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Dr. Marty Nemko is
among the nation's most sought-after experts on both career and
education issues. Marty has been interviewed in hundreds of major
media--from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times
to ABC.com.
He has been career coach to over
2,000 clients, and has a 97% client satisfaction rate.
Marty is
co-president of the National Organization for Men:
www.orgformen.org
Visit Marty at
www.martynemko.com
Or email Marty at
mnemko@comcast.net
His book, Cool Careers for
Dummies is the #1 rated career guide in the Readers Choice
poll and made the Wall Street Journal national business
bestseller list.
Visit Marty at
www.martynemko.com
Marty Nemko is
co-president of the National Organization for Men:
www.orgformen.org
Or email Marty at
mnemko@comcast.net
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Article... |
Tim Russert, Sudden Heart
Attack, and Sexism Against Men
by
Marty Nemko © 2008
Tim Russert’s untimely death from a
sudden heart attack reminded me of the dramatic 50+-year-long gender
disparity against men in health care research and outreach.
Many more men than
women die of sudden heart attack
and
at an earlier age
than do women of breast cancer.
Indeed, sudden heart attack is the
#1 cause of premature death among men over 40. Yet, more money per
capita is spent on breast cancer research.
And regarding outreach, there are a
trivial number of prostate cancer ribbons compared with the number
of pink ribbons against breast cancer. And have you ever seen even
one ribbon against sudden heart attack?
More broadly, men die 5.3 years
younger than women, and spend their last decade in worse health.
There are more than four widows for every widower.
Yet when I searched PubMed, which
indexes 3,000 medical journals over the past 58 years, I found
22,304 articles with the keywords “women’s health,” but only 586
with “men’s health.” That’s 39 articles related to women’s health
for every one on men’s.
If women suffer a deficit, for
example, the “underrepresentation” of women in engineering, we
typically see significant efforts at redress. Yet, when men have the
deficit—even the ultimate deficit: they die younger—not only is
there not redress, but the opposite occurs: disproportionate amounts
of research and outreach are directed at women’s health.
I’ve heard these explanations to
justify the double standard:
 | 1. “It wouldn’t happen if,
like women, men organized to protest.”My response: Would you
deny redress to women who are “underrepresented” if they hadn’t
organized to protest? |
| 2. “Men’s dying younger is
their fault—if they’d only take better care of themselves.”
My response: The three major controllable causes of mortality
and morbidity are obesity, smoking, and excessive drinking. Men
have lower incidences of the first two. In any event, if women
are “underrepresented” in engineering, would you deny them the
redress by chastising them, “It’s your own fault. Do better in
science and math.”? |
| 3. “In the past, most health
research was done on men. This only levels the playing field.”
My response: First, as cited, over the past 58 years—the period
during which the greatest medical advances have been made—the
opposite is true. And with regard to research that’s more than
58 years old, an underreported reason why women were often
excluded from many experimental treatments was not lack of
interest in women’s health but a concern that an experimental
drug or treatment might damage a woman’s fetus.
And en toto, any deleterious effect that came from a smaller
percentage of women being subjects in 58+-year-old medical
research apparently was small: In, fact, the
life-expectancy gap
in favor of women grew during every decade but one from 1900
through 1980.
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The big question is why:
| Why do you think that, for the
past 50+ years, the overwhelming majority of health care
research has been on women’s health, despite men living shorter
and in poorer last-decade health? |
And consider these other
male-death-related questions:
| Why do 92% of workplace deaths
occur to men yet we rarely hear that statistic, while we
frequently hear statistics such as, “Women earn 79 cents on the
dollar compared with men?” (By the way, that statistic is
misleading: Most current evidence suggests that for the same
work, pay is, on average, roughly equal.) |
| Why, still, must only men
register with the U.S. military’s Selective Service? |
| Why, still, are only men
allowed to serve in direct combat? (resulting in the
little-publicized fact that 99% of the Iraq War deaths were
men.) |
| Why do the media emphasize
when deaths occur to “women and children?” |
I agree with men’s advocate Warren
Farrell, who is the author of nine books including
The Myth of Male
Power and who has taught at Georgetown and the School of Medicine at U.C. San Diego. He believes the main reason is sexism: “Men are the
disposable sex.”
Many of us have the opportunity to
be gender-neutral or biased toward or against men in our
professional lives.
For example, consider all the
choices that higher educators can make:
| Which students to admit to
your program |
| Which readings to assign |
| What content to present in
class |
| What research agenda to pursue |
| Who to select as your research
assistant |
| What student thesis and
dissertation topics to encourage |
| Who to hire as a faculty
member or administrator |
| To whom to grant tenure |
| Which studies to fund. (For
example, should sudden heart attack studies be given higher
priority?) |
At this point in time, what do you
think is the wisest stance for you, personally, to take?
Marty Nemko is co-president of
the National Organization for Men:
www.orgformen.org.
Copyright 2008 Marty Nemko, all rights reserved
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