Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
This is where it's important to differentiate between lagging and leading indicators. In lagging indicators, like number of CEOs, women are still behind. The leading indicators are where (future) men are falling behind. If your focus on is equality of outcomes, you might be inclined to focus on lagging indicators, but the leading indicators are what allow us to act with foresight.
|
Good post. This is what strikes me all the time when it comes to the gender equality debate: you can't expect the world to change overnight. These corporate boards full of old dudes are products of the conditions prevailing in the past. Those same boards 30 years from now will be the products of the conditions prevailing today.
All indications are that women today are doing better than men in many respects and, therefore, will have better opportunities than men in many areas in the future (including some of the dominant professions, medicine and law for example, and academia generally). This is therefore a good time to consider issues that affect the males in our population, e.g., higher sedation levels in school, lower post-secondary enrollment, decreasing earnings, higher incarceration, higher suicide rates, etc.
None of that is to say that we should not continue to encourage the participation of women in all aspects of society, but it does not serve us to leave men - and really we're talking about
boys here - behind.
This is where Peterson makes some good points, i.e., boys need to have pride, take responsibility for themselves, and stand on their own two feet, but society also needs to stop vilifying them and putting the focus largely on the success of girls while simultaneously denigrating the success of men (or broadly casting men as society's villains).
It's an important discussion to have, but one that seems often to be dismissed as ridiculous (i.e, men - despite all their struggles as a demographic - have all the privileges and power and, therefore, nothing to complain about, no one to blame but themselves, and are deserving of no sympathy).
I'm not convinced that's a societal attitude that's going to produce good people of any description.