Though not a threatened species, men will lose out

It’s not possible to ditch a system that held women back without consequences for some men, especially mediocre ones

ometimes it’s hard to be a man. No, honestly. Sometimes it really is, especially if you’re a certain sort of man; the sort for whom maleness would, a few decades ago, have been their biggest trump card.

It’s not as hard, obviously, as those busy portraying middle-aged men as an endangered species would have you believe. A British government reshuffle whose standout moment was a capable woman losing her cabinet job, while Boris Johnson kept his, is an odd sort of “massacre of the middle-aged men”, as the Daily Mail splashed it. (If there is a dodgy positive-discrimination scheme operating in politics now, it’s based not on gender, but on Brexit; the quota of Leavers in government must be preserved, and if you subtract the ones who can’t be allowed anywhere near power, the sky’s practically the limit for the rest.)

But that said, last week has not been great for men. It started with male actors taking a chastened back seat at the Golden Globes, while their female co-stars protested sexual harassment. It moved on into a debate about the fact that some men at the BBC probably earn too much — which is not the whole reason some BBC women earn too little, but is not wholly irrelevant either, and suggests pay cuts loom for some.

Shortly after that, Toby Young resigned from a university quango, after being accused of tweeting suspiciously often about breasts; and a reshuffle billed as propelling more women into government (if not actually into cabinet) brutally ended the careers of several obscure middle-rankers who hadn’t much troubled the scoreboard lately. Now there are only 82 poor, marginalised male ministers facing a whole 32 women.

And in a final blow to the self-appointed custodians of traditional masculinity, the army unveiled a new femalefriendly recruitment campaign, suggesting it’s OK to cry and promising emotional support for soldiers.

There’s a reason, of course, that the armed forces describe themselves as a family. They’ve always offered a form of emotional support, a powerful sense of belonging and comradeship, and the army’s existing recruitment campaign already played on that by featuring soldiers describing how their mates helped them out in the tough early stages of training.

As for crying, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan left psychological scars as deep as the physical ones, and those long ago forced top brass to rethink their approach to combat stress.

Yet, the idea that repressing trauma in traditional manly fashion will make it magically go away, rather than seek darker outlets, persists among armchair generals.

Achieving equality

But like all fairytales, these fabled threats to masculinity itself do contain a kernel of truth. They have resonance for a reason. They speak to a broader fear that men will have to make sacrifices — changing their behaviour, or taking a financial hit — for women to achieve equality. And the unpalatable truth is that some men will.

It’s simply not possible to ditch a system that rewarded men unfairly at women’s expense without there being disagreeable consequences for at least some men. But just as advocates of social mobility shy away from explaining that it may not work out that happily for the dim but rich, women often don’t like to think there will be casualties from equality.

One of the most powerful arguments made against equal pay half a century ago, and against paid work for women before that, was that men would lose out; that their salaries would be cut, rather than women’s ratcheted up, to achieve parity, and overall families would be worse off. It didn’t happen that way, of course. One of the few things stopping low-income households being squeezed even tighter during the early 2000s was the rise in second earners going into work. Higher female employment is associated with rising gross domestic product and the kind of economic growth that enables pay rises to happen, as well as generating more money for public services. Women don’t just take jobs, but create them.

But in organisations with finite budgets — such as the BBC — cutting men’s pay could be the only realistic way to close some of the ridiculously large gaps they have been allowed to open up. Meanwhile, pruning some decent but not exactly indispensable types is the only way to bring new people into the middle ranks of government, without expanding the payroll. It’s hard to be honest about this when the other side is being rampantly dishonest, pretending every time a man loses out that it’s a conspiracy against all men. And it’s absolutely not a reason to retreat from the pursuit of equality.

But it’s the truth, and it has consequences for which we’re not preparing boys nearly well enough. Hiding from it won’t make it go away. columnist.

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