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During
UCLA's International Women's Day celebration earlier this month,
women's studies Professor Christine Littleton said, "It is
women who do the work of the world" ("Students
celebrate International Women's Day," Daily Bruin, News,
March 12). To judge who does "the work of the world"
in a world of over 6 billion people is a gargantuan task (though
Littleton doesn't seem much burdened by it), but let's begin by
asking two questions:
1)
Who works the most hours (inside or outside the home) in the
average family unit worldwide?
2)
Who does the most demanding and dangerous work?
The
second question is much easier to answer than the first, so
let's start there. According to the International Labor
Organization, an estimated 1.1 million workers are killed in
industrial accidents each year, exceeding the number killed from
road accidents, war, violence and AIDS.
These
accidents occur primarily in mining, logging, heavy agricultural
labor, construction, fishing, heavy manufacturing and various
other overwhelmingly male jobs. The ILO estimates that some
600,000 lives would be saved every year if available safety
practices were used. The ILO also estimates that there are an
approximately 250 million occupational accidents and 160 million
occupational diseases each year. The ILO doesn't keep figures by
gender, but in countries like England, Australia, Canada, and
South Africa, where such figures are available, the fatalities
and serious injuries are usually over 90 percent male.
The
gender breakdowns in the U.S. are little different. According to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were over 125 million
workplace injuries in the United States between 1976 and 1999.
Nearly 100,000 workers died from job-related injuries between
1980 and 1994 with 95 percent of them male. Of the 25 most
dangerous jobs listed by the U.S. Department of Labor, all of
them are at least 90 percent and are often 100 percent male.
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
more than three million workers a year are treated in hospital
emergency rooms for occupational injuries and nearly 50 American
workers are injured every minute of the 40-hour work week. On
average, every day 17 die, 16 of them male.
So
there is no doubt that the most dangerous and demanding jobs are
done by men, in most if not virtually every society, and that
men shoulder the burden of dangerous labor in the U.S. Let's
consider the other question: Who works the most hours (inside or
outside the home) in the average family unit worldwide? It's a
much harder question to answer but, as best as can be told, the
average man is doing at least as much as the average woman is.
Feminists
generally base their claim that women do most of "the
work" on the United Nations 1995 "Human Development
Report," which was presented at the U.N. International
Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995. The report claimed that
women do more work than men. It was, of course, reported
uncritically by the U.S. media with headlines such as "It's
Official: Women Do Work Harder" and "A Woman's Work is
Never Done."
But,
as U.N. official Terry McKinley said in February 1996, the U.N.
misrepresented the study in several important ways. For one, the
information provided by the U.N. to the press only applied to
countries where women were found to work more hours than men;
the countries where men were found to work more hours than women
were deliberately excluded (Warren Farrell,
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say) .
Moreover,
when the data provided by researchers in some countries
(including the U.S.) did not fit the U.N.'s intention to show
that women "do more," researchers were asked (in a
private communication) to amend their studies. Researchers were
asked to include women's voluntary community work as well as
hobbies in order to increase women's perceived workload.
Researchers were not asked to include these items (or any
others) in men's labor. As a study of men and women's labor, the
U.N. findings are worthless.
But, even if one could possibly do an effective study on how
many hours the average man and woman worked (inside and outside
the home, worldwide), a finding that women work more hours would
not mean that women work "harder" or "more" because the more
difficult and dangerous nature of men's work would not be
accounted for.
While judging the labors of the world (most of it impoverished) is
practically impossible, it is not nearly as hard to judge the
labor in an advanced, industrial nation. In the United States,
studies have shown that women clearly are not working more or
harder than men.
For
example, the U.N.'s survey on the United States showed that
American men work three more hours a week on average than
American women. Other neutral researchers have come up with
similar conclusions, including the Journal of Economic
Literature, which reports that the average man works five hours
more, and the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center
which puts the disparity at 3.4 more male hours per week.
Feminist
surveys, such as the famous Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild,
get "women do more" figures by a variety of
disreputable gimmicks, recounted in great detail in Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don'
Say. Remember, too,
that all of these surveys (the serious ones and the feminist
advocacy ones) count only hours. A man doing eight hours of
dangerous construction work in the 100-degree heat is credited
with no more than a woman who works in an air-conditioned office
or who, in the comfort and safety of her own home (and without a
supervisor breathing down her neck), cooks breakfast, takes the
kids to school, packs her husband's lunch and folds the laundry
while chatting on the phone.
Feminists routinely focus blame on
men, but the enemy of most of the women of the world is not the
man who works hard to feed his wife and kids but the grinding
poverty that wreaks devastation on everybody: men, women,
and children.
Glenn
Sacks' columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of America's
largest newspapers. Glenn can be reached via his website at
www.GlennSacks.com or
via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
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