Working Well With Men director Jack Kammer has been in touch with an editor at a major publishing house. The editor has expressed an interest in Jack's concept for a possible book on men and men's issues in Social Work. Though there is by no means any certainty that a book will actually be published, Jack will be at work full-time (and then some) on a formal book proposal. If things go well, we might see a book published before the end of 2017. Please stay tuned.

In the meantime, though Jack will not be posting much in the way of ongoing updates, all products and services offered by Working Well With Men remain available. Please see workingwellwithmen.com.

Management gurus often talk about the parable of “The Fox and the Hedgehog.” The Fox knows a little about a lot of things. The Hedgehog knows just one big thing, and she knows it very well. The Fox is more glamorous and sleek as it bounds from place to place, but the humble Hedgehog stays focused on a clear concept and is more likely than the Fox to succeed in her mission.

I am no management guru and I have no transformative expertise to offer in the many skills required of managers. But I have one clear simple idea that might work for many social work managers today. I am a Hedgehog. You might want to be one too.

Imagine it is 1965 and instead of a social work manager you are a corporate hiring and training manager. You have problems. Your company needs highly skilled and motivated workers and you are having trouble finding enough good men.

The men you have are working too much overtime. The men are getting frazzled and fatigued. The men’s work quality is slipping. Customers are starting to complain.

All you need is men with talent. You can train new men in the specific skills the jobs require. But where are the men? Where are the men you so desperately need?

You are starting to hear rumblings about women wanting to enter your industry. Sure, maybe a few of them. But most of them just want to file their nails and eat bon-bons and watch soap operas and gossip with their friends on the phone. And even if there are a lot of them who say they want jobs, that will never work. You know how women are. They’re all so manipulative! And they could never do the job the way men do it. What your people do is man’s work. Besides, women would drop out of the training program as soon as they saw what it really took. We love and respect them, of course, but they are just irresponsible. And anyhow, your current workers do not want to work with women. Men have enough of women at home!

What are you going to do to recruit the talent you need?

What did we do?

Starting in the 1960s, corporate hiring and training managers underwent a huge transformation in the way American businesses treated women. There was resistance, there was turmoil, there was disruption and displacement, but we got over it and we got to a better place. American businesses stopped wasting talent just because it was female.

Today, children, families and communities are struggling. If we listen, we can hear that men want to be hired and trained to help in our industry. They have the drive and the talent to help families thrive, to help neighborhoods be safe and strong, to help children grow up healthy and happy.

Many women did not want to be stuck at home or in low-level jobs; many men do not want to be stuck outside the family, in subservient parenting roles, or marginalized in their communities. They want to be respected for more than the money they make.

Opening up business jobs to women did more than just give them employment and put dollars in their pockets. It completely reconfigured cultural notions of what women—even women who did not want or need jobs—should and could be. Changing business changed women, and changing women changed business—in a virtuous cycle that continues to this day. We can do the same in a virtuous cycle of interactions between Social Work and men.

If we are unhappy that men are too often cold, irresponsible, immature, undependable—recall your experience (“enough of them!”), name your stereotype (“they’re all so violent!)—we need to be their hiring and training managers for jobs in which they get respect and rewards for being gentle, reliable, warm and nurturing. In our everyday decisions, in our planning, in our policies and programs, our treatments and services, we are, in effect, making decisions about hiring and training people to be parents, and more broadly, to be engaged, effective, community citizens. Men are not going to prepare themselves for those jobs if they are not going to be hired to do them, and be rewarded and respected for their efforts.

Social work managers are looking for innovations. Let’s critically, honestly, candidly, unflinchingly examine what we think of men. And if we see that we have not exactly lived up to our Code of Ethics where men are concerned—being aware of our biases, respecting the dignity and worth of the person, and recognizing the central importance of human relationships in men’s lives, for instance—let’s pursue two avenues for improvement: 1) let’s reach out to men and actively, affirmatively make sure they know that we want them to come for training and that they will be respected and treated fairly in our hiring decisions; 2) let’s reach in to our staffs and work hard to change a social work culture that sometimes treats men as unsuited or inferior for the family and community work that needs to be done.

That is what a Hedgehog might do. It is an innovation we need, a strategy we can grow with, a formula for enhancing our value to the society that funds and pays us. Easier said than done, I know. But you said you were looking for a challenge, didn’t you?

This blog was originally published by the Network for Social Work Management as part of the Monday Morning Manager series.

Our profession of Social Work has a reputation for being unfriendly to men. In discussions with my parolees and probationers when I was a Parole & Probation agent in central Baltimore and with my detainees when I was a Correctional Officer at the Baltimore City jail, the feeling was strong that social workers in general don’t care much for men.

Outside the criminal justice system and far from Baltimore, the feeling is just as clear. One noted writer calls Social Work “perhaps the field that is most anti-male.” Another says social workers are the “feminist family police” who are prone to anti-male gender biases in family matters as strong and destructive as the racial biases underlying unfortunate behavior among police on the street.

From my own experience I cannot say these feelings are groundless. Far from it, in fact.

But just as there are good cops caught in a racist culture, there are good social workers, managers and educators who feel troubled and demoralized by a set of customs, beliefs, attitudes and practices that make it hard to be fair, balanced, respectful and helpful to men. I have worked with some of them. They are the hope and inspiration for today’s launch of Working Well With Men.

WWWM will do its best to provide them with tools and training so they can offer leadership on a different path forward.

The fundamental message is, “We can do better. We are wasting men’s talents. We are ignoring our ethical commitments to diversity and inclusiveness, we are forgetting our obligation to honor the dignity and worth of all persons. We need to see men not as the problem, but rather as an essential part of solutions that will take root, live, grow and work for the long term.”

It won’t be easy to speak up in that way. If you do it, you will likely face three powerful forces.

One is GroupThink, which makes it difficult to speak about alternatives to what “everybody knows.”

Another is In-Group Bias, which is 4.5 times stronger among women than among men*. We might think of this as The Sisterhood. If you are a female social worker who speaks up for men, you can expect to be deemed unsisterly; if you are a male social worker you run the risk of being called misogynist.

The third is the Women-Are-Wonderful Effect**. When  a woman is in conflict or disagreement with a man, the Women-Are-Wonderful Effect makes it easy for social workers to believe the best about her and the worst about him.

Please look carefully at our website to see what we have to offer. And please let me know what else we might do to help you nudge Social Work in a better direction along gender lines. We want to do everything we can to help men give and get all the love they can.

References:

*Laurie A. Rudman and Stephanie A. Goodwin (2004). Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: Why do women like women more than men like men? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (4). 494–509.

**Alice H. Eagly and Antonio Mladinic (1994). Are people prejudiced against women? Some answers from research on attitudes, gender stereotypes, and judgments of competence. European Review of Social Psychology, 5 (1): 1-35. pp. 13, 21.