Warren Farrell
American educator, activist and author of seven books on men's and women's issues.
If power means having control over one's own life, then perhaps there is no better ranking of the impact of sex roles and racism on power over our own lives than life expectancy.
Unemployment, of course, sends the economy into a recession, creating more unemployment. Ironically, unemployment hurts women more than men. Feminists argue that’s because of sex discrimination: women are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Correct on the outcome; wrong on the reason. We hire first what we need most, and we fire first what we need least. That’s why you hire the garbage collector first, and fire him last. Men may be hired first and fired last because more men are willing to do society’s dirty work and hazardous work for a lower price.
We would not think of allowing a man to determine a woman’s life merely because a fetus he helped create was in her womb; then why would we allow a woman to determine a man’s life merely because a fetus he helped create is in her womb?
The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother’s time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours… It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.
There are 25 differences in the way women and men behave in the workplace. These 25 differences lead to men receiving higher pay and women having better lives—or at least more balanced lives.
Only when a woman shares male risks can she really begin to understand men.
A part-time working woman makes $1.10 for every dollar made by her male counterpart.
A study of attorneys found that the attorneys whose pictures were judged independently to be the better-looking ones were able to earn about 12% more per year than the less good-looking ones. The better-looking attorneys worked longer hours, but even when that and dozens of other variables were controlled for, the better-looking attorneys were able to bill significantly more per hour. Needless to say, the male attorneys were ranked as much less attractive than the women, increasing the gap in women’s pay over men’s. The bigger the gap in looks, the bigger was the gap in pay. The more time passed, the more the gap widened. Sometimes life isn’t fair.
When I eat a meal, I think of all the people whose labor has contributed to my nourishment, and that thought nourishes my appreciation. I hope it nourishes you too.
In brief, we do more research on men in prison, men in the military, and men in general than we do on women for the same reason we do more research on rats than we do on humans.
As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.
In the case of a man and a woman [accused of commiting a crime together], both will often agree to the man taking the rap—despite the man being more likely to receive a longer sentence and more likely to be raped in prison. If blacks were agreeing to do that for whites, the black community would be smart enough to call that ‘learned subservience.’
Choosing safety is a choice of life over career.
The belief that women are discriminated against in the workplace reinforces a couple's tendency to have the woman stay at home. It is the tendency for women to stay at home that makes the workplace value her less. then, shortly after she is married, it begins to make sense for her to move for her husband's career, not for her husband to move for her career. Conversely, it makes sense for them to invest in his medical, law, or engineering degree--rather than hers... ironically, then, a reality has been created from a false reality. And, ironically, women's careers are hurt via comments meant to prod a society into helping women's careers. The road to hell is paved...
As females enter the workplace, will our tendency to protect women create rules that will also protect men? Yes and no. Yes, when, for example, the new concern for doctors working fewer than eighty hours per week also affects men. No, when working-class jobs get divided into the males taking the hazardous jobs… and women taking safer jobs. And in professional careers, if males take irregular hours and specialties such as surgery, while females take regular hours and specialties like psychiatry, then we will only reinforce the female-protected class and the male-disposable class.
It is ironic that a movement that made its reputation championing the irrelevance of biological differences when those differences were to most women's disadvantage immediately returned to biological determinism when those differences were to the most women’s advantage.
Single women often fear that the men they are going out with wouldn't be comfortable with less career and more child. Perhaps. If a woman selects a man with a lot of career ambition, she'll get what she selected. The solution? Choose among men who would love to be married to a career woman who valued his being home full-time with the children for a few years. Can't find these men? State your interest on your Match.com profile--the Internet's the best net to catch the right fish. You'll be surprised.
The rules of sexism do not free men from the terror of violence; they only keep men from complaining about it.
Men tuned into women but not tuned into their own hurts usually retained the attitude that women needed special protection.
No movement calls [migrant workers] oppressed for providing money for women from whom they are receiving neither cooking nor cleaning; for providing their wives with homes while they sleep on the ground.