Employment

Dangerous work in Australia is performed overwhelmingly by men (ABS 2001). In one year alone there were 134,000 incidents of work-related fatalities and disabilities – not including work-related diseases. The overwhelming majority of these casualties were men.

While women are now in the Australian armed forces they do not take up active combat roles and during a war it is only men who are conscripted to fight. However, women have been killed in Iraq in the US Army but when we look at the total casualties in Iraq the female casualties comprise only 2.17% of the total.

Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary, stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly, if not almost entirely, male, which might explain why men commit over 80% of all suicides. (Most of these statistics come from The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell.)

While average starting salaries for women continue to lag behind those of their male counterparts, females do have higher salaries in a number of areas including optometry (109.6 per cent of males’ salaries), pharmacy (104.9 per cent), biological sciences (102.6 per cent) and social work (102.4 per cent). However, it is important to note that males are over-represented in low income jobs with over 30 per cent of men aged 25 - 45 years earning less than $21,500 per year. The implication of this is that many men are not in a position to attract a spouse, marry and have kids.

When we look at unemployment rates in Australia we can see that men make up 66.6% of all the people receiving Newstart allowance (uemployment benefit) and male participation rates in the workforce have continued to decline as traditional areas of male employment disappear.

There are many programs directed at increasing the female employment participation rate at the expense of meeting parental obligations. It is no wonder that the birth rate is so low, but is this really creating a better society? Ironically feminism has elevated the masculine traits to be the most sort after for both genders and hence no one wants to look after the kids, because such roles have very low status and pay.

Recent research completed by Rocio Garcia-Retamero, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has identified that Women bosses are significantly more likely than men to discriminate against female employees.


The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one. The findings suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.