Have today's women got the jump on men?

Sita Vaaetasi takes the leap off the Sky Tower - 55 per cent of those brave enough to do so are women. Picture / Richard Robinson

A young couple inch gingerly out to a platform near the top of Auckland's Sky Tower, clutching their tickets to jump 192m to the ground.

"Quite often you get a couple walking in," says Sky Jump manager Steve Weidmann, "and you get the girl doing it and the guy says no, he's not doing it.

"I tend to think girls have more brains, so I guess it does surprise me a bit - but they are also braver."

Weidmann estimates that 55 per cent of those who hurl themselves off the Sky Tower are female. AJ Hackett reports exactly the same percentage of women taking bungy jumps at its sites around the country.

Girls have always done well in English, but last year slightly more girls than boys passed level 1 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement in what used to be a boys' stronghold, maths.

It is becoming common now to see women in traditionally male domains such as road work gangs or bus driving.

Women fill the roles of Governor-General, Prime Minister, Chief Justice, Speaker and the heads of our biggest listed company and our second-biggest bank.

Labour MP John Tamihere told Investigate magazine last month that the most powerful network in the ruling party was "the Labour Party wimmin's division ... it's about an anti-men's agenda".

Men, it seems, are reeling from the shock of it. Former Lifeline director Bruce Mackie told a men's summit at Waitakere this month that more men than women were dying of cancer, heart disease, accidents and suicide because of "a crisis of the spirit".

When women are throwing themselves off the Sky Tower and into the paid workforce, taking the risks that men used to take, men are left wondering what their role is.

"They are not nurturers any more, and we are not protectors. Everything has changed," says Father and Child Society president Philip Chapman.

Well, poor old men, you might say. At first sight their complaints look laughable alongside the figures on the next page, showing that, below the very top level of business and politics, men are mostly still in control.

Helen Clark is one of only four female Cabinet ministers - up from one in 1975, but still only 29 per cent of the number of men in Cabinet (14).

Telecom's Theresa Gattung is one of just five female chief executives of companies listed on the stock exchange. Thirty years ago there were none, but five is still a minuscule 3 per cent of the 174 male heads of listed companies.

Men still work more and earn more. Even though 64 per cent more women than men now graduate from university with bachelor's degrees, their average salary last year in their first job after graduating, $36,910, was still 6 per cent below the average salary of their male classmates, $39,960.

Across the workforce the pay gap has narrowed in the past 30 years from 25 per cent to 14 per cent, but in March the average man still earned $21.89 an hour and the average woman exactly $3 less, $18.89.

Yet at a deeper level, things really are changing more than these figures indicate. Technology, economic and demographic forces and official policies are all transforming the roles of men and women faster than men, at least, have kept up with.

Former Women's Affairs Minister Margaret Shields, who is convening a national women's convention in Wellington next weekend, says the organisers initially planned a joint conference of men and women to celebrate 30 years of social change since a big United Women's Convention in 1975.

"But men really weren't ready," she says. "On the whole, men haven't had to be half as reflective as women, because they were kind of in charge.

"I would really welcome similar meetings for men to look at what they see as their vision for society, so we can get further ahead."

The contraceptive pill, of course, has been one of the biggest technological changes, freeing women to delay childbirth from a median age of 25 in the 1970s to 30 today.

Economic changes have driven traditionally male manual jobs out to Asia, replaced by female-dominated jobs in shops, offices and caring professions. In 30 years the proportion of women aged 15-plus who are in employment has leapt from 36 per cent to 58 per cent, while the ratio of men of the same age group in employment has dropped from 78 per cent to 72 per cent.

The domestic purposes benefit (DPB), introduced in 1973, has allowed a dramatic rise in sole-parent households from 9 per cent of all households with children in 1976 to 31 per cent in 2001 - the highest rate of sole parents in the world. Many of the remaining two-adult homes are now blended families, with at least one adult being a step-parent.

Even in homes with preschool children, 49 per cent of the mothers now do at least some paid work. But this rate drops to only 32 per cent in sole-parent homes.

Official policy, set out by the Ministry of Women's Affairs last year in an Action Plan for New Zealand Women, calls for even more "initiatives to increase women's participation in the paid workforce, particularly sole parents".

The plan aims to attract more women into apprenticeships and entrepreneurship. Although the Government can't force private companies to promote women, it aims to achieve "50/50 representation" on the boards of state entities by 2010.

A Ministry of Education report on Questioning Gender (2001) argued against "dualistic thinking" that sees males and females as opposites, and quoted an American study arguing that "schools should help boys and girls to relate as equals through co-operative learning activities and non-athletic pursuits, including clubs".

"It is sometimes claimed that boys and girls (and certain ethnic groups) have essentially different 'learning styles', and that teaching should allow these styles to flourish," the report said.

"However, we found that studies that attempted to establish empirical support for the importance of learning styles had failed to do so."

To some men's groups, this is going too far. No one argues against the 50/50 goal in areas such as politics and state boards, where democracy requires representativeness. But they question the ministry's claims on teaching styles, and dispute whether the 50/50 principle should extend to areas such as participating in paid work and apprenticeships.

"If you go back to the 1950s we had a situation that was quite ridiculous - we had such a strong division of roles that they were incredibly limiting for both genders," explains Warwick Pudney, a counsellor who co-ordinated the men's summit.

"Feminism caused a big upset by saying that was totally created by the environment. I think it was successful. We took away any excesses and got people to go back and say, why can't guys be kindergarten teachers, and so on.

"However, the problem I have with that is that it's only partly true. There is environment and there is nature. It's not okay to simply ignore the genetic component."

For a start, he says, human males have, on average, 30 per cent more muscle tissue than females. That makes them naturally "protectors".

His colleague, Rex McCann, says the experience of giving birth pulls a woman forcefully into nurturing the child that comes from her body, while men naturally turn outwards "to protect that life and to protect that woman" from the outside world.

Forcing teenage boys to sit in classrooms for six hours a day, they say, runs against everything that their hormones are telling them to do.

"They are gawky and ugly and this testosterone makes them very restless," says Pudney. "They are interested in hierarchy and physicality. If we have a school system that says, 'Sit still, engage verbally,' it denies the physicality of boys."

Unlike the Ministry of Education, the Education Review Office found in a 1999 report that "boys and girls learn and respond in different ways and achieve best with different teaching styles".

It acknowledged the problems created by increasing the number of female teachers from 55 per cent of all teachers in 1971 to 71 per cent last year.

It quoted Australian author Steve Biddulph: "Boys today, already underfathered and beginning to show problem behaviour, come into a school environment that is largely feminine. They fit in poorly and tend to form an anti-school subculture."

It found that both girls and boys did better in single-sex schools than in co-educational ones on average, although it warned that individual students varied.

Pudney believes some co-ed schools overseas have found the best of both worlds by running separate classes for boys and girls in English and social studies, where the two sexes tend to learn differently, while mixing them for other subjects.

Following the same logic, boys may need sports and manual classes, even though they are out of fashion, and in adulthood they may be more likely than young women to seek out physical work such as trades.

But as women join them in paid work, so many men now want to get more involved at home with the children.

"As women have moved into the workplace, men are freed up from being the sole breadwinners, and there is a parallel engaging of aspirations to be more hands-on with the children," says McCann.

As men see it, however, there are barriers. Most importantly, the breakup of the nuclear family denies many men frequent access to their children.

Facts are sparse because Statistics New Zealand has not kept figures on the gender of parents awarded custody since 1990, but in that year 78 per cent of court judgments gave sole custody to the mothers, and just 12 per cent to fathers. Only 10 per cent resulted in shared or joint custody.

Union of Fathers president Jim Bagnall says the Family Court is now being encouraged to grant shared custody, but he would like to see it made a legal presumption unless there was strong evidence against it.

Pudney says tax and benefit policies also need to change so that couples who stay together get at least the same state income support as they would by splitting up and putting one partner on the DPB.

Even if they stay together, McCann says the huge modern emphasis on the dangers of child abuse has undermined men's confidence as parents. "You get men asking, 'Is it okay if I bath my daughter?"' he says.

Pudney suggests that antenatal classes should be broadened so that they don't just prepare mothers for childbirth, but also prepare both partners for their long-term parenting roles.

He advocates "a Ministry of Men's Affairs, or at a minimum a Ministry of Family Affairs" to make sure official policies help men engage more in the family, just as the Ministry of Women's Affairs helps women into paid work.

"Government-funded paternity leave, equal to the maternity leave, would assist," he suggests.

In fact, a woman is eligible for 13 weeks' parental, not maternity, leave, and can transfer some, or even all, of her entitlement to a spouse or partner who is also working and meets eligibility criteria.

For men as well as women, employers can also help by allowing flexible working hours, and more work from home.

On these issues, the Ministry of Women's Affairs heartily agrees.

Shenagh Gleisner, a former head of cervical screening at the Auckland Area Health Board who became the ministry's head last year, says she and her partner would never have been able to bring up their seven children if her employers had not let her work non-standard hours.

The ministry is working with other state agencies, employers and unions to promote such changes to create a better "work/life balance".

"We start with the assumption that the smaller the gender gap the better," she says. "I don't think we would ever say we have to be 50/50 on everything. What we want is for families - men and women together - to be able to make decisions that suit them."

Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Judy McGregor, a former editor, is less compromising.

Asked whether biological differences make young men naturally more suited to trades apprenticeships than young women, she retorts: "Baloney! People tried that on me when I wanted to be a journalist."

Only 7 per cent of modern apprenticeships are held by young women, up only marginally from 3 per cent of apprenticeships in 1975.

McGregor advocates promoting them much more to young women.

Conversely, Margaret Shields argues that the biological act of childbirth is not what produces a woman's "maternal instinct".

"It's looking after children that produces a parental instinct," she says. That is available to fathers as well as mothers if they are willing to work and consume less and spend more time caring.

"I think there needs to be a really thoroughgoing discussion about where we are going. People are not having enough time with their kids," she says. "It's not a move back into the kitchen, it's what sort of a society do we want? How can we stop abusing not only the people who live here, but also the resources that we have, which are not inexhaustible?"

Ruling the roost

New Zealand's ruling women include

HELEN CLARK: The first woman to be elected Prime Minister. A ruthless and strong leader whose style draws comparisons with Sir Robert Muldoon.
DAME SIAN ELIAS: The country's first female Chief Justice. Has shown that she is not afraid to speak out and deliver criticism.
MARGARET WILSON: New Zealand's first woman Speaker of Parliament. Developed a tough reputation as a Cabinet minister.
THERESA GATTUNG: Chief Executive of our biggest listed company, Telecom. A driven, ambitious person.