Men Trouble, Women Trouble

Marriage, fertility, and life expectancy gaps.

Doing a shorter roundup of good pieces I’ve been reading as my family gets through the one-two punch of tech week for my husband’s students’ production of The Winter’s Tale and general third trimester malaise.

A little pitch for The Winter’s Tale and all the late romances: These are plays that begin like tragedies and end like comedies. To go from (attempted) murder to marriage often requires moments of strange grace or confusion (bears! pirates! a beheaded body wearing the wrong clothes!) to reset what the characters might long to put right, but can’t achieve on their own.

Elsewhere in farce, I have a piece in First Things on the folly of setting up an AI chatbot as a catechist, whether or not it pretends to be a priest. As I write: “Non-human tools work best when they free up our time for our most humane work. I run the laundry machine, rather than wash clothes by hand, so I have more time to play in the dirt with my daughters. God invites us to imitate him as sub-creators. It is a profound misuse of that invitation to build tools to take over our most human and relational tasks.”

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

First up in outside readings,

Richard V Reeves

of

Of Boys and Men

has reflections on the report from Norway’s Mannsutvalgets, or Men’s Equality Commission. Reeves writes:

The Commission states bluntly that “it is an equality challenge that men in Norway live shorter lives than women.” I agree. But in most studies of gender equality, the gap in life expectancy is simply treated as a given, rather than as a gap.

Reeves spotlights some of the report’s recommendations (I’ve paraphrased/compressed his text below):

• Equal paid leave. The Commission proposes that mothers and fathers have equal, independent leave rights.

• Flexible school start. The Commission proposes that parents have right to delay school start for their children (or “redshirting”) to make it easier for boys to start at the same level of maturity as girls.

• More men studying for careers in health, education and social care.

• Men’s Health Committee. In order to “carry out a closer investigation of men's health challenges and gender differences in health.”

• Gender neutral equality law. The current Equality and Discrimination Act in Norway states that it is “particularly aimed at improving the position of women and minorities”. The Commission believes that “this provision should be made gender neutral by removing the words ‘women's and’ from the law.

I’m definitely pro more men in HEAL professions, and more sex-disaggregated looks at men and women’s health. I’ve benefited enormously from my husband’s paternity leaves, but many countries that have parity on paper between men and women’s leave have very little take-up from men in practice.

What I find very odd in this list is the idea of stripping out “women” from Norway’s Equality and Discrimination Act.

You can have two models of preserving gender equity:

1. Figuring our which sex is “losing” on net and making sure to make things up to them.

2. Being attentive to the particular, different needs of both sexes, avoiding neutrality where not appropriate, expecting both sexes need specific advocacy on different issues.

Taking sex out seems counterproductive to me (even though it’s odd to imagine also adding “women and men.”) The closer you get to neutral, the more I expect you shortchange men and women.

Anna North of Vox had a good piece on egg freezing and the gap between its promise and its practice. One of the key details (very well highlighted in Motherhood on Ice, which I recommend) is that egg freezing is a response to a marriage gap as much as to a fertility problem.

Eliza Brown, now a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley, and her team interviewed 52 women who had frozen or were considering freezing their eggs in 2016 and 2017. None of them cited a desire to climb the corporate ladder. Instead, almost all were interested in egg freezing because they lacked a romantic partner. “Most of our participants understood egg freezing as a way to actually temporarily disentangle romantic and reproductive trajectories,” Brown tells Vox.

One thing that comes through very clearly is that many of these women aren’t casual about fertility and marriage, but they see limited ways to improve their odds besides trying to add time to the clock. In one woman’s experience:

She froze 14 eggs, beginning about 10 years ago when she was 36. At the equivalent of about $1,200 per egg, the process wasn’t cheap. But by the end, she says, “I felt really proud that I was doing something proactive, and something that gave me options.”

When she decided to use the frozen eggs to conceive on her own at 40, however, none of them fertilized. “I felt really angry at the universe,” she says. She later married and had a child using a donor egg.

It’s very hard to want children and have no clear path to family life at 36. If you see egg freezing as a response to a marriage gap, it’s clear you want to consider earlier interventions (and I don’t mean earlier freezing cycles!).

Several friends and I did a little brainstorming on twitter.

Where and how would you intervene to facilitate marriage (or make more men marriage-ready earlier)?

How can we work toward men’s gender equity without defaulting to gender neutrality or putting women on the back burner?