(Important announcement)
Whoever coined the aphorism there are three kinds of lies: lies damned lies and statistics had never encountered feminist statistics. A modern-day writer might say, there are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and feminist statistics. Feminists are responsible for some of the most pernicious and misleading statistics and have been adept at inserting those ‘statistics’ into mainstream discourse where they are seldom challenged.
The sort of misleading statistics you can find in the Guardian, The Independent or BBC online any day of the week. Misleading claims about the gender pay gap, about women’s pension provision, about sexual harassment and a multitude of other matters. It can be hard to have the information at your fingertips to refute such claims but there is an invaluable source of information provided by blogger, William Collins who is the author of the Illustrated Empathy Gap which is, in my opinion, the definitive blog for anyone interested in men’s issues. It is almost completely devoid of invective or rhetoric but patiently dissecting the statistics around feminist claims he lays the field to waste.
William Collins pulled together and expanded much of the content of his blog into a book The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantage and the Mechanisms of their Neglect. Click the link to buy the book on Amazon.
Now, however, you can buy the book in Kindle format. There are some advantages to this format, particularly if you read the book on a tablet or a PC where the figures will appear in colour and you can click on the hyperlinks to access the source data. Better still, buy both, you can read the book in bed at night and study it in more detail on a tablet by day. Click the figure below to access the kindle format.
I have drawn extensively from William Collins’s work in this blog, in letters to MPs, responses to newspaper columns and discussions with friends and colleagues and I think anybody interested in men’s issues should have a copy. Because publishing is dominated at all levels by a predominantly young female and activist workforce (see here and here) , it can not have been easy publishing this book. So – buy it now.