During these holidays I’m reading the book by Warren Farrell “The Boy Crisis - Why our boys are struggling and what can we do about it”.
As both the father of a little girl and as an educator I often question myself about gender roles and gender equality. I care to provide my pupils equal opportunities as they grow, and to show respect and help them on their own unique path.
I often though feel uneasy around many discussions that we have at work that focus on providing equal opportunities for girls in STEM, or that focus on providing equal opportunities for our female researcher colleagues. There is something about some of these discussions that does not feel right to me, that I often struggle to pinpoint and find the words to express what it is about. I often hear my female colleagues say things that would likely get me fired if I were to say those same things in public, genders reversed, just to be told that there are things I cannot understand because of my “male privilege”.
When my wife and I were expecting our baby, we did not want to know the gender in advance, both because we did not want it to affect our decisions, and because we liked the surprise. Apart from the pressure that we received from friends and family to know the gender, once our baby was born I got struck by the comment of a good friend and colleague: “You are lucky that you just got a girl, she’s going to have a much easier time growing up”. At first I did not understand that comment, we are still fighting for equal opportunities for girls in STEM after all.
As a kid born in the late ’80s—around the cross point where girls were doing as well as boys in school after the leaps forward made by the first wave of feminism in the ’60s and ’70s—I am relatively blind to the struggles of the current generation of students who is born in the ’00s and ’10s. This year in Denmark for the first time girls with non-western background did better than danish boys in 9th grade. In other words, being born female from a cultural background that traditionally suppresses girls’ rights to education gives about the same disadvantage for doing well in school as being born male from a western background. The trend for non-western girls is (fortunately) upwards, while the trend for boys has flattened, after plummeting ever since the cross point of the ’80s.
A kid’s success in education is a very good predictor for their success in life. While I hear a lot of welcome efforts to promote female access to STEM educations, which are definitely valuable and will give our girls an edge in society, as well as help reduce the bias in these fields, I don’t hear about equal efforts to address the male struggles in primary education, or to promote male access to care professions that are strongly female-dominated (health care, child care, primary education, elderly care). Many of these care professions are also very valuable and in dire need of more work force. Maybe as a STEM worker this is my blind spot, so please! prove me wrong if you work in primary education or one of the care professions, and help us all do something about it.
As the father of a little girl I worry that if we don’t act now, she will have all the advantages and opportunities to do well in school, but she will likely struggle to find a partner with the same drive, focus and motivation to do well in his future. As an educator in STEM, the worry that my male students perform worse is present and real, despite all the implicit bias that we still need to address as a field that has long been male dominated.
As a father who wants equal participation to my partner in all aspects of family life, spanning the roles of diaper-changer and of bread-winner, I experience that gender discriminations that we fought so long to dismantle are still very real for me. It’s not perfect for my wife either, but it’s mostly undisputed that she can join the workforce and study without it being frowned upon. For me, any comment about how well I do parenting inevitably comes with strings attached: “… unlike most men who are terrible parents”. I had my baby girl taken away from my arms as I was caring for her by my mother-in-law, which would be outrageous if this was done to a mom, but as a dad I was told to suck it up. I heard from friends that they will never accept a male baby-sitter or kindergarten teacher because of the risk that he’ll be a rapist pedophile. There is a long list of discriminations for males who want to be good child carers, but I’ll stop here.
Unfortunately, this kind of issues is only apparent to men much later in life, since we were never denied an education or access to the workforce, the typical issues that women encountered in their early life. Young men however struggle with a lack of identity and purpose in life, they have a sense of injustice that is often answered by yearning for traditional family and gender roles, though it is not a balanced answer to what is offered to girls. As we worked on breaking female gender roles and discriminations for now 60 years have we forgotten to do the same for males?
I’m enjoying this book by Warren Farrell and I hope more people who care about these issues join me for the ride. Gender issues are difficult and it’s far too easy to be 50% blind, looking at them only from one own’s perspective and life experience. Farrell focuses on boys in this book, but he does so with a feminist’s perspective that I think both men and women will appreciate.