Posted on 03/04/2003 9:18:41 PM PST by Pokey78
Has the pendulum swung too far?
We are constantly urged to make greater efforts to improve the lot of women and minorities. Yet it seems fairer at this point in American history to make greater efforts to improve the situation for white males.
I can hear you laughing. After all, most CEOs and political leaders are white males. But when you leave that top 0.1%, things look different.
I have career counseled almost 2,000 people, and unless they're stars, my white male clients have a tougher time getting hired than do my female and minority clients.
We accept as gospel the widely-reported statistic that women earn 77 cents on the dollar. Fact is, according to research in progress by Dr. Warren Farrell, when all variables are controlled for: for example, actual hours worked, experience, work hazards, commute distance, and performance evaluations, for the same work, women earn more than men.
Yet white males continue to see more and more efforts to help everyone except white males:
Employers often practice reverse discrimination, if only because they fear the EEOC will count noses. And when there's a downsizing, employers resist firing women and minorities, knowing that many of them would file a wrongful termination suit. They have special legal protections; white males do not.
If minorities or women receive less pay or are so-called underrepresented in a particular profession, for example, in the boardroom, women's groups insist it's mainly because of sexism, that white males have essentially erected a glass ceiling through which they allow pitifully few women to seep. Privately, however, even many ardent feminists recognize that the main reason for the low percentage of females in senior positions is that more women would rather balance work and family than work the long hours it takes to rise to the top.
Of course, the media give millions of dollars of free exposure to the sexism argument, for example, unquestioningly promulgating the misleading "women earn 77 cents on the dollar" statistic yet give virtually no exposure to opposing views.
And if men are underrepresented, for example, as they are in colleges -- colleges are now 59% women, 41% men -- you barely hear a peep about it in the media. Professional baseball, football, and basketball are dominated by minorities. Ever hear the media decry the underrepresentation of white males?
Most seriously, men die seven years younger than women, yet there's no call for more spending on men's health. Where are all those advocates who scream when women and minorities get the short end of the stick? They're still calling for more medical studies on women. Every day, it seems, there's another walk or run for breast cancer. When was the last time you heard of a run for heart attack, the main cause of early death among men? The Oakland A's, a team watched mainly by men, have a breast cancer day. They don't have a prostate cancer day or heart attack day. Meanwhile, there are more than four widows for every widower.
The rule seems to be: discriminate -- as long as the ones being discriminated against are white males.
So, next time you hear a plea to support women and minorities, you might save just a little kindness for the no-longer so privileged white male.
Marty Nemko (www.martynemko.com) is a career counselor and columnist for Monster.com and the San Francisco Chronicle. He can be reached at mnemko@earthlink.net.
While that has been repeated enough times to become "conventional wisdom", noone (least of all Sen. Clinton) ever mentions that the main reason the cost of non-salary benefits has skyrocketed in the workplace is because women are and always have been a much higher medical risk than men.
I discovered this for myself when I went to work for a healthcare provider in the 90's and saw my premiums for major medical double overnight. When I asked the "benefits specialist" in HR why this was, she responded chirpily, "This company is 89% female."
White men have to be twice as good as anyone else to succeed today.
Fortunately, this is not difficult.
FALSE STATEMENT. The majority of AFDC recipients are NOT white
From US Dept of Health & Human Services (Table 10, breakdown by race), we have:
TABLE 10 AFDC FAMILIES BY RACE OF NATURAL OR ADOPTIVE PARENT OCTOBER 1995 - SEPTEMBER 1996 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RACE OF PARENT! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL NATIVE UN- STATE FAMILIES WHITE BLACK HISPANIC ASIAN AMERICAN KNOWN ---------------- --------- ----- ----- -------- ----- -------- ----- U.S. TOTAL 4,553,308 35.9% 36.9% 20.8% 3.0% 1.4% 2.0%There are more black families on welfare than Whites, and Blacks and Hispanics make up 57% of the total
"To treat some people equally, we must treat them differently"
Jutice Blackmun, in the Affirmative Action in college admissions case, CA v Bakke
How would you classify Tiger Woods, or other multi-racial people? Alternately, some people refuse to put down their race on the paperwork
Of course, "we should resist the temptation to partition ourselves off into groups like this..." because as you say, "positioning the argument this way simply buys into the left's premise that groups are important..." On the otherhand, denying the truth of an observation, just because it positions our arguments at a perceived disadvantage, also is not a sound practice. Honesty must come first. Then create arguments to deal with it.
Keeping our eyes focused on the idea of individual rights as a goal, must not supercede the reality of individuals who use group power to effectively advance their own aims at the expense of other, less fortunate individuals.
Most white males with IQs of 115 have to really struggle in todays America. Their struggle is often not recognized by those with IQs of 125.
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