Mike Buchanan interviewed by Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio 5 Live this morning

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Mike Buchanan

Along with an academic from the University of London, I was interviewed by Nicky Campbell this morning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGOBYFHv4HA

Interviewees aren’t generally told how long they’ll be given to speak, which is frustrating, as is contributing to programmes over the phone, rather than in a studio. In the event we had a little over five minutes to cover issues which would have merited at least an hour-long discussion, and I was given barely a minute to make my contribution. Nicky Campbell’s introduction to the piece included this:

More men should be prepared to work part-time. That’s the finding of a new report from the University of London’s Institute of Education, which argues that women will continue to be under-represented and underpaid unless more of their male colleagues are willing to work fewer hours. Dr Tom Schuller led the research…

Dr Schuller’s predictably feminist narrative included this gem:

The gender pay gap is very big and it shows no sign of closing.

Can Dr Schuller really not know that the gender pay gap is 100% attributable to the choices men and women freely make with respect to the world of work – the lines of work they choose, the effort they put into climbing the career ladder, their willingness to work unsocial hours etc.? It seems almost inconceivable even for a leftie academic. I was determined to challenge him strongly on this issue, but wasn’t given the opportunity to do so. You do what you can in the limited time available.

About Mike Buchanan

I'm a men's human rights advocate, writer, and publisher. My primary focus is leading the political party I launched in 2013, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). I still work actively on two campaigns I launched in early 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League. In 2014 I launched The Alternative Sexism Project, aiming to raise public understanding that the sexism faced by men and boys has far more grievous consequences than the sexism faced by women and girls.
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  • Well done Mike, you managed to get across some good points in a limited time, I can understand the frustration to try and get your voice heard when you hear outright white lies or anecdote dressed up as fact coming your way.

    Dr Schuller has a very pronounced feminist spin on his analysis coming from a very pro feminist university. No surprise there then. So men need to give up their full time work for women to have. Men working in part-time work is needed to give it presitge! That is an insult to all but also how weak his feminist colleagues judge women’s status, Why? What proof does he have that men, with the same skills and experience, in the same part-time job get paid more? He had a self admitted trouble with logic. Why is it particularly women who will work longer than men if the retirement age is the same? He is willing to admit more men will have died due to abuse, suicide and lack of spending on men’s health. The wasted talent of educated women is sadly down to women and their choices, not men. Dr Schuller completely misses the point. I think he will find childcare is available now but only on terms favourable to women, men do not get chance to use it, especially with the family court systems results. What he also does not take into account is men have to support themselves, so prefer full time work. It is called survival. Women have the option to not work or work part time and let the state pay the difference due to the defacto children custody, they had no incentive to do otherwise. He completely ignores this and thinks male poverty is the answer. How did he become a professor?

    • John, many thanks. Dr Schuller is sadly all too typical of academic commentators on gender-related matters today, and indeed for most of the past 30 years. They know which side their bread’s buttered, they perpetuate feminist narratives which relentlessly disadvantage men and boys, and they do it with enthusiasm. After all, they don’t suffer the consequences PERSONALLY, do they? I can count the academic commentators on gender issues who I respect – globally – and I’d barely have to move on to my second hand. Prof Miles Groth and Christina Hoff Sommers (an ‘equity’ feminist) would be among them.

  • To use the current Labour theme. He is a like the rest “two nation” promoters. One for the gender-feminists and one for everyone else. i prefer your “one voice for all” party. So do not be shy to promote your “one voice for all” message.

  • White feminist males are disproportionately represented in Quack-ademia, and many of the other massive pork bloated bureaucracies that feed off the tax dollar. They keep their jobs by attacking others who are not white gender-feminists.

  • vadark

    I think you did a sterling job, Mike, considering you had 1 minute to speak, and you managed to get across some good points. It’s a real shame that you don’t get more air time on these interviews, it really is. Dr Schuller is an idiot if he expects men to give up working in order to make way for women. What an illogical load of codswallop he came out with! I bet if you’d been given another 30 seconds you’d have managed to ask which jobs men should be expected to relinquish, exactly – road sweepers, miners, lorry drivers, waste collectors or builders, perhaps? Let’s all guess what his cherry-picked answer would have been! I wonder where Dr Schuller receives his funding from to compile such reports?

    • Thanks Vadark. Some time ago I was on the TV programme ‘Daily Politics’ and Heather Rabbatts was talking about the ‘need’ for gender quotas on major corporate boards. I asked her why she wasn’t also pressing for gender quotas for long-distance lorry drivers and she started spluttering. A large number of people looking at this piece today, and quite a few got to the J4MB site by googling terms such as ‘Brunel University £15,000’. One of our FoI requests sent to Brunel led to the admission that M>F transsexuals would be eligible, even if in ‘transition’. We can but hope every transsexual M>F graduate engineer in the country wishing to do a postgraduate course will now apply to Brunel…

  • I think this is one of the slightly better opponents Mike has faced, someone perhaps not as blinded by gender hatred as others and thus having some sort of seemingly semi-rational point to make some of the time.

    Schuller did seem to fall apart towards the end though, suggesting that women (who all retire earlier) had a longer period of time to spend in the workforce in their later lives!

    If you want to see the typical BBC bias here that Mike has to face every single time he’s on the air, then just see who got both the first and last word in the debate and the amount of time given to each.

    • Thanks for this. I suspect he was a little thrown by having his key thesis described by me as ‘ridiculous’. Academics are accustomed to being respected purely on account of being academics, and they exploit it shamelessly. I have ZERO respect for 99.9% of academic commentators on gender-related issues. If I’d been allowed more airtime I’d have torn into his ridiculous ‘gender pay gap’ narrative. Maybe next time I’ll be allowed TWO minutes to let rip…

  • Next time you are asked about the gender pay gap guote this.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1308508/Gender-pay-gap-U-S-reversed-young-women.html.

    Young single american women earn MORE than men. That should FTSU. No problem with educated people being paid equally but the discrimination of men in entering education, and false rape culture in college targeting men when they get there is a contributing cause.
    But this is hailed as equality because it favours women. You cannot make it up. But they still need quotas right?

    • Thanks John. Will check the (US-related) link in the morning but I know that on average British women in their 20s have earned more than British men of the same age for a few years now, for the reasons you mention. The Fawcett Society is very silent on THIS gender pay gap, surprisingly… and yes, still a need for quotas, of course!

  • I would have liked to see Mike been given the opportunity to take him to task on the “choice” issue.

    Schuller sneakily turned reality on its head by implying that men had all the choices and women were somehow forced to choose to stay at home. The reality is the exact opposite. Hopelessly misandirst family courts refuse to given any significant access to fathers, forcing them to become walking cash machines instead of parents. Divorce settlements further forcing fathers into full time work (and overtime).

    Men, particularly those who’ve been through a divorce, are the ones who lack choices. They can either work themselves to the bone or they can be homeless. Even single men lack choice too, how many women in our hugely materialistic society are interested in a partner who only has a part time income?

  • Well done Mike! As usual deference given to the academic. But what a stupid idea. Surely the obvious practical result to the research is that it is full time work that either sex has to do to earn the same . Of course “maternity leave” that could be allocated to either parent is a good idea on equity grounds , may indeed encourage some blokes to to the main child care and frankly good on them. But even so on my industry (health) loads of women are part time without any family responsibility as such. They have hobbies and interests well paid partners and so on . They’d be really pissed off of their partners came home with any notion of them getting “family friendly” hours. Most of all what a stupid idea that more men going part time somehow makes part timers more valuable to employers?