Oftentimes in society, we are told women are victims of an unfair system, that their lives in comparison to men are much more difficult, and that there is this inherent male privilege that every man possesses.  But despite being told this narrative my entire life, whether that be at school or home, I always had my doubts. So I set out to check the data.

Criminal Justice:

After extensively researching this topic I have found that the data does not reflect the narrative I have been told my entire life. A woman who is a member of the Michigan Law School faculty found large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%) in federal criminal cases. She found that female arrestees are also significantly more likely to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. 

 Mental Health:

The American Foundation for suicide prevention found that men were 3.56 times more likely to commit suicide than women in 2018. The CDC found women were twice as likely to have depression. The suicide rates seem to show women are not necessarily more likely to have depression than men but that they are more likely to be open about it and feel like it is ok to talk about it which could translate to lower suicide rates. The CDC found men are more than twice as likely to have ADHD. 

Physical harm:

In 2018, Statistica found that men were over 11 times more likely to be killed in a workplace accident than women. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that men experienced higher victimization rates of virtually all violent crime except rape and sexual assault. Males’ potential to be in more workplace accidents can be attributed to their willingness to take more high-risk jobs and that could potentially be a factor as to why men are paid more on average.

 Homelessness:

The National Alliance to end Homelessness finds that men make up for around 70 percent of homelessness and women account for around 30 percent of homelessness less than half of the male rate of homelessness. This can be attributed in part to men’s’ over-representation in the criminal justice system due to men in many instances being prosecuted more harshly than women, endhomelessness.org finds that at least 48,000 people entering homeless shelters are coming directly from prisons or jails.

 Wage:

Many people argue that women make about 77 cents to the dollar of men. But this model is extremely misleading because it fails to factor in occupation, education, hours worked per week, and personal choices. An extensive Harvard study by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel shows that differences in wages can be attributed to personal choices and decisions made by individuals, not systemic discrimination. When people use the argument of unequal pay they are purposefully misleading people to sell a narrative of victimhood that has been repeatedly debunked time and time again. 

While women are treated relatively equally in the United States and other similar industrialized countries, many countries such as Saudi Arabia (where women could not drive until very recently) and other fundamentalist nations still have a long way to go and are far from gender equality. The purpose of this was not to claim men have it easier or downplay the many struggles women face but to prove that men and women are treated relatively equal and that the insistence to repeatedly say that men are more privileged than women is counterproductive and untrue.