- New Zealand Equality Education Foundation

CHAPTER 5
EMPLOYMENT ISSUES AND THE "WOMEN CAN DO ANYTHING" LIE

News Item
Barry Ceminchuk ... has sued the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense for employment discrimination against him and all men.1

Introduction
There are jobs in which women have gained an unfair advantage over men -- others where women already had an advantage -- and more where Feminists have leveraged and exacerbated an already inequitable state of affairs. Three employment sectors where men are disadvantaged are the police, modelling, and professional sports. Why? Because men have to compete with women on a level playing field when it suits women, but when it doesn't, women get special, preferential treatment.

The slogan "Women Can Do Anything", which has been popular in New Zealand, was meant as a claim that women could do any job men could. In practice, it became dogma that had to be proved, usually by applying a double standard.2 Thus, in the police force, men have to perform a physical test each year in less time than the women. (In the U.S. this is called "gender norming."). But no one imposes gender norming on criminals, so a gender-normed policewoman is likely to be physically incompetent, when faced with the task of chasing or fighting a male criminal. If the police could do a deal with the criminals, whereby the crims wouldn't run too fast or fight too hard when confronted by a mere policewoman, this sexist double-standard would perhaps start to make sense.

Is the return on our investment making the double standard worthwhile? Hardly. According to an article in the Wellington Dominion newspaper of October 11th 1997, women don't stay in the New Zealand police force as long as men do – only seven years, on average, as against 17 years for men – so the investment in training a woman police officer is a relative waste of taxpayers' money.

This same double standard is applied in other fields. In professional sports, golf has separate men's and women's tees. In professional tennis, the women play "best of three sets" while men play "best of five sets" – for virtually the same prize money.

Aren't double standards supposed to be sexist? Not in this case, according to University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon: "Why should you have to be the same as a man to get what a man gets simply because he is one?" (The Seattle Times, March 6, 1992) She argues that workplace performance is judged by male standards based on male paradigms and this amounts to discrimination when those standards are applied to women. Hence, employers should not judge women by those standards.

In the real world, this argument is incoherent. A job is not a right – it is a means to provide economic resources for oneself, one's dependents, and the community. Western men allowed women into the workforce on the assumption they were just as good as men. At least, according to the Feminist propaganda they were as good as men.

If Feminists now say women are not, after all, as productive as men, and for this reason need to be assessed by different standards, then they are in effect arguing for women to get back to the kitchen! At least there they would provide a service with high social utility paid for by the labour of their menfolk, as used to be the case in western societies. No economy is so rich and secure that it can afford to give priority to inefficient workers when more efficient ones are available.

The Feminist slogans "Women Can Do Anything" and "Girls Can Do Anything" are lies. They are never applied fairly. But they are not truly intended as statements of fact; in reality: they are devices, propaganda of the kind common in totalitarian countries to overcome and conquer the truth, to make something true that is obviously not true, to peddle a Big Lie. Remember George Orwell (the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984") ? He would recognize the modern Feminist state as a totalitarian one.

The main aim of Feminists in recent years has been to get more women into the paid workforce and make life for them there as pleasant and as profitable as possible no matter the price men have to pay for it. Feminists have paid lip-service to the notions of "equality" and "equity" where this seemed to be a useful tactic. But there have been no effective men's pressure-groups to assure these standards were adhered to. Hence, unless some Feminist group decides to make an issue of something nobody listens to calls for equity. And this gives women an extremely unfair advantage.


Equal Employment Opportunities and Affirmative Action kill men
Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and Affirmative Action (AA) are examples of Feminist-supported workplace policies, and these policies kill. Mainly, they kill men (see below). And that's quite apart from the jobs they steal from able men to squander on less qualified women.

This may be hard to prove, since any two candidates for a given job may have such different educational backgrounds and life experiences that it is easy for a selection panel with a particular agenda (e.g., Affirmative Action) to find some factors in the background of the applicants they can use to rationalise their decision afterwards, if necessary. For example, they could say their organisation lacked enough customer service staff who had experience dealing with whining children; their preferred candidate "just happened" to have such experience and they felt this would be more useful for dealing with customers than extensive knowledge of the products, services and industry. But we still need examples where such bias is obvious.

Feminists have adamantly asserted that "women can do anything" and that men, as a sex, cannot be considered more suitable than women for particular jobs. So why is it okay to say women, as a sex, are more suited for particular jobs? This is a glaring example of Feminists employing sexist standards to advance their agenda, and it goes against everything they say they stand for. If a job requires men to meet certain physical fitness criteria, it should require all candidates to meet those same standards. If a female candidate can meet those standards, under the principles of equal employment opportunity she should get the same consideration any other equally qualified male candidate would receive. But affirmative action has different priorities.

There are obvious, apparent differences between the policies of EEO and AA The term "Equal Employment Opportunity" implies there should be no barriers based purely on race or sex to any person who aspires to a particular position. "Affirmative Action," however, goes well beyond that. If removing barriers to women and ethnic minorities, etc., does not result in their being employed in every workplace and at every hierarchical level in proportion to their presence in the population as a whole, then quotas need to be set to achieve that result artificially and irrespective of the merits of the candidates for the positions.

Each government and workplace tends to interpret these two programmes differently, depending on the political forces at work there. John Marcus of the National Coalition of Free Men defines Affirmative Action as follows:

Current policy of establishing hiring quotas, quotas for business contracts, quotas for university admissions, providing some people, and not others, with more favorable loan arrangements, preferential treatment in awarding broadcast licenses and other favoritism based on race and gender. Favoritism is enforced through government agencies. Affirmative action first became wide spread during the Nixon administration (Republican). (www.ncfm.org/afiract.htm)

We have to look at both sides of the ledger. Women may have been prevented from doing certain things, but some of those things (which men were forced to do) were unpleasant -- even dangerous. In pre-Feminist western societies, there was an equal-but-different model of gender roles which emphasised the fact that there are some things women can do better than men, and vice versa.

Women can't do everything as well as men
When women get pregnant or during menstruation and menopause, which don't have precise male equivalents, women tend to function below par, intellectually (see the medical research papers: Buckwalter JG; Stanczyk FZ; McCleary CA; Bluestein BW; Buckwalter DK; Rankin KP; Chang L; Goodwin TM (1998) and Keenan PA; Yaldoo DT; Stress ME; Fuerst DR; Ginsburg KA (1998)).

Certainly they cannot sustain the kind of physical activity required by many jobs. And pregnant women leave. They may come back, and in many jurisdictions employers are required to hold position for them, but while they are gone their coworkers must shoulder extra responsibilities, then bring them back up to speed upon return. Hence, women can cost more and produce less than men.
Moreover, the Feminist lie puts people (mainly men) at risk when it allows women into positions where they are not physically competent. Every time male and female police officers patrol together, it is because a man was denied the job (see below). The lie gave the job to a woman who performed less well than he did in a physical test. So when those two police officers patrol together, the man will sometimes be forced to protect the woman because she can’t handle it. That happened in one particular case near Wellington, New Zealand. Two unarmed police officers were injured – the man much more severely than the woman – in an assault.

Employing women as fire fighters also puts people in burning buildings at risk. They may die solely because women lack the upper-body strength to move unconscious, heavy people out of burning buildings by themselves. In the past, if two firemen entered a burning building and saw two unconscious people, those two people would be carried or dragged to safety. Now, if a male and a female firefighter enter a burning building and find two unconscious people, unless the male firefighter can return in time, the second of these victims may die!

Nowadays, some fire services have a policy whereby two firefighters are required to move any incapacitated person at a fire scene. I believe that this policy was brought in as a sop to physically incompetent women – so that their physical incompetence would not stand out. The result is that some people may be dying at fires, who would otherwise have been saved.

But not all jobs require that kind of strength. What about those? EEO Policies for men and women are a result of the relatively recent upsurge in numbers of women in the paid workforce. This upsurge, in turn, was the result of:

1. the increased mechanisation of the workplace, which reduced the importance of physical strength;
2. an increase in available labour-saving devices for the home, which gave women more free time;
3. the availability of safe and convenient methods of birth-control, which had the same result;
4. pressure from Feminists, who convinced generations of western women that it is nobler to work in paid employment than as a traditional housewife;
5. the deliberate provision of daycare, with the specific intention of encouraging women to enter or reenter the paid workforce.

Research has shown that daycare is detrimental to the psychological development and socialisation of children. So Feminism extracts a price not just from men and unborn children, but also from children, and the adults that they will turn into. See http://ici2.umn.edu/ceed/publications/factfind/daycare.htm .

Feminists have largely dictated the lines along which EEO policies were implemented. They required male-only or mainly-male workplaces to conform to policies designed to make it easier for women who wanted to work alongside men to gain entry. Moreover, they do not care what policies men might need to help them work alongside all these women! The only policies they look for are those which force men to make the workplace and work easier for women.

The New Zealand Human Rights Commission's Equal Employment Opportunities Manual defines "Equal Employment Opportunities" as:

“A systematic, results-oriented, set of actions that are directed towards the identification and elimination of discriminatory barriers that cause or perpetuate inequality in the employment of any person or group of persons.”

On the surface, this appears to apply to “any person or group of persons” without bias. Including men. There are at least three areas in society, however, where it is men who are discriminated against by such barriers. Is the Commission willing to address them? No, as the manual states:

Men are not within the target groups (i.e., do not belong to an ethnic or other official minority) and are not included for special consideration in the manual. They have not been subjected in the same degree to the factors which have limited the participation in employment of target group members.

In other words, men don’t count.

Moreover, this discrimination is exacerbated by Human Rights legislation which is seldom written with men in mind, and the pervasive male chivalry which applies sexist double standards that generally favour women. For example, I was working in a female-dominated workplace when management brought in an anti-sexual harassment policy. This policy was drafted by a committee headed by an old-style Feminist woman in middle management. The new policy gave examples of "sexual harassment," including "looking up skirts and down dresses." Obviously this targets male and lesbian "offenders."

Immediately, two middle-aged Feminist women whom I found unattractive took it upon themselves to bend over and expose their bras and breasts to me (since I was well-known as the one-and-only anti-Feminist activist). I regarded this as sexual harassment, but the anti-sexual harassment policy made me out to be harassing them unless I instantly averted my eyes! So I went to the only pro-male member of the committee and complained about this, after which he managed to get the policy amended so no sex-specific offences or examples were mentioned. I am certain no other person there would have thought of or dared to lift a finger to change that anti-male policy.

Image versus reality
All the propaganda about EEO is putting pressure on organisations to hire and promote women solely for the sake of hiring and promoting women. These organisations worry about their image. Women spend much more money on consumption than men, so this gives them power over retail firms and advertisers. In the article, "Work-Day Dream" www.geocities.com/peterzohrab/199enslt.html#Dream
the author writes:

“With an hour to kill on my lunch break, I casually stroll through the brightly lit corridors of the shopping mall. As I look around, it occurs to me that I could easily spend the rest of my life without ever needing a good 95% of the items sold in this place. Yet everywhere I look it's mostly women snapping things up left right and center.”

Men may be fired or made redundant to make space for women who are not be selected on merit, but just because they are women. This is serious sex discrimination.

In June 1994, the male staff at New Zealand's Open Polytechnic formed a Men's Network. Its aim was to combat the "gender-cleansing" effects of the Equal Employment Opportunities policy practised by that institution's female Principal. Tom Dowling, coordinator of this network, said he had never thought seriously about discrimination against men or about men's rights until it became obvious men were being removed to make way for women. I interviewed him for Wellington Access Radio's Men's Rights programme. He told me it was an informal meeting at morning tea which crystallised the issue for him and his male colleagues. The Open Polytechnic was in the middle of the latest round of redundancies layoffs – the fifth such round in four years. Redundancy was the topic of conversation at that morning tea.

What focused their minds on the issue of men's rights was that 79 of the 80 staff laid off so far had been men! Furthermore, they noticed that 48 of the 52 who were about to be laid off were men. "Not surprisingly, as men. we found this rather concerning," Dowling said.

Four years previously, when the female Principal took over from her male predecessor, the Open Polytechnic employed few women. Only 20 percent of the staff, as the subjects taught were mainly male-dominated trade subjects. Now, according to Tom, the latest redundancy round would turn male staff into a minority on campus. Most of the powerful management positions were held, or were about to be held by women. Since men were about to become a minority in the staff-room, the Men's Network decided to ask for the privileges the Women's Network had long enjoyed under the Open Polytechnic's Equal Employment Opportunities policy.

The Women's Network had a notice-board for its own exclusive use. Now the Men's Network demanded the right to take it over. Tom pointed out that the idea for a Men's Network was largely tongue-in-cheek when it started. But it got more serious as the members began delving more deeply into the institution's Equal Employment Opportunities operation.

They learned groups with official status under the Equal Employment Opportunities policy had monthly meetings. These meetings were half in paid time. Since the campus was split between several sites, the institution paid the monthly taxi fares of network members who had to travel to the main campus for these meetings. Obviously, these subsidies came from the same source which formely paid the salaries of the men who were laid off. These subsidies were not only substantial, they were also sometimes used for dubious purposes. For example, the May 1994 Women's Network meeting was held for the purpose of watching slides on Africa provided by a travel consultant. And in 1993 the Open Polytechnic's EEO programme funded an ethnic food festival.

The issue of toilets also cropped up. This is particularly interesting as one of New Zealand's most radically Feminist members of Parliament, Marilyn Waring, made a big issue of the lack of female toilets in Parliament Buildings. On the floor of the secondary campus where Dowling worked, the only toilet was a women's toilet, despite women being a minority on that floor. Male staff had to go down to the next floor, which was leased by another organisation, to use a male toilet. To add insult to injury, the male toilet was smelly and fitted out like a public toilet while the women's toilet was very plush and fitted with an extractor-fan and air-freshener. The toilet situation was similar on the other secondary polytechnic campus. When employers discriminate against men in various ways, it seldom gets any publicity or resolution.

False Statistics
The vigour with which social engineering policies such as EEO and AA are implemented is often linked to the perceived severity of the issue. And it is Feminist researchers, by and large, who produce the statistics intended to show how big such problems are. Hence, EEO and AA policies are often based on distorted statistics. An official government report, for example, states:

There has been little movement towards gender equity in the teaching service in the past three years.... Fewer women than men held senior positions, particularly in primary schools. Furthermore, they received, on average, lower salaries than did their male colleagues in equivalent positions or with the same qualifications. (page 1, second paragraph).3

This passage was obviously intended by the two female authors to create the impression there was some problem to be solved here. The leaflet is studded with words such as "imbalance," "under-representation" and so on. However, the leaflet does not take account of – or even mention – length of service! Pay-scales in the teaching service are based on a system of seniority from a point initially determined by qualifications to a maximum you can't progress beyond without applying for promotion.

Near the end, the leaflet does mention how more women than men left the service (temporarily or permanently), and it is obvious childbirth and childcare must have been among the reasons for this. Yet the leaflet neither investigates nor even mentions any reason why women have lower salaries than men with the same qualifications that do not support their contention of gender bias. Because women have shorter careers, they don't progress as far up the payscale ladder, and they are less likely to apply for or achieve promotion.

The link is obvious, though it may not account statistically for all the difference between men's and women's salaries in the teaching service. Regardless, the leaflet conveys a misleading impression, and the authors must have been either incompetent or intentionally fraudulent. Do our officials care? I wrote to the Minister of Education about this and the reply from Education Ministry Group Manager Rob McIntosh neither disputes this nor apologizes for the oversight:

“Unfortunately, data on length of service was not available when the report was being prepared. While acknowledging the relevance of this factor to some of the issues discussed, its absence does not invalidate the material which is included. For example, if position is partly determined by years of service, then the analysis of salary by designation also reflects the length of time a person has been teaching.”

They simply do not care. As long as there is no Masculist research industry to balance the bias of the Feminist research industry, this sort of distortion will continue to go unchallenged and result in administrative and political policies which discriminate against men.

Men work for and earn more money than women do, but women control more than 65% of US personal wealth and spend four consumer dollars for every consumer dollar men spend. This means that personal wealth is controlled mainly by women, because women live longer than men and inherit their wealth at the point in their life when they are likely to be at their richest. Young men, on the other hand, are usually relatively poor at the start of their careers. Women also get wealth from men through alimony, palimony and child-support payments which they do not have to report for tax purposes because men do.

Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment regulations are another example of one-sided rules instigated by Feminists, who have scant regard for the needs or rights of men. In some cases, these seem to have been devised by Lesbian Separatists who really would prefer to have nothing to do with men at all! It is generally men who take the initiative in sexual relationships, with all the attendant risks of rejection. This means that men, on the whole, must be more open about their sexual feelings or end up single, celibate and alone. Heterosexual women, on the whole, tend to be more passive and are less overt about their sexual feelings since they can afford to wait until a man makes the first move.

So sexual harassment regulations, by punishing natural male sexual behaviours while rewarding natural female passivity, oppress men. Men, by acting naturally, can now have their careers blighted – while women, by acting naturally, are defined in this context as model employees. Females can and do sexually harass males (I have been on the receiving end of this), but it is basically an offense waiting for a man to commit it.

Sexual harassment regulations can even have an anti-male bias written into them, as I mentioned earlier. Policies, for example, which restrict "looking down shirts or up skirts" as a form of sexual harassment but place no restrictions on women dressing in ways that produce gaps in their blouses or allow vast amounts of leg or even underwear to be seen, depending on the position of the wearer. This makes women officially blameless while forcing men to avert their eyes or run the risk of being automatically guilty of sexual harassment.

In America, the National Association of Scholars took out an ad in the March 1994 edition of the American Spectator publicizing their policy statement on sexual harassment and academic freedom. Two of the most important points it makes are:

1. Institutions should define sexual harassment precisely, confining it to individual behaviour that is manifestly sexual and that clearly violates the rights of others;
2. Institutions should punish those who knowingly lodge false accusations of harassment.

These aim to make it difficult for women (in particular) to turn just any trivial incident into a sexual harassment complaint – and also to make it hard to use sexual harassment complaints as a way of victimising people who have unpopular opinions. But most institutions are far too intimidated by the Feminist lobby and their lawyers to implement reasonable policy. Better by far to immolate individual innocent men than to risk a big money lawsuit with all the attendant bad publicity. Proving once more how sexual harassment oppresses men.

Sports Apartheid
Where is the slogan "Women Can Do Anything" in professional sports such as tennis? Professional and semi-professional sportswomen receive far more prize-money and publicity than the level of their performances relative to men in most sports deserves. For example, in Iron Man and triathlon events the media and judges lavish attention on the male winner (and perhaps the second and third men to cross the finish line), and then on the first one-to-three women to cross the finish-line, even though the women may come in much later than dozens of men. Not only does this discriminate against all the men who come in ahead of the leading women, but all mention of the comparative times of the leading men and the leading women are sometimes censored out. To hide the fact that women can’t do just anything men can, of course.

In October, 1993, there was a combination running-and-mountain-bike race in Dunedin, New Zealand. Both men and women competed, but the women were given a 20-minute head-start. As one of the leading male contenders pointed out, this was highly sexist. If a woman, benefiting from her head-start, had come in first, she would have received exactly the same prize-money a male winner would, despite his 20-minute handicap.

As it happened, the best men took about 30 minutes less time than the leading women to cover the course, so it was a man who took the winner's purse. Will Feminists pressure the organisers to raise the handicap to 30 minutes, so a less able woman can win? Soon we could witness the sexist farce of a woman picking up the winner's purse for achieving a result inferior to several men and 30 minutes worse than the best man.

If sportswomen who underperform the best sportsmen in certain sports are to get the same level of publicity and sponsorship as the best sportsmen, then so should the best junior sportsmen and sportswomen, the best disabled sportsmen and sportswomen, the best veteran/masters sportsmen and sportswomen, and so on. Wherever there was sexual segregation Feminists did not like, they called it "sexist" and got it abolished. But in open competition with men, female athletes would be shown for what they really are. This is why Feminists have not been jumping up and down demanding an end to double standards on this issue, of course.

Similar conditions occur in other sports, such as tennis and golf, as Bertels (1981) points out. Professional female tennis-players play three-set tennis while their male colleagues often have to play five-set tennis championships. The calibre of women's tennis is lower, yet the women players seldom miss an opportunity to demand purses equal to men’s! In golf, the women's tee is closer to the green than the men's despite the obvious inequality involved. Again, no Feminists have complained about this. But they are complaining about the prize money.

Should they be paid the same as men? Thomas (1993) also points out that at Wimbledon female prize-money is within 10 percent of male prize-money. Female players such as Monica Seles want 100 percent parity in prize-money. Several years ago the male player Pat Cash said women are not only not as good at tennis as men (and no woman has denied this or attempted to disprove it), but they also don’t work as hard for their money.

Barbara Potter, a radio commentator for the BBC and a former professional tennis player, estimates that only 50 percent of professional women tennis players are fully fit. The men are much fitter, as they play on a much more competitive circuit. When Steffi Graf won (the women's) Wimbledon singles title in 1991, she had to play only 128 games to win her prize money of Stg. 216,000. Michael Stich, the men's 1991 Wimbledon champion, had to play all of 257 games for his prize money of Stg. 240,000. This works out to Stg. 933.85 per game for Stich, and almost twice as much per game – Stg. 1,687.50 – for Graf. Based on pay per game, the Feminists have no case.

Nor, according to Thomas (1993) can they argue for equal prize-money on the grounds of the amount of revenue they generate. On British television, for example, the BBC had 8.1 million viewers for the 1991 Wimbledon men's final but only 7.0 million viewers for the women's final. And the black market prices for Wimbledon centre court tickets for the men's final were Stg. 650-900 for the men's final and only Stg. 300-450 for the women's final.

Where is all the money paid to female tennis-players coming from? The same sources that pay male tennis-players. But female players are paid more than men, relative to the income they actually generate. If they were paid purely in proportion to their economic value, then male players would be paid more because male players earn more. So male professionals are in effect subsidising their female counterparts. Isn’t that like a sexist double standard? Two separate and unequal systems, like athletic segregation, or apartheid, one for privileged women, the other for workhorse men? But where are the Feminists demanding equal pay for equal work?

Since Feminists favour EEO and oppose separate men's clubs, the sexual apartheid system in all sports should be abolished; e.g., female players should play in the same competition as men and for the same prizes. The alternatives are to continue with the Feminist hypocrisy, or enshrine sexual segregation in some areas of social and sporting life through legislation, with pay for men set substantially higher than women to accurately reflect the different objective standards involved.

It is highly unfair for men and women to be treated equally in employment only when it suits women! We must actively oppose this, because Feminists are demanding more of this “equal” treatment (money and media coverage) across the board for their substandard half of the apartheid sports industry. All their jabber about wanting nothing more than a level playing field notwithstanding, this is one arena in which women are almost always incapable of competing on that much vaunted but little coveted level playing-field.

Double Standards
As I mentioned earlier, police recruitment policies in some countries discriminate against men. My example is the New Zealand police force, but I am sure such discrimination is a feature of most western police forces. There are no longer any minimum height requirements for police recruits in New Zealand, but there used to be. I asked Police Headquarters why the requirements were eliminated, and their reply was illuminating. It is "a well-established fact," they said, that men are, on average, taller than women. Proportionately, they argued, it would discriminate against women to set the same minimum height standards for them as for men.

How about areas such as the real estate industry, where women are sometimes considered to have better relevant people-skills than men? How about demanding that that industry should aim to employ more men who have less developed people skills because it would discriminate against men to set the same people skills standards for them as for women? Here people would say the best person for the job should get the job. Then why don't they say that for the police? A competent police force is much more vital to society's welfare than a competent real estate industry.

When Feminism-related jobs are advertised (in the Ministry of Women's Affairs, or Equal Employment Opportunities positions, etc.), one of the criteria is usually "an interest in sexual equality issues," or some such phrase. Proportionately, many more women than men meet this criterion, but no one ever says that the Ministry of Women's Affairs should lower their standards on this to be fair, proportionately, to men. Here's another (albeit extreme) example: it is also a "well-established fact" that it is very much more difficult for a woman, or even a group of women, to rape a man than for a man, or group of men to rape a woman. Does anyone ever argue that penalties for men who rape women should be lowered to be proportionately fair to men?

Feminist arguments taken to their logically absurd extreme aside, the fact remains that under the pressure from Feminist lobby-groups society does impose a double standard on men.

And what about ethnic double standards? If we have them for men and women, then logically, we should have different standards for ethnic or other groups whose average physical characteristics differ from the average for the population as a whole. Otherwise, some ethnic groups, such as the generally powerful Samoans, might have an “unfair advantage” over other ethnic groups, such as the generally slight east Asians. But let’s take the twisted Feminist logic ever further and apply it to disabled people. If we are going to have different physical standards for men and women, then we should have different standards for the physically and intellectually challenged, who should also be entitled to become police officers.

I wrote to the Minister of Police and got a copy of their old and new entry standards for recruits. I couldn't believe my eyes! The 1990 version had explicitly different standards for men and women, in that men of all ages had less time to complete the physical tasks than women of comparable ages. But in 1993 a Review of the Entry Standards for Police Recruits was completed. It said that the previous test "had different requirements for men and women and under the Human Rights legislation this is no longer acceptable." So they changed the screening process. Fair enough, you might think. But the new regulations had different standards for men and women, too! All that had really changed was the performance scores were translated into grades (0 to 3). The translation formula was what was different for men and women.

So a man and a woman might both get a 3 ("good") for the vertical jump, for example, but a man would have to reach 48cm or more where a woman would only have to reach 40cm, and so on for the various activities.

Obviously, they had their lawyers figure out a way to retain the double standard without breaching the letter of the new Human Rights legislation! Think of all the male applicants who fail even though they perform better than woman who pass. Forget the men, think of you and your loved ones getting inferior protection because the best candidates were not recruited. Straight-out job-related discrimination against men does take place – especially in female-dominated organisations such as cosmetics companies, and this is occasionally reported in the media.

Housework
The proposal that women should be paid wages for housework is another means by which Feminists are trying to extort money from men. If women can't get into the paid workforce, then taxpayers should pay them to stay home! In a radio interview an official from the New Zealand Ministry of Women's Affairs noted the Ministry opposes wages for housework/child upbringing and wants to retain features of the tax system that favour working couples over single-income families. Why? Ostensibly because it is unfair to women to pay them to stay home. Two-income families, the Ministry spokeswoman said, can usually cover the cost of childcare and/or home help themselves (i.e., from the pay one parent would otherwise relinquish to stay at home), or the working parents are able to handle the housework/child-care in addition to their work-commitments. Hence, why limit women's options?

There is an obvious Feminist value-judgement here: encouraging both partners to get jobs is more important to them than housework and bringing up a family. What the Ministry of Women's Affairs spokeswoman did not say was that having more housewives at home bringing up children would diminish the size of the working women's lobby, which (including the male partners of working women, who like the extra income) is the backbone of the Feminist movement. This is the real reason some Feminists oppose a wage for housewives, and why conservative Christian parties sometimes favour it. Employers, however, may have mixed motives for giving in to Feminist demands – women may be willing to work for less than men are, and having more women alongside men in the workforce increases the labour pool and drives down wages.

Moreover, income taxation in several western countries is structured along Feminist lines. One person in New Zealand earning, say, NZ$40,000 pays more tax than a working couple with a combined income of NZ$40,000. The government grants low income earners rebates irrespective of their partner's income, or lack thereof. In other words, the family is no longer a taxation unit, the number of dependents is no longer relevant to the amount of tax a person pays, and this contributes to the rising number of single parent (i.e. single mother) households. And New Zealand is by no means alone in this. The income taxes of several countries actively discourage marriage thereby hastening the demise of two-parent households.

Why would they want to do that? Because like the Chinese Communists under Mao, Feminists see the family as a rival power-structure they must weaken if not destroy.

Feminists have captured the Establishment in western countries, and they are continually restructuring society to make working women (with of without a partner, and with or without children) the central focus. Barbara Andolsen's article, for example, "A Woman's Work is Never Done" (1985), deals with the related issue of households where both the man and the woman work, but the woman still does most of the housework. She argues that justice requires men and women in such households should share the housework equally:

By 1983 fifty-two percent of all wives were working for wages. Almost two-thirds of all women with children ages six to seventeen were working for wages. Fifty percent of mothers with children under six were working outside the home (an increase of seventeen percent in one decade.) More than three-quarters of all divorced mothers are in the labor force. American households in which a wage-earning husband supports a nonwage-earning wife – a wife presumable devoting her energies to household maintenance – are now a dwindling minority among families. (page 4)

The same period might well furnish a Masculist researcher with other, arguably related statistics: a rise in sales of books by Feminists, a rising divorce-rate, a rising truancy-rate, a rising drug-dependency rate, a rising male suicide rate, and a rising crime rate. One could speculate that the increasing number of Feminist books (together with improved birth-control methods) persuaded more and more married women to enter the workforce and leave their husbands (not necessarily in that order). The increasing number of two-income and one-parent families led to increased truancy, drug-dependency, and crime among their neglected children. The New Scientist of 20 February 1999 reports that Bernard Lerer and his colleagues found that children whose parents split up are more likely to have a psychiatric illness later in life.

Feminism has destabilised the traditional family, encouraged many women to be dissatisfied (or to be brought up already dissatisfied) with the nuclear family, where the husband was the sole breadwinner and also titular "head of the household." Husbands, or potential husbands, had to either conform to a changing role in the family or opt for celibacy or separation (if already in a relationship). Feminism (particularly Radical Feminism) also romanticised financial and emotional independence from men as an ideal to which women should aspire.

Be that as it may, the fact seems to be that working couples do not share the housework equally: working husbands with working wives only do, on average, up to about twenty-five percent of what Andolsen calls the "more pleasant" of the household tasks, such as social or educational care of children, food-preparation, and food-clean-up. This ignores the more traditionally male chores, such as sports-coaching, gardening, car maintenance, and home-handyman-type work, which take up a lot of the working man's spare time. Warren Farrell (1993) reports two US studies showing men do more work than women, if you include housework, commuting, repairs, work in the garden, and so on.

Feminists also ignore how husbands are more likely to work overtime, either by bringing their work home with them or physically remaining at the workplace. And as more men than women occupy senior positions, the latter is more likely to apply to them as well. We should also note that one reason more men than women occupy senior positions is precisely because men work significantly more overtime than women.

Andolsen is aware of this, but her response is to propose employers stop requiring their ambitious employees to work these long hours! As Feminist writer Ellie McGarth put it, "The answer is not to move women out of star jobs but to redefine our expectations for everyone." (Savvy magazine, June 1989, p 40) Not only is this unrealistic, but also evidence Feminists have raised the notion of shared housework to the status of an ideal for its own sake, not as an issue of ethics or equity.

An estrogen tax?
In any emergency involving danger (whether local and personal, civil or military), it is men, not women, that Feminists expect to run the risks. Any laziness that men may or may not exhibit around the house is a fair trade off against the danger society may call upon us to face.

Just how real is this risk? How can we quantify it? The problem is actuarial in nature, something insurance companies deal with all the time. They calculate their premiums on the basis of statistics as to the likelihood of the event they are insuring against. They also build in their overheads and a profit margin. In this context, if we picture the family as a socio-economic unit, then, all other factors being equal, the reason insurance premiums for men are higher than women is because of the greater risks men face throughout life, because the state spends less money researching, publicising, preventing, and treating men's health issues, and because men are not encouraged to look after their own health the way women are.

Hence, men are providing protection on a non-profit basis. They provide protection from potential burglars, rapists, etc., and they do this just by their physical presence. Sometimes they actually have to confront such criminals, but often a criminal will avoid entering a house just because an adult male is obviously resident. Men are also liable to be conscripted in wartime to pursue the military aims of the nation as a whole.

The standard Feminist response to this is, it's a man-problem to begin with, because, but for the male aggressors, women wouldn't need protection; hence, there should even be a special "testosterone tax" on men to help pay for the added expense males impose upon society. However, there is no evidence that women, in any specific country at a time of war, are any more pacifist than men, and there is no evidence that women leaders are more pacifist than male leaders. Just because the leaders who have to decide whether to go to war are usually male, armchair Feminists can sit back and pretend such decisions have nothing to do with women. Similarly, they assert men have a higher propensity to commit crime than women, but as more women become the primary breadwinners the crime rate for women is going up.

Instead of a "testosterone tax," we arguably need an "oestrogen tax" because women live longer and therefore use more taxpayer-funded health resources,utilities, and retirement benefits. They also receive more state-funded legal aid and single parent benefits. And they carry out taxpayer-funded abortions. Women also tie up more of the GNP of western countries because a significant proportion of the media, bureaucracy, education system, and legislature is dedicated to promoting and implementing Feminist agendas and suppressing men's and fathers' rights. Women are never conscripted into the front-line in wartime, so they should be taxed to pay for this sexist exemption.

It should be perfectly possible to quantify these issues, and to quantify the value of housework, based on rates of pay for home help. On this basis, it should be possible to quantify how much, or how little housework the average adult male should equitably do, and how much the oestrogen tax should amount to.

If a wife does not have an outside job, then who does most of the housework would not be an issue. But Feminism has taught women it is better to get a job outside the home than to do a good job of looking after your children. Once they are working, women don't always see why they should also do most of the housework. On the other hand, maybe the husband would prefer her to stay home and do the housework and childcare. Why should he then shoulder extra burdens created by his wife's selfish or materialistic decision?

Close relationships work best when based on complementarity rather than competition. A marriage of two people of similar personalities does not work as well as one where the personalities of the spouses complement one another. Likewise with roles. The best thing about the old-fashioned philosophy that "a woman's place is in the home" was that spouses had distinct, well-defined and complementary roles in the socio-economic system of the family. If both are working, then they are to some extent competitors. Of course, complementarity also results if the wife works and the man is a househusband, but few women are interested in such an arrangement.

Having a job of her own also makes it more likely a woman will feel like leaving her husband. Every relationship goes through stresses and strains. The social and legal climate helps to determine how much a couple will put up with before they separate or divorce. And the Feminists have seen to it women are more inclined than ever to leave – especially as matrimonial and divorce legislation and enforcement are biased against men.

Military Service and Conscription – a Pregnant Silence
Military service and conscription are an area where women have always had an advantage over men, and Feminists are not about to complain about it! But they are working hard trying to get women the choice of a military career without the obligation of conscription. Nowhere are Feminist double standards more blatant. Farrell (1993) states this issue of military service in graphic terms:

Imagine: Music is playing on your car radio. An announcer's voice interrupts: 'We have a special bulletin from the president.'... The president announces, "Since 1.2 million American men have been killed in war, as part of my new program for equality, we will draft only women until 1.2 million American women have been killed in war." (op. cit. page 28)

Wars have always involved civilian casualties, but most of the casualties are soldiers and most of the soldiers have been men. So I think it is worthwhile making Farrel's imaginary scenario a political proposal. At least it would expose Feminists as the hypocrites they are.

As a bare minimum, Liberal Masculists might say that the drafting of women as front-line troops should occur on exactly the same basis as for men (whether in war or peace). Increased use of military technology has indeed reduced the importance of men's greater upper-body strength and hormonal characteristics in war, as much of the action is now long-distance. Even infantry warfare involves little upper-body strength. However, this is more a moral issue than a practical one and the argument for mandatory draft registration of women would be strong even in the absence of sophisticated military hardware.

Moral and political arguments aside, conservative Masculists still prefer the traditional division of labour: only men should be subject to conscription and front line duty, but they should receive some special treatment in return. Legal status as head of the household, for example. It might even be used as an argument for repealing women's right to vote: why should women elect governments that can declare war when they don't share equally in the dangers that war involves?

Some Feminists favour opening front-line positions to women who volunteer. However, Feminists don't like the idea of compelling women to undertake such dangerous and unpleasant duties. Of course, many men oppose the idea, as well, but Feminists who hide behind this are hypocrites. Many Feminists pretend that wars are "men's games", which is an outright lie. Most wars have just as much support from the females in the populations involved as from the males. How many Feminists stood up and said that Britain should not defend itself against Hitler, for example ? And I once read of a German mother who so adored Hitler that she said that, if Hitler was really homosexual, she would send her son to sleep with him ! In 1999 the Sri Lankan Prime Minister was a woman, and in that year a Tamil female suicide bomber blew herself up in an attempt to kill her ! In what way was that a "man's game"?

Feminists also say we should concentrate on preventing war because a world without war has no need for conscription. True enough, but that does not stop them from demanding that women have the option to serve on the front lines. Moreover, there is a contradiction between that and the line Feminists take on abortion. You never hear Feminists say they oppose abortion because they are concentrating their efforts on preventing unwanted pregnancies!

Everyone agrees that war and unwanted pregnancies are both evils we should avoid. But in the case of war, Feminists pretend they can abolish the evil and thereby ignore the conscription issue. While in the case of unwanted pregnancy, they focus instead on removing the inconvenience for women – at the cost of a human life!

But this is not the only context in which they suffer from a distorted sense of proportionality: The Men's Manifesto (Richard Doyle, Men's Defense Association, 1992) notes Feminists made a serious demand for a statue of a "combat woman" to be erected at the Vietnam War Memorial in the United States. This was intended to memorialize specially and separately the eight (8) American women who died in that war. The existing memorial would then be shared only by the 58,000 American men who died there.

This complete lack of compassion, gratitude and sense of proportion by the Feminists is absolutely typical. They must feel guilty about all the sacrifices men have made in wartime on behalf of women and children, and that it is one of the weakest points of their case if it leads them to attempt to raise ancillary activities to the same level as front-line infantry fighting.

The Sexual Division of Labour
In their drive to get more women into the paid workforce, one of the Feminists' main complaints has been how more men than women hold full-time jobs. What's more, even when women started to enter the work-force in large numbers, occupations still tended to be sexually segregated, with many (though not all) of the predominantly male occupations commanding higher pay.

In his introduction to Lionel Tiger (1984), Desmond Morris gives the following as the historical cause of this phenomenon:

When our ancient ancestors switched to hunting as a way of life, the relationship between males and females was dramatically altered. Females, with their heavy reproductive burden, were unable to play a major role in this new feeding pattern, which had become so vital for survival. A much greater division of labour between the sexes arose. The males became specialized for the chase. They became more athletic and they spent long periods of time away from the tribal home base, in pursuit of prey.

To put this in perspective, it is worth noting that most humans were hunter-gatherers until about 5,000 years ago – that is, for about 99 percent of our existence as a species. This is not to say the hunting, carried out primarily by men, was economically more important than the gathering, which was carried out primarily by women. The women gathered the food for the basic diet, and what the men brought back from the hunt was the "icing on the cake," as it were. Meat was important as a source of fat and protein. However, to say hunting was the original cause of the division of labour does not amount to a claim that what men did was more important than what women did.

Nor, as Tiger (1970) emphasizes, is saying there was a good reason for creating a sexual division of labour long ago the same as contending it must be perpetuated, or that it cannot be reversed in the present or future. Nevertheless, Morris and Tiger do talk in terms of genetic changes resulting from natural selection. They are both biologists and social scientists who base their work on that of ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, George Schaller and Jane Goodall.

Such scientists discovered a lot about the complexity of animal (especially primate) social behaviour. Moreover, they are also in a position to start puzzling out how these patterns of behaviour can be genetically transmitted and selected for, or selected out, just like physical characteristic. Thus what they claim about "human nature" has a semi-permanent ring to it. Natural selection operates over a large time-scale. And species have so far never been able or willing to consciously determine the overall course of genetic development within their own species.

So it is easy to see how this book upset many Feminists. They are, after all, keen to bring about social change; i.e., change resulting from conscious administrative and legal reforms which take place on the time-scale of a generation, or thereabouts. They would not be happy to hear someone claim male dominance in the best-paid, full-time employment sectors reflects reality on the genetic level. This would mean it could not be changed for thousands of years, and no amount of pressure from Feminist groups could hasten the day. Instead, any change would have to result from impersonal, intangible selective pressures.

But such findings have other, more immediate results of far greater concern to Feminists, as well. Academic works by people like Lionel Tiger (and also those written by Feminists) may claim to be merely descriptive of what the authors observe. But there is a feedback-loop between description and behaviour in the social sciences. As soon as an academic popularises the fact that certain previously obscure facts do occur, people accept them, allowing the events in question to occur more frequently. Thus what started off as a descriptive account ends up being more prescriptive – an indication of what should or at least could take place without being ethically wrong.

Hence, it's important for us to consider the attitudes of the author or researcher. We cannot simply assume academics pursue their work in a purely objective frame of mind. If a sociolinguist, for example, undertakes a lengthy study of a stigmatized word (such as "ain't"), then two things are certain:

1. They would not devote all that time if they firmly believed the word was bad and should never be used: the research topic selects the researcher, to some extent;
2. Once the research results are published, showing the use of "ain't" was not random, but had just as structured a place in its own linguistics and sociolinguistic context as any other word, then the taboos against its use weaken and "polite society" begins using it more than before. Ironically, the same researcher could then go back a few years later, do some follow-up research, find the previously taboo word was now no longer so taboo, and never realise their own research contributed to this change!

This is why Feminists reacted so strongly against Lionel Tiger's book. Once it was known that bonding within male groups is "natural" and has specific functions, men felt less guilty about belonging to male-only organisations. The less guilty they feel, the less likely they are to bow to Feminist pressure to admit women members. And they may also feel less guilty about working in male-only occupations.

Most Feminist meetings, "consciousness-raising" sessions, etc., exclude men. With no men present to defend themselves (or for some women to empathize with), the extremists can push their line more effectively. "Those who are absent are always in the wrong," as the French proverb goes. Thus they can convict men of all sorts of "crimes" when the guys aren't around to defend themselves.
Conversely, this is also why Feminists want to desegregate all male-only institutions: a male point of view, such as Masculism, could (and probably would) develop in a male-only environment.

Similarly, when an academic devotes herself to research in "Women's Studies," we can confidently assume they have an emotional stake in those issues. Once they publish their research, public attitudes toward those issues will almost certainly change, probably in the direction the author desires. This is why the very existence of "Women's Studies" departments in universities, and of Ministries of "Women's Affairs" in government is fraught with political implications.

Desmond Morris obviously believes natural selection has favoured societies with male bonding as part of their social organisation, and that the consequences are binding on us genetically to this day:

His comments are particularly valuable at a time when attempts are being made to minimize the difference between the sexes. A misguided but vociferous minority is campaigning to conceal human gender differences and to obscure the evolutionary truth about our species. This unisexual philosophy seeks to distort the facts as part of an otherwise laudable assault on the unjustifiable exploitation and subjugation of modern woman. (op.cit.)

One of the central themes of Tiger (1984) is that "differences between males and females, as whole groups, are not solely restricted to discernible physical ones and those specifically reproductive operations related to them." Take hormones, for example – they differ, and they affect our moods and emotions differently. Even if hormones are "physical," the moods and emotions they produce are not.

Once a Feminist admits men and women differ psychologically (if only because of hormones), it becomes very hard to deny other psychological differences between men and women. These psychological differences are what make "equality" (in the sense of identical treatment) hard to support in theory or achieve in practice. Indeed, any society which attempts to implement the kind of social changes Feminism facilitates may eventually collapse under the strain as the unstable elements of society out-reproduce and, thereby, replace the more stable elements:

It seems inescapable that one concrete outcome of this is a widespread pattern of relatively late marriage, delayed childbearing, if any, and then smaller families than before in the major industrial economies.... Since we know that children of small families have small or smaller families themselves, this seems like a continuously persisting trend. In addition, the proportion of men and women who are unmarried has been rising ..., and presumable related to this is a deep decline in birth rates in industrial economies such that on balance it is below replacement. (Tiger 1984, Preface)

One of the striking features of the black ghettoes of American cities is their high proportion of single mothers with many children. It is a truism that single mothers have trouble controlling their teenage sons. The people of the ghettoes have the lowest educational levels, the most poverty, the most crime, the most drug abuse, the most alienation from the police and the Establishment as a whole, as well as the greatest propensity to riot. Feminism alone is not responsible for this or the widespread decline of the two-parent family, but it is shares the responsibility.

Do we want children in our society? That is the question. If our main aim is materialistic, then bringing up children takes second place. In that context, it makes sense for women to consider not marrying and to delay or avoid having children, and for both parents to work. However, if our primary social goal is to bring up each new generation in a stable and secure environment, then parents have to make sacrifices. Unless there are communal or extended-family child-care options, one parent (usually the mother) has to stay home, we must restore the role of a housewife to its previous high status as an occupation, we need to socially stigmatize divorce, and the employed parent (usually the father) has to be legally liable for the upkeep of the non-employed partner and children.

Children are our future, and if we put them last, what becomes of that future? In that context, the question is not "is there a sexual division of labour," but "how do we best fulfill the sexual division of labour?"

Other Employment Issues
At the start of this chapter, we mentioned models and professional tennis players. As Thomas (1993) points out, it is very illuminating to compare the situation of professional tennis-players with that of professional models. Fees for male models are much less than those paid to female models, as men generally provide a much smaller market for cosmetics and fashionable clothes than women do.

In this area, unlike professional tennis, the economics of the situation dictate the respective incomes of male and female professionals. In tennis, as we saw, Feminists applied political pressure with the result that top female tennis professionals now receive 90 percent of the pay top male professionals earn. We also saw how the females expend less effort dollar-for-dollar, pound-for-pound, than the males, and how female professional tennis generates much less revenue than male professional tennis. In modelling, however, women bring in more money than men do and are paid accordingly; so where are the Feminists demanding equality?

While the top female models have annual earnings in the millions of dollars, the top male models have annual earnings in the mere tens of thousands – one hundredth of the female figure! There is a great and obvious inequity in this situation. Men should demand that either male models earn 90 percent of what female models earn, or female professional tennis-players go back to earning what they are actually worth in economic terms.

Equal pay for equal stress?
According to an article in the London "Independent" newspaper about research by Dr. Tessa Pollard of Oxford University, men and women, in supposedly equally demanding jobs, reported (subjectively) equal amounts of work stress. However, objectively, men had higher adrenalin levels (showing higher stress) than the women. The researcher concluded women's hormones protected them from adrenalin surges, and this may be why men have higher levels of heart disease than women.

But this may be only part of the story; another factor they should consider is interpersonal relations. In the context of Feminist propaganda, men in the modern workplace are subject to much more stress from this source than women are. As the Feminist agenda invades the workplace, it forces men to adapt a predominantly male environment to Feminist sensibilities. How can a man relax when any normally masculine behavior he may exhibit could get him fired? The Feminist anti-male conspiracy has men on edge. No wonder they suffer from higher levels of stress.

In this context, Richard Doyle commented in The Liberator (www.mensdefense.org) newsletter (March 1995) on research by Anne S. Tsui of the University of California at Irvine. She reported that men in an all-male work environment show the strongest commitment to their jobs, and their commitment declines as the percentage of women in their work group rises. There may well be a connection between these research results. It is also noticeable how the Japanese economy has suffered, since the male-only workplace culture became diluted by increasing numbers of women workers. We should encourage research to follow this line of inquiry.

Conclusion
There are areas in paid employment where women have achieved an unfair advantage. And there are other areas where women already had an advantage, where Feminists have actually worsened an already inequitable state of affairs. Equity needs to be restored to the workplace, or men's morale will suffer serious damage. Workplace efficiency and economic performance are likely to decline if we continue discriminating against men with one-sided Feminist employment laws and regulations.