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Discrimination Against Men Appearance and Causes in the Context of a Modern Welfare State

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Discrimination Against Men Appearance and Causes in the Context of a Modern Welfare State View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Lauda Pasi Malmi Discrimination Against Men Appearance and Causes in the Context of a Modern Welfare State Academic Dissertation to be publicly defended under permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lapland in the Mauri Hall on Friday 6th of February 2009 at 12 Acta Electronica Universitatis Lapponiensis 39 University of Lapland Faculty of Social Sciences Copyright: Pasi Malmi Distributor: Lapland University Press P.O. Box 8123 FI-96101 Rovaniemi tel. + 358 40-821 4242 , fax + 358 16 341 2933 publication@ulapland.fi www.ulapland.fi /publications Paperback ISBN 978-952-484-279-2 ISSN 0788-7604 PDF ISBN 978-952-484-309-6 ISSN 1796-6310 www.ulapland.fi /unipub/actanet 3 Abstract Malmi Pasi Discrimination against Men: Appearance and Causes in the Context of a Modern Welfare State Rovaniemi: University of Lapland, 2009, 453 pp., Acta Universitatis Lapponinsis 157 Dissertation: University of Lapland ISSN 0788-7604 ISBN 978-952-484-279-2 The purpose of the work is to examine the forms of discrimination against men in Finland in a manner that brings light also to the appearance of this phenomenon in other welfare states. The second goal of the study is to create a model of the causes of discrimination against men. According to the model, which synthesizes administrative sciences, gender studies and memetics, gender discrimination is caused by a mental diff erentiation between men and women. This diff erentiation tends to lead to the segregation of societies into masculine and feminine activities, and to organizations and net- works which are dominated by either men or by women. The organizations dominated by men will tend to develop ideologies and cultures which emphasize the superiority of men over women, whilst women’s organizations and networks tend to glorify women, and exaggerate the defi ciencies of men. This bias is likely to evolve in all religions, ideologies, sciences and professions which are dominated either by men or by women. The evolution and reproduction of the feminine and masculine biases is caused by a feedback loop, in which mental memes such as norms, role expectations, attitudes, beliefs and paradigms manifest themselves into cultural memes of masculinity and femininity, such as habits, traditions, advertisements, discourses and texts. This reproductive loop is completed by the manner in which people interpret and imitate the cultural memes that they recognize around themselves. The evolution of mental and cultural memes tends to favor simple and attractive memes. The attractiveness of memes is substantially aff ected by their coherence with popular memeplexes, dis- courses and paradigms. Those memes that are anomalous to dominant paradigms and memeplexes tend to be fi ltered out in the process of memetic reasoning, which is a chaotic combination of fuzzy logic, Chinese whispers, and an intentional twisting of memes. Another consequence of memetic reasoning is the tendency of exaggerated, simplifi ed and mutated memes to replace their original memetic “ancestors” that have been developed within rational and coherent scientifi c or political par- adigms. This tendency towards mutations makes it possible that two seemingly opposing discourses such as sexism and feminism emit memes that recombine into misandric memeplexes such as the reverse strategy which considers women better and more valuable than men. In the same fashion, some welfare state ideologies such as the general idea of favoring the disadvantaged tend to mu- tate and corrupt into misinterpretations which cause harm either to men or to women. An example of such corruption is the evolution of the memeplex of reverse discrimination, which proposes the wide and practically permanent usage of double standards in favor of women, and which diff ers from the more moderate memeplex of positive action. 4 When this is all summed up, we may predict that modern welfare states tend to be simultane- ous patriarchies and matriarchies in such a fashion that women have a high chance of being dis- criminated in male dominated organizations and fi elds of activity, while men will be discriminated by female dominated organizations and fi elds of activity. These predictions were evaluated in a study that analyzed 1149 complaints and other requests of action sent to the Finnish equality ombuds- man’s offi ce 1997–2004. In more than one third of the potential or confi rmed cases of discrimination, the discrimination appeared against men. Men seem to have a two times higher chance of being discriminated in issues concerning the treatment of customers, both by private and public organiza- tions. Women seem to have a three times higher chance of being discriminated on the labor market than men, in general. However, male employees seem to have a 3–9 times higher chance of being discriminated in those fi elds of activity, in which the majority of employees and managers are women (e.g. social services and healthcare). 5 Contents Thanks 15 1 Topic of Study and the Research Mission 17 1.1 Topic of Study and Its Relevance 17 1.2 Research Mission and the Specifi c Research Tasks 18 1.3 Positioning the Work among Existing Studies 19 1.4 Personal Standpoint 21 1.5 The Structure of the Thesis 22 1.6 Research Data and Methods of the Empirical Studies 23 2 Conceptual Analysis of Discrimination and Modern Welfare States 24 2.1 Central Concepts Relating to Gender Discrimination 24 2.1.1 Discrimination and equality in general 24 2.1.2 Structural discrimination, formal equality, and substantive equality 25 2.1.3 Positive action and reverse discrimination 25 2.1.4 Reversed burden of proof 26 2.1.5 Direct, indirect and structural gender discrimination 27 2.1.6 Misogyny and misandry 28 2.2 Modern Welfare States 30 2.2.1 Welfare states 30 2.2.2 Modernity and modern welfare states 31 2.2.3 Femocrats, gender mainstreaming, and femocracy 34 2.3 Explicating the Scope of the Thesis 35 3 Introduction to the Discrimination of Men and its Causes 36 3.1 Gender Roles and Structural Discrimination 36 3.2 Hegemonic Masculinity as the Oppressor of Men and Women 38 3.3 Industrial Capitalism as a Discriminator of Men 39 3.4 Feminism as a Potential Discriminator of Men 41 3.5 Women as Exploiters of the Chivalrous Men 43 3.6 Finnish Statistics Concerning the Impacts of Structural Discrimination on Men 45 3.6.1 Introduction 45 3.6.2 Dropping out of the society 46 3.6.2 Men’s health problems and lowered life time expectancy 47 3.7 Summary 48 4 A Synthetic Theory of Socio-Cultural Evolution 51 4.1 Introduction 51 4.2 Overview 52 4.2.1 Central concepts 52 4.2.2 The determinants of sociocultural evolution 56 4.3 Functional Pressure 57 4.3.1 Introduction 57 4.3.2 Earlier theories of functional selection 58 6 4.3.3 The combined eff ects of economic, coercive, reproductive and cognitive selection 59 4.3.4 The signifi cance of functional selection in the context of the welfare states 62 4.4 Unintentional Biases as Shapers of Memes 63 4.4.1 Introduction 63 4.4.2 Cognitive, linguistic and communicational biases 63 4.4.3 Emotional and social psychological biases 68 4.4.4 Memetic reasoning 70 4.5 Social Groups, Power and Interest Group Bias 71 4.5.1 Introduction 71 4.5.2 The elements and consequences of power 71 4.5.3 An empirically oriented typology of power resources 75 4.5.4 The connections from memes and power to discrimination 79 4.6 Metamemes and Paradigms as Shapers of Other Memes 81 4.6.1 Introduction 81 4.6.2 Paradigms and other metamemes 82 4.6.3 The evolution of theoretical paradigms 86 4.7 The Role of Organizations and Media in Sociocultural Evolution 92 4.7.1 Introduction 92 4.7.2 The vertical and horizontal aggregation of organizational memes 93 4.7.3 The change of organizational memes 96 4.7.4 Organizational clusters 98 4.8 The Success Factors of Memes and the Degeneration of Scientifi c Knowledge 99 4.8.1 Summary of the success factors of a meme 99 4.8.2 The degeneration of scientifi c knowledge in modern societies 102 4.9 Predicting the Evolution of the Welfare States 108 4.9.1 The central memeplexes of the welfare state ideology 108 4.9.2 Functional selection and the macro level trends of welfare states 108 4.9.3 Interest groups and discourses as determinants of the future of welfare states 112 4.10 Summary 115 5 Applying the Theory to Gender Discrimination 118 5.1 Introduction 118 5.2 Identifying the Memeplexes and Biases that Cause Gender Discrimination 119 5.2.1 Mental and cultural memeplexes 119 5.2.2 Sociostructural memes as causes of gender discrimination 122 5.2.3 A typology of the biases that cause gender discrimination 127 5.3 Functional Selection as a Determinant of the Gendered Memes 128 5.3.1 Functional selection in primitive and agrarian societies 128 5.3.2 Functional selection in the industrial and post industrial societies 130 5.4 The Feminine and Masculine Bias as Causes of Gender Discrimination 133 5.4.1 Introduction 133 5.4.2 The gendering of the cognitive and linguistic biases 133 7 5.4.3 The emotional and social psychological gender bias 137 5.4.4 Masculine and feminine biases as shapers of facts 140 5.4.5 Examples of the discriminative eff ects of the masculine and feminine biases 141 5.5 Feminism and Masculism as Causes of Gender Discrimination 143 5.5.1 The cooperation and competition between feminism and masculism 143 5.5.2 Sexist masculism and male chauvinism as causes of the bad status of women 144 5.5.3 Sexist branches of feminism as a cause of the bad status of
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