Privilege, Male

Male privilege is a special status conferred on males in societies where male supremacy is the central social organizing feature. Such patriarchal societies confer broad social, economic, and political assets on men because they are male. These privileges are based on beliefs about the superiority of male biological sex and gender.

Male privilege is blatant, subtle, and pervasive. The seeming naturalness and invisibility of male privilege is challenging and difficult to confront. Peggy Mclntosh, one of the first feminist scholars to write about male privilege, describes it as an “invisible backpack” of rights and privileges that all males carry, often unaware, and usually unacknowledged. She and others analyze the contents of the “backpack” and show how societies at large, and males in general, take the assumed rights and privileges of males for granted and perpetuate them. Another helpful metaphor for the ubiquitous nature of male privilege describes it as the imperceptible “wind at the back” of all males.

A primary challenge in addressing and eliminating male privilege is its pervasive and invisible nature. Male privilege is a long-standing, accepted, but unacknowledged effect of patriarchy that has been fortified over many generations. Its unquestioned and unrecognized power makes it difficult for the males reaping the dividends of their privilege to see, understand, or acknowledge. It can lead them to think that they obtain their status (e.g., job, socioeconomic class, education, political appointment, partner, wife, etc.) solely by individual achievement and merit.

The invisibility of male privilege can be illustrated with a simple example showing the way the salaries of men and women are usually compared. To quantitatively demonstrate employment and wage inequities in the workplace, the comparison between men and women is usually stated from the perspective of the relatively less privileged or underpaid female. For example, in 2005, women's wages were 76 percent of men's wages in the United States; in other words, women earned 760 for every $1.00 earned by men. Reframing this example and making the same comparison but with men as the reference point shows the dividend of male privilege: In 2005, men's wages were 32 percent higher than women's wages (32 percent male dividend), or men earned $1.32 for every $1.00 earned by women ($0.32 male dividend).

[Page 684]Research on male privilege looks critically at this social construct to describe and define the privilege— but more important, to identify it and make it visible. The goals are to increase awareness, deconstruct male privilege, decrease oppressive behaviors, and create more productive interactions that break long-held biases that are predicated on patriarchal assumptions about gender.