Sometimes it seems the gulf between popular perception and reality has never been greater. Two charts make the point.
The first comes to us from the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry (AEI, 12/23/19). It’s a comparison of girls/women with boys/men in 42 categories. For every 100 girls and women, there are some number of boys and men in the same category. For example, for every 100 women who earn a master’s degree, there are 74 men who do. And for every 100 women between the ages of 20 and 29 who commit suicide, there are 450 men who do. So it goes, throughout 42 categories in which girls and women are doing far better than boys and men.
It’s a highly informative chart, particularly if one assumes, as the zeitgeist has it, that men are privileged and women oppressed. If Perry’s chart is any indication, much the opposite is true. Perry’s chart indicates that, if anything, it’s men and boys who need our attention and help.
And it barely scratches the surface. Yes, it shows men and boys far outnumbering women and girls in prisons, but what the chart can’t reveal is that, as law professor Sonja Starr’s 2013 study shows, men are treated more harshly at every step of the criminal justice process than are women. That includes severity of charging, plea bargains offered and sentencing. The greater number of men behind bars reflects their greater tendency to commit crime, but also their harsher treatment by the system.
Nor does Perry’s chart say anything about who gets killed and maimed in war. Men hold that distinction hands-down. And it doesn’t mention that millions of young men are required to register with the Selective Service System, but no young women are. Nor does it include the fact that, although men and women are equally likely to be victims of domestic violence, there are more than 1,500 DV shelters in the country for women and just three for men.
And the extreme male-female inequalities in family courts also don’t appear. Why, for example, are only 36% of non-custodial mothers ordered to pay child support when 56% of non-custodial fathers are? Why are fathers often denied meaningful parenting time with their children? Why are 97% of alimony obligors men? Why do men who father children have no right to even know they’ve done so? Why do men in most states have no right to know about or consent to the adoption of their children? Why do we spend $5 billion per year to enforce child support orders, but only $10 million to support orders of visitation, a 500:1 ratio? The former of course overwhelmingly benefits mothers and the latter fathers, to the extent it does at all. Why are over 80% of custodial parents mothers?
Perry’s chart is an eye-opener for anyone who’s absorbed the notion that men are privileged and women oppressed by this society. But just 42 categories don’t begin to show the full range of inequalities in which men trail women.
Now let’s turn to our second chart that can be found on pages 287 and 288 of the World Economic Forum’s so-called Global Gender Gap Report (World Economic Forum, 2018). I say “so-called” because it’s a train wreck between perceptions and reality about gender inequality. More on that later.
The GGGR purports to educate us on various gaps between men and women worldwide. It focuses on four areas of life – economics, education, health and political empowerment – and analyzes the conditions of the sexes in each country. Each country is summarized in 2 pages.
Exactly how the data on the sexes are analyzed remains murky, but suffice it to say that each category receives a rating of 0 – 1. The higher the number, the closer to gender equality a country is in each category. (At least that’s what we’re supposed to think.) A ‘1’ is perfect parity (again supposedly), a ‘0’ is perfect inequality and everything in between indicates some level of inequality.
The United States scores well on, for example, primary education, i.e. the percentage of kids of each sex enrolled in grade school. The U.S. scored 0.996 out of a possible 1.000 meaning that there were almost as many girls as boys enrolled in primary school. The numbers in secondary education are even better where we scored a ‘1’.
But when the GGGR moves on to tertiary education, i.e. college-level enrollment, the WEF shows its hand. There the U.S. scored a ‘1’ as well, i.e. perfectly gender-equal.
But wait. In fact, just 42% of college enrollees are men and 58% women. So how does the World Economic Forum figure that constitutes gender equality? It’s a pithy question, but the answer is simple. In the GGGR, any inequality in which men are the ones less well-off is scored as equal. Only inequalities that dispose against women are recognized as unequal. When men hold the short end of the stick, all is well. To the WEF, inequality, even extreme inequality, equals equality as long as it’s men who suffer.
Plus, some of the “inequalities” reported by the GGGR aren’t inequalities at all. Consider for example the category of “Political Empowerment.” By that the report means the number of women compared to men elected to office. Predictably, the U.S. scores woefully, a pathetic 0.244. So clearly, the U.S. has a lot of work to do in the area of electoral office-holding, right?
But again, wait. As to elected office, we know that U.S. voters, in the aggregate, don’t discriminate on the basis of sex. As “Sex as a Political Variable,” the most comprehensive study of the matter ever conducted, concludes “When women run, women win, exactly as often as men do.” In short, the fact that there are fewer women holding elected office means but one thing – that they’re less likely to run than are men. Yes, there are fewer women than men holding office, but that’s their choice. Would the WEF have us force them?
Then there’s the factually false. Astonishingly, the GGGR informs readers that the U.S. has no law mandating equal pay for men and women. In fact of course it has a great number of them – federal law, the laws of all 50 states and not a few cities have their own statutes on the subject and all of them mandate equal pay. But the GGGR claims otherwise.
Finally, there’s the question of the four areas chosen by the GGGR for “analysis.” Why those and not others or additional ones? After all, those categories look very much like they were chosen to highlight women’s lower status and ignore men’s. Why not a category for child custody? Why not one for death on the job or in war? Why not one for inequality before the criminal justice system? Why not one for suicide? The possibilities are endless, but the WEF chose just four, the better to elide the real issues facing men and boys and pretend that gender inequality adversely affects only the distaff segment of society.
What all that means of course is that the “Global Gender Gap Report” is no such thing. It’s a document that ignores men’s inequalities, champions women’s and pretends that women are hard done by when, in the West at least, they’re not.
So there we have our two charts. The AEI’s tells a bit of hard reality, one that’s reported very little in the mainstream news media and pop culture. The WEF’s is all about perpetuating a long-held and much cherished perception of women and girls as society’s victims. The latter works hard (as it must) to distort the truth, the former reports the data and lets the chips fall where they will.
