As part of that process, I spent some time thumbing through a directory of non- profit foundations, which drove home again something I have known for years: There is a vast data gap between men's issues and women's issues. And it appears to be growing, not closing.
Flipping back to the index of foundation directory, I found a third of a page devoted to foundations that will underwrite women's programs. But foundations interested in funding men's programs? There wasn't even an index heading, much less any listings.
I don't know that anyone has ever sought to ascertain conclusively the differential between research funding devoted to women's concerns vs. men's concerns, but the difference is certainly vast. In a conversation with author Warren Farrell, I once estimated the ratio at 100-to-1. Warren corrected me; he said it had to be at least 1,000-to-1.
Upon reflection, I think we both grossly underestimated the difference.
The ramifications of this preoccupation with only women's issues are far-reaching.
The National Institutes of Health, the agency that doles out the federal government's health research funds, gives at least twice as much to research on women's health as it does to research on men's health. One result: On an age- adjusted basis, men's mortality rates are greater for every one of the 15 leading causes of death. Breast cancer kills about 45,000 women each year, prostate cancer claims 32,000. Yet we know so little about prostate cancer that one of the most accepted treatments is just to let the disease race old age to see which kills the victim first. In the meantime, research funding for breast cancer is more than six times that for prostate cancer.
The data gap, in other words, costs men's lives.
Perhaps nowhere, though, have the results of the data gap been more apparent than in the area of domestic violence.
Research into family violence takes one of two directions. The first is to determine the extent of and harm wrought by violence against women. The second is an examination of family in general, without regard to gender. There is virtually no research specifically targeted at family violence perpetrated by women, and its effect on males.
To my knowledge, no one has ever looked at the reasons for the reluctance of men to report violence inflicted upon them; at whether men set higher thresholds for considering themselves injured and for medical intervention; at whether police are biased against males in investigating family violence.
Murray Straus, the doyen of domestic violence researchers and co-director of the Family Research Institute at the University of New Hampshire, says this of the second category of research:
"Although there may be exceptions that I missed, every study among the more than 30 describing some type of sample that is not self-selective...has found a rate of assault by women on male partners that is about the same as the rate of assault by men on female partners." (Straus, Murray A. "Physical Assaults by Wives: A Major Social Problem." From Current Controversies on Family Violence, Edited by Richard J. Gelles and Donileen R. Loseke. Newbury Park, CA: Sage (1993), p 71
What's happening, though, is that the results of the first category of research get reported in the mass media. And because there is no counterbalancing research on the effects of female violence on males, there is a major data gap. Women's advocates have used the results of advocacy research to create a climate of crisis. Foundations, such as those NCFM will be soliciting for funds, have responded by financing program after program designed to benefit battered women.
These programs contribute to a self-perpetuating cycle of bias. They create clinical populations of supposedly battered women who are a ready pool for feminist researchers to study.
From those studies feminist researchers create more skewed data to seek more funding to create more programs benefiting women to drain money away from programs benefiting men, creating more clinical populations of women to study, ad infinitum.
The data gap is a major impediment to men's activists. If, for example, no one has ever examined the bias of our educational system for rewarding the passive "good behavior of girls and punishing the rowdy "bad" behavior of boys, the task of rebutting the allegation that education is biased against girls is rendered far more difficult. Activists are left with only the defensive tactic of discrediting the research into girls' problems; they have no data of their own to use offensively. That is the reason I adamantly refuse to concede bias or discrimination exists against women in any given instance. Give us data parity, where we can truly compare experiences of the sexes, and then, if indicated, I'll be conciliatory.
The next time you are engaged in a spirited discussion of gender issues, and getting buried by feminist statistics, be aware that you have just tumbled into the data gap. Cold comfort, perhaps -- but knowing it is only your data that is inferior is surely better than feeling your whole sex is inferior.
Semper fratres.
Reprinted with permission from Transitions
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