over what constitutes such authority. So one can see the strange phenomenon of Americans, even if they proclaim atheism, behaving as though there is some sort of irrefutable weight to their beliefs, which must be sanctioned by some force or the other (perhaps Darwin has become a spook?). Justifications through scripture have also become increasingly odd and divorced from reality, such as Governor Sanford’s attempt to use scripture to ameliorate his shameless adultery. Wouldn’t it have been better for him to simply say that he was only sating a hunger, reprehensible though his behavior may have been? No, not here; he had to make an attempt to sanctify it somehow.

It is this fragmented, febrile and often myopic interpretation of divine authority (how could it be otherwise?) that leads to an utter lack of consensus on propriety in American culture. In this bubbling cauldron of opinions and ideas, where every heresy has equal weight, there can be no lasting sense of order that sustains society. Rather, the survival of the state itself has become orthodoxy in America, and the impermanence, turnover and anarchy of society has become its corollary — or perhaps even the necessary ingredient of this orthodoxy.

We see the converse in Chinese civilization, where it is assumed that social order undergirds the state, and divine favor is granted through the preservation of that order. The state that fails to do so loses this favor, and is eventually crushed. So in China one gets the sense that the people and their customs survive and prevail despite the periodic failures of the state, whereas in America today it is taught that the state survives and prevails despite the periodic failures of the American people. This is really the essence of the term “propositional nation,” or “creedal nation.”

The current situation in America is not unprecedented — not even in China itself. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 saw social order turned on its head in China. Mao, in a bid to reestablish power following a temporary fall from grace in the early 1960s (resulting from the disasters of the Great Leap Forward), drew from his base – largely young devotees of his personality cult – and declared a state of perpetual revolution. Students as young as 12 denounced and disciplined teachers, and doctors and experts of all sorts were dragged from their professions for being counter-revolutionary and hauled before criticism committees, where they were slandered, humiliated and beaten. The inevitable result was the breakdown of China’s society, which had profound implications for millions of people whose lives were put on hold, or worse, for a decade.

Finally, in 1976 Mao’s death and the devastating Tangshan earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands, were widely seen as signs of divine disfavor, and the Chinese began to slowly return to tradition and the ancient social norms. Today, the Cultural Revolution is known as Mao’s greatest error, and seen as a great offense against the natural order of society. This, as I mentioned before, is the Chinese version of heresy.

Naturally, having been around for 2,200 years, unified China has seen many periods of dysfunctional government that eventually led to dynastic collapse, the most recent of which occurred less than a century ago. Like the current American state, Chinese governments have always done their best to survive, and in doing so have upset the natural order countless times. The fact that such a strong notion of tradition exists in China is testament to these repeated failures, which have tempered the Chinese people and civilization through periodic trials and tests.

Perhaps we Americans are on the verge of such a trial — we may even be in the midst of one today. When the state takes precedence over the people, it bends the people to suit its needs, and this is why we are observing such a radical departure from established norms. America’s national philosophy, which is still not fully formed, does not need to be done away with, but it is becoming clear at this point that adjustments must be made. Our radical individualism has taken us to a point where our country cannot hold together without the rigid system of law and regulation that stifles rather than promotes freedom. So we find that our lack of consensus and rejection of any common, unifying philosophy and spirituality has come to imprison us in a rigid institution that grants us all a cell of our own, but does not allow the uplifting and liberating experience of living in a true national community with a common purpose.

This is why we live in such contentious confusing times. It is why so many have no idea of, or appreciation for, their natural place in our world.

I’ve finally got time to blog again, but I bit off a big plug this time, and it’s taking me a while to finish the latest post. Hopefully, I’ll have it up this evening, and there will be some food for thought for men who are trying to figure out what’s gone wrong here in America.

I’m using China as a reference, because I think America and China have a lot in common and a lot to learn from each other. Of course, I have also studied Chinese society more than any other, so it is something I naturally turn to for understanding. It’s really not a bad place to go, considering the history of Chinese civilization, and its undeniable influence on the progress of civilization.

While I still have a great deal of faith in the American people (and I mean unreconstructed American people, not the new “anything goes” idea of what makes an American), I think it’s time we put a little more effort into cultural exploration. If America is to leave a legacy as potent as its current geopolitical might, it’s time for us to start putting a great deal of thought into figuring out what our nation is, and a study of other cultures and philosophies will go a long ways toward helping us see some universal truths. I’d like to give Justin, who runs the Religion News Blog, credit for his efforts in this genre. The importance of this field of study cannot be overlooked.

I think we are expansive, but still unique. We should attract the best, but preserve our own nature. This is a thin line to walk, but it can be done. Importantly, we ought to recognize that there is a common sense of right and wrong throughout humanity, and if we are open to this truth we will find that we are far from alone.

I haven’t been posting too much lately, but I have a pretty good excuse. I’ve got my kids for a couple weeks (ending on Friday), and at ages 3 and 4.5 they are a real handful. It never ceases to amaze me how they can just keep on going, and going and… Well, you get the point.

I think it’s important to recognize that raising small children is indeed a full-time job, and then some. Women who put all their effort into this noble vocation should be praised and highly valued. Furthermore, they should be strongly encouraged to do so in the bounds of marriage, because, to be quite frank, it’s far too much to ask from the majority of women to go it alone.

It’s always a joy to see kids happy, healthy, and energetic, but sometimes it sure feels like they’ll be sending you to an early grave with their relentless exuberance. Whatever the case, I’m very happy to have my kids under my roof for an extended period of time without having to go for days without seeing them, and they seem pretty happy to be with daddy.

However, when they go to mom’s place for a couple of weeks I’ll have a lot more time to sit, think, and produce some new content. But of course I’ll be sad when I don’t hear their little feet pattering into the kitchen for dinner, and I’ll miss reading them stories before bedtime. It’s a complicated thing, being a father.

Because there has been some discussion in the blogosphere lately concerning the role of women in the American workforce, which they are apparently coming to dominate, I thought a 2008 Financial Times (one of my favorite publications) article on women in software development and IT might be worth examining.

It starts out with a story of a talented girl, Emma McGrattan, who became a software company executive despite misgivings on the part of her father. These stories are often used as examples of how women are held back, but the fact is that Ms. McGrattan is one of a very few exceptions. Not only do fewer girls want to become engineers, fewer of them have the visuospatial and mathematical skills that are required in that field.

Nevertheless, concerted efforts are being made to push girls into engineering and development, extending to unabashed gender discrimination on the part of female employers:

“I’m always urging my human resources department to get me more resumés from women and encouraging my managers to bring their daughters into work,” says Siki Giunta, president and CEO of Managed Objects, the business service management software company. “We need to make young women understand the scope of this business and the excellent pay and promotion opportunities it has to offer, regardless of gender,” she says.

Some, it seems, are taking direct action. “If I see a man and a woman candidate who are equally qualified to take a role in my organisation, I’ll pick the woman every time,” says Daphna Steinmetz, chief innovation officer at Comverse (NASDAQ: CMVT – News) , the telecommunications software company. “Because I want to extend the opportunities I’ve enjoyed to other women.”

Despite their best efforts, most girls remain uninterested in becoming technology workers:

“I find news of such declines very sobering in light of the increasing influence of technology in all our lives and the fact that women make up half the working population. There’s a growing disconnect between who’s using technology and who’s delivering it and that needs to be addressed,” says Charmaine Eggberry, vice-president and managing director for EMEA at Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM – News) (RIM), developer and manufacturer of the BlackBerry.

The situation could get worse before it gets better, she warns. In a recent survey commissioned by her company, 90 per cent of young people of both sexes aged between 11 and 16 said they thought using technology was “cool” and regularly chatted with their friends about technology. Yet only 28 per cent of girls had considered a career in technology, compared with more than 52 per cent of boys.

Quel horreur! Fewer girls than boys are interested in machines and programming… What is the world coming to?

One might think that there has been a millennial conspiracy to keep females out these professions, despite their intimate involvement with the mechanics of running a household for all this time, which gave them ample opportunities to tinker with or invent machines of all sorts.

However, the article does get down to what the true goal is, and it is what a few of us have been chafing at for a while on this blog and others:

Women, she found, tend to demonstrate better bilateral brain involvement in listening – in combining left-brain thinking (logic, analysis and a concern for accuracy) with right-brain thinking (aesthetics, feeling and creativity) simultaneously. This ability, she says, is highly prized by the IT sector in roles such as business analyst and team leader.

Women are generally held to be better at language skills, such as verbal fluency, giving them an advantage in human discourse and writing activities. They also score better on social skills and understanding other people’s viewpoints, valuable in team building and negotiation.

So there you have it. Although women may not be as focused on the nuts and bolts, they are uniquely qualified to manage men in high-tech industry — at least according to analysts at Gartner Research.

Does this suggest that, in the future, men will be the cubicle line workers slaving away in a strange sort of polyandrous occupational setup, where their at-work activities are monitored by an on-the-job equivalent of a domineering nanny or wife?

What I’d like to discuss is the banishment of men from cultural and linguistic pursuits in favor of women. Why is it taken for granted that women are better at language and communication than men, even though men still outscore women on the verbal section of the SAT?

Sometimes I get the feeling that we are living in one of those strange times when dysfunctional systems are supported with every effort despite their obvious failure in many very important areas.

As Obama stumps for his new health care plan, this is a good time to start thinking about what the ramifications could be for men. Currently, most of America’s uninsured are men, despite the fact that men suffer more injuries and have a far higher death rate than women.

The low priority given to men’s health and well-being is evident in a number of government programs and laws that exclusively cater to women’s well-being, such as WIC and VAWA. Women’s shelters abound, despite the fact that men represent the overwhelming majority of the homeless. Federal funding for women’s afflictions, such as breast cancer, dwarfs that directed toward specifically male diseases such as prostate cancer, and it also threatens to overshadow very deadly diseases, such as pancreatic cancer, that strike both genders.

On the balance, it might seem that universal health coverage would be good for men, but Massachussets, which has a state health care plan, has the widest gender disparity in health insurance. The danger is that universal health care may be simply another mechanism for wealth transfer from men to women, with men receiving little in return, and possibly no net benefit at all. I can easily imagine divorced men being forced to pay the federal government whenever their ex opts to use government health insurance for the children, whether she has the ability to pay or not.

It is well-known among mental health professionals that, following divorce or unemployment, men are much more likely to develop both physical and mental conditions, which can directly lead to death. Suicide is a fairly common male reaction to divorce or unemployment, yet there is almost no government support for men in these circumstances. In fact, it is exactly the opposite: the government plays a part in punishing and goading divorced men – especially if they are or become unemployed – sometimes driving them to take their own lives.

If there is to be any overhaul of health care, men have to start demanding some fair treatment in both disbursement of health insurance and treatment for men. Men should also demand optional post-divorce counseling for both mental and physical health, as well as health and nutritional supplements such as WIC if they are in need. For every public women’s health clinic, there should be a men’s health clinic, and married and divorced men should watch very carefully for efforts to legally obligate men to pay the government more money in case their wives and exes decide (without any input from the father) to ride a free health care train with the kids.