The End of Men?

David Brooks, conservative columnist at The New York Times, praises Hanna Rosin’s new book. The End of Men? Hardly. Brooks and Rosin’s selective exclusion of obvious data is suspicious, and risks encouraging those who say we live in a gender blind society. Some say women are doing fine, it is boys who need help, so we can abandon efforts to help women succeed.

Looking first at the data cited by Brooks or Rosin: “Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.” Those jobs are in service sectors and health care, and are not generally high paying. Men “stink” at communicating “smoothly”? That would explain why men constitute 83% of Congress and 77% of state legislatures – the later percentage having stayed flat for the past dozen years. Women are “pioneering” hook up culture? Even a cursory look at popular culture strongly suggests that men still regard women as sex objects and that young women still regard sex primarily as a vehicle to please men.

Looking at some key data from my recent book Upside Down: The Paradoxes of Gender in the New Century (www.upsidedownbook.NET), shows that that since the dawn of the new century women’s progress has stalled. Women’s median income as percentage of men’s? Flat The pay gap between men and women with four-year degrees? Increased. Women’s percentage of directors of large corporations and of partners in large law firms? Flat. The extent of occupational gender segregation in various professions dominated by one gender? Unchanged. Women’s representation in statewide elective offices and as mayors of large and medium sized cities? Down.

Are women more adaptable than men? Perhaps, but as the subordinate gender in a patriarchal world, of course they have to be to make any progress at all. But a wealth of data shows that women in developed nations are less happy than they were forty years ago, both absolutely and compared to men. We need to change that.

The unavailability of part time work affects us all.

The Atlantic’s widely read July 2012 cover story, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, observed that workplace structures make it almost impossible for mothers to have high pressure, long hours careers. Author Anne-Marie Slaughter wryly noted that, “In Washington, ‘leaving to spend time with your family,’ is a euphemism for being fired” for men, but is often the truth for women. Writer Anand Giridharadas responded that America may actually be worse off for being governed and managed by “single-minded, obsessive, fierce, hurried … self-serving [and] less-than-empathetic” alpha career types who largely “ignore their families.” He rightly wondered what biases affect policymakers who “have prioritized the making of social policy over their own families.”

Fantasy football?

Another in a series of paradoxes:
It's amazing that in 2009, a professional football league for women was born - in which the players wear only helmets, shoulder pads, shoes and bikinis. It's full contact, with blocking, tackling, passing and injuries. "True fantasy football," as the Lingerie Football League describes itself. Fantasy for men, of course. Game videos show what appear to be athletic swimsuit models mixing it up on the field, being cheered on by bleachers full of male fans. While this may have created professional opportunities for women in sports, depending how one defines sport, it also calls into question how far we've really progressed in the forty years of the modern women's movement. The fans willing to buy tickets to these games surely are more interested in the sight of nearly naked female bodies wrestling each other to the ground than in the athletic ability on display.

If I were a resident of a Middle Eastern nation defending local practices that seemed to Western sensibilities to be demeaning to women, I would cite Lingerie Football as an example of Western hypocrisy.

What would happen if we turned our thinking upside down and:

• Oprah gave all of her billions to journalist and women’s rights crusader William Kristof to spend on projects to help women?
• Bill Gates announced that the other half of his foundations’ billions not devoted to vaccines henceforth would go to projects to help women and girls?
• Every member of the NBA making over one million dollars a year made a public service spot against domestic violence or rape and paid to air it on TV shows aimed at the young male demographic?
• The U.S. ratified the international treaty banning gender discrimination, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)?
• The Federal government and all companies and organizations receiving federal funds were required to offer flexible workplace policies and reduced schedule options to all employees?
• The U.S. went from seventy-fourth in world rankings of women’s percentages in national legislatures, where it is in the company of Albania and Turkmenistan, to fourth?

Part time professionals = more full time lives.

Another in a series of paradox solutions:

If our economy is to obtain the maximum benefit from the millions of women trained and educated to create, produce, process, diagnose, teach, manage or advise, can’t we offer options that will allow them to continue to work if they choose to have families? Providing part time options in every career track will ensure that the greatest number of women are poised for leadership roles when they are done having children. If women are forced to leave their jobs in order to have children, most will never recover those lost years in their careers. At the age when many men are at the pinnacles of the their careers, many women are reentering the work force with unequal experience. But how to change the existing employer mindset that so opposes part time opportunities for professionals? Here’s one idea:

When layoffs began in earnest in 2008 in response to the recession, there was much public debate about the merits of simply reducing many workers’ pay and hours proportionately in order to reduce the need for layoffs. Proponents argued that shortening hours would greatly reduce the number of families in dire economic circumstances, spread the pain of the recession more equitably, and lessen the chances the recession would go into free fall. In Germany this approach is called Kurzarbeit, which translates as short work. When companies reduce workers’ hours, the government uses money from a special fund to pay workers two-thirds of their lost salaries. The U.S. should consider using this approach. If it could jumpstart a change in employers’ attitudes toward letting employees work less than full time schedules, we’d not only be better able to weather economic downturns, we’d also have a more flexible and family friendly economy.

Question for Palin.

As Governor, what is she doing about the fact that Alaska ranks number one in the nation for the rate at which women are murdered by men, and number one for its rape rate? (Alaska only ranks 22nd for murders regardless of gender.) While she served as mayor, her town began charging rape victims hundreds of dollars each for the forensic exams used in prosecution of rape, and her police chief vehemently opposed a bill in the state legislature to prohibit charging victims for the exams.

Palin may hinder electing other women.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Like many people, I’ve trying to wrap my head around McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin, Governor of the forty-eighth state (in population) for twenty months. While many theories abound, my best guess is that trying to pick up Hillary supporters with a woman may have been only one of three of his motivations. Perhaps more important is that McCain is running against what he describes as a celebrity. Regardless of your political leanings, you have to admit that Obama blows away McCain in the charisma department. Palin has a magnetic charm, according to her opponents in the Alaska gubernatorial race, that makes voters love her regardless of her positions on the issues. Unlike Mitt Romney, people tend to believe her sincerity. Also significant is that Palin’s Pentecostal and right wing views amp up McCain’s previously tepid appeal to his party’s religious right base. As more details of her public and private life and of McCain's hasty vetting of her are revealed, however, it is clear that McCain was so desperate to shake up the race that he did not conduct the rigorous investigation to which Vice-Presidential candidates normally are subjected.

Even if McCain and Palin lose, and as long as Palin doesn’t make too many mistakes, there is a potential upside to her candidacy. It may encourage party bosses to put forward more women as candidates in the future under the assumption that they will charm voters. But there are a number of downsides, including that it may set back efforts toward getting more women into elective office.

The first is that her candidacy may reinforce the popular belief that there are no women with the intellect, experience and ideological beliefs that make them qualified to be President – with the exception of Hillary Clinton. After Clinton’s run fizzled in May of 2008, The New York Times could not find a political strategist able to name anyone else likely to be the first woman President. McCain touts Palin’s executive experience, which presumes he sought that in a running mate. If wanted a sitting woman governor, he had only one real choice: Palin. The other two Republicans are in Hawaii and Connecticut. Hawaii’s Linda Lingle is a childless, twice-divorced Jew. Connecticut’s Jodi Rell signed the bill making Connecticut the first state (not acting under court order) to allow gay couples to join in civil unions giving them all the rights of married couples. Rell does not have a college degree. That left him with Governor Palin, a former beauty queen with an undergraduate degree in journalism from a mediocre university (University of Idaho), whose prior political experience was as the mayor of a small town. Her first trip outside the U.S. was last year. If she has any foreign policy expertise, she’s keeping it a secret.

The second downside would continue the popular belief that it may still be impossible for a woman to be qualified to be President and at the same time not have high negatives with half of the voters. In other words, if you’re a woman with the intellect, drive and toughness needed to be President, many voters will find you to be unfeminine and scary. Thus, the parties may conclude that the only way a woman can become President is to follow the lead of George Bush and be perceived as being a congenial sort, a person the average voter could talk to casually and not find intellectually overwhelming.

For a candidate to not appear to be too intellectual usually means the candidate can't actually be extremely smart. But picking women without the best intelligence and perspective increases the chances that the female leaders of tomorrow will be what some feminists refer to as "social males" – women who simply adopt a patriarchal view of the world and perpetuate it in their words and actions. The problem is more acute in cases such as Palin's, where the good ole boys do the picking. In this sense, Palin’s bid is for women as Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court was for African-Americans.

The third downside comes if the Grand Old Party ultimately does not succeed in dumbing down the office in voters’ minds, and through McCain’s premature death in office at the young age of 73 puts a clearly unqualified woman in the White House. If she does not do exceptionally well, this may block the pipeline for women for that office for decades to come. (The 2005-2006 series Commander in Chief may have prophesied the future of McCain’s administration. In the series, a Republican President dies and his female Vice-President, regarded by some as not qualified to serve, takes over. Too bad ABC impeached it after one season. Otherwise, we could have seen more of how TV writers would imagine a Palin Presidency.)

(Update: Somewhat ominously, in her acceptance speech Palin compared herself to Harry Truman. Less than three months after becoming Vice-President, Truman became President when Roosevelt died. He had been a US Senator for ten years before that.)

At this point we should be so past the need to question whether a woman candidate for political office is qualified. In particular, we should not have to raise this question about a woman’s candidacy for Vice-President in the twenty-first century. If McCain had wanted a female running mate, he had several experienced Republican senators to chose from. There is no excuse for putting forward a woman whose lack of qualification causes people to say that she only got the job because she's a woman, as people are saying about Palin. NY Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins hopes that in the Vice-Presidential debate Biden will say to Palin (in a reprise of the 1988 debate), "I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton."

It is insulting to women to think that just putting a woman on the ticket, no matter her positions on the issues or her qualifications, will convince women to vote for a ticket that opposes equal pay legislation and other efforts towards women’s equality. It’s especially insulting when you realize how far behind the Republican party is in putting women in office, compared to the Democratic party. There are considerably fewer than half as many Republican women in Congress and in state legislatures as there are Democratic women.

The nature vs. nurture debate about gender.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
So-called "gender" feminists assert a blank slate theory: that men and women are inherently the same. Apparent cognitive and behavioral differences between men and women are purely a product of women’s subordination in a repressive patriarchy, they say, and should gradually disappear as women rise to a more equal footing with men.

But if the opposite were true, it could mean that we've been doing feminism all wrong – which could explain a lot about the movement's widespread stall after nearly forty years of trying to realize its promise.

Neuroscience has revealed gender differences in every major part of the brain. Many studies show brain regions that manage emotions, reasoning and even motor control are not the same in men and women. There are also huge gender differences in hormones that affect brain chemistry. One theory asserts that gender differences in brain function and chemistry largely cancel each other out so as to preclude gender differences from being seen in behavior.

Is gender insulting to women leaders?

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Gender denial by women in power seems to be seems to all too common in 21st century America. Responding to a question about her gender, Drew Faust, Harvard’s first female president, replied, "I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard." N.Y. Times blogger Judith Warner agreed, arguing that attributing the newly appointed Faust’s notoriety as "a people person" to her gender "is to cut Faust off at the knees."

Yet gender is clearly an issue surrounding Dr. Faust’s appointment. It brings the number of female Ivy League Presidents to 50% - nearly to the percentage of women in the general population. Dr. Faust replaced a man who alienated many with his imperious style and his comments about gender differences. Dr. Faust, it is said, listens and makes people feel heard and included.

A N.Y. Times reporter researching an article recently found very few female CEO's willing to say anything about gender. Could it be that women executives still regard their gender as a professional liability?

To procreate or not to procreate? That is the question.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
A recent exchange between Senator Barbara Boxer and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice highlights one difficulty in staking out a clear vision of women’s roles in the twenty-first century: women, like men, make different choices and do not share a single set of priorities. In a Senate hearing, Boxer tried to say that many of the Iraq War policymakers do not have as much as stake as the military families whose sons and daughters face death and injury in battle. Secretary Rice's supporters later complained that Boxer seemed to be criticizing Rice for not having children.

This conflict between two women policymakers illustrates the challenge of devising policies that improve the outcomes of the seemingly impossible choices currently facing many working parents, while at the same time not shifting the discrimination onto those choosing not to procreate. Should people of either gender who choose not to procreate have the priorities of their workplaces set my those who do, or vice versa?

Finally, the Boxer-Rice exchange also demonstrates how procreation and children are still regarded as women's issues. If the exchange had been between two men, it would have generated much less attention and criticism. It shows how far we still have to go to achieve gender equality. (Another lesson from the Boxer-Rice exchange is how quickly policy conversations can turn into partisan political fights that distract from the real issues. One of Rice’s supporters, Rush Limbaugh, rolled out the Clarence Thomas lynching metaphor to describe Boxer’s treatment of Rice.)

The 26 percent rule

Looking for some illustrations of how the 26 percent rule described in the book Upside Down would work? Here's some examples from 2004:

Women made up forty-seven percent of the Washington State Senate and thirty-two percent of the House in 2004. The combined percentage of both chambers remained the highest in the nation, even though they have dipped slightly since their peak in 1994. In theory, the Senate could use the twenty-six percent rule unmodified. The House could use just over half of thirty-two percent, or women’s votes equal to at least seventeen percent of the total number of House members. Because women constituted a much higher percentage of Democratic legislators than of Republicans, and Democrats controlled the House while Republicans controlled the Senate, the consequences of the rule for the two chambers would be quite different. These results illustrate two ways in which the rule would affect a number of other states.

To pass legislation in the ninety-eight member House using the rule at seventeen percent, Democrats would need just seventeen votes. There were twenty female Democrats in 2004. To affect women’s influence in the House, the rule would have to be introduced at twenty-one percent. This way, the Democrats would have to strike a bargain with at least one Republican woman in order to pass bills. After an increase of just one Democratic woman, House Democrats would be freed from their obligation to seek support from Republican women for two years. After that, either the failsafe provision or growth in the number of female legislators would keep raising the bar. For the Republicans, a gain of just four more seats, coming from either gender, would give them control of the House. However, they would need to increase the women in their ranks from the existing number of eleven to at least ten more to earn a two-year respite from having to seek support from Democratic women in order to pass bills.

In the forty-nine member Senate, Republicans had a one vote majority in 2004, but Democrats had more than twice as many women. Using the twenty-six percent rule unmodified would require Republicans to routinely beg six Democratic women to join in their votes, which would severely limit their ability to govern. Lowering the introductory percentage to just eighteen instead would force them to get support from only two Democratic women, which would make it possible to forge reasonable compromises on legislation and fulfil the purpose of the rule. As the Washington example illustrates, the rule’s initial percentages would have to be tailored to the circumstances of each state legislature.

There are seventeen states in which, unlike Washington, the twenty-six percent rule could be enacted by a majority of voters. For most legislative chambers the rule initially would be adjusted to begin one to three percentage points above half the current percentage of women’s representation in that chamber.

In states where the majority party has a lopsided majority, a high percentage of women legislators, or both, implementation at just above half the existing overall percentage of women in each chamber would not change present practices. In the Democratic controlled California Senate, implementation of even the unmodified twenty-six percent rule would not immediately change anything. Out of a total of forty members, there were eleven women in 2004 – all Democrats. The rule would serve only to encourage the minority party to work harder to increase the number of women legislators in its ranks in preparation for a return to power. The value of highlighting the opposition’s lack of attention to women’s issues, combined with the erection of a device that would reduce the risk of a reversal of political fortunes, might make the rule attractive to Democratic Senators.

In the California Assembly, and in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, the unmodified twenty-six percent rule would force their Democratic leaders to work with one Republican woman. Just over half the total percentage of women in the California Assembly in 2004 was sixteen percent, but the rule would not be effective unless introduced at twenty-six percent because most of those women were Democrats.

In Republican controlled Arizona, North Dakota (House only) and South Dakota, and Democratic controlled Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma (Senate only) and Nevada (House only), legislatures faced situations similar to the Washington House. Introducing the rule at a percentage just a point or two above half the existing percentage of women in each chamber would change nothing. It would take an increase of approximately five percentage points above half the existing percentage to force the majority party to seek agreement with one woman from the minority party. The Nevada House would have to start the rule at least eight points above the normal modification for it to have an impact. (As in Washington State, a different party controlled each of the two chambers in Nevada’s legislature in 2004.)

Other legislatures were comparable to the Washington Senate, where the majority party had a lower percentage of women than the minority party. In those states, implementation of the rule adjusted to just above half the overall percentage of women in a chamber would require the majority party to negotiate with four or more women from the minority party. Lowering the number of women needed to just two would reduce the risk of gridlock. To accomplish this, the rule percentage would have to be set below half the existing overall percentage of women. States with at least one chamber affected in this manner included Republican controlled Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Montana. The 2004 Colorado Senate had nine Democratic women and only one Republican woman.

The thirty member Oregon Senate was evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats in 2004. With six Democratic women and only one Republican woman, it presented a special case. If Democrats were facing the rule, it would have to be introduced substantially higher than half the existing overall percentage to have an effect, whereas for Republicans it would have to be substantially lower to be viable. Probably, the fairest solution would be to base it on the Republicans’ circumstances.

In the remaining states allowing constitutional amendment by voter initiative, introducing the rule at just over half the existing percentage of women in each chamber would be the right number to help shape policy to be more favorable to women’s needs. The majority party would have to bargain with one or two women from the minority party in order to pass legislation. These states included Republican controlled Florida, Ohio, Oregon (House only) and Nevada (Senate only), and Democratic controlled Oklahoma (House only).

Finally, there is Nebraska, with non-partisan elections and only one chamber in its legislature. Just over eighteen percent of its legislators were women. Introduced at ten percent, the rule would give Nebraska women a greater voice in decision making.