Originally posted on my men’s rights blog.
Sweden’s plans to eliminate gender-based affirmative action laws for higher education lead me to an interesting dilemma. I’m against affirmative action in all its forms because it tries to solve the lack of equal opportunity in this world downstream, once people have gone through 18+ years of an unfair system. But I find myself pondering actually supporting affirmative action programs for males, at least temporarily.
Affirmative action for girls was wrong. Affirmative action for boys is wrong too. Is it worse to eliminate affirmative action for boys now, leaving them on their own in a system that has all but destroyed their opportunities, or to keep the flawed program in place until the root problem is solved?
In the end affirmative action needs to be replaced with upstream programs to give children from different social classes a minimum amount of base support from an early age. One aspect of this will be to make the educational system fair to boys by allowing them to learn in ways suited to them and fostering competition in the classroom, which tends to drive boys to succeed. Today’s feminized classrooms stifle boys’ natural energy, promoting purposeless cooperation over competition, taking the focus off achieving the correct solutions to problems. We need to treat boys like they are boys, not little girls. In fact, since boys and girls learn in different ways they should be educated separately until a certain age.
It’s entirely hypocritical for the same folks who pushed affirmative action for girls to demand we cancel it for boys. Pushing affirmative action only when it suits select groups is shameless discrimination. The same double standards show up in child support and alimony cases. Although these programs were meant to be attacks against men, some women find themselves owing child support and alimony to men as they are propelled higher into the workforce through affirmative action programs. Feminists cry foul, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Or is it?
There are actually a lot of situations where laws or society’s views, which are wrong in the first place but only applied against men, start to be applied to women as well. Alimony, child support, education, arbitrary age of consent, military conscription. When this happens I’m torn between supporting the flawed law for the sake of equal treatment between the genders or condemning the law because it’s unfair regardless of whether it’s applied to men or women. I worry that if I condemn it, it will still just be applied against men but never for women.
Until the entire educational system is made fair to boys, can we really allow gender-based affirmative action programs for higher education to be eliminated? Do two wrongs make a right? Really, we’re stuck with two very unattractive options. If we support retaining affirmative action programs that benefit boys we are supporting a form of discrimination. If we support eliminating these programs we are leaving boys defenseless in a world that is already against them. The best option is to fix the educational system, but how long will that take?
In fixing the educational system we also have to realize that not all boys learn the same way. Is education based on sex really the best method or does it need to be based more directly on how an individual child learns? Although a lot of men’s rights activists like to say men are smarter than women it’s just not true in every case. I know some women who are just as skilled at engineering and management as men, if not moreso. And I think it’s very likely that when I have a daughter someday she’ll be inclined toward math, science, and engineering far more than women’s studies.
I wonder what will happen to gender-based affirmative action in science, math, and engineering. Politicians may try to eliminate affirmative action programs favoring males but will they simultaneously try to find a way to retain the programs favoring females, who are on average less adept at high level science, math, and engineering? I wonder how they’ll explain that one away. What can we do about it?
