r/Destiny • u/EggRocket • 4h ago
Effort Post Feminism and International Organizations Often Mask Men's Issues
The Global Gender Gap Index is one of the largest international indices which measures gender-related issues. It uses these four subindices—
- Economic Participation and Opportunity
- Educational Attainment
- Health and Survival
- Political Empowerment
In Gender-specific Call of Duty: A Note on the Neglect
of Conscription in Gender Equality Indices, Heikkilä and Laukkanen bring up a salient but oft-neglected point—male-only conscription (and I am going to argue by extension male issues) are not addressed whatsoever by the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), the Gender Development Index (GDI), nor any other prominent international gender-gap index.
By neglecting gender-specific conscription, current indices are incomplete and 1) signal that gender-specific conscription is not considered to be an important gender equality issue and 2) suggest that reforms in gender-specific conscription do not affect measured gender equality.
This is highly problematic, as it masks gender inequality by giving states such as Finland, Switzerland, Estonia, and Singapore far higher rankings than they deserve. Prima facie, if you run an index which purports to measure gender equality, you should obviously consider male-only conscription—a harsh, gender-based discriminatory law which can be read as a gender-based tax upon young men.
But these international bodies aren’t merely indifferent, their indifference is downright harmful to men because they are masking unfair, sexist and patriarchal gender norms under the guise of supposed prima facie gender equality.
Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls is not just the right thing to do, it’s essential for sustainable development. Goal 5 focuses on closing the gender gap and ensuring equal opportunities for all.
In Goal 5 (‘Gender Equality’) of their Sustainable Development Goals, the UN does not mention a single male-centric issue ANYWHERE.
If you are a girl, you can stay in school, help empower your female classmates to do the same and fight for your right to access sexual and reproductive health services.
If you are a woman, you can address unconscious biases and implicit associations that form an unintended and often an invisible barrier to equal opportunity.
If you are a man or a boy, you can work alongside women and girls to achieve gender equality and embrace healthy, respectful relationships.
Surely, I can’t be the only one who finds this downright crazy and borderline misandrist. Instead of bringing up any male-centric issue, they imply that men and boys should instead focus and prioritize women, rather than do anything about the issues themselves might encounter throughout life. It seems very female-biased.
To be clear, I am not arguing that this is necessarily wrong, or that men should not do this. Rather, I’m saying it’s a HIGHLY dismissive statement on behalf of the UN.
So, what are some things which I would want these international bodies, and more people in general to address?
- Address male-only conscription. The idea that if you are in Singapore (two-year conscription) or South Korea (eighteen month-long conscription) you must give up more than a YEAR of your life for the SAME rights and privileges on paper as anyone else is asinine (alongside the state stripping away your hypothetical right to be a civilian based on immutable characteristics), and utterly incompatible with liberal ideals. If conscription is to be conceptualized as a civic duty, it must be SHARED throughout the citizenry. I think this must be weighed heavily, just as much as a law which prescribed a female-only tax or women themselves giving up years to serve in the army. Just as such a tax would be heavily weighed by the GGGI, I argue conscription also ought to be.
- Disproportionate punishment. In Singapore, only men can be caned. A seventeen-year-old boy may be caned for drug trafficking; a twenty-five year-old woman cannot. Women are categorically exempt from caning. Why? If you get squeamish at the thought of caning women, perhaps you should re-consider why you are okay with caning men and boys.
- Public health. Women are biologically predisposed to live longer than males and do so in every single country on Earth. Recall our four GGGI metrics—the ‘Health and Survival’ metric is measured so that females are expected to live five years longer than males. So, if country X has women living ONLY three years more, then they lose points. However, if country X has women living TEN years longer than males, they don’t lose anything, because of the 1.06 female-to-male life expectancy cap. This is indefensible; these global gender gap indices should also measure public health problems when they are male-centric—for example, the huge rates of alcoholism in Eastern Europe lead many men to an early grave. This should be treated as a public health crisis disproportionately affecting men. Instead, it isn’t accounted for, and we rarely hear about it.
Another problem is that this is largely intentional. See from the WEF, the creators of the GGGI:
The third distinguishing feature of the Global Gender Gap Index is that it ranks countries according to their proximity to gender equality rather than to women’s empowerment. Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen indicators has declined, rather than whether women are winning the so-called “battle of the sexes”. Hence, the index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men in particular indicators in some countries. Thus, a country that has higher enrolment for girls rather than boys in secondary school will score equal to a country where boys’ and girls’ enrolment is the same.
This is a confused account of gender equality. Gender equality should measure the disparity between the sexes, but instead the WEF defines gender equality as female parity relative to men. Why should a country which has higher enrollment for secondary schooling for girls score perfectly, whereas one which has a higher male enrollment loses points? A female advantage is never recorded as a con, but a male advantage is seen as detrimental. Why?
If you want to do this, fine. But call yourself the Female Parity/Empowerment Index, not the Global Gender Gap Index. By saying otherwise, you are implicitly masking structural and institutional harms towards men, which already do not get nearly as much international attention.
It is also interesting how when women uphold patriarchy, it is internalized misogyny, but when men do the same, feminists argue it’s toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is a real thing, as is internalized misogyny, but why not go with internalized misandry or toxic feminity instead? This seems to be another continuation of feminist critique often being highly critical of male-coded traits while simultaneously shy of giving women any responsibility or agency for upholding patriarchy.
One final note on conscription comes from Switzerland. For some reason, in this country a man can choose to (a.) complete military service (b.) complete alternative service or (c.) pay an additional tax. Men who do not complete sufficient service, including many men declared medically unfit, pay 3% of their taxable income, with a minimum annual payment of CHF 400, for as many as ELEVEN years. Women bear no equivalent general obligation. Switzerland collected CHF 165 million through this tax in 2022 alone.
The rationale for this discrimination tends to be that women preform much unpaid domestic labor. However, this is a category error. A literal, gender-based tax imposed upon males is not the same thing as soft pressures causing women who by and large choose to have children tending to preform somewhat more domestic labor (around 20-30%). Why is a man paying an extra male-specific tax whereas a woman who forgoes having children does not have to pay whatsoever? It also erases any reason a man should have for trying to pursue domestic equality, since you’re compensating this way anyways. If I’m paying this tax, I don’t want to hear shit about unpaid labor, nor do anything to try to solve said issue.
The government is assuming it is a man’s duty to pay this tax or preform military service, whereas it is very uncomfortable saying women have any gender-based duty or obligation to the state. The Swiss government would never say women ought to preform domestic labor. If women do not have this as an obligation, why impose one on males? You cannot impose obligations based on non-obligations.
Anyways, that’s my rant. Give me your thoughts and critiques.
. . .
Jussi Heikkilä. Ina Laukkanen. Gender-specific Call of Duty: A Note on the Neglect
of Conscription in Gender Equality Indices. 2020.
UN. Goal 5: Gender Equality. 2026.
WEF. Appendix B The Global Gender Gap Index: Methodology and Technical Notes.
