Mens Rights Thread

Another paid advertorial about supporting women

Empowering women in pharma: MSD Ireland’s commitment to supporting diverse leadership

https://www.irishtimes.com/sponsored/2024/11/12/empowering-women-in-pharma-msd-irelands-commitment-to-supporting-diverse-leadership

Diversity is deeply ingrained at all levels of the business, including within the national senior leadership team, where the company has achieved full gender parity. Across MSD Ireland’s significant research and manufacturing divisions three of their five manufacturing sites in Ireland are led by women – a proportion that is well above industry standards.

I’m not convinced by a blank slate/tabula rasa view of gender.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/education/2024/12/08/boys-will-be-boys-why-gender-attitudes-of-todays-schoolchildren-are-remarkably-traditional
But I found this article still had some interesting points to me. For example:

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The Children’s School Lives report, for example, found a higher expectation by teachers for girls to attend higher education. Children also seem to have internalised this: girls themselves, for example, were more likely than boys to aspire to go to college or university.

Dympna Devine, professor of education at UCD and lead investigator in the report, says there are hopeful signs: girls, as they grow older, are less likely to feel constrained by gender boundaries, the report found.

—

She recalls one case study school in the research – an all-boys school in a more disadvantaged area – where a teacher talked about the “emotionality” of boys.

“The teacher sad they are every bit as connected to their feeling as girls, but they don’t have the language to express it. It underlines the need to work with boys and girls so they are more self-aware and understanding of gender stereotypes.”

Like lots of other companies, the Irish Times is praising itself for reducing the gender pay gap

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/12/16/gender-pay-gap-at-the-irish-times-narrows-to-less-than-1/

Excepts:

It also noted that the company’s senior leadership team was more than 60 per cent female.

That seems to be highlighted as a good thing in a way it wouldn’t if it was over 60% male.

While the company said it had a relatively small number of people who work part-time, the women who did were now paid “significantly more” than their male counterparts.

“This is predominantly due to the work being performed [experienced, senior editorial staff compared with semi-skilled staff in the company’s distribution teams],” the company said.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2024/1219/1487424-rte-pay-gap/

Gender pay gap narrows at RTÉ
[..]


RTÉ said that as in previous years, the gender pay gap is driven in large part by grades eligible for overtime payments.

[..]

The gender pay gap report outlines the measures being taken by RTÉ aimed at addressing the issue including offering a variety of flexible working options, extensive learning and development opportunities and more inclusive hiring processes.

"As explained in the report, the gender pay gap does not mean that men and women are paid differently for the same work, but rather that men and women are represented differently across various roles and pay levels in RTÉ," RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst said in a message to staff.

"While the improvements we have made may appear small, I am encouraged to see that the trend in the right direction, particularly given the complexity of RTÉ as an organisation which operates with a very low turnover of staff," Mr Bakhurst said.

Gender pay gap widens at top-tier law firm despite promotions

https://www.independent.ie/business/gender-pay-gap-widens-at-top-tier-law-firm-despite-promotions/a684888503.html

[..]

At Arthur Cox, in common with other top law firms, women make up a majority of employees but pay numbers are skewed by the concentration of men in the very highest tiers of earners including equity partners, who in effect own the firm, and partners, who are its most senior professionals.At Arthur Cox there was no gender pay gap in 2023, if equity partners were excluded, and in 2024 it was a relatively small 3pc. However, equity partnership in a top firm is the holy grail, in terms of earning power, for Irish solicitors and at Arthur Cox the pay gap widened in 2024 when those high earners are included. That was despite three women being promoted to equity partnerships during the year. The promotions mean 30pc of equity partners are now women but the number of women in junior roles increased even more.Their report explained: “Our female headcount increased by 4pc whereas our male headcount remained static. Most of these female new hires were in more junior roles, which impacts the average hourly rate of pay for female employees.”
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Equity partnership is a very small part of the workforce.
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A&L Goodbody (ALG):

"Women there account for 99pc of personal assistants"

This relatively low-paid job is going to skew the figures for lots of companies.

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While major private sector firms are the biggest employers, the public sector is also a direct employer of lawyers. This includes the Chief State Solicitors Office (CSSO) where women continue to out-earn their male colleagues thanks to over representation in senior management.At the CSSO, women make up 230 of their 366 employees, but 80pc of the management are also female.The report concludes: “The findings suggest that the CSSO holds no barrier for the career progression of females and may be viewed as an employer of choice for females both at the clerical and professional levels.”

--

I doubt it would be talked about like that if it was 80% male.

It's also interesting that they don't give the figures for the CSSO.
https://paygap.ie/company/cssoif

I'm reading the statistics right, the mean gender gap in favour of women there is 14.08% and the median gender gap is 40.18% in favour of women. You would think those figures would make the article.

https://assets.gov.ie/314928/789b800f-dc75-4d7f-aee3-9872e83f049a.pdf

Gender Pay Gap Report

Chief State Solicitor’s Office

[..]

Measures being taken, or proposed to be taken to eliminate or reduce such differences

The findings suggest that the CSSO holds no barrier for the career progression of females and may be viewed as an employer of choice for females both at the clerical and professional levels

Gender pay gap increased at three government departments during 2024 Department of Equality again the only department at which women received higher average hourly pay

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/01/01/gender-pay-gap-increased-at-three-government-departments-during-2024

The heading gives an unbalanced perspective. Here are the full details:

The gap in favour of men grew at three departments – Education; Further and Higher Education; and Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media – while it was unchanged at another.

It was cut at 11 departments, most significantly the Department of Finance, where it fell from 10 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and Justice, where it was reduced from 5.3 per cent to 1.3 per cent.

With random variation, you would expect some numbers to increase and some numbers to decrease. It's clear that overall the pay gap is decreasing.

Some extracts:

Men and women in the Civil Service, as elsewhere, must be paid the same amount for doing the same work and what the figures in the reports tend to indicate is the disparity in numbers of men and women at different levels of organisations.

Women make up more than half of the workforce in a majority of government departments but tend to be over-represented in more junior roles and under-represented in the most senior positions.

—

In the commentary on its report, the Department of Education, which reported a gender pay gap of 1.9 per cent, up from 0.4 per cent a year ago, said it has strong levels of representation in senior grades but “37 per cent of the overall number of female staff employed by the department are in the clerical officer grade, which is the administrative grade entry point to the Civil Service and 80 per cent of our clerical officers are female”.

The Department of Further and Higher Education points to the higher numbers of female staff participating in job share or similar schemes as a factor for its pay gap and it states that 97 per cent of staff availing of Civil Service family-friendly schemes are female.

—

The gender pay gap for the Defence Forces, meanwhile, is 2.8 per cent, indicating that the 557 women among the 7,451 personnel earned more per hour on average than their male counterparts.

If one adapts the language of privilege, one could argue women are privileged in being able to avail of family-friendly schemes/part-time work and work in low pay jobs like being a clerical officer while there is more pressure on men to earn well, particularly from their thirties on.

Sn@kebite: Its clear theres inequalities men face and biased reporting of statistics is taking place. 

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123009754#Comment_123009754

I think it is very, very likely that there is discrimination against men going on in some of these companies and taxpayer-funded organisations because of the drive to reduce and eventually remove any gender pay gap.

Warren Farrell itemised 25 workplace choices men and women make which lead to gender pay gaps. I can’t find a full list at the moment but here's an extract from one place http://www.menstuff.org/columns/surprise/farrell.html

discussing 10 variables that can help explain the pay gap

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After a decade of research, I discovered 25 differences in men and women’s work-life choices. All of them lead to men earning more money; and all lead to women having lives more balanced between work and home. (Since real power is about having a better life, well, once again, the women have outsmarted us!)

High pay, as it turns out, is about trade-offs. Men’s trade-offs include working more hours (women work more at home); taking more-dangerous, dirtier and outdoor jobs (garbage collecting; construction; trucking); relocating and traveling; training for more technical jobs with less people contact (engineering); taking late night shifts; working for more years; and being absent less frequently.

These are just 10 of the 25 variables that must be controlled to accurately assess the pay gap. And they don’t include three of the most important variables: one’s specialty, sub-specialty and productivity.

Is the pay gap, then, about men and women’s choices? Not quite. It’s about parents’ choices.

Women who have never been married and are without children earn 117 percent of their male counterparts. (The comparison controls for education, hours worked and age.) Why? The decisions of never-married women without children are more like men’s (e.g., they work longer hours and don’t leave their careers), and never-married mens are more like women’s (careers in arts, etc.). The result? The women out-earn the men.

The crucial variable in the pay gap is family decisions. And the most important family variable is the division of labor once children are born: children lead to dad intensifying his work commitments and mom intensifying her family commitments.

The pay gap, then, is not the problem. It is a reflection largely of family decisions that we may or may not wish to change. The law can still attend to discrimination, but not by starting with the assumption the pay gap means discrimination.

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One assumption seems to be that the gender distribution of workers should be similar all the way up the pay grades. So, if one takes primary school teaching as an example where maybe 85% (?) of teachers are female, one should expect that a similar percentage of principals should also be female. But that presumes that male and female teachers are equally likely to want to be principals. From what I’ve picked up, that’s not the case with many women not wanting the longer hours and extra responsibilities of being a principal. So, one doesn’t end up with a situation that 85% of principals are female but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is discrimination. Discrimination can arise if there is a drive to increase the number of female principals. So, if a man and a woman both go for the job, a man may be at a disadvantage/a woman may be at an advantage because of the drive to increase the number of female principals to match the overall percentage in the workplace and similarly to reduce the gender pay gap.

This is just one example but the same principle can apply regarding promotions within an organisation where female candidates may be advantaged/male candidates may be disadvantaged. So rather than leading to less gender discrimination, a push to reduce the gender pay gap can actually cause gender discrimination.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is right - it’s time to celebrate ‘masculine energy’ again

A society that enjoyed the denigration of men was always going to face a reckoning

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/01/23/finn-mcredmond-maybe-mark-zuckerberg-is-right-its-time-to-celebrate-masculine-energy-again/

Some extracts:

Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan, in a typically sprawling and discursive interview, that company culture had been “culturally neutered.”

“Masculine energy is good,” he added, “and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it…I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.” What is behind the epiphany?
[..]
The statement “history moves in cycles” is both banal and true, and therefore important to remind ourselves of frequently. And in the grand pendulum swing of history it was about time for masculinity to be back in vogue. Speaking in 2013 in a debate entitled “Are Men Obsolete” (the motion was resolved: men are obsolete) the dissident and maverick feminist Camille Paglia said: “a peevish, grudging rancour against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second and third-wave feminism… men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment”.

All of this four years before the MeToo movement gripped society and – for all its good – turbo-charged a culture-wide suspicion of men and their motivations. It struck me as rather unfair at the time and even more unfair now that masculinity was wholesale written up as something to abhor; that young men should be scolded over and over again about an inherent part of their nature; that we should just pretend that masculinity was not a crucial architect of the society that we live in. A society that enjoyed the denigration of men was always going to face a reckoning. And I would rather it was heralded by the slightly weird Zuckerbergs of the world than those with nastier and more violent inclinations.
[..]
I hardly think Zuckerberg is encouraging his employees to bring their most boorish and laddish selves to the floors of Meta, but instead suggesting that maybe we lose something quite important if we neuter the culture altogether.

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I think it's good to see some of these issues being aired especially in the influential Irish Times. When there has been talk about males as a group it has quite often been negative in recent years, with relatively little questioning and push-back (except on the internet to an extent).

Just a continuation of my 2 posts above about the furore about gender balance in government parties

Greater gender balance expected to feature in Taoiseach’s 11 nominees to Seanad

[..]

There is an expectation within both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that the nominations will be used to appoint more women in the wake of the backlash over the gender make-up among ranks of new Ministers.

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/02/06/greater-gender-balance-expected-to-feature-in-taoiseachs-11-nominees-to-seanad

I'm pretty sure I have suggested in one of these threads that there seems to be a bias in what's gets published in the media in terms of desirable traits for women versus men and similarly undesirable traits i.e. there is more of a willingness to say women are on average better for X than to say men are on average better for Y and similarly more willingness to say men are worse/bad in some undesirable area than women are worse/bad in some undesirable area.

It's interesting to see that there has been some research on this general topic and indeed there has been replication in the area:


https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35353872/

PLoS One . 2022 Mar 30;17(3):e0266171. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266171. eCollection 2022.

People react more positively to female- than to male-favoring sex differences: A direct replication of a counterintuitive finding

Steve Stewart-Williams 1, Xiu Ling Wong 1, Chern Yi Marybeth Chang 2, Andrew G Thomas 3

Affiliations Expand

PMID: 35353872 PMCID: PMC8967052 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266171

Abstract

We report a direct replication of our earlier study looking at how people react to research on sex differences depending on whether the research puts men or women in a better light.

Three-hundred-and-three participants read a fictional popular-science article about fabricated research finding that women score higher on a desirable trait/lower on an undesirable one (female-favoring difference) or that men do (male-favoring difference).

Consistent with our original study, both sexes reacted less positively to the male-favoring differences, with no difference between men and women in the strength of this effect.

Also consistent with our original study, belief in male privilege and a left-leaning political orientation predicted less positive reactions to the male-favoring sex differences; neither variable, however, predicted reactions to the female-favoring sex differences (in the original study, male-privilege belief predicted positive reactions).

As well as looking at how participants reacted to the research, we looked at their predictions about how the average man and woman would react.

Consistent with our earlier results, participants of both sexes predicted that the average man and woman would exhibit considerable own-sex favoritism.

In doing so, they exaggerated the magnitude of the average woman's own-sex favoritism and predicted strong own-sex favoritism from the average man when in fact the average man exhibited modest other-sex favoritism.

A greater awareness of people's tendency to exaggerate own-sex bias could help to ameliorate conflict between the sexes.

Not sure which thread to post this in but there is quite a large gender difference in this area:

Almost 50 per cent of Irish people say they are struggling financially and have no savings to fall back on, according to a survey published today.

The absence of savings is more pronounced among women, with 42 per cent saying they are only able to set aside 5 per cent or less of their income compared to 24 per cent of men in a similar position, the research from LIA, the Life Insurance Association, which specialises in education and development of financial advice and planning professionals.

All told, 43 per cent of those surveyed said they were struggling and lacked any class of financial safety net. An absence of preparedness is again more pronounced among women, with only 11 per cent saying they felt “very prepared” financially compared with 23 per cent of men.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/03/21/almost-50-of-people-have-no-savings-and-are-struggling-financially-survey-shows/