But as we’ve quickly learned with the ascent of women in politics and government, a woman in power does not guarantee a leader who prioritizes the needs of women.
A few years ago she had a baby – a beautiful strong-minded little girl – and after much toss and turn – she decided that she was not going to return to work as a teacher. So now she is a stay at home mom. [...] This is like the best mom ever, a woman who studies and thinks out all her moves as a mom – what food her daughter should eat, what fabrics should be close to her skin, how much television is too much television – or is she better off with non at all? This woman who washes her own diapers because she’s worried about the earth and yes, she has a partner – who happens to be a man – who works day and night so that she can stay home and raise their daughter in the way she thinks is best. This is a job, and important one, is it not? It is also a job she loves and one that she feels has great meaning for her.
Of the 1,260 men and women whom Pew pollsters surveyed over the summer [in 2008], 43% responded that the woman makes most of the major decisions for the family, with 31% saying that the couple makes most decisions together. There was a small difference (within the margin of error) between the control exerted by wives who earn more than their husbands and those who earn less (46% versus 42%). But in both cases, women wielded sole decision-making power far more than men did, indicating that what "father knows best" is when to defer to mom.
Certainly that was what University of Iowa researchers found last year [2007] when they measured how couples negotiate conflict over household decisions. That study not only confirmed that men will usually go along with their wives but found that when couples do disagree, wives are far more persuasive than husbands in changing their spouses' minds.
[... T]he researchers saw that when spouses engaged in debate, the women gained more ground than their husbands did. "[The women] were communicating more powerful messages and men were responding to those messages by agreeing," Mr. Vogel stated in a press release.
The hypothesis that men hold more sway in relationships because they typically make more money didn't play out.
If a bigger paycheck did mean more power in any area of family decision making, the most likely one would be finances. But even there women are in charge, with more women than men in the Pew survey saying that they manage the couple's budget and wives in the Iowa study winning out over husbands in money disagreements. According to Pew, 45% of women said they hold the family purse strings compared to 37% of men.
This despite two-thirds of the couples reporting that the man had the higher income. In fact, in recent years a substantial amount of research has shown that wives lose some of their household decision-making power when they earn more than their husbands, possibly because by spending fewer hours in the home they forfeit claims to certain household "expertise."
[.. A]dvertisers have been tracking the buying habits of American families since the 1940s. What they have found is that women made more of the household purchasing decisions before the advent of the feminist movement and that they make more of the purchasing decisions now, regardless of how big or small their paychecks are. These marketing surveys have been remarkably consistent, and they haven't changed much in the past 60 years.
To be fair, many of the scholarly studies' conclusions include a "final say" contingency -- many husbands claim that they have veto power when they feel very strongly about an issue. But consumer research shows that with the exception of what car to buy and when to buy it, men rarely claim strong enough feelings to override their wives.
"Across all decision-making realms, it tilts to the woman," noted Rich Morin, the Pew study's lead author. "I was surprised by the percentage of men who made none of the decisions in any of the areas. A significant percentage were just bystanders."
[...] The general consensus of sociologists is that, whereas a woman's marital satisfaction is dependent on a combination of economic, emotional and psychological realities, a man's marital satisfaction is most determined by one factor: how happy his wife is. When she is happy, he is. Working within this framework, most husbands are unwilling to dig in their heels on any issue unless they have a tremendous incentive to do so.
Researchers find that when only one sex expresses argument-provoking feelings, it is likely to be the wife - by a ratio of almost six to one (85 percent vs 15 percent). When both sexes participate but one dominates, women are about twice as likely to dominate. Overall, women are more willing to initiate conflict, no willing to escalate conflict, better able to handle it when it occurs, and, when they have initiated it, are quicker to get over it.
These findings come from numerous sources. They are found among couples of high, medium, and low socio-economic status. They are found using a variety of methodologies: the couples at themselves acknowledge the gap, and, much more reliably, researchers who systematically observe couples verify the couple's own assessments.
Probably the most respected researcher in the field is John Gottman at the University of Washington. He records pulse rates, heart output, skin conductance, and other indicators of stress. Then he videotapes the couples to observe facial expressions and body language. He does not ask the couples to fight, since that would be artificial. Instead, he basically works with the couple and when a major air are of disagreement naturally even though this, he asks them to discuss it and attempts to resolve it. When a fight naturally occurs, the equipment is there to record it.
Gottman found that men are more intimidated by angry women than women are by angry men. Men are more stressed by marital arguments, while women are more comfortable with emotional confrontation and are better at it.
Even in the feminist movement, the medium is the message: feminists express anger even as the message is that women cannot express anger; men repress anger even as they are judged to be the sex that has no problem expressing it! We often hear we have a battle of the sexes when, in fact, we have a war in which only one side has shown up. (Men put their heads into the sand and hope the bullets will miss!)
Withdrawal is not the way men do battle with men. It is the way men do battle with women. Because the purpose of doing battle with men was to prepare men to protect women from conflict, not to be the source of conflict.
The Report’s Gender Gap Index ranks economies according to their gender gaps and their scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the inequality between women and men that has been closed. Information about gender imbalances to the advantage of women is explicitly prevented from affecting the score.
UNESCO describes attempts to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education and emphasizes the plight of girls in unequal access in third world countries. However, the GPI ignores the gender disparity that benefits first-world women in tertiary education as in Iceland, for example, where 65% of students enrolling in tertiary education are female.
The UN uses a different standard for male and female life expectancy, basically assuming that it is natural that women should live about 5 years longer than men.
A "fair innings" between the sexes: are men being treated inequitably?
In most modern developed communities, women are known to live longer than men. A less known fact is that in many statistics reporting differences in life expectancy between socio-economic classes, on average women in the worst-off social class live as long as men in the best-off social class, if not longer. It is true that women tend to have higher morbidity, or lower health-related quality of life, especially at advanced age, but this female disadvantage does not offset the life expectancy advantage sufficiently to lead to the conclusion that men and women enjoy comparable lifetime health prospects in these communities. Although there is much public and policy discussion about the inequity of health inequalities between the social classes, there is relatively little discussion about such inequalities between the sexes. The paper first discusses the applicability of the fair innings argument to the issue of inequality in health between the sexes. It critically examines six arguments concerning why inequality in health between the sexes may or may not be an inequity. Next, special attention is given to the argument that it is wrong to judge the fairness or unfairness of health inequalities in isolation, but that this judgement should be made only after considering other inequalities relevant to overall human well-being, many of which are believed to work to the disadvantage of women. An analytical framework based on the Gender-related Development Index (a supplementary index to the Human Development Index) is taken as a starting point, to address the issue of health and overall well-being. But this is found wanting, and suggestions are made as to how its conceptual and empirical properties could be improved. Meanwhile we conclude that a prima facie case has been made that the current distribution of health in most countries does not give men a "fair innings", but the broader question about general well-being remains unresolved.
The implication [...] is that men do not get a “fair innings” in a publicly financed health care system in which they subsidize women’s health care use [Tsuchiya and Williams (2004)].
The importance of men’s health is not simply a utilitarian matter of the greater good in relation to the economic health of the country. If health inequalities between social and occupational classes or ethnic groups are considered to be a major issue of equity—or intrinsic fairness—then the poorer health status of men poses a similar challenge. It is difficult to diminish the importance of men’s health on the basis of either riskier/unhealthy behaviours, or as a function of occupational roles, when such issues are seen as being important factors to be addressed when confronting other forms of health inequality.
[...]The international literature has identified that men tend to have higher mortality rates, but that women tend to have higher morbidity rates, especially at advanced age. However the reduced quantity of life on the part of men does not appear to be offset by the reduced quality of life on the part of women. Rather, the emerging international literature on quality-adjusted life expectancy and disability adjusted life expectancy in developed countries indicates a persisting inequality of poorer lifetime health outcomes among men compared to women in the same community.
Equitable development towards the abolition of gender will most likely involve two moves. The first is the one where women move into spheres that have traditionally been regarded as male, and as a result, expose themselves to higher levels of health risks. The second is one where men move into spheres that have traditionally been regarded as female. If men are to benefit from the lower health risks traditionally enjoyed by women, they will also have to reduce their labour market activities at the same time. In this respect, a re-assessment of what constitutes “masculinity” would be good for men’s health, and, to the extent that this is in line with what women want, it will be good for women’s well-being as well, if not their health.
[...]For men, the issue is relatively straightforward: they get to engage more with their children, they get to work less, they bear less responsibility for generating cash income, and as a result they get better health. The fact that more men do not currently make choices along these lines (“because the man should put the bread on the table”) is indirect proof that the genderless society is yet to come. On the other hand, for women, the picture is more complicated: they see less of their children, they get to work harder, they bear more responsibility for financing the family, and as a result their health will be worse. So, why would women want to do it? What does “development” mean to women in this context? It is crucial to note that it has been predominantly women, not men, who have struggled for changes in the traditional gender system. Women have wanted to escape an exclusive occupancy in the domestic sphere because it is lonely, repetitive and boring, involving hard work, associated with low nor no social status, under-rewarded and un-paid, etc., whereas men have not valued the prospect of entering closer relationships with their children for the very same reasons. With more
information regarding the health consequences for men, there may be some increased interest amongst men towards gender abolition. However, unless the current conceptualisation of masculinity changes, this is unlikely to lead to a major movement, since the very essence of conventional masculinity is that “real” men should not be affected by concerns over their own health and safety. Furthermore, the public sphere of resources, independence, and politics has
traditionally been valued more highly than the domestic, private sphere of caring. The asymmetric power dimension of the gender system, which links the male with the public (and therefore to superiority) and the female with the private (and therefore to subordination), is highly
relevant in this context.
In gendered societies, women and men have been subjected to different behavioural and aspirational norms, which seem to have long term health effects. We have pointed out that equitable development towards a genderless society will probably have a negative impact on women’s ELQ relative to men’s. An interesting question is, if health and longevity are key elements of well-being, then what does it mean, when improving well-being beyond a certain
point by removing an asymmetric and inequitable social system seems to result in their reduction? It is possible that certain forms of the patriarch gender system have in effect allowed women to exploit men so that they do not have to shoulder the fair share of the health risks
associated with human/social life. The breaking up of the gender system will mean women giving up the undue advantages regarding life time health they have so far enjoyed.
[...]Insofar as the current gender system works to the advantage of female ELQ, equitable development towards abolishing this will imply women having to give up the excess health advantage, just like men having to give up their excess socio-economic advantages. Assuming full information and rational choice, if a significant proportion of women do make choices that imply reducing their own ELQ, it will mean these women do not regard mere ELQ as an absolute
good: they will be better off with less health and more choices/control. Sen (2002) argues “health is among the most important conditions of human life and a critically significant constituent of human capabilities” (p660 l). We agree, but we will also like to point out that health alone is no
good if there are no socio-economic opportunities to pursue. Health and longevity are not absolute, but is something that can be traded off with other opportunities in life.
When shown a photo of baseball-player George Brett, womens' eyes focused on his face. By contrast, when men were shown the same photo, they focused also on his crotch. The researchers noted, "Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site." - from here
The finding, reported in Hormones and Behavior, confirmed the hypothesis of a previous study (Stephen Hamann and Kim Wallen, et al., 2004) that reported men and women showed different patterns of brain activity when viewing sexual stimuli. The present study examined sex differences in attention by employing eye-tracking technology that pinpoints individual attention to different elements of each picture such as the face or body parts.
"Men looked at the female face much more than women, and both looked at the genitals comparably,"
[...]"The eye-tracking data suggested what women paid most attention to was dependent upon their hormonal state. Women using hormonal contraceptives looked more at the genitals, while women who were not using hormonal contraceptives paid more attention to contextual elements of the photographs,"
The answer may lie within a small section of the brain called the amygdala, which is important in the processing of emotional information. In Dr. Hamann and Wallen's previous fMRI study, men showed more activation in the amygdala in response to sexual vs. neutral stimuli than did women. From the fMRI study alone, the cause of the increased activity was unclear, but Rupp and Wallen's study suggests the possibility that higher amygdala activation in men may be related to their increased attention to faces in sexual photographs.
Men and women did not differ in their overall interest in the stimuli, indicated by equal subjective ratings and viewing times, although there were preferences for specific types of pictures. Pictures of the opposite sex receiving oral sex were rated as least sexually attractive by all participants and they looked longer at pictures showing the female actor’s body. Women rated pictures in which the female actor was looking indirectly at the camera as more attractive, while men did not discriminate by female gaze. Participants did not look as long at close-ups of genitals, and men and women on oral contraceptives rated genital images as less sexually attractive. Together, these data demonstrate sex-specific preferences for specific types of stimuli even when, across stimuli, overall interest was comparable
Generally, heterosexual men subjectively rate stimuli depicting nude males or male–male sexual behavior as less sexually arousing or attractive than stimuli including women (Costa, Braun, & Birbaumer, 2003; Schmidt, 1975; Steinman et al., 1981). In contrast, women generally rate photos of both males and females comparably attractive or arousing (Costa et al., 2003; Schmidt, 1975; Steinman et al., 1981). Genital measurement to same and opposite-sex stimuli shows the same pattern for men and women with men showing highest genital responding to their preferred sex while women show comparable genital arousal independent of the sex of the actors (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004).
[...]Generally, eye-tracking studies find more same-sex viewing interest in women than men (Lykins et al., 2006, 2008; Rupp & Wallen, 2007a). However, despite differences in gaze patterns, there were no sex differences in subjective ratings of the stimuli (Lykins et al., 2006; Rupp & Wallen, 2007a). Because men and women did not differ in subjective ratings, but had different patterns of attention, it is possible that men and women have different cognitive processing strategies when viewing sexual stimuli, and the different strategies produce equal levels of arousal though the aspects of the images visualized were different.
[...]In addition to eye-tracking studies demonstrating sex differences in attention to visual sexual stimuli, recent neuroimaging work also suggests that men and women’s brains may respond
differently to visual sexual stimuli (reviewed in Rupp & Wallen, 2008) even in the absence of sex differences in subjective ratings (Hamann, Herman, Nolan, & Wallen, 2004). This further suggests that subjective ratings may not capture possible sex difference in initial interest in and cognitive processing of visual sexualstimuli. We do notyet know the exact relationship
between neural activation, reflecting changes in cognitive processing, and subjective and conscious evaluations of sexualstimuli.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a gender-based discrimination law that treats men and women differently when it comes to citizenship [...] Currently, children born overseas who have one U.S.-citizen parent can obtain U.S. citizenship if the citizen parent had been physically present in the U.S. for a certain period of time before the child’s birth, according to the Supreme Court's blog.
If the citizen parent is the father, the period is five years; if it is the mother, the period is one year. - from here
The statements posed were about behaviour, intelligence and success in school, such as “This child is really clever”, or “This child always finishes their work”. More than 200 children of various ages were tested, and the results were:
At age 4, girls consistently pick the girl picture as being cleverer, better-performing, more focused and better behaved than boys.
The boys continue to hold no gender bias for about 2-3 years, but by around the age of 7 or 8 they start to exhibit gender bias… in favour of girls, at their own expense. Their views start to conform to that of the girls, and this continues throughout the older age groups.
The girls continue to hold the same views throughout.
I’d love to know more about what’s giving those 4-year-old girls such strong anti-male prejudices. I’d like to also draw attention to the fact that the questions didn’t just cover the children’s own views, but also asked the children what adults believed.
It’s a question of the current system essentially comprising a female-dominated workplace, one which Ms Hartley’s research suggests is distinctly misandrist — particularly at the primary-school level where children are learning what school is and how they fit within it. In an employment context, we’d call that a hostile working environment.
My belief is that to improve boys education, it’s not necessary to pair each boy with a male teacher (or each girl with a female teacher). Instead, it’s necessary to change those fundamental attitudes that are telling boys, before they even reach the age of 7, that they are inferior.
