U.S. Researchers demonstrate high costs of drop-outs

By Henry M. Levin and Cecilia E. Rouse, New York Times, January 25, 2012

Henry M. Levin is a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cecilia E. Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, was a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011.
In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.
Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.
Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.
These programs sound expensive — some Americans probably think that preventing 1.3 million students from dropping out of high school each year can’t be done — but in fact the costs of inaction are far greater.
High school completion is, of course, the most significant requirement for entering college. While our economic competitors are rapidly increasing graduation rates at both levels, we continue to fall behind. Educated workers are the basis of economic growth — they are especially critical as sources of innovation and productivity given the pace and nature of technological progress.
If we could reduce the current number of dropouts by just half, we would yield almost 700,000 new graduates a year, and it would more than pay for itself. Studies show that the typical high school graduate will obtain higher employment and earnings — an astonishing 50 percent to 100 percent increase in lifetime income — and will be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Further, because of the increased income, the typical graduate will contribute more in tax revenues over his lifetime than if he’d dropped out.
When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime. This is a benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000 — or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years. That’s real money — and a reason both liberals and conservatives should rally behind dropout prevention as an element of economic recovery, leaving aside the ethical dimensions of educating our young people.
Some might argue that these estimates are too large, that the relationships among the time-tested interventions, high school graduation rates and adult outcomes have not been proved yet on a large scale. Those are important considerations, but the evidence cannot be denied: increased education does, indeed, improve skill levels and help individuals to lead healthier and more productive lives. And despite the high unemployment rate today, we have every reason to believe that many of these new graduates would find work — our history is filled with sustained periods of economic growth when increasing numbers of young people obtained more schooling and received large economic benefits as a result.
Of course, there are other strategies for improving educational attainment — researchers learn more every day about which are effective and which are not. But even with what we know, a failure to substantially reduce the numbers of high school dropouts is demonstrably penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Proven educational strategies to increase high school completion, like high-quality preschool, provide returns to the taxpayer that are as much as three and a half times their cost. Investing our public dollars wisely to reduce the number of high school dropouts must be a central part of any strategy to raise long-run economic growth, reduce inequality and return fiscal health to our federal, state and local governments.

Setting goals like 700,000 additional graduates, and demonstrating the investment return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar invested in keeping kids in school, and positing $127,000 of graduate contribution to state coffers and an accumulative $90 billion for each year of increasing the number of graduates by 700,000, or $90 billion over eleven years....all worthy and credible figures and projections.
However, while the economy is sputtering and has been for at last the last four years, and while No Child Left Behind was always nothing more than a "teach-to-the-test" cover of the politicians' asses, and not a visionary educational approach, and while reducing the number of drop-outs, and increasing the number of graduates is and always will be a good thing to do, nevertheless:--

• learning generates much more that dollars, for both the graduate and the state
• learning generates many more options within the graduates perspective on whatever life or career situation presents itself
• learning also generates a much more demanding and imaginative culture through which, we can only hope, politicians will have to account to both more and more penetrating questions from more sources...generating a far more interactive and accountable and thereby responsible society
• learning also stimulates the imagination, if done successfully, thereby providing the essential foundation for a society and a culture seeking to shed the "ingenuity gap" which plagues North American culture, on both sides of the border, although it is more serious in Canada..

So while the accountants and the revenue department would be happier with more graduates coughing up more cash into public coffers, that is not the reason, nor even the most important reason to propose, to advocate and to implement strategies and tactics that keep students in school longer....It may be a useful byproduct...but it is certainly not the most important reason for such a policy implementation: never was, never will be!

Manipulating numbers: in faculty ratios, and in entry requirements to university...needs reversing

I had the opportunity to discuss the issues faced by male adolescents in Ontario secondary schools this weekend with a retired teacher from an Ottawa high school.
He made two significant points:

1. When the Ontario Ministry of education began the initiative to level the ratio of faculty numbers between males and females, they instructed the Human Resources departments of the boards of education to comb the personnel files of prospective women, those who were already qualified and those who were working on their qualifications to positions of leadership and responsibility, and phone those likely prospects with a "nudge" of encouragement to inspire their application both to the studies and to the application for such positions. However, as with most government programs, once started, rarely stopped, and when the 50-50 ratio of male and female instructors was achieved, the program continued, until now the ratio is more like 80-20, female to male. As a former Guidance Counsellor, he had observed the spectre of a grade nine boy, attempting to separate from his mother, under the 80-20 ratio, and facing 7 female instructors of his 8 subject teachers.
2. The second point he made concerned the admission requirements for engineering students in such universities as Queen's. In another attempt to encourage female applicants, the entry requirements were lowered, for example, to a 75% average at graduation for females, while for males the entry requirements remained at 85%. It did not take long for the male students, naturally, to catch on to what they were facing and withdraw from the competition, leaving the classroom spaces to the women, and consequently also the professional graduates.

If such entry requirements were skewed in other faculties like medicine, law, psychology, social work...it is little wonder that the graduate schools are now dominated, in numerical form, by women in all of those faculties.
With respect to #1 above, it is long overdue  that the male-female ratio among secondary school instructors and administrators be re-calibrated, to achieve a ratio much closer to the 50-50 balance that could be considered optimum.
With respect to #2 above, the universities would do everyone, themselves, the culture and the professions a large favour if they were to return to a standard entry requirement for male and female students, in all faculties. Otherwise, we will experience more situations similar to the North York General Hospital who searched for more than two years for a teaching practitioner in family medicine who was male, without success. Many veterinarian clinics are now staffed by women who refuse to make "house calls" to sick large farm animals. That is another professional gap that will likely grow.
In both instances, what may have been an appropriate idea at its inception has now served its purpose, and needs, in both cases, to be rectified. And where is the public push-back to come from?

Canadian Boys lag behind girls in literacy,reading and now science: PCAP Report

By Kat Hammar, Globe and Mail, November 28, 2011
Canada’s report card on schools will be handed out to the provinces Monday, revealing mixed marks for Quebec and growing struggles in science and reading for boys across the country.

Once every three years, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, or PCAP, measures the reading, math and science proficiency of Grade 8 students in every province and the Yukon. Though the latest results are strong overall, when pulled apart, they identify weak spots for Canadian schools.

The results, taken from a random sampling of 32,000 students in 2010, also show that boys, who have lagged behind their female classmates on literacy tests for decades, are now also behind in reading and, for the first time, science. Math scores between the sexes were tied.

“We’re used to seeing boys having a disadvantage in reading but not necessarily in the other domains,” said Andrew Parkin, Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education. “The report is good for sending up little flares for the provinces. I think that boys in science can be seen as one of those flares.”
The reason for the achievement gap between the sexes is the subject of debate, but academics and educators have blamed video games, attention deficit disorder and the feminization of the education sector.
School districts in Toronto and Edmonton are looking to single-sex education to help close the gap, aiming to tailor the classroom to boys by making it more active, choosing reading materials that align with boys’ interest, and including more male role models in the curriculum.
Boys behind girls in literacy, now reading and for the first time in science...and reasons cited include:

• video games
• attention deficit disorder
• feminization of the education sector

Single gender classes might help some. However, there is a growing argument to be made that the culture of North American education is counter-intuitive, in many ways, to the education of boys and young men. And, reports, like this one, merely underline the "turning-off" of boys, not merely the failing grades.
Let's add to the list above of possible contributing factors to this slide: the role played by money and the greed of many of the best and brightest male minds over the last generation at least. Remember, it was Lee Iacocca while president of Chrysler, in 1986, who could not recruit male graduates for the auto industry, and who received a letter from the presidents of Yale and Harvard. In effect these letters were "mea culpa" letters by those university presidents for "teaching the wrong values to their students" meaning that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake had replaced "making a contribution to society" while earning an income.
This problem of falling male grades did not start in the last year or two. It goes back a long way and unless and until the politically correct imposed silence on the issue of feminization of education is lifited, the education establishment will not aggressively approach the issue.
It is not a slam on women teachers, principals or even board members to say that men are different, wired differently, learn differently, have different ambitions, different cultural attitudes, different cultural language and differenty cultural archetypes through which they see the world. And to say all of that is not to excuse inappropriate or violent or crude or offensive behaviour, attitudes or socialization.
The ratio of male to female teachers has fallen disproportionately.
The culture of schools generatlly has tipped in favour of women both in leadership roles and in mentoring and in cultural acceptance of selective behaviours.
And "making nice" about these issues, will not permit nor initiate substantive change.
Parents of male students need to consider membership on school councils. Parents of male students need to ask for reports on the culture of the school, documenting the rates of detentions, suspensions, withdrawals and drop-outs between male and female students. They need to ask about hiring practices, and the need to hire more male teachers, more male principals, and more male superintendents.
They need to petition the Colleges of Education and their provincial members of the various parliaments to examine the issue of male student performance and its implications. The provinces and the federal government need to put some research money into graduate studies in education, around the world, to determine the best practices for male student success and by incorpotating those "best practices" set goals for reversing the trends documented in these latest set of testing instruments.

Roots of "mancession," --narcissism and alienation among young men

By Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, November 10, 2011

There’s a young man I know called Ben, whose story has become familiar. Ben is 24. He finished high school, but university was not for him. He’s bounced through a lot of low-paid jobs in retail and fast food, with spells of unemployment in between. Nothing has quite caught on, and he has no plan for his life. Like many twentysomethings, he can’t afford to live on his own, so he’s moved back in with his mother. It’s not clear – least of all to him – how he’ll establish himself as an independent adult.
The recession has been particularly hard on guys like Ben. Even so, he’s luckier than many. In Canada, the jobless rate for young adults is a relatively low 14 per cent. Across the European Union, the jobless rate is more than 20 per cent. In the U.S., the jobless rate for high-school-educated men between 20 and 24 – Ben’s generation – has reached 22.4 per cent. That’s more than double what it was four years ago. The situation of young American blacks is much worse. In Illinois, for example, only about 25 per cent of young black male adults have a job. And this time, nobody, anywhere, expects the job market to pick up any time soon.
Despite what the Occupy movement says, the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.
Young men without work aren’t just an economic problem. They’re a huge social problem. “We’re at risk of having a generation of young males who aren’t well-connected to the labour market and who don’t feel strong ownership of community or society because they haven’t benefited from it,” Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Wall Street Journal.
Young men without work are trapped in a twilight world of failure to achieve adulthood. They don’t move out and they don’t get married (although they’re increasingly likely to have kids). In the U.S., four out of 10 men between 18 and 30 are living with their parents. In Britain, it’s five out of 10. In Italy, it’s eight out of 10 (although that also reflects the extraordinary attachment of Italian parents to their grown-up kids).
But young men who live at home also have less incentive to find work. The longer they go without work, the dimmer their prospects become. And the more likely they are to drink, do drugs and develop other habits that will make them even less employable.
There’s a reason this downturn has been called the “mancession.” Jobs in manufacturing and construction have dried up, while employment in female-friendly fields such as health care has stayed steady or even grown. But something else is going wrong. A lot of young men seem to have given up. In an age when having a university degree matters more than ever, large numbers have gone AWOL from higher education. Even the ones who have degrees face higher unemployment than women do, a British study found. Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of a British think tank on higher education, blamed the men’s underachievement on complacency and “general hopelessness.”
Psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, also thinks behavioural factors are holding young people back. She argues that an epidemic of narcissism has created millions of young adults who think they don’t have to work or study hard because they’re already smart. “It’s delusional thinking,” she told a conference of psychologists in Australia.
Joblessness is not the same as poverty. It’s worse. There’s lots of evidence to show that the scars of joblessness can last a lifetime. And fixing the problem will be very hard, because the problem is not simply economic. It’s also structural and social. We’ll need more than an economic upturn to reconnect a lot of our young men to work. But it matters more than we think – because without work, there’s no path to manhood.
A mancession?
General hopelessness?
An epidemic of narcissism?
Complacency?
AWOL from higher education?
There is simply no doubting the statistical data. Men are in profound difficulty, and as a result, the society itself faces an increasing and potentially insurmoutable problem.
But the story does not start with the useful data to which Ms Wente refers.
It goes farther back to young boys looking for mentors, models and supportive coaches. Of course, we make much of the honourable few who serve in that capacity. But there are so few, compared to the need.
There is a culture, at home and in the elementary schools, for starters, that favours female children and students. The last fifty years have seen a triumph of feminism, and a resulting demographic swing in professions like teaching toward women practitioners. Schools have become the domain of women, both in the front of the classroom and in the principal's office. Male students are "necessary evil" making disturbances when they should be quiet; rough-housing when they are supposed to be solving problems, doing math, learning history, or even playing organized games.
Male students far too often replace "school" and the many potential opportunities for socializing, learning and growth with some high-tech gaming device, preferring a virtual reality to one with people many of whom find his "gender" second class, to put it mildly. Too many boys are put on ritalin because they are diagnosed with ADHD, and need "more control." Too many boys are sent to the office for discipline because they are bored, alienated from the compliant-dependent school culture which is much more suited to compliant female students.
Reading and writing, both involving skills in which girls develop earlier and more easily, and it would seem naturally, are relegated, in the boys vernacular to "girl" subjects. Math and science, formerly an arena in which boys could hold their own, with interest, motivation, curiosity and some inherent skill, are now less attractive because, for one reason, the "game-boy" is more complex than most school science experiments.
If the early signs of what a boy considers "the establishment" are more supportive and encouraging of female students, and if his home life lacks a male figure, where does he go for male fraternity, collegiality and even just hanging out.
He has no trouble finding other males his age who are equally "turned off", tuned-out, seeking the comfort of their own "victim" (without ever condescnding to that word) and school work is the last thing he thinks about when the school day ends.
So while we are diagnosing the societal symptoms of what is now called a "mancession": a recession based almost exclusively on males without work, the fork in the road was taken many years before the unemployment numbers were gathered.
Our faculties of education, and our school boards and our principals associations and our colleges of teachers and our teachers' unions have to step up to the plate, and they will only do so if and when the epidemic of men withdrawing from the society reaches proportions where the public demands an affirmative action recruiting program to recruit male teachers for elementary schools, and for secondary schools and when teachers federations demand gender equality for men when hiring for positions of responsibility, and when curriculum designers ask boys what and how they would commit to learn, in order to qualify for seats in universities and colleges now either unfilled or filled by women, and thereby take their place as willing participants in a society that so trashes the current stereotypes of masculinity that almost every television ad contains another dumb, sexually driven, and socially inept male figure, not to mention the billions of dollars being generated by programs like The Big Bang Theory, in which highly educated males demonstrate their almost total estrangement from society and the female gender, with whom they are constantly trying to connect.
To overcome the potential tragedy of the impending mancession, we will need a commitment from all sectors in the society to recognize the blind spots in our vision of equality, in our modelling of respect and tolerance for both genders and a receptive culture for masculine and feminine qualities in all humans, celebrating the androyny bestowed on all of us by nature.
That will take generations....and we really don't have that long!

To all Canadian males 16-25: challenge yourself to achieve your potential

By Kate Bolick, The Atlantic, November 6, 2011
Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

By themselves, the cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. ...
But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller....
(T)ake 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. In 1944, a new Family Law was passed, which essentially freed men from responsibility for illegitimate children; in effect, the state took on the role of “husband.” As a result of this policy—and of the general dearth of males—men moved at will from house to house, where they were expected to do nothing and were treated like kings; a generation of children were raised without reliable fathers, and women became the “responsible” gender. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war.

Indeed, Siberia today is suffering such an acute “man shortage” (due in part to massive rates of alcoholism) that both men and women have lobbied the Russian parliament to legalize polygamy. In 2009, The Guardian cited Russian politicians’ claims that polygamy would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women.” In endorsing polygamy, these women, particularly those in remote rural areas without running water, may be less concerned with loneliness than with something more pragmatic: help with the chores. Caroline Humphrey, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has studied the region, said women supporters believed the legalization of polygamy would be a “godsend,” giving them “rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.”
While the Bolick piece focuses on the future of marriage and coupling, there are serious implications for men in the numbers. And those implications apply to Canadian males between 16 and 25...We cannot afford a lost generation!
Why, for example, are men not attending university in greater numbers, to acquire what most people, including the academic researchers, agree is one of the best ways to, if not guarantee then certainly to access, healthy and rewarding employment, access to health care, and not incidentally enhanced access to the most qualified and most interesting women in your town or city?
Rather than withdrawing into a cocoon of resentment about the economy and job losses especially among men, and rather than acceding to the stereotype of males as "dead beats" or "playboys", neither of which are attractive to healthy women looking for a mate, why not hit the books, or the desktop, depending on where and how you do your homework in grade and secondary school, aim for the best marks you can achieve, seek the support and coaching from your favourite teacher and crack the vault by opening the scholarship and bursary money available to see that your education does not stop prematurely.
If senior males suffer from Erectile Dysfunction (sometimes known as premature ejaculation) why should younger men suffer from premature elimination from the brain development pool?
That may sound like a flippant question but the implications are very serious.
Getting a quality education, in a field in which you as a male are interested, may be the most significant decision of your first quarter century. By taking such a decision, you rebuild the reputation of men on the North American continent, a reputation badly in need of shoring up. By taking such a decision, you also invest, not only in your own intellectual, social and cultural development, (and income-earning potential) but in the enhanced potential for your children, and your family. A university or college grad is far more likely to witness his children enrol in post-secondary school, and also to graduate from those schools. And that is no small accomplishment.
It may be true that high school culture is not "your cup of tea" especially with all the rules and regulations imposed without much logic other than the need of the system to keep control. It may also be true that your gameboy and/or your I-Pad, are far more interesting and more fun and more attractive than your algebra equation, or your chemistry experiment, and it may seem difficult, if not nigh on impossible, for you to make the connections between macy of the shards of information and light and the larger picture of your professional career, and the development of your highest potential.
However, we need each of you, each male in the 16-22 age range, to climb on the seemingly horseless wagon that bears the address (University/College of X) without the kind of cynicism and resentful withdrawal that accompanies what looks like alienation from the system, and separation from the public culture of corporate greed and job losses, and female empowerment, and broken marriages and families...and jump into the challenge that is obtaining first an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in your choice of discipline.
If playing a sport is your best expression, then go at it with vigour, including both finding an outstanding coach and a team mate whose mentorship you can share. Search all the best schools where your sport is being played. Search the best coaches and the best lecturers in the academic discipline of your interest.
Say "YES" to your commitment to your self, and forget about the late nights, and the term tests and the essays and exams that will accompany your decision. Keep your eye fixed on completing that degree, and the admittedly only potential (not guaranteed) access it will give you to a job in your field and demonstrate to your friends and family that your goal is worth pursuing.
You do not have to be a "type A" personality nor do you have to be a "nerd" nor do you have to be a "genius" to enter the most challenging academic stream of your capacity to learn....you just have to believe that your fullest development is more important that a million oilsands for the recovery of the energy within.
If Canada is not a nation of "intellectual, cultural and social" developers, and merely a developers of technology for the extraction of heavy oil, and soft and hard lumber, and expensive minerals, then we will have sacrificed our most precious resource, our human resource on the altar of profit, greed and reductionism.
And, while young women are, or seem to be, committed to their own full development, and men are loath to compete with the same women they may seek to date (wisely) it is time to reverse the image of attempting to compete with the female cohorts of your graduating class.
Your competition is not the narrow one of "besting" the women in your class; your competiton is to "best" the best of the young men and women from every major country in the world, where your next generations peers and intellectual mentors will come from. Whether they speak Mandarin, or Hindi, or Farsi, or German, or Norwegian...we need a huge cadre of well-education Canadian male brains connected to their bodies and their imaginations and their highest ideals and best angels and so do your children and your grandchildren.
And, while, as Red Green says, "We are all in this together, we are also counting on you!"





No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.

"Sometimes I need God to be male!" Hugo Schwyzer

By Hugo Schwyzer, from Good Men Project website, October 12, 2011

Hugo Schwyzer has taught history and gender studies at Pasadena City College since 1993, where he developed the college's first courses on Men and Masculinity and Beauty and Body Image. He serves as co-director of the Perfectly Unperfected Project, a campaign to transform young people's attitudes around body image and fashion. Hugo lives with his wife, daughter, and six chinchillas in Los Angeles. Hugo blogs at his eponymous website and at Healthy Is the New Skinny.

In one of the first religious studies courses I took in college, the professor made a point that the God of the Bible is neither male nor female. We learned that to call the Lord, “He” misrepresented the original intent of the Torah, and that we’d be better off not using pronouns at all. If anything, my professor said, citing Genesis 5:1-2, God was both male and female—and more as well. After all, how could both men and women be made in God’s image if God didn’t have a feminine aspect?

A few years later, when I was auditing courses at the Graduate Theological Union and exploring a possible vocation to the priesthood (an idea that didn’t last long), I encountered feminist theology. I learned about God’s feminine aspect. For example, Hosea 13:8 describes God as a mother bear robbed of her cubs, while Jesus compares himself to a mother hen in Luke 13:34. I remember one of my classmates, a woman studying for ordination as an Episcopal priest, remarking that the more she studied Scripture, the more she realized that God was more female than male. “God is a nurturer,” she noted, “more like a mother than a father.”
While considering that career as a Catholic priest, I saw how the refusal to acknowledge the feminine aspect of God led to an intense devotion to Mary. The Virgin, I was told, was the tender intercessor who could plead for humanity to a more judgmental (or at the very least, less gentle) masculine God. The implication was clear: not only was God male, God’s masculinity was a barrier to empathy—hence the need for a woman to intercede to remind Him to go easy, like a mother pleading with her husband to lighten up on the discipline.
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What I found frustrating was that the feminist theologians arguing for the primarily feminine aspect of God and the conservative Catholics wrapped in Marian devotion were essentially saying the same thing: maleness can’t be nurturing. My friend, the liberal Episcopalian, believed God was tender—and therefore female. My traditionalist Catholic buddies believed that a thoroughly masculine God had largely outsourced His compassion to Mary. Both ignored the obvious other possibility.
Of course, many people have excellent reasons to be put off by masculine language and imagery for God. For men and women who’ve had strained or abusive relationships with their own fathers, calling God, “Father,”doesn’t happen easily. For many straight Christian men, the romantic vocabulary of evangelical culture can also be off-putting. (One of the standard critiques of contemporary praise music is the ubiquitous “Jesus is my Boyfriend” theme in so many worship songs.) For people who have been wounded by father figures, or who struggle to imagine intimacy with a man, using exclusively male language for God can be a real barrier to spiritual connection.
But at the same time, we need to acknowledge the radical and simple truth that men can be as tender as women. A father can nurture his children with every bit as much love and devotion as their mother. A fully adult man doesn’t need women to intercede to remind him of his responsibility to be compassionate. But when our only vocabulary for gentleness is feminine, we don’t acknowledge men’s capacity to be gentle. And when we label every loving action of God as evidence of God’s femaleness, we miss the point that God’s male aspect is every bit as kind.
From both a spiritual and historical-grammatical standpoint, God is neither male nor female—and at the same time, both male and female. It’s vital that we listen to what feminist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Wiccan theologians are saying about the feminine aspect of the divine. Yes, God is a mother figure. But that’s only half the story. The paradox is that God is also a father figure—just a very different kind of father than the one celebrated in Western culture.
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We need to see that from a biblical perspective, God isn’t “being male” when he gets angry and “being female” when he weeps over human suffering. God is both when he does both. In that light, perhaps the rigid gender roles we prescribe in our culture aren’t God’s plan, but instead a man-made consequence of our inability to discern God’s intent for our lives. By embodying what are stereotypically male and female characteristics simultaneously, God just may be reminding us that we too are called to break out of the gender straitjacket.
In a world where so many men do abandon their responsibilities and where violence (almost) always wears a male face, there’s something revolutionary about acknowledging that a father figure can be forgiving, empathetic, gentle, and reliable. There’s also something equally significant about acknowledging that a mother figure can be a passionate, bold, relentless—even angry—advocate for justice. Anything less not only robs God of God’s full divinity, but robs us of our full potential as human beings.
I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the gender of God. But I do know that following God means moving beyond the confines of traditional, limiting roles. As a dad, I appreciate the reminder that papas can and should be every bit as tender and loving as mamas. And so sometimes, this professor of gender studies calls God “father.” Not because that’s all God is, but because those of us who are also daddies need a reminder of just how loving, passionate, and tender we are called to be.


In a world where so many men do abandon their responsibilities and where violence (almost) always wears a male face, there’s something revolutionary about acknowledging that a father figure can be forgiving, empathetic, gentle, and reliable.
I lifted this quote from the Schwyzer piece, because it jumped out at me, and I recall my own classes in seminary where God was championed as female, by all the feminists in the class, and those of us of the "other gender" were quite happy to remain compliant. I even recall attempting to get the attention of a rural parish meeting when someone near the end of the meeting opined, "May God Bless our little church and the people in it"...to which I interjected, "I am confident She will!" to the amazement of those present.
Androgyny is not part of the normal discourse in contemporary society; not the androgyny of the female population, nor that of the male population, and certainly not the qualities attributed to God.
Needing God to be male is a completely normal and expected reaction to the tsunami of talk about the feminized God.
Another observation on the piece above is the "mother" does not constitute the total female character, nor father the whole male character, of either humans or God. And such a reduction, as is the case with almost all reductions, perpetuates the "parent" God, as opposed to the "male" or the "female" God.
One of the most heinous aspects of Christian ministry is the rendering of parishoners as children before a parent God...as if such a metaphor appropriated the normal, accepted and expected relationship between God and humans.
The church has, for far too long, abrogated the parent role, as its way of cozying up to power and control, premised on an out-of-control, savage, even undisciplined race called homo sapiens. Telling its parishoners what to do, when to do it, how to pray, and when to do that, how to "love" and when to do that, how to donate and when to do that, the meaning and purpose of sexuality including when and with whom to engage in that activity...these are all controlling interventions in order to demonstrate the utility of the church's role in one's life...as a regulator.
Whereas, there is considerable evidence that the regulator role is based on the fear of the church hierarchy that those in its "charge" will bring dishonour and disrepute upon the organization, if left free to make autonomous choices. There is also considerable evidence that the regulator role simply does not work, but certainly creates an virtually insurmountable wall between those "inside" and those "outside" who do have, have not, or will not fully comply with whatever rules the church sets out.
I always thought/believed/felt/intuited...that God wanted me to be "alive" in all aspects of my existence, not regulated by some permanent parent whose regulations were more important than my own rebellion. Perhaps if the church were to begin from the premise that humans are innately "good" and "seek to do good" although can also be deceived by self and others, then the premise of "sin" as a starting place for the definition of human beings would rightly atrophy, and perhaps then we could proceed to experience the awesome nature of God's gifts of life and grace in our lives, regardless of the specific "umbrella" or membership we chose, or not.
So long as we are still struggling with our definition of a deity, we will continue to struggle with our definition of our own gender, given the intimate link between our identity and our picture and relationship to God.

Manlands at IKEA, perpetuating the baby-man meme

By Katrina Onstad, Globe and Mail, Occtober 8, 2011

Last month, in a ham-fisted effort to minimize spousal unit tension, an IKEA in Sydney, Australia temporarily installed Manland. Much like Smaland, IKEA’s bubble room and crafts centre for children, Manland is filled with stimulating diversions (foosball, hot dogs) for men unable to shop without a meltdown. “Some men may pretend to enjoy the shopping experience,” a reporter enthused in a news clip on Australian TV. “We all know they’d prefer to be playing an Xbox or watching the footy than pushing a trolley!” Word! High five!
The set of assumptions behind Manland doesn’t flatter either sex. Once again, here comes the baby-man meme, wherein men are unable and unwilling to participate in the rote side of domestic life. These are the same guys who steal breakfast cereal from their kids in ads or are played by Jim Belushi on sitcoms.
Upholding the clichés of masculinity – real men hate shopping and love Space Invaders – doesn’t make men manlier; it makes them seem a little pathetic. To be a man – or any kind of adult – is to participate fully in your relationship and muster up a civil opinion on a bath mat from time to time. Manland is a country populated by the lowest form of manhood: the whiner who can’t even put aside his own (adolescent) proclivities for an hour to help his wife carry a Shrömpfken – one that he’s probably going to enjoy sleeping on himself.
I’m not sure what’s less appealing: a man who wants to go to Manland or a woman who wants to “drop off” her husband there. Every baby-man in pop culture has his counterpart in the eye-rolling/arms-across-the- chest bemused female killjoy. Manland perpetuates the myth that ladies love shopping only slightly more than they love demoralizing their husbands.
The baby-man meme...where the undeveloped, immature, withdrawn and self-indulgent narcissistic male of the species is 'dropped-off' by his more mature, gregarious, interdependent and integrated female partner in order to reduce the potential for a "melt-down" usually associated with two-year-old temper tantrums...hmmmmmm!
This is not a good picture for any "Y" chromosome-bearing "homo sapiens". In fact, it is so regressive, so insulting and so pathetic as to be another sign of the tragedy that is 21st century masculinity, or at least its portrayal and even its widely held stereotype in the minds, eyes and hearts of many women.And apparently, in the boardroom of IKEA.
There is a pattern to much of what is perceived as "reality" in current vernacular, and thereby current perceptions. Just as the definition of depression in the DSM IV is derived from the descriptions of female patients/clients from practicing psychiatrists, so too is the definition of healthy masculinity derived, we suspect, from the cynical, victimized and too-frequent female conversation in all workplaces, coffee shops, docctors' offices, and soccer practices. Women talk about their men to other women. Men, on the other hand, are sworn to silence, as if it were a code of honour, both to other men and to women.
Fifteen years after I left a marriage of twenty-three years, a marriage that included three daughters, I met a former colleague with whom I had worked and commuted for well nigh twenty years. His first comment, not having spoken with me in the interim, was, "I never heard you say anything negative about your former spouse!"
To which I responded, "Well, no one else did either! Those are private matters left better in that private file."
On the other hand, at this very moment, in hospitals, police stations, ambulance stations, banks, professional offices of every genre, schools, universities and even corporations, women are, among other things, "drubbing out their men" for irresponsibility, for negligence, for passive aggressive attitudes and behaviour, for missing an important date on the calendar, for "going out to play" when the family, or the leaky faucet needed serious attention. Women seem to be fed by such conversations, perhaps because it reinforces the victim archetype in which many have been stuck for many decades.
It was Carol Pearson (The Hero Within) who pointed out barely a decade or two ago that North American society was/is (?) dominated by two archetypes, the victim (women) and the warrior (men). In the public media, in advertising, in film and television, such archetypes (morphed into stereotypes) set the "norm" and billions of dollars of television programming in both revenues and expenditures circulate around the depiction of these two archetypes, sometimes in exclusively male conversation (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory) or in exclusively female conversation (Desperate Housewives)...Of course, the women's liberation movement was originally designed to point out the legitimate stengths, capabilities and leadership qualities of all women, in the hope that most, if not all, would rise to the top of the corporate, professional and even political ladder in their field, thereby levelling the playing field in status, in pay and in role modelling with men.
The men of my acquaintance, who have done the work of acknowledging our single-minded pursuit of power/money/status to the neglect of our families and our emotional development for the first half century of our lives and have followed that 'confession' with a new, less stressful and less ambitious path to a greater degree of both inner peace and relationship accord, without having in any way abandoned our masculinity, are clearly not the majority. In fact, we threaten other mostly younger men who, so far, have not hit their wall, or seen the light, depending on the "fish-in-the-face" that has struck them in a painful epiphany.
So there is not only a macro division between women and men, but a slightly less macro, but still not micro separation among different groups of men. And this division, including how "macho" men react to gay men in such a frightened and alienating manner, is at least as problematic to the evolution of masculinity, as is the continuing sandpaper roughness that comprises many male-female partnerships.
There is a significant need for straight men to embrace (not in the physical, but in the political sense) gay men. Men like Brian Burke, hardly a male insecure about his masculinity, attending and putting a public face on the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto, in honour of his deceased gay son make a significant contribution to the integration of gay and straight men. Of course, the current Mayor of Toronto's refusal to attend that same parade, preferring the "cottage" for the weekend, tip the scales back into the predictable, proverbial separation between the two groups.
Similarly, the issue of fighting in pro hockey is an example of the divide between the "macho" defenders and the "evolved" agents of change. Don Cherry fills his bank account selling video of hockey violence, some of it acceptable, much of it potential career and/or life threatening, all of dedicated to preserving a "rough" and "natural" form of masculinity, to the denigration of a more sophisticated, intellectual and creative pursuit of the same rubber disc. While public opinion polls demonstrate that 74% of those asked would prefer to see fighting removed from the game, leaving only 24% supporting its being retained, fights are replayed on the television screens inside and outside the arenas, as a last gasp of air for the museum pieces they ought to have become decades ago.
Fighting about fighting is really analogous to the debates that have occurred for the last twenty years about the dnagers of cigarette smoke, both primary and secondary. Everyone knows about the dangers and the risks, and yet the ardevaarks prevail, because change will hurt the game, or (upspoken) change will reduce the opportunity for men to be real men.
In many ways, this is a clinging to a fossil of the past, for the sake of denying the present and the future. Men can be diligent, competive, resourceful and disciplined, and uphold their (and our) masculinity while playing any game, including professional hockey, without once raising their fist, or taking a deliberate shot at the head of an opponent. Fast-paced skills, anticipation, creativity, imagination, intuition including open-ice body checks do not, and will not downgrade the game. In fact, they will always enhance the game, and the spectators' appreciation for it.
It is a desperate clinging to a long-worn-out stereotype that infuses too much of North American life that must be put to rest. A story from a pulp and paper mill, relayed through a safety officer may illustrate my point. A new recruit was using a metal pole to roll a large roll of paper (several tons in weight) along the floor, when a veteran of the plant noticed. "That's not how we do it here!" he shouted, putting his shoulder into the roll to accomplish the procedure in his "manly" manner. When the young recruit attempted to regain his masculinity in front of the critic, he dislocated his shoulder, requiring medical attention, incurring significant costs for the health care system and failing to help the older generation evolve to a more safe, less "physical" in the body sense way of doing things in that plant.
It is the division between the "effete" males (words chosen by the stereotype of masculinity) and the "real men" (again words chosen by the same group) that is at issue here. And to paint this as a male-female conflict is to miss the essential ingredient of the conflcit. It is, essentially, an internal conflict within each man that has no, or very little. public expression in a conciliatory and collegial manner to guide men into full acceptance of their own complex reality.
Only if and when men, all men, both straight and gay, become comfortable in our own reality, and with each other will this chasm be bridged. When we come to acknowledge that 10% of all men are gay, including those in the NHL, the NFL, the NBA, the IFFA, and the World Cup of Football, and openly agree that they too are legitimate members of the "Y" chromosome fraternity, without fear, without rancour, without bigotry and without sepregation will there be some opening of the door and window of opportunity to bringing about healing of this age-old separation between and among men.