by Dr. Warren Farrell

Studies are done when studies are funded. If the area is gender, the funding is feminist.

Lace Curtain Research and the Funding It Finds

Now that men are in the minority in college (45%), and doing worse in almost� all subjects except math and science in high school, and dropping out, committing suicide, and suffering learning disabilities at much higher rates, we would expect special financial aid to be available to boys � perhaps even more than to girls. Not the case.

Although women dominate the humanities, grants to study male-female issues given by the National Endowment for the Humanities are given almost exclusively to study only women, and from only a feminist perspective. For example, $27,500 for �Witchcraft Beliefs and the History of Thought in Ancient Mesopotamia.�[16]� What is distinctly missing are studies relevant to both sexes knowing how to improve their lives, such as �The Impact of Stepdad vs. Biological Father Involvement in Divorced Families.�

The pattern is the same with the National Endowment for the Arts using, for example, $37,500 of our money to fund exhibits titled �A Woman�s Life Isn�t Worth Much,�[17] but virtually nothing on men�s lives.

Other studies are conducted more directly by the government, such as the Census Bureau. Let�s look....

Remember the headlines we read telling us how little men pay in child support, based on Census Bureau figures? All these Census Bureau�s figures are based on the reports of women. And only women.

Only recently did the government commission a special survey including men. The men reported paying almost 40% more than the women reported receiving (between 80% and 93% of what the court had ordered),[18] plus more payments in full and on time.[19]

Why haven�t we seen any �Men Pay 80%-93%� headlines? Because as soon as the men�s perspective was discovered to be so different, the Family Support Administration had the study discontinued � it was not released.[20] Which is another way of saying �censored.�

Another example. The National Longitudinal Survey provides the basis for thousands of articles about women every year. It is perhaps the most important study of how Americans� lives change during our lifetimes. Well, no longer. Since 1983, men have been dropped from the study.[21] It is now the most important study about how women�s lives change.�

How was the dropping of men justified? Men are harder to study. Wasn�t that was one of the reasons the medical community gave to feminists when feminists asked why women had been left out of many medical studies? The feminists rightly protested, �Go the extra mile � we have the right to know what does and doesn�t apply to us.� The feminists were right, but the men are silent. The government can�t hear what men don�t say.

The Murder of All Justice

In the chapter on domestic violence, much of the censorship I discussed emanated from the US Department of Justice. It was the Department of Justice that censored abuse by women from a 1979 poll. Finally some professors discovered the data on the original computer tape.[22] The Bureau of Justice Statistics� �Murder In Families� stressed women-as-victims although its own raw data showed 55.5% male and 44.5% female victims of family murder.[23] Similarly, it issued a report on Violence Against Women,[24] but none on Violence Against Men � despite the fact that two-thirds of the violence is against men. We saw also how the FBI hides the female method of killing by contract by calling it a multiple-offender killing.[25]

I am unaware of a single government source with a focus on family or gender that does not now have a strong feminist bias. Some are bureaus of feminist bias....

Labor in The Women�s Bureau

You�ve probably read that men earn more than women for the same work. Most of us believe it. That statistic evolves from data compiled by the US Department of Labor. But the Department of Labor has only a Women�s Bureau, not a Men�s Bureau. Thus we are given raw data that tells us women earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by men, but no Men�s Bureau looks beyond the surface to show us what�s missing....

What�s missing? In the research for a forthcoming book (25 Ways to Higher Pay), I discovered that men behave differently toward the workplace in 25 different ways. All these ways lead to men earning more, but for very different work (more-hazardous jobs, more technical professions like engineering or brain surgery, etc.), very different behavior at work (longer hours, working night shifts, etc.), and very different efforts to obtain the work (working in much less enticing locations [Alaskan oil rigs, coal mines], commuting further, relocating more, working overseas), and so on.

The Women�s Bureau gives us breakdowns by all the categories in which men outearn women, but these 25 differences that tell us why men earn more aren�t mentioned; and areas in which women outearn men (e.g., entry-level engineers or mechanics) do not become press releases or stories in our local paper. The biases are reinforced by an American school system in which only 58% of high school students in 1999 understand even the very basics of supply and demand.[26] So it does not compute to 42% of students that when men choose labor that fewer people want to do (because of those 25 types of hardships), it means their pay will be higher because of supply and demand, not discrimination. (And higher pay is usually why the men choose that labor.)

Once this Lace Curtain bias (reinforced by a women�s bureau without a men�s bureau) is in our psyches, it creates the political justification for others: Equal Pay Day is established.[27] Vice President Gore not only says that women are paid less for the same work, but that more-competent women are deprived of jobs before less-competent men. He doesn�t mention affirmative action as the legal requirement for the opposite to be permitted. Then the Council of Economic Advisers reports women earn only 75 cents to men�s dollar.

This confluence of misinformation creates the political atmosphere which allows President Clinton to announce tripling the mechanisms to enforce penalties for discrimination against women for the fiscal 2000 budget.[28] A public service campaign will inform women of their rights. Enter a new millennium of lawsuits. For what are the lawsuits a substitute? Women knowing the other 25 ways they can receive higher pay. These would make their company need them more rather than fear them more. That�s the difference between victim feminism and empowerment feminism.

The Office of Research on Women�s Health...and the Deaths of our Sons, Husbands, and Dads

There is no misuse of the lace curtain that is killing our fathers and their sons more than its misuse in the area of men�s and women�s health. We all benefit from more research on both sexes� health. So why have we been focusing on women�s health during the past three decades to such a degree that we have an Office of Research on Women�s Health but none on men�s health? Because we were told by government leaders and feminist activists that women�s health research received only 10% of all health research funding. We were not told men�s research receives only 5% of government funding (the other 85% is for non gender-specific research, such as cellular, blood, DNA, etc.).[29]

In certain areas women�s health research was neglected. We were led to believe that is because we didn�t care about women. The opposite was true. Men, and especially male prisoners, military men and African-American men, were the most likely to be the guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs because we cared less if men and prisoners died. That is, we used men for experimental research for the same reason we use rats for experimental research.

Two points are important here: What neglect there was of women came from protecting women too much. A core theme of this book is the �female protection paradox�: that protecting women hurts women. This is just one example. Second, the neglect was limited to certain areas of women�s health � overall women�s health research has long exceeded men�s.[30]

Notice, though, that we are not being told that we needed to pay attention to women�s and men�s health. The women�s health message has, ironically, been a competitive one: women neglected, men not. And it has been a blaming one: The male medical community cares more about men.

The result? Most of the world assumes women just �naturally� live longer than men. They are unaware that in 1920, for example, American men died only one year sooner than women; today, they die seven years sooner.[31] While dozens of studies are being done on the possible damage of silicone breast implants, the causes of men dying seven years sooner are virtually ignored. Nor are most of us aware of how quickly men�s health is deteriorating. When I wrote The Myth of Male Power in 1993, the gap between male and female suicide was 3.9 to 1; now it is 4.5 to 1 (see table). In Great Britain, there is a recent 339% increase in male suicides by hanging alone.[32]

Even as we are increasingly hearing that women die of heart disease as often as men, we are not hearing that when most women die of heart disease, men have been long dead. Here are the age-adjusted death rates for the ten leading causes of death......

Rest of article can be read here: http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/f/farrell/farrell_2.htm