Many self-described male allies of women may be giving themselves too much credit.
A majority of men in the era of #MeToo and Time’s Up report a bent toward gender equality, according to a new study published Friday to mark International Women’s Day.
Seven in 10 believe more women should hold positions of political power, 6 in 10 are in favor of more female leadership at work, and nearly 9 in 10 (88%) say they’re “doing everything they can to support their partner’s career,” according to the national survey by gender-justice organization Promundo.
‘It’s time for men to close this allyship gap and move from intention to thoughtful action.’ —Promundo
But many also “overstate their allyship,” the report said. Some 77% percent of men say they’re doing everything they can to promote workplace gender equality, while just 41% of women agreed that men were doing so. What’s more, 89% of men said they’d be good listeners if a woman at work were to relay an incident of workplace harassment, while only 58% of women felt men in their workplace would be good listeners.
“Men are saying they’re doing more; that they are listening and speaking out when they see discrimination or harassment — but women see a lot less of that,” Promundo president and CEO Gary Barker told MarketWatch.
What’s more, 48% of female parents — a group known to spend more time on housework and child care — deemed their partner’s load of household work unfair, and 40% thought the same about child care. That’s compared to a mere 24% of male parents who thought their own household workload was unfair, and 22% who thought that of their child-care burden.
“It’s time for men to close this ‘allyship gap’ and move from intention to thoughtful action,” the report’s authors wrote.
Here are a three simple steps men can take action:
1. Listen more to women’s experiences of harassment or discrimination. Instead of presuming a woman wants you to intervene in a situation or offer your opinion, try asking what you can do to help. “Open up the space for, ‘I’m listening if you want to talk about it,’” Barker said. Practice active listening with responses like, “I think what I heard you say was…” and “Let me make sure I understood what you said.”
2. Stand up for equality and fairness, both at work and at home. “It does matter that we as men add our voices to demanding equal pay, to questioning whether we have equitable leadership at the top, to supporting work-life balances that we often think are women’s [issues],” like parental-leave policies, Barker said. This may involve more men sharing their salaries with female colleagues or those women on the workforce who are negotiating a new role or salary.
3. Call out other men’s bad behavior. “There’s nothing more powerful that allows harassment to happen than men’s silence, and there’s probably nothing more powerful to end harassment than men calling out other men who do harass,” Barker said. Because it can be difficult to speak out on your own, he said, reach out to fellow male colleagues who may feel the same way about a perpetrator, and talk to the target of the harassment about what you can do to help.
Men may lack a full grasp of women’s challenges
Two in three men affirm that women still face “major” professional barriers, nearly half agree it’s easier for men to land their “dream job,” and 48% say they’re more aware than they were a year ago of the workplace discrimination women face.
But men’s appraisal of day-to-day inequities seems to differ from women’s actual experiences, the survey found. Some 85% of male respondents say their workplace pays, promotes and recruits men and women in equal measure and 77% didn’t consider sexual harassment a problem in their workplace. In contrast, about 4 in 10 working women said they’d experienced some type of gender discrimination on the job, and another 4 in 10 said they’d been sexually harassed at work.
Some men also find it difficult to take concrete action, the survey found. Some 35% percent of men say it’s “really hard to step in or speak up” while witnessing bullying or harassment. And nearly half of both men and women agree that “men who support women’s leadership often face a lot of criticism.”
The latest research, conducted with survey partner Kantar TNS and supported by the menswear brand Bonobos, drew from a nationally representative online survey of 1,201 adults between the ages of 25 and 45, as well as from four focus groups conducted in January.
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