There are millions of male ex-offenders in the US.45 Given how hard it is for them to get a job and housing, why are there not better rehabilitation programs for them, especially when so many have no or few work qualifications, or were suffering from substance abuse problems? Why aren't there mandatory parenting programs since more than half the men in prison are fathers, six out of ten of them reported having an absent father when they were growing up,46 and a quarter of them had a parent that had also been incarcerated?47
Nearly eight out of ten male prisoners will be arrested for a new crime within five years of their release.48 Many male inmates say that seeing their children while in prison and having support from their families would stop them from reoffending in the future, yet more mothers in prison have contact with their children despite more fathers in prison being the primary financial supporter before their incarceration.49 To a man, this reinforces that providing is what gives him purpose and makes him lovable. Ex-prisoners have significant financial obstacles upon release; they also commit suicide at 7 times the rate of the normal population.50
The sexual abuses and the consequences of those abuses that men face in prison are another story. In addition to their being raped, often gang-raped, men in prison face contracting deadly sexually transmitted infections like HIV, which is spread more easily through anal sex. HIV rates are about four times higher among prisoners than among the general population, said researchers who were studying the handful of prisons in the US that have begun to offer condom-dispensing machines, which were part of an effort to decrease the spread of sexually transmitted infections.51
If only there was more action taken to prevent rape in prison in the first place.
Why Is it so Hard to Change the Supposed “Pay Gap”?
One reason the jobs men hold pay more is because they are more hazardous... Just as the “glass ceiling” describes the invisible barrier that keeps women out of jobs with the most pay, the “glass cellar” describes the invisible barrier that keeps men in jobs with the most hazards.
—Warren Farrell52
One of the reasons why the women's movement has been so successful is because it emphasized equal rights while minimizing equal responsibilities. Thus the myth fed to young women that they can “have it all.” Sidestepping equal responsibilities has resulted in women wanting the same rights top executives have but not the same responsibilities that the men doing the dangerous physical work have. Those men are invisible, which is ironic considering how much we depend on the hard work of those men every day.
Some people make the argument that women trying for higher-level positions meet resistance from their male colleagues, blaming a sexist environment, but recent research has revealed that women are just as likely to show sexism toward other women in professional settings, including hiring practices, salaries, and professional mentorship.53
One small Dutch study published in Psychological Science, for example, found both supportive and biased opinions among women's attitudes toward each other. The researchers looked at attitudes of senior policewomen and “queen bee” behavior. In the experiment, half of the participants wrote about a time they felt being a woman was a disadvantage at work or they experienced gender discrimination. The other participants were instructed to write about a situation where their personal abilities were valued and their gender was irrelevant. Then both groups were asked to describe their leadership style and how similar they thought they were to other women, and if they believed gender bias was a problem in the police force.
The women's answers reflected how much they focused on their gender identity at work. The women who exhibited queen bee behavior did not identify strongly with other women at work and had been primed to think about gender bias. They leaned more toward a masculine style of leadership, seeing themselves as different from other women, and didn't see gender bias as a problem. Women who did identify strongly with other women at work and were similarly primed to believe there was a gender bias, had a greater urge to mentor other women.
The researchers suggested that organizations that want more women at the top must confront gender bias in the workplace. “If you simply put women at higher positions without doing anything about gender bias in the organization, these women will be forced to distance themselves from the group,” researcher Belle Derks said. Otherwise, these women may discount gender bias, or refrain from helping women below them. “If you set women up this way, so they have to choose between their opportunities and the opportunities of the group, some women will choose themselves. Why should you choose your group? Men don't have to.”54
The problem with suggesting that dangerous professions should adapt to women instead of women adapting to dangerous professions is that men and women who would be working together would develop two different—and incompatible—mindsets about what the job requires of them. Another way to think about the Dutch study is to consider that the perceived gender bias may actually be a generic mindset that has developed over time so that employees can meet the requirements of their profession, such as situational awareness and the willingness to respond physically to a threat. What women feel is opposition from their male peers may actually be a litmus test that everyone in the profession must endure. Their peers need to know this person—man or woman—can hack it and is tough enough to “have their back” in the moments that count, as Warren Farrell points out:
Combat training requires the men to devalue their lives . . . The result? Harassment and hazing are preparation for devaluation—which is why men haze and harass one another: they are amputating each other's individuality because the war machine works best with standardized parts. Harassment and hazing are therefore a prerequisite to combat training in the “men's army”; but in the “women's army,” harassment and hazing can be protested—they conflict with valuing one's life. If the men's and women's armies were physically separate, these differences would be less of a problem. However, when the men are told that the women are equals but if they harass and haze the women as equals they'll have their careers ruined (and often family life destroyed), this only reinforces the men's beliefs that women want to “have their cake and eat it, too.”55
As an example, the Marine Corps recently determined male combat units significantly outperform mixed units; the all-male units are faster, more lethal, evacuate casualties in less time, can carry more weight, and suffer fewer injuries, all of which means “fewer casualties.” The men also have more anaerobic power—the top 25th percentile of women overlaps with the bottom 25th percentile of men, and aerobic capacity—the top 10th percentile of women overlaps with the bottom 50th percentile of men.56
Though some professions will always carry more risk than others, women don't generally go into occupations in large numbers unless it is physically safe. So the real change that needs to happen is making those industries as safe as possible, or, if men and women are going to have different standards, they need to be separated into all-male and all-female teams. The under-protection of men forces them to adopt an attitude that looks like bigotry when in fact we should be looking at what kind of climate hazardous professions create for employees. Decades of research on the power of the system and situation revealed that we cannot just look at the “bad apples” (or individuals) in the barrel; we must look at the barrel, or situation, itself—and then move our analysis upward to discover who are the “barrel makers” (the systemic influencers), with deep power to create, change, and terminate situations that impact the individuals operating within them.
FIFTEEN
Economic Downturn
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.
—Noam Chomsky, American linguist and social-political critic
The cost of a gallon of gas, school tuition, and a house are now way out of proportion for young people in comparison to the baby boomer generation t
hat has parented the current generation. Perhaps not surprisingly, while the cost of education has increased at several times above the inflation rate since the 1990s, the cost of computers, televisions, and toys has decreased. Regardless, it's more expensive to live in the Western world now than before the economic slump, and many people are taking on large amounts of additional debt just to make ends meet.
Equity strategist Peter Bookvar says, “The absolute cost of living is now back at a record high even though there are fewer jobs.”1 Americans generally feel they have more opportunity to get ahead than their parents but are more exposed to economic risk as well.2 The rise of gig-based work (nontraditional, nonemployee jobs filled by independent contractors, freelancers, and temps) means more and more companies don't have to provide full-time employee benefits, health care, retirement savings plans, or any kind of workplace protections.3
In the 1970s the majority of the 72 percent of Americans with a high school education or less were still able to flourish and make it into the middle classes. Having less education was not much of a hindrance if a person had a strong work ethic because manufacturing still had a very large presence.4 Over the next several decades that path to the middle class became less attainable as companies that used to pride themselves on being self-sufficient began to focus on cost-saving measures, particularly outsourcing jobs to foreign countries with low wages and minimal to no benefits. At the same time this restructuring of business was happening, the costs of living continued to rise and the overall median wage for men remained stagnant.
Over the next decade and a half, the “good life” drifted further out of sight. The workforce increased by almost 70 percent while those with a high school education or less decreased to 41 percent of workers, meaning about two million jobs were no longer available to those with no post-secondary education.5 Fast-forward to today, where the majority of the net job growth in developed nations has been created by positions that require at least some post-secondary education.6 The picture is certainly grim for the less educated, especially the less educated male.
From 1969 to 2009 the median annual earnings dropped 38 percent for male high school dropouts, 26 percent for men with just a high school diploma, and 2 percent for men with a college degree—keep in mind those numbers only include the men who have jobs. The average earnings at every education level surpass median earnings, indicating a concentrated wage increase for those at the top of the distribution.7
Capital accumulates capital faster than labor; during the initial years of the nation's economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.8 Now it costs more to send kids to private elementary school than it used to cost to go to a prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, and only the elite can afford it.
Proportions have grown out of control:
1970: Tuition: 5.5 percent of annual household income
House: 305 percent of annual household income9
1991: Tuition: 19 percent of annual household income
House: 500 percent of annual household income10
2010: Tuition: 33 percent of annual household income
House: 552 percent of annual household income11
In sum, a high school diploma is no longer a passport to “living the dream.” Now many people—even those with higher education—have little hope of getting ahead as their lives begin to resemble the drudgery of Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down after it has been moved to the top.
The Escalating Cost of Living Is Driving Down Personal and Social Values
In this recession era, three men have lost their jobs for every woman who has lost hers.12 Has the cost of living combined with fewer prospects caused men to see the idea of family not as the reward of one's hard work but, rather, as a burden and the cause of now having to work harder? To many young men, the future looks bleak, and they wonder how they will ever be able to afford a wife, children, house, and a reasonable lifestyle when they retire—assuming they had a job with benefits.
We can no longer buy the myth that the good life can be provided by a single paycheck. Nor can we pretend that upward mobility is equally accessible to everyone, as Sir Ferdinand Mount, columnist for the Sunday Times, pointed out in his book, Mind the Gap:
Over the course of the 20th century foreign competition demanded that we give up the old nepotism and promotion by seniority. In order to survive, we needed to reward and advance merit wherever it was found. As a result, a new elite was formed, and the lower classes were drained of their most talented members . . . Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider . . . Less alluring still is the tendency of capitalism to de-skill workers, especially those at the bottom . . . capitalism is continually finding efficiency gains by simplifying tasks for humans, while it complicates them for machines, so that all the business of calculating, measuring, estimating and combining is done by the computer, while the human is required only to press a small selection of buttons.13
The new nature of physically undemanding work means women can participate in the jobs they never could before, he explains, but,
it has a downside too, in that physical strength and endurance, once the principal selling qualities for lower-class men, find fewer takers now. Male pride and sense of usefulness diminish correspondingly. We are uncomfortably aware that a job for life in a steel mill or even a coal mine is more a man's life than a series of impermanent engagements to stack shelves in a supermarket.14
This simplifying of previously complex tasks can partly explain why wages have not increased. “We are the generation living through an information revolution every bit as profound as the industrial revolution of the past,” says psychologist Mary Ragan,15 but the information revolution is leaving far too many behind without a sense of purpose. As one twenty-six-year-old male from our survey said, millennial have
struggled with higher unemployment rates due to . . . a lack of opportunities in this volatile economy. We feel lost and abandoned, for as much talk as there is of . . . social programs and getting the older generation back to work in the media, there is very little to no attention given to us 20- and 30-somethings that have been left behind.
Even for the young men who have the desire to get additional education and fully apply themselves, the high price of schooling is sure to break their back.
Man's Math
This amusing equation is all over the Internet. Sadly, many young men draw the same conclusion.
Many students who go into serious debt for college degrees grasp the realities of employment only upon graduation: that there isn't a real job awaiting them and their diploma isn't an assured route for success. A whole generation of young people, who were told they could be anything they put their minds to, are being thrown into a junkyard of mass unemployment, settling for some “cube farm” job just to make ends meet.
The pressure can be too much. We see extremes in Japan, where, in addition to the soshoku danshi—herbivorous men—there is another set of male shut-ins called hikikomori, who never leave their homes, or, in most cases, their parents' homes. China has its own version of this category of men, diaosi, which literally translates to “male pubic hair.” The diaosi are working-class men, many in the tech industry, who lack social skills and spend much of their free time gaming. Although their wages are often considered middle class, they feel deprived relative to the gao fu shuai—tall, rich, and handsome men—and are not optimistic about ever moving up the hierarchy. These self-labeled groupings of guys reflect the powerlessness many of them feel in the tough economy; all over the world it's getting harder for the ordinary male to succeed.
Without the real possibility of ever becoming the family breadwinner, young men are growing up with feelings of anticipated failure. If they can't be the alpha mal
e, what new roles are available for them? If we don't figure this out, employing systemic as well as individual solutions, it's going to be a lonely world for many young men and eventually, everyone.
The devaluation of social interaction and relationships will have significant impacts on and local, regional, and global economy, not only in the lost human capital but through negative population growth. The combination of loneliness and lack of purpose should be a red flag for anyone who cares about young men. Loneliness is more hazardous to the health than smoking or obesity.16 It reduces life expectancy—lonely people have weaker immune systems and die faster from disease.17 Men with few prospects are also more likely to kill themselves.18 And some see the widening wealth gap leading to increased crime and social unrest.19 In other words, if society wants to harness the constructive power of its young men, society is going to have to care about its young men.
PART III
Solutions
SIXTEEN
What the Government Can Do
Worldwide, people now trust social media more than they trust their government, in which confidence is at an all-time low.1 More and more, people are counting on businesses and NGOs to invent, connect, and take action in ways that governments are incapable, unwilling, or too slow to do. In the US, Bill and Melinda Gates are even funding education reform through their foundation, with programs such as “Postsecondary Success,”2 because schools are failing to deliver positive results. The government needs to bring in more tech stars to make its services and agencies much more user friendly, efficient, and responsive.3
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