White male culture and dis/advantage

October 6 2001 - In the September edition of HRMagazine, Michael Welp, a principal at EqualVoice is quoted as saying that white men need to view themselves as part of a culture and a group. He says that: "Many organizations define diversity as simply respecting everyone's different culture. This attitude ignores the fact that there are systemic advantages for the white male culture. For one thing, we never have to leave our own culture and enter someone else's. This allows us to continue to think of ourselves as individuals, not as part of a white male culture. Everyone else, however, must become bi-cultural in order to fit into our culture."

In the same article, Jeff Hitchcock, author of Unraveling the White Cocoon (Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 2001) says that: "I had never thought of myself as needing to be involved in a diversity process. I had evolved to the point where I realized that we, as white males, had all of the privileges, but I still thought that only people of color had a need for a sense of community. I realized then that white men also have a part to play in diversity."

Hitchcock went on to say "I'm not sure it's a good idea to make white men too much of an entity and tell them that they have their own culture," He offered two reasons for concern:

1. "There is a lot of collusion between white men and white women regarding who we are as white people. When you place the focus on white men, it is sometimes difficult to get to the elements of privilege and culture for white men and white women. That is, when you remove white women from the discussion, you lose something. You give white women a 'break' on issues of racism that they don't always deserve."

2. "Just as there is a lot of collusion between white men and white women on the issue of race, there is also a lot of collusion between white men and men of color on sexism." Again he argues that a focus on white males 'gives black men a "break" on the question of how they think about and treat women.'

Last year, a study for British think-tank CIVITAS concluded that men are now at a disadvantage in the workplace. In the study, Women or Men - Who Are The Victims? (Pizzey, et al, 2000) , Professor J R Shackleton and Peter Urwin of the Westminster Business School argue that, in many ways, the modern work environment favours women rather than men:

* Male jobs are less secure. Male unemployment is higher than female unemployment. Redundancy rates are higher for men.

* Male jobs are more dangerous. Men are more likely to suffer injuries, including fatal injuries, at work.

* Jobs have been falling in manufacturing, where men predominate, and rising in female-dominated service industries.

* Women are more likely to receive in-work training than men.

* Workplace legislation usually favours women workers, including the right to take time off work for family emergencies. Meanwhile, the trade unions, most of whose members are men, have had their powers reduced.

* Women have more time off work for sickness than men.

* The state pension and most occupational pensions are actuarially unfair to men. Women live longer, which means that ‘a man and a woman with similar characteristics, retiring at the same age and on the same salary, can expect different benefits from the same contributions'.

Shackleton and Urwin point out that the often-quoted comparison between the average earnings of men and women - the rate for women is 75% of that for men (p.2) - does not take into account the difference made by the personal choice to marry. Married men earn more than single men, presumably because they are motivated by their family responsibilities, argue Shackleton and Urwin. But marriage has the opposite effect for women. They may drop out of the employment market completely or change from full-time to part-time working to allow for the demands of childrearing. In fact, the gap in pay between single men and single women is small, and often insignificant (p.10).

Decisions about marriage and childbearing are freely taken, they argue, so it is difficult to see how government action could narrow the gap in average earnings without unacceptable interference in people's private lives. Shackleton and Urwin warn that ‘the labour market is a very complicated place' (p.22), and that attempts to even out differences between broad groups like men and women can lead to laws and regulations which endanger jobs by imposing a burden on employers, rather than achieving their stated aims.

References
Atkinson, W. (2001) 'Bringing diversity to White Men', HRMagazine, Sep 2001, Vol. 46, (9), pp: 76-83
E. Pizzey, E., Shackleton, J.R. and Unwin, P. (2000), Women or men: who are the victims, CIVITAS, The Institute for the Study of Civil Society.