Are men now discriminated against?
Well, in one way of coursemen are discriminated against, just as women are. In fact, all of us are discriminated against all the time: that’s just peopleusing their own mixtures of judgement and prejudice to decide things about us by our looks, accent, height, weight, whatever.
But in the more specific sense, are men now sexually discriminated against? There does seem to be some evidence that there is, as this quoted by Dr. Helen shows.
According to a 2006 survey commissioned by Kelly Services, a firm that finds temporary and permanent staff for companies, 34.8% of men said they believed they had experienced discrimination over the past five years at work compared with 33.3% of women. Similar findings were reported by University of Toronto sociology professor John Kervin. In a survey of business students at an Ontario college, Prof. Kervin found that just as many men as women — 21% each — felt their professors were biased against them because of their gender.
It’s the classic workplace discrimination scenario in reverse: All things being equal, if a man and woman are up for the same job, the woman has an unfair advantage, say men’s rights advocates. And they blame decades of affirmative action initiatives that have encouraged companies to promote women and minorities.
There’s a branch of socioligical thought which says that men cannot be discriminated against in this manner. It’s very closely allied with the idea that racial minorities cannot be racist themselves. Only those in the position of power in a society can be guilty of such discrimination. Thus minorities cannot be raciost (which will be huge news to those who have encountered such racism first hand) and men cannot be discriminated against in a patriarchy.
This particular strand of sociological thought is worth even less than most others in that benighted discipline of course. Discrimination is discrimination whether it is of the affirmative kind or not.
But if we’ve reached the point that just as many men are being discriminated against as women, might it not be time to call that whole policy of affirmative discrimination into question? If what we’re trying to do is wipe out such unfairness, it doesn’t seem very sensible to be adding to it ourselves, does it?
August 27th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Unfortunately, there is no answer here that will wipe the slate clean and allow people to start over on any equal playing field. As for blacks in America, as black historian Roger Wilkins put it in a 1995 article for The Nation: “blacks have a 375-year history on this continent: 245 involving slavery, 100 involving legal discrimination, and only 30 involving anything else.” Of course now this is 40 or so of ‘anything else,’ but that history is hard to overcome, I think.
And there is the other side of the argument, that affirmative action was the wrong approach to it all, because whereas animosity might have died out with an older generation (or perhaps this is too hopeful), now we have a new generation of white people bitter and resentful of certain people because affirmative action, equal opportunity, etc. has made it harder for them to get jobs, get into school, get that scholarship, and so forth.
As for being bitter and resentful toward women for the same reason, resentment will only go so far from men to women, because many men would not choose to cut themselves off from women altogether…
Tim adds: That last is quite right. It’s terribly difficult to have a war between the sexes when everyone keeps wanting to cooperate with the enemy.