If you’ve read this blog long enough, you may remember a series I did on the so-called Global Gender Gap Report. It’s a product of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and combines many of the very worst, misandric notions extant. The authors are a group of well-respected economists and researchers from high levels of academia. Clinton cabinet member Laura DeAndrea Tyson was one.
So with all that brain power, you’d think they’d come up with a document that at least met minimum standards of evidence-based reason. But no. Apparently it’s so common in academia to believe that the word “gender” means “women” that it didn’t occur to the authors to notice that it doesn’t.
In any case, the GGGR devotes one page to each country in the world for which there are reliable statistics. Data are gathered in a variety of areas to see how each country measures up in the gender equality arena. So categories like Education, Politics and Health are included and in turn broken down into subcategories. Primary Education would be an example of a subcategory of Education.
And each country gets a score in each subcategory which are aggregated into a category score which are in turn aggregated into a country score.
The scoring was as follows: if a country had true gender equality in a subcategory, it received a 1. If women were less than equal, it received a score of less than one. That of course leads the inquiring reader to ask “what happens if men are less than equal in a certain area?” Well, in that case the country receives a 1.
In other words, anti-female inequality is bad and receives a sub-1 score; anti-male inequality is deemed to be equality. In the Orwellian world of the GGGR, inequality equals equality, at least where men are concerned. For example, in the United States, the fact that men don’t live as long as women is scored 1 – gender equal – as is the fact that a lower percentage of boys are enrolled in primary school. To the fine folks at the World Economic Forum, that’s equality.
Truly, that’s how these people think.
Well, whatever those people had seems to be catching. Here’s my evidence for that proposition. It’s from something called the Council of Europe, an organization of 47 member countries that proudly tells us that
The primary aim of the Council of Europe is to create a common democratic and legal area throughout the whole of the continent, ensuring respect for its fundamental values: human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
Good. We’re all for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Still, some might pause when they see how the COE intends to accomplish those lofty aims.
[W]e try to find shared solutions to major problems such as terrorism, organised crime and corruption, cybercrime, bioethics and cloning, violence against children and women, and trafficking in human beings.
Yep, there’s that minor oversight again – about a third of the population of Europe – men. According to the COE, violence against children and women is bad, and of course they’re right about that. Violence against men? Not so much. In fact, not at all.
So this publication by the COE should come as no surprise (COE, 2008). It’s called “Administrative Data Collection on Domestic Violence in Council of Europe Member States” and it’s the product of – can you guess? – the part of the COE devoted to “gender equality.” See how that works? The gender equality folks, in their concern about domestic violence, totally ignore violence against men. Like the World Economic Forum, the Council of Europe finds men’s problems of no moment.
And sure enough, the publication linked to defines domestic violence as
“…any act of gender-based violence, which results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life. This includes, but is not limited to, the following: violence occurring in the family or domestic
unit, including, inter alia, physical and mental aggression, emotional and psychological abuse, rape and sexual abuse and rape between spouses, regular or occasional partners and cohabitants (…)’
As your third grade teacher probably told you, you can’t define a word using the same word. Well, the authors didn’t get that memo either, defining as they do, “violence” as “violence.”
Nevertheless, what’s more important is first that the definition requires domestic violence to be “gender-based.” That means that, for example, lesbian women and gay men are out of the picture. The council isn’t interested in them.
And of course the biggie is that, in order to qualify as domestic violence, it has to be done to a woman. That combination of “gender-based” with “to women” ensures that all perpetrators will be men and all victims women. That, I suspect, is just the way the folks at the “Steering Committee for Equality Between Women and Men” like it. I think that because in all the many pages of its website, the Committee makes no reference – not one – to the possibility of women’s violence against men.
And that, in this Orwellian world, is called “equality.”
I wondered what they would have to say about these issues, so I emailed them a few questions. That was a week ago, but they haven’t gotten back to me.
Thanks to Paul for the heads-up.