Is International Men’s Day celebrated this month the Joke of the Year? A fair number of people would argue that the day has comedy show potential. Why devote an entire day to the rights of a societal group that is already the world’s most privileged people? Is International Men’s Day the equivalent of a CEO’s march for greater salary gaps (“Moёt & Chandon Imperial is getting more expensive, fellows – can we widen those gaps again?”)? Let’s stop the comedy show right there. By assuming that men are on the top of the ladder in every aspect of life, we are doing ourselves a massive disservice. 

Men are statistically much more likely than women to fall victim to violence. Too many boys, moreover, struggle to excel in an educational system that clearly isn’t adapted to them – in virtually every country in the world, girls outperform their male counterparts massively. It’s not a question of IQ. A massive body of research has already dismissed the supposed link between intelligence and gender as nonsense. We actually have no clue what the real reason for the imbalance is, since it’s not a debate that we are willing to have. If the roles had been reversed – if girls underperformed – the attitude would have been different. Gender equality advocates would finance studies to analyse the problem. Social workers would fight for our schoolgirls’ right to education on their own terms. But nobody fights for the rights of boys and men, since we all wrongly assume that they already have everything.

Men are far from having everything – especially not in this country. They are, for instance, deprived of the right to combine their professional lives with an active and inclusive family life. While the (albeit ungenerous) maternity leave system gives Mauritian women a fighting chance to combine motherhood with their careers, the handful of days that new fathers get is a joke. The country is stuck in a traditional gender role pattern, where a man’s only strategy for being a good father is to bring home the bacon while his wife looks after the baby during the working day. It’s a structural problem that makes us remain yesterday’s prisoners, whether or not we like it. 

We ought to seek inspiration from countries that have succeeded in giving men the option of leading full lives. In Iceland, fathers get three months paternity leave, mothers get three months, and the couple gets three more months to share. In Sweden, parents get 480 days to share, 90 of which have to be used by the father. In Denmark, couples are given roughly eight months to share between them. 

We will never achieve real equality on the gender front unless we stop treating men’s rights as a joke. It’s like playing tennis without an opponent. The ball just keeps falling to the ground, regardless of how many times we hit it with our societal stupidity.

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