Wall Street Journal - June 3, 2009 <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124386767941072379.html>
Guys Left Behind (GLBs) By MARK PENN With E. Kinney Zalesne
Guys are simply falling behind these days.
We may not yet have the first woman president, but a look at what is happening with the next generation shows that women are succeeding in an ever-widening range of areas, while there is a statistically significant and growing group of guys who are just not going to make it.
Sure, most leadership positions are still filled by men, and there are lots of super-achieving men out there. But on the other end of the spectrum, serious problems are brewing for the future of men. You see it in statistic after statistic. Some of these have been true for a long time -- others are new and a growing part of the times. But while women have shown some dramatic improvements in health, education and income, men at the bottom end are facing problems that are as bad as ever -- and in some areas getting worse.
More women in the workplace, more female-led families and more sexual equality in general might be expected to cause women to pick up men's bad habits, or be exposed to greater dangers. But for the most part, that hasn't happened.
In fact, men continue to outstrip women in most of the downers of life. A record 1.5 million men are in the clink, up 600,000 in the last decade. Only 115,000 women have committed crimes worthy of jail -- and while that's doubled in the last 10 years, more men continue to wind up in jail by a ratio of nearly 15-to-1.
Men remain much more likely to be alcoholics than women. Almost three- quarters of men are obese, compared to fewer than two-thirds of women. Despite improvements for both sexes, men die almost twice as often from heart disease than women. And in a study of people in publicly funded drug treatment facilities, men outnumbered women by more than two to one.
Men have always died more in traffic accidents -- initially, they were the more frequent drivers -- but even as women have dramatically increased their mileage in recent decades, the gap has barely budged: 61,000 men were involved in fatal auto crashes in 2007, compared to only 33,000 women.
More surprising is what has happened to men during this recession. In December 2007, before the economic crisis set in, unemployment rates were roughly equal, but this time it's the guys who have been laid off in greater numbers. The unemployment rate surged from 4.4% to 7.2% for men, but from 4.3% to only 5.9% for women.
When it comes to earning what you learn, guys aren't learning what they need to -- women are getting almost 60% of the college degrees conferred, compared to barely 40% for men. This college gap could be the one that spells the most serious problem for guys, and can over time be at the root of a lot of increased frustration and even crime. This is a complete reversal of the past, as women have surged well past the 50% mark in those hitting this key educational benchmark for success.
All told, the gap in life expectancy is five years -- men are expected to live to 75 and women to 80 -- so as a group, men are behind now in every major category of health, education and lifespan. The one area in which men still dominate is wealth, especially at the multi-million- dollar upper end -- but that's true primarily because of the oldest generations. The pay gap is closing for people in their twenties; income tax filings show that at least in big cities, women in their twenties are earning just as much as their male counterparts.
The trends can also be seen in the makeup of professional schools. Fifty years ago, there were very few women earning professional degrees. Today, they are close to, if not surpassing, men in law school and medical school.
I attended a lecture recently of Marianne J. Legato, who specializes in gender-specific medicine and last year published "Why Men Die First." Her conclusion is that men, despite their many past and current advantages, are in real trouble now. She suggests that the problem is rooted in how men evolved over thousands of years and now face "biological and societal" hazards that make them more vulnerable now.
The lifestyles and habits that worked so well for men in more dangerous times may not be working so well for them in the information age. In every age from the caves right on through the second World War, it worked for men to take big risks, have short attention spans and be driven by ego. These days, those things are more likely to get in the way of doing a good job. Hunting wild boar and hunting through Wikipedia require a different set of skills.
The statistics seem to confirm Dr. Legato's theory. And this is not just a U.S. phenomenon. In developing countries such as India, women are generally seen as better employees, compared to men who are considered hard to train, unwilling to listen and likely to quit. They can just be too fidgety to be the best employees, in the view of many emerging businesses. If this is the case, a lot of men could be headed for even a bigger fall as the information age spreads around the globe.
Women are also the majority of those voting in our elections. They made up 53% of the electorate in the 2008 presidential election, and women's top concerns -- including health care and education -- are at the heart of swing voters' concerns. Guys, who lean more Republican, have been losing political steam; at the moment, their issues just don't seem to be at the top of the agenda.
So if these long-term trends continue, women, who are already the majority of car buyers, will grow in consumer influence in every major area: from health care to home buying, from technology to investment planning. There is tremendous room for growth by women in these marketplaces over the next 15 years, as the long-term effects of these gender disparities deepen, and the income disparities begin to even out over time.
The flip side of this is that social costs of GLBs -- Guys Left Behind -- will become an increasing drag on society and on the national budget. In this recession, states and local governments are hard- pressed to invest more in prisoner education, job training and re- entry programs. And while there's a great deal of money being poured into schools, it's not clear there's any focus on dealing with the disproportionate number of boys left behind. Without a proper policy focus on these issues, guys will fall further behind.
Indeed, girls' greater success in school could soon become one of those "unshakable" truths that we come to see as natural -- like women's longer lifespans. As Dr. Legato points out, the gender disparity in lifespan is not necessarily natural; in 1900, both men and women were expected to live about 47 years. It was only as lifespan was increased that the disparity started to appear -- maybe it could closed again if we poured some research and effort into it.
While we have a $3 billion dollar SAT study industry, we have very few gender-specific programs to help close the emerging gaps in high school and college. No political movement driving funds to reduce the double dose of heart-related deaths among men. No serious Web sites devoted to supporting men and their disproportionate suffering in this regard.
GLBs face more fatal accidents, shortened educational and earning opportunities, higher unemployment, more drug and alcohol dependencies, greater obesity, declining political influence, more heart attacks and shorter lives. The appointment of the third woman Supreme Court Justice will be another crack in the glass ceiling that, for thousands of years, has kept women out of the leadership strata. But unless we also focus on the brewing problems with guys at the other end of the spectrum, we just might be creating a newer and deeper basement that a lot of men may never get out of.