Appalling Gender Bias

Marc Angelucci

If you kill a black man driving drunk, you'll face an average prison term of two years. If you kill a white man, the term will increase to four years. And if you kill a white woman, it will jump to six years. ("Unconventional Wisdom," Washington Post, Sept. 7, 2000.)

For some reason, though, our media only likes to tell the racial part of the story, and leaves the devaluation of male lives hidden under a cloak of silence.

On Jan. 31, 2001, a Michael Schwartz column described the Prison Industrial Complex – a prison slave labor market of nonviolent criminals made up of mostly "the poor, the mentally ill, people of color, drug addicts and many combinations of these characteristics." ("Slave labor means big bucks for U.S. corporations," Daily Bruin, Viewpoint).

While I agreed with this, I couldn't help noticing how the very demographic that accounts for 90 percent of those prisoners, and 98 percent of death row inmates, went completely unmentioned. Why was that? Did the writer momentarily forget that gender exists?

If you missed your quiet time today, you can make up for it now. Close your eyes and imagine what the column would have looked like if the statistics were reversed. Ready? "Ommm . . ." Wow. Did you see what I saw? "Women . . . women . . . women."

When a disparity adversely affects women, even by 1 percent, gender is all over the page

This is no joke. It's a crisis. When a disparity adversely affects women, even by 1 percent, gender is all over the page, but when it adversely affects men, even by 98 percent, not a word. We simply don't care much about men. In fact, the devaluation of male lives is so entrenched in our psyches and endemic to our system that we refuse to see it – even when it's smack in our face. The criminal justice system is a good example.

According to Pradeep Ramanathan, vice president of the National Coalition of Free Men, a volunteer, non-profit organization that has explored and addressed men's issues since 1976, "All the research clearly demonstrates that gender is the most significant biasing factor in determining whether or not someone will be charged, prosecuted, indicted and sentenced, as well as determining the severity of the sentence."

And he's right. For example, federal crime statistics from the National Institute of Justice demonstrate that being male increases your chance of receiving a death sentence for murder by more than 20 times.

A study of non-accomplice crimes that factored together the number of charges, convicted offenses, prior felony convictions, and the race, age, work and family history of the accused, found that "gender differences, favoring women, are more often found than race differences, favoring whites," (Crime and Delinquency, 1989, v 35, pp 136-168).

 being male increases sentence lengths more than any other variable

In fact, being male increases sentence lengths more than any other variable, according to researchers Zingraff and Thompson in the International Journal of the Sociology of Law.

What is behind this? Gender bias researchers John Ryan and Ian Wilson suggest it stems from stereotypes about women being more innocent, more reformable, and less dangerous than men. Barbara Swartz, director of New York's Women's Prison Project, called it the "chivalry factor" and said, "If there were more women judges, more women would go to jail." ("Courts Easier On Women," The Sunday Record, Oct. 5, 1975).

Regardless, it's the men getting screwed, again, and nobody wants to talk about it.

Many states do have task forces to study gender bias in the justice system. But since they pay groups like the National Organization for Women and the National Association of Women Judges to decide which issues to study, their conclusions are even more biased than the system itself.

Here's an example. For the same crime, women are more likely to receive probation while men receive a prison term. What does the commission decide to say? Women are discriminated against because they receive longer probation periods. (New York Times, July 2, 1989).

"None of (the commissions) study bias against men," said Ramanathan. "NCFM has made some progress in Texas, but we need more volunteers."

And sentencing is only one type of anti-male bias in the justice system. There are others.

Prison rape, for instance, is probably the most underreported type of rape due to the danger of reporting it and the blind eye that guards are often said to turn on victims. Some estimates, using existing data, project that completed rapes occur as often as 242,000 times in male prisons and 5,000 times in female prisons yearly. (Stephen Donaldson, "Rape of Incarcerated Americans," July 1995.)

Whatever the number, our government ignores it. According to traditional laws defining rape, the government even excludes male victims from rape statistics and rape shield protection (Evidence Code 1103). Meanwhile, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to study rapes of women on college campuses, defining it to include "unwanted sex" and asking women on campuses if they have ever been "overwhelmed by continual pestering and verbal pressure" into having sex (www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/182369.txt).

While they were playing Sir Gallahad, they excluded men from the study altogether. Never mind that at least 40 studies (using similar definitions of rape) found that men are raped by women almost as often as the reverse. (Sexuality and Culture, v 4, n 3, Summer 2000.)

men's feelings just don't count.

Apparently, men's feelings just don't count. And they never will until men transcend their protector roles and resist. As Dr. Warren Farrell put it, "Men do not speak up, organize, or publicize, so biases against women are eliminated and biases against men remain." ("Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say," 1999).

I dream of a day when men of all races join hands, women too, and insist that discrimination against males be addressed along with all other discrimination. But that will take activists with courage, passion and persistence. At present, it remains a vision. Care to join me? Here's my hand.