PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

This is kind of shocking: 75% of those who lost their jobs when the recession hit in 2008 were men. Here is another stat to go along with it: 35% of the working age males across America are not working at all. (Working is defined as having done any work in the last two weeks for pay.) Hey, that’s only 16 points away from a majority.

What does this mean? Well, in the case of 75% of the jobs being dropped having been held by men, there could be a lot of different answers. I have one. Men aren’t wanted by corporations and other employers any more. If you have a choice between firing a man and firing a women, get rid of the man every time. Women generally will work for less money and having started lower, they are less likely to reach the wage levels many men expect.

Men are more demanding. They gripe and complain and they want to get promoted. They need the money to play the traditional role of supporting their families. Men are much less compliant than women.

Women, in most cases, have been taught in one way or another to be compliant from childhood onward. Little boys act up in school, little girls bring apples for the teacher and get better grades. The general atmosphere of female compliance is reinforced in the early grades by the fact that most of the teachers are usually women. Elementary school can be like a girl’s club where unruly, excitable boys just don’t fit in. If you spend the first six or seven years of your education that way, it certainly can have a strong effect.

As for 35% of men not working and most of them not looking for work, that is a lot more complicated. Some men are taking advantage of the idea of the end of traditional male/female roles to do what they want and some could be eager to throw off the role of chief of the household. If women want to be “the boss”, some men probably say, “Let them!”, and I will do what I want.

Another factor is that men have collectively come to realize that employers don’t really want to hire them. If you’ve gone to 20 serious job interviews with no action, it could get discouraging. If you become convinced that you aren’t going to be hired, why keep looking? Why beat yourself over the head?

It appears, beyond a doubt, that as a nation we have allowed discrimination against women in the work place to turn into discrimination against men. So much time and energy was put into addressing the grievances of women that the country might have pushed too far the other way. More likely as a primary explanation is this: businesses, once they hired women, found they liked them more than a lot of men who worked there and, gradually, they found ways of sending the men home. When the recession hit, it was pay dirt for business: they could eliminate troublesome men, and their pay scales, and save money by having women do the same work.

Whatever the reasons behind these employment trends, they represent watershed changes in America and in our expectations for men and women. There could be a lot of trouble ahead if men are pushed toward being unwanted, superfluous objects.

On top of all this, some employers are refusing to even consider the unemployed, of either sex, for jobs that are opening up. The absolute arrogance of this is amazing. My guess is that people doing the hiring are just looking for an easy way to avoid having to go through so many applications. It would be illegal to discriminate in some other ways (“no people with brown eyes will be considered”), so they come up with this stupid idea. What happens if the best employee in the history of the world for a given company just happens to have been unemployed for awhile? Too bad. Don’t employers know that millions of really good people have been out of work? Who cares?

Doug Terry, 6.10.11

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