Month: February 2022

I remember when my brother, who is thirteen years younger than me and the only male child in our family, learned key lessons on how to be masculine. My father bought him a gun when he was about eight and took him hunting to shoot rabbits. My brother did not what to shoot or kill anything, and he cried and protested. My father made him shoot and kill a rabbit by shaming him, calling him a sissy, and saying he would never be his “real son” if he didn’t do it without crying. Real sons don’t cry. I watched my previously sensitive brother shut down and change dramatically as he walled himself off from his emotions to please my father. This transformation was heartbreaking for me to watch.

This not showing emotion or vulnerability may be one of the factors in male burnout, described by Jonathan Malesic, writing for the New York Times. Malesic notes that while much attention has been paid to women’s burnout during the pandemic due to the disproportionate strain of balancing work, housework, and caregiving, not enough attention has been paid to men’s burnout. Men are experiencing burnout in significant numbers, which is contributing to the staff shortages in every industry.

Malesic reports that burnout is defined by researchers as “a syndrome with three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism and a sense of ineffectiveness.” The author notes that while both women and men experience all three dimensions of burnout, the patterns are different. For example, a large study conducted in 2010 found that women tend to score higher on the exhaustion scale while men score higher on the cynicism scale. Cynicism is also called “emotional distancing.” This sense of hopelessness, exhaustion, and a lack of motivation or the ability to care about one’s job and sometimes about one’s family can be overwhelming.

Malesic points out the different types of factors that may impact men’s burnout:

• The enduring “breadwinner ethos” describes the societal expectation that men need to prove their manhood through their performance at work. Malesic notes that “our society still largely equates masculinity with being a stoical wage earner.”
• Stoicism, or emotional distancing, is coded as masculine and seen as a sign of professional competence in stereotypical cultural archetypes such as stern managers, hard-boiled police officers, or brusque physicians. The author notes that the fictional titular television character Ted Lasso is seen as funny and a bit silly because he defies the cultural masculine stereotypes as a positive and emotionally supportive soccer coach.
• Men are less likely than women to talk about their problems. Men are 40 percent less likely than women to seek professional counseling for any reason. Men also have fewer friends to talk with and often do not have anyone, aside from a spouse or partner, they feel they can open up to.
• Men are not prepared by society to share the burden of parenthood and do not see parenting as an integral part of being a man, according to a study on parenting conducted in Belgium. This factor could contribute to a high rate of burnout in fathers, who see their role of parenting conflicting with their breadwinner role.

The author notes that younger men may think this breadwinner ethos is a concept of the past, but they’d be wrong. A study by the Pew Research Center in 2017 reported that

• 71 percent of Americans thought “being able to support a family” was important for a man to be a good husband, compared with 32 percent who said it was important for a woman to be a good wife.
• 64 percent of adults aged eighteen to twenty-nine said breadwinning was important to be a good husband while 34 percent said it was important to be a good wife.

I agree with Malesic when he says that to end our burnout culture for men, we need new ideals about the role of work and values that focus less on economic productivity and more on loyalty, solidarity, and courage—“including the courage to quit a job, raise a child or both.”

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

When I hear the term gender gap, I tend to think of the gender wage gap or the gender voting gap, both of which have been regularly discussed in the public domain in recent years. A summary of new research by Thomas B. Edsall, writing for the New York Times, reveals multiple dimensions of the gender gap that have implications for differences not only in voting patterns but also in government policy priorities and organizational leadership and cultures. These differences make the case for balanced representation.

Edsall reports on the following statistics:

• In a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute found the “largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women identified as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.”
• A Knight Foundation survey in 2017 of 3,014 college students asked, “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights?” Male students preferred protecting free speech over inclusion by 61 to 39 percent. Female students favored inclusion over free speech by 64 to 35 percent.
• The article “The Suffragist Peace,” published in 2018 by Joslyn N. Barnhart, Allan Dafoe, Elizbeth N. Saunders, and Robert F. Trager, cites research showing that preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women. Women prefer peaceful options and are more willing to see their leaders back down than engage in wars. They conclude that the more women participate in voting and governance, the more democracy and democratic peace will result.
• Other studies confirm earlier feminist research showing that men and women broadly differ in values as defined by care, fairness, benevolence, and protecting the welfare of others. In line with these differences in values, women are more likely than men to regard hate speech as a form of violence rather than as free-speech expression.
• Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business, notes that both men and women are competitive. While men enjoy direct status competition, women use competition strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation, disguise competition, and avoid interference in other women’s goals.
• Between 1992 and 2016, political scientists at North Carolina State University and Augusta University analyzed the responses of those who identified themselves as feminists or antifeminists based on surveys conducted by the American National Election Studies. During this period, the total number of voters saying they were feminists grew from 28 to 34 percent. The biggest gains were among young voters. Self-identification as feminist by women with college degrees rose from 34 to 61 percent in contrast to men with college degrees, whose self-identification as feminist fell from 37 to 35 percent.

In conclusion, the gender gaps described above have a lot of potential implications for government, organizations, and society. Certainly not all women or men are the same, but the trends in dimensions of gender differences described by Edsall suggest, in general terms, that women and men bring important contrasts to the table. Women still do not have equal representation in government or organizational leadership roles, both of which shape policy and culture. More representation and voice in these positions of influence could result in less war and more equitable organizations and society.

Photo by Mirah Curzer on Unsplash

Much has been written about staffing shortages in almost every sector of our economy and the high rates of “quitting” by lower-wage workers. While research shows that many white women and women of color, especially mothers, are quitting because of a lack of workplace support for childcare and other family challenges such as eldercare, a new study by William M. Rodgers III and Lowell Ricketts of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve of Saint Louis focuses on the unusually high exit from the labor force of workers who are age sixty-five and older. The authors note that rate of retirement among those sixty-five and older “exceeds that predicted by the demographic shift of baby boomers” and is an important contributor to the widespread labor shortages in the United States. While I was not surprised about parents having to leave the workplace during the pandemic because of the demands of remote schooling and the lack of childcare, I was surprised by this information about “the great retirement.”

This study by the Institute for Economic Equity found the following:

• Retirements were much more common among older white women without college education.
• Male workers were less likely to be retired than their female counterparts.
• Black, Hispanic, and Native American workers were less likely to be retired than their white peers of similar ages.
• Workers who were married or widowed were more likely to be retired than their single peers who have never been married.
• Workers with at least some college education were less likely to be retired than their peers with a high school diploma or less education.
• As household income increases, the likelihood of retirement declines.
• Veterans were more likely to be retired versus nonveterans.
• Rates of anxiety were significantly lower among retirees relative to their similarly aged peers still in the labor force, which may reflect the fear of the virus for older workers.

Some of these findings seem contradictory and are not explained by the authors. For example, why are workers with less education and income more likely to retire than those with higher household incomes? It would seem that lower-wage workers would feel more pressure to stay in the workforce than would be true for households with higher incomes.

In another seemingly contradictory finding, the authors note that the tumult of the pandemic economy produced asset appreciation in investment and residential real estate with average net worth jumping 12 percent and 14.8 percent among households with a head of household aged fifty-five to sixty-nine and seventy and older, respectively. They speculate that this increase in assets may have motivated retirements among those workers with the means to do so, which makes sense but seems to contradict other findings.

Despite some contradictory finds, this study does identify an important trend to be aware of. The great labor shortage we are experiencing means that the loss of experienced talent through unusually high rates of retirement of older workers is a significant factor that employers might want to address. Creative solutions, such as part-time employment, might lure much-needed older workers back into the workforce.

Photo by Aris Sfakianakis on Unsplash

I find it inspiring to learn about women in history who broke barriers and forged new pathways. Often, their accomplishments have been lost or forgotten—or at least were unknown to me. Here are the brief stories of four more amazing women I have recently stumbled across.

Gertrude Jeannette (1914–2018)

Reportedly the first woman to drive a taxi in New York City, Gertrude Jeannette got her license to drive taxis in 1942. Jonathan Wolfe, writing for the New York Times, explains that Black drivers were not allowed to work downtown, so when Jeannette pulled up to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan to try to get her first customer, the other drivers tried to cut her off and hurled insults at her as a Black woman. After intentionally ramming into a Checker cab that had lurched in front of her to cut her off, she drove off from the Waldorf with her first customer.

Jeannette later overcame a childhood stutter and became a Broadway, film, and television actor and playwright. She was barred from working in theaters during the Red Scare of the 1950s because of her association with Paul Robeson, who was on a watch list due to his activism. Jeannette then set up a succession of theater companies in Harlem to make sure the community continued to have top-notch theater. Wolfe explains that she continued to act into her eighties and retired from directing at ninety-eight.

Julia Tuttle (1849–1898)

Known as the “Mother of Miami,” Julia Tuttle is recognized as the only woman to have founded a major American city. Elena Sheppard writes that Tuttle purchased 640 acres on the north side of the Miami River, land from which Native American tribes, most notably the Tequesta, had been ousted during the Seminole Wars. The daughter of a homesteader, she worked with other landowners to attract the building of a railroad in 1896 to the swampy area to encourage development and settlement. In 1896, Miami was incorporated, but Tuttle, being a woman, was not permitted to cast a vote. Tuttle built a hotel, was one of the first directors of the Bank of Bay Biscayne (until forced to resign because she was a woman), and spent her short life developing the fledgling city. Tuttle died in 1898 at the age of forty-nine.

Claudette Colvin (1940–present day)

Claudette Colvin’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and the broader civil rights movement has been overlooked. But now, reports Eduardo Medina, she says, “I wanted my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to understand that their grandmother stood up for something very important, and that it changed our lives a lot, changed attitudes.” That is why she filed a petition in October 2021 to have her juvenile arrest record expunged because she felt justice from the court system was sixty-six years past due.

Medina reports that in March 1955, when Colvin was fifteen, she refused to give up her seat in the Whites-only section of a bus in Montgomery. She was promptly arrested and kicked by officers as they dragged her off the bus. She was convicted of violating the city’s segregation law, causing disorderly conduct, and assaulting an officer, and she went on to become the star witness in 1956 in the landmark case that effectively ended bus segregation. Colvin’s arrest came nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, but Parks is the one who became the face of the movement, and Colvin was forgotten.

Medina notes that the current judge handling Colvin’s case to clear her record is Calvin L. Williams, the first Black judge to serve in Alabama’s Fifteen Judicial Circuit Court. Williams notes that history has come full circle when he, a Black judge, can bring justice to a case where justice was so long denied to a Black person.

Alice Guy Blaché (1873–1968)

In 1911, Alice Guy Blaché was recognized as the first female filmmaker in history in an article published in the Moving Picture News. Elizabeth Weitzman reports that “until recently, Guy Blaché was mostly relegated to the footnotes: credited regularly as the first female filmmaker (when credited at all), but overlooked in terms of her impact as an artist and an innovator.” She began making films in 1896, with around one thousand films under her belt by the end of her career. As Weitzman describes, Guy Blaché was “constantly pushing visual and thematic boundaries. She experimented with early synchronized sound, color and special effects. She explored gender, race and class. And she inspired future giants like Sergei Eisenstein.”

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times writes that Guy Blaché was born in France and began her filmmaking career there. She moved to the United States in 1907 to continue her filmmaking and by 1910 had established her own film studio, Solax Company. Her films included gun-toting heroines and many other groundbreaking themes. By the 1920s, the movie industry had become big business and was no longer hospitable to women. She returned to France, but she could not find work there as a filmmaker. She also tried to find her catalog of films, but they were presumed lost, and she was forgotten. “Only now,” writes Dargis, “largely because of the feminist film scholars who are writing women back into history, does her place seems secure.”

By not forgetting these women, we honor those who came before us and make space for new visionaries in the years ahead.

Photo courtesy of Phillip Pessar (CC BY 2.0)