One last word on the Global Gender Gap Report.  I've criticized the Report for being a transparent fraud.  To the uninitiated, its title might suggest that it's some sort of dispassionate accounting of the many ways in which men have it better than women and women have it better than men in 134 different nations of the world.  That of course would be completely wrong.  The Report is nothing of the sort.  It very frankly defines as unequal any condition that doesn't favor women, while defining as equal any condition that does.  As such, it is in no sense a report on the relative equalities of the sexes; it's what Canadian journalist Barbara Kay might call the Global Women's Interests Report.  

But it might be argued that, after all, the report itself makes all of this perfectly clear.  It makes no effort to hide its methodology.  Anyone who can read knows that the report doesn't claim to be a balanced look at the sexes, but rather advocacy for women, irrespective of their wellbeing vis-a vis men.  In short, the report is what it is and makes no bones about it.  Criticizing it for not being gender balanced is like criticizing War and Peace because it's not Anna Karenina.  It doesn't pretend to be.

That argument would be fine if it weren't for the fact that, somehow, that all gets lost when a document entitled the Global Gender Gap Report produced by the World Economic Forum is itself reported on by the mainstream media.  In this article (New York Times, 10/28/09), this article (Time, 10/28/09) and this article (Boston Globe, 11/12/09), the Global Gender Gap Report is characterized not as the pro-woman advocacy it is, but as precisely what its title suggests.

So the New York Times piece quotes the report's self-description that it "tries to assess how well countries 'are dividing their resources and opportunities among their male and female populations.'"  That of course is flagrantly false.  The report does no such thing.  Again, when a country divides its "resources and opportunities" in a way that disadvantages men, the report defines that as equality.  The data on longevity and education in the United States, among many others, make that clear.

The Times, then, uncritically passes on to its readers the notion that the Report is a gender-balanced look at the state of men and women in various countries in the world.  At the same time it barely mentions the easy-to-understand methodology that leaves no doubt that the Report is anything but gender-neutral.

The result is not surprising.  We live in times in which few people in the Western world at least even consider the possibility that men in fact do worse than women on a long list of categories.  From longevity to education to incarceration to homelessness, women do much better than men, but is that common knowledge?  If it is, I would think you'd see it written or spoken about in a few places other than GlennSacks.com.

When published in a cultural context that readily assumes female victimization, sometimes in the face of obvious facts to the contrary, such a report is easily taken to be just what it seems to be but isn't - a balanced look at the wellfare of the sexes that finds that women come up short.  And lo and behold, that's just what happened with the GGG Report.  Its title and a few carefully chosen words about division of resources and opportunities between the sexes were all it took to convince incautious writers at major publications of some fundamental untruths.  And in so doing, they passed along the false notion, so commonly held in the West, that women uniquely suffer the slings and arrows of societal fortunes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Men and the Media, Gender Issues (Misc.). You can trackback from your own site.