When will men achieve equality?
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Recently the Sunday Times published an article cataloguing the despair of successful middle-aged fathers. Though it might seem easy to mock, no reader with human empathy would do so. Despair seeped through. The 40-year-old financial consultant who lives in Hampshire and describes his four-hour commute as “like being psychologically waterboarded”. The 44-year-old who says “I hate my job, I couldn’t give a toss if I’m a success or not, but it’s too late to change now . . . ” The one asked “Are you happy?” and who answered, after a long pause, “No . . . but who is?”
So bent is our national narrative on insisting that “men are on top” that we overlook telling statistics and worrying truths. According to the same article, “Men in the UK are three times more likely to take their own life than women. Men aged 45-49 have the highest rate of suicide, nearly four times that of women the same age.” In terms of wellbeing “middle-aged people . . . have the lowest levels of personal wellbeing,” but “middle-aged men are even less happy and less satisfied than unhappy, unsatisfied middle-aged women.”
These are statistics of which the charity, Men & Boys Coalition, is well aware. It was set up to draw our attention to them. But it makes limited headway. Men are perhaps too chivalrous, women too aware of the gains to be made, to challenge the narrative that women are the “second sex”.
Sometimes only structural change can challenge a deeply embedded narrative. Recently the Men & Boys Coalition came up with an idea. They suggested we “change the remit of the Government Equalities Office to include men and boys”. They suggested its current focus, which excludes men “is not in keeping with an inclusive, fair and equality-based government or society” and “leads to the continuing public policy deficit in tackling well-being issues affecting men and boys”.
This could indeed be the game-changer we need to achieve greater focus on the issues facing men and boys. But it could also be good for the Government Equalities Office. Douglas Murray writes well about what happens when narratively-accepted oppressed groups achieve their aims. Would-be rebels find themselves with little to resist. They play-act battles of a previous age, on a smaller stage, shouting more loudly. They look for ever more angels on the head of a pin.
This can now surely be detected in the activities of the Government Equalities Office (GEO). While its name implies that it is interested in “equality” its remit is actually limited to “policy relating to women, sexual orientation and transgender equality”. That is skewed. To justify their existence, they need not root out inequality, but dedicate themselves to proving it looms large.
Recently the GEO put out a press release with the heading “Government brings LGBT charity leaders together to grow the sector”. Reading the details, it seemed that the government — in the form of the GEO — was bringing a group of lobbying organisations together to spend two days learning about how they could more effectively lobby the government — in the form of the GEO. That in turn will help justify the GEO’s remit and existence.
Before that, Victoria Atkins MP announcing a GEO survey into sexual harassment in the workplace described people who had experienced sexual harassment as “survivors”, which surely devalues the term. Of sexual harassment, she said “we can stamp it out”.
Really? Does anyone actually believe that? When one person’s sexual harassment might be another’s clumsy efforts to connect, how is that going to happen? In truth, of course, the human race will blunder on, a little better at this, a little worse at that. But if the GEO has the remit of actually stamping out sexual harassment, its future, its focus, and its funding is guaranteed to kingdom come.
The main industry that the GEO oversees is gender pay gap reporting. In its 2019/20 Strategic Plan, it actually says it will “close the gender pay gap”. The gender pay gap is already essentially nil for men and women before they have children. You might think therefore that the GEO’s work is done. But to “close the gap” completely, they must now set about the unedifying task of weaning women away from their children. That will take forever.
Meanwhile men kill themselves more often than women. They die younger. They make up most of the prison population. They are nearly all of our rough sleepers. Of perhaps greatest concern is the education gap between boys and girls. England’s schoolboys have had worse exam results than girls for 30 years. According to the BBC “Girls are now 14 per cent more likely to pass English and maths GCSE than boys, with 64 per cent of girls doing so and 56 per cent of boys.”
In terms of university admissions “In the 2018 cycle, 196,105 men/boys domiciled in the UK accepted places at university, compared to 263,180 women/girls — a gap of 67,075.” That is extraordinary and worrying. A former head of university and college admissions services, Mary Curnock Cook said she was “baffled by this yawning inequality”, which revealed a “massive policy blind spot”.
So here is a positive suggestion to address that policy blind spot. Change the remit of the Government Equalities Office to include men and boys. Change the title of the “Minister for Women and Equalities” to the “Minister for Equalities”. Doing so is surely an example of a win win win.
The bureaucrats will get some incredibly serious issues to get their teeth into, areas where there are genuine blind spots and research gaps. The problems facing boys and men will be looked at, fully in the face. The women and children who love those men, and who don’t want them in the office till midnight, facing a four hour commute, or dying young, will benefit too.
