Story: Women and men
Page 8 – Common ground: 1999–2010
Men and women have more in common in the early 21st century than they did in earlier times. In jobs, public office, and even in clothes and alcohol consumption, there is much greater similarity in the lives of women and men today.
Lingering differences
However, differences remained, some new, some of longer standing. Boys’ reported poorer performance in school qualifications became the subject of public anxiety. Despite the fact that girls’ academic results were slightly better overall, there remained a considerable economic gap between women and men. In 2009 men took home pay packets that were on average 12% higher than those of women.
Prison and health statistics revealed a continuing pattern of men as perpetrators of crime and women as more likely to suffer ill health.
Shared territory?
The common ground evident in women’s and men’s lives in the 2000s was more a result of women taking up activities previously the preserve of men than the reverse. An exception is parenting. Fatherhood had become a recognised and valued role for men, and men as well as women were eligible for parental leave.
Woman’s destiny
In 1889 former colonial treasurer and politician Sir Julius Vogel predicted a woman would be ruler of a United Greater Britain in his futuristic novel Anno Domini, 2000, or woman's destiny. The details were a bit awry but his general prediction was true for New Zealand in the 2000s, when the prime minister, political-party leaders, chief justice, governor general, and chief executive of the largest business were all female.
The number of men playing netball was minuscule compared to the number and profile of women and girls playing rugby, rugby league, and especially soccer. However, male sports stars continued to receive more attention, and higher levels of funding, than their female counterparts. The images of All Blacks and other male sports stars had become less macho – they took time out for their children’s births, and appeared in fashion promotions.
Popular culture
In popular culture old meanings of what it was to be a man or a woman continued to play out along with new possibilities and dilemmas. Beer advertising billboards, television dramas and colloquial expressions provided insight into the continued evolution of how New Zealanders live as men and women.
Munter and Van, male characters in the highly successful television drama series Outrageous fortune, have 'issues'. Bushman and writer Barry Crump, rugby player Colin Meads, writer Frank Sargeson or Maurice Gee's character Plumb might have experienced something similar, but would never have spoken of them, least of all with their mates.
Female characters were often multi-dimensional and acting in a larger world. Cheryl West, the sexy matriarch of the Outrageous fortune family, the interfering but good-hearted Marj in television soap Shortland Street and feisty Pai in the film Whale rider all had lives beyond those defined by their men or families.
These stories of New Zealanders made reference both to a past that had become an object of curiosity and irony, and the new terrain of a changed gender landscape. Telling someone else, or yourself, ‘to man up’ was to draw on the old virtue of male stoical courage, but to do so knowing that it was a code rather than a prescription or monopoly for men or women.
