In this issue:

· Bits and Pieces

Bits and Pieces

Here are some things that have been lingering in my imaginary in-box. I'm hoping you can help me out with a couple of them.

Ten Most Dangerous Jobs

Here's a list I came across on the Internet. The top five seem to be "dominated" by men, and I don't recall seeing women marching or protesting to break into these fields. The other thing that strikes me is that the top five constitute a vast portion of the infrastructure of our society. Without these workers, the high-paying jobs such as lawyer and computer programmer and advertising executive would be largely irrelevant.

· Tied for "first" place: Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting at 30.1 deaths per 100,000 workers per year.

· Fifth place: Mining at 28.3 deaths per 100,000.

· Sixth place (tie): Transportation and Warehousing at 17.8 deaths per 100,000.

· Eighth place: Construction at 11.9 deaths per 100,000.

· Ninth place: Utilities at 6.1 deaths per 100,000.

· Tenth place: Wholesale trade at 4.4 deaths per 100,000

I think it's worth pondering the low pay and high mortality rate of the many men who keep things going in the world and who are supposedly members of a privileged class simply because they're men.

Calling In

When I worked in computer software, the managers called it "eating our own dog food" - a colorful but unappetizing way of saying we should be using our own products. But there's more. Here's a list of things that managers, CEOs, and Chairpersons should be doing. To the extent that any of us are involved in work that removes us from direct contact with employees and customers (or family for that matter!), we might find some surprises if we tried any of these things.

1. Call your own main phone number. How many key presses does it take to talk to a human being? How many times do you get caught in a loop? Imagine customers or clients hanging up in disgust. You might even try to get through to your own office.

2. Eat at your cafeteria. Is it clean? How's the food? How much does it cost? How are people interacting as they eat together? Are paper and plastic items being recycled?

3. Call Human Resources from both an inside phone and from home. How many hoops do you need to jump through to get basic information? How secure is the system? Could a clever stranger (government snoop, lawyer, competitor) crack into someone's personal data? Is the overall setup designed to be helpful or frustrating to employees? How hard is it to speak to a human? Once connected to a human, does that person speak English (or the native tongue of your company) well enough and clearly enough to be helpful?

4. Call customer support or technical support. Same questions as for Human Resources.

5. Try to return a product that's either defective or that you've simply changed your mind about. How hard or easy is this?

6. Visit your company's website. How many clicks does it take to get basic information? If you can order products, how difficult is this? If the customer makes a simple mistake, does that customer have to re-enter all the information? How easy or hard is it to get basic information about health coverage, expense account reimbursements, payroll glitches, and the like? What dead-ends and circular loops do you find? How many grammatical or spelling errors do you find?

Try adapting this kind of investigation to your situation - academic, research, family business, and so on. How much are you losing because you decided to cut corners, let technical people have too much say in operations, outsourced operations that affect customers or employees?

Gender Skirmishes

Lots of ink and megabytes have been spent on the so-called gender wars, but most of us are engaged in mere skirmishes. We don't get involved in the huge movements except perhaps arguing with someone at a party. But we do get caught up in smaller day-to-day battles that can bless or curse our relationships.

I'm planning a series of articles (for this newsletter or perhaps some other venue) on this. I'd like to share some possible topics, and ask you for your ideas. Some topics have already been covered on this site, but not in any unified way.

Here's what I have so far:

· Toilets - seat up or down?

· Compromise

· Communication - styles, timing, etc.

· Child-rearing - unified front, individual styles, or what?

· Sports - can I be a sports nut without driving her nuts?

· Refrigerator blindness - why and how, and whether it's serious enough to do something about.

· Testosterone poisoning - real? fiction? a matter of biology or perception?

· Domestic abuse against men: underreported and undertreated, or overblown?

· Statistics about men vs. women - lies and damned lies?

· Men's health, women's health: Who's really being underserved?

· A vas deferens - social and personal politics of whose tubes get tied.

Can you help me with some other topics? E-mail me at menletter@aol.com. Thanks!

Book Reviews

Two recent books deal with very different views on salary equity between men and women.

The first is Evelyn Murphy's Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men - And What to Do About It. Look for it at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com.

The second is Warren Farrell's Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap - and What Women Can Do About It. Look for it at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com.

If you have or are willing to buy either or both books and would like to write a brief review, let me know. Ideally, I'd like to have a single reviewer do both books. Alternatively, if you're partnered with a woman, it would be great to have both of your perspectives on both books. E-mail me at menletter@aol.com. Thanks!

I've ordered a new book by Norah Vincent: Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back. Ms. Vincent, a gay op-ed writer from Los Angeles, disguised herself as a man for 18 months and joined a bowling league, dated men, spent time in a monastery, and went on a Robert Bly-style men's retreat. Her conclusions about men, and the psychological cost to her, are (according to reviews so far) surprising. I'll review the book in a future issue. If you've read it, or intend to, I'd be happy to learn what you think. E-mail me at menletter@aol.com. Thanks!