Why Many Men Don’t Embrace Equality [View all]

[seabeyond]

Not long ago, I appeared on a television talk show opposite three “angry white males” who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination. The show’s title, no doubt to entice a large potential audience, was “A Black Woman Stole My Job.” Each of the men described how they were passed over for jobs or promotions for which they believed themselves qualified. Then it was my turn to respond. I said I had one question about one word in the title of the show. I asked them about the word “my.” Where did they get the idea it was “their” job? Why wasn’t the show called “A Black Woman Got a Job” or “A Black Woman Got the Job?”

These men felt the job was “theirs” because they felt entitled to it, and when some “other” person – black, female – got the job, that person was really taking what was “rightfully” theirs. “It seems like if you’re a white male you don’t have a chance,” commented a young man to then-New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen a decade ago. The young man went to a college where 5% of his classmates were black. “What the kid really meant is that he no longer has the edge,” she wrote of the encounter, that the rules of a system that may have served his father will have changed. It is one of those good-old-days constructs to believe it was a system based purely on merit, but we know that’s not true. It is a system that once favored him, and others like him. Now sometimes – just sometimes – it favors someone different.

I think it’s hard, really hard, to change that mindset. We were raised to be Don Drapers, Alpha males, casually, uncritically entitled to a gender order that is vertical, hierarchical. And now we feel we have to be more Al Gore-esque Beta-males, oriented to equality, horizontally.

But change we shall – and not just because it’s the right thing to do. It’s also in our interests to embrace gender equality. The empirical evidence is clear: at the corporate level, those companies that embrace diversity and enable everyone (including white men) to feel included and valued have lower rates of absenteeism and job turnover, and higher levels of job satisfaction and productivity. And personally, the more equal our relationships, the happier and healthier everyone will be.

http://thecurrentconscience.com/blog/