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.

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

In Defense of Men
by
Marty Nemko, Ph.D. © 2005

What do the following people have in common: Aristotle, Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Monet, the Wright Brothers, Jonas Salk, Steven Spielberg, the key scientists behind the development of every drug from aspirin to breast cancer breakthrough Herceptin, from anesthetic to heart bypass surgery, from refrigeration to heating, from the electric light bulb to the radio, the car, the television, the computer, and the mapping of human genome? They’re all men.

And in the five decades since the women’s movement began, 97% of science, 92% of literature, and 100% of economics Nobel laureates are still men.

Let’s turn to the lower rungs of the work world. Do you want any of these jobs: Fumigator? Prison guard? Coal miner? Steelworker? Sewer maintainer? Neither do most women. 95+ percent of people who do such grungy, dangerous, life-shortening but essential work are men.

Yet today, men are falsely accused of so much:

ACCUSATION: Catalyst and the National Organization for Women complain than men have erected a glass ceiling that causes women to earn just 75 cents for every dollar men earn.

DEFENSE: In an exhaustive analysis in Dr. Warren Farrell’s new book, Why Men Earn More (Amacom, 2005), when equating for job difficulty, unpleasantness, hours per week worked, years of experience, etc., women earn more than men for the same work. So, the reason, on average, that women earn less is because they are unwilling to do the yucky jobs. For example, jobs as computer programmers and engineers pay well, indeed women earn $1.10 for every dollar a man earns, but those jobs require never ending training in highly technical material and long, deadline-driven days cogitating at maximum in isolation. Few women are willing to do that work, so 75 percent of programmers and engineers are men. Jobs in sweltering, clanging, carcinogenic iron foundries pay well, but few women are willing to do that work According to the Jobs Rated Almanac, fewer than one percent(!) of ironworkers are women. Jobs as CEOs pay very well but require 60-hour workweeks and, usually, decades of willingness to move their families and themselves every few years to places like Birmingham and Bismarck to accept a promotion. Based on my experience as career coach to 1,500 female and 700 male professionals, many, many fewer women than men are willing to do that.

ACCUSATION: Men are too aggressive in the workplace. They’re just not process-oriented enough. “Men just don’t get it.”

DEFENSE: Women are allowed to make that criticism. Yet imagine if a man said, “Women are too process-oriented. They need to be more aggressive.” That man would be immediately censured.

And just imagine if a male employee asserted that a female coworker’s overemotional behavior is caused by pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) even though there’s an entire industry selling products to women suffering from PMS.

Or even worse, imagine if a feminist overheard a male manager saying,

“I prefer to hire men because they’re less emotional most of the month and dramatically so the rest of the time. I also prefer to hire men because they devote more time to their careers. More women want to work shorter hours so they can have enough time for family, friends, and so on. Yet another reason I like to hire men is that women, on average, are more devious. Guys are more direct; you’re more likely to know where you stand.” Even though there is reasonable basis for that manager’s assertions, he would be fired faster than you could say, “sex discrimination.”

Yet if that same manager were to express bias toward female employees, for example, “I prefer to hire women because they’re more interpersonally sensitive and better team builders,” that equally gender-generalizing statement would likely be met, not by a lawsuit, but with praise. There is a new double-standard: employers, the media, and the colleges can be biased against men but not women.

ACCUSATION: We must focus more on women’s health. After all, most medical research is done on men.

DEFENSE: In decades past, more research was done on men than on women, but that was not because of sexism. Drug companies didn’t want to use women during childbearing years for fear of liability if the woman got pregnant during the study and the drug hurt the unborn child. Also, men, on average, are bigger risk takers and so are more likely to take the risk of being a guinea pig in a potentially dangerous experiment. Nevertheless, in recent years, the situation has completely changed. Dr. Farrell searched Index Medicus, which indexes 3,000 medical journals to find that there now are 23 articles on women’s health for every one on men’s! In addition, there are 15 federal agencies on women’s health. None for men, despite the fact that men’s health needs are profound: Men die six years younger than women, leaving four widows for every widower!

When women have a deficit—for example, there are fewer female engineers than males--there’s a massive effort to encourage math teachers to call on girls more, and many college engineering programs have set up reverse discrimination admission criteria to reject more male applicants so they can accept more females. But when men suffer even the ultimate deficit—they die younger--it is ignored.

Worse, a higher percentage of attention than ever is paid to women’s versus men’s health, which will further increase the male-female death gap. In addition to the above cited examples, there are countless walks, runs, and other fundraisers and TV awareness campaigns for breast cancer. I’ve never seen one for sudden heart attack, the leading cause of early death among men despite the fact that men die younger of all 10 of the 10 leading causes of death! I get my phone bill and the envelope bears a large pink ribbon and, inside, there’s a donor form for breast cancer. I go to the post office and there’s a big sign trumpeting that profits from breast cancer stamps will go toward breast cancer. I go to my Wells Fargo ATM and am greeted by a screen emblazoned with the pink breast cancer ribbon. I even go to the Oakland A’s game, a sport predominantly patronized by men, and they announce Breast Cancer Day. Where’s the Sudden Heart Attack Day? Men have a right to live too.

And let’s not forget that we send only men into direct combat.

Maybe Warren Farrell is right: Today, despite all the male contributions, “men are the disposable sex.”

Dr. Nemko along with Dr. Warren Farrell is creating the National Organization for Men. Nemko was recently called “The Bay Area’s Best Career Coach” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His radio show airs Sundays 11 am to noon Pacific Time on KALW 91.7 FM (NPR- San Francisco) and archived on www.martynemko.com. That site also contains 400+ of his published writings. The Reader’s Choice poll rated his book, Cool Careers for Dummies, the #1 most useful career guide.

Copyright 2005 Marty Nemko, all rights reserved