 Okay, we're back, we're live, I'm Jay Fidel, happy to be here at Think Tech and we're talking about community matters and one of the matters we'd like to talk about is, you know, decency. And today we're going to talk about the gender gap in America and how it is growing with Brad Coates. Brad Coates is a lawyer, but he's also a philosopher and he's also kind of a social analyst, if you will, and he's here with us now and so is his book. So Brad, welcome to the show, as always. Good to be back, Jay. And the book, now the book is called, Divorce with Decency, and I was thinking, it's a great book and we talked about it before, and there's so much that you need to learn, in looking at divorce with, you know, the scribe by decency. But you know, what about life with decency? Divorce with decency, life with decency. I mean, don't you think the human condition would be better for all eight billion of us if we were just decent all day? We tried hard. I don't think anybody would argue with that, but my focus has been mainly on relationships. Started out, you know, being a divorce lawyer and focusing on, you know, what the causes of divorce were. And I've rewritten this book about five different times, and each time it seems to be getting more and more clear that what's actually happening is that there's a growing gender gap between men and women in society, and that I think is contributing to the divorce. I mean, the divorce rate. There's all kinds of other factors, of course. Oh, okay. Well, that's the title of our show, the gender gap. Imagine that. That was growing. But let me unpack that a little bit with you. What do you mean gender gap? Is there a gap? What is it? Something viva la différence? You know, French is a de rigueur this week, a view of Notre Dame. Of course. Viva la différence. What is the gender gap, anyway? Well, the gender gap as pertains to marriage, again, it used to be that the surest way to financial security for women was a marriage to a potentially wealthier guy. Women were at home being homemakers. The guy was bringing home the paycheck. He was the one who had basically almost all the money, and the more successful the male was, the more successful the marriage was, maybe. Now, women are more successful than men an awful lot of the time. And that has been a relatively recent shift. I recall, leave it to Beaver in the 50s, you remember that? And all the, you know, the public view of marriage was the white picket fence. And it was the women staying home and tending to the cooking and the cleaning and the children. And the man goes off warrior style and makes a living and brings home a paycheck. And so many families that I knew in those days, the women would never have thought about working ever. But at the same time, she was, you know, under the thumb, that's too strong a term. But she was submissive and the husband was prominent. Well, women are no longer submissive. No. That's for sure. Let me just give you some statistics about how dramatically this has changed. I'm going to read them off my crib sheet because what's happened now is that, you know, this is really the roots of feminism is that women are now much less dependent upon men, certainly economically. Nowadays, many women, married men would have less education and lower earning power than they did. In 1960, 32% of wives worked in 1980 was 60, 61%. Life is now the main breadwinner and over 25% of all US households. That was 7% in 1970. Almost 60% of all bachelors and higher degrees, more than half are now earned by women. One third of married wives are now better educated than their husband. One third of all small US businesses are now female-owned. California just had a past and new statute that requires female, minimum numbers of females on boards of directors for major companies. It's getting to be, you know, you had the largest number of women ever in US history, 102 women elected to the US House of Representatives in last year's election. So this is a major and significant change. Is this all out of glorious stinum? What happened here? Women's rights, women's lib, if you will. Well, it's the extrapolation of that, for sure. I mean, you know, depending on where you want to carry it back to it, it may be all out of the birth control pill. I mean, it used to be that women were getting pregnant, but every time they had sex, not every time, but often they'd have sex and be pregnant, that would take them out of the working world. Listen to this, childbearing has been reduced from being the primary activity in a female's life cycle, to now being only one of several activities that she does. Before, conceiving and childbearing occupied half of a woman's life cycle. Now, it's down to about 10%. Why is that? Women are having fewer kids, so they're not as many, I'm replicating. And there's better childcare services available. So women that used to have to be out of the labor force just for childbearing alone now can come back into it. And it turns out they're smarter and getting more degrees and out earning guys a lot of the time. And at the same time, men are getting weaker. So that's kind of a bizarre phenomenon, too. How about the Me Too thing? A Me Too thing is two years old now. Funny it came up just around the time that Trump was elected. Yeah, not that funny. Not that big a coincidence. Sorry, not that funny. And certainly not a coincidence. No. So here we have the Me Too thing. It has gone in every direction, including don't even touch me in an affectionate way. And that has somehow changed and catapulted us all into a new view of the relationship between men and women, at least in public, and, I suppose, in private. Oh, totally. I mean, it certainly has expanded the concept of the sisterhood standing up for one another. I mean, after the Kavanaugh hearings, the number of hotline abuse calls, domestic violence calls, exploded. A woman who had previously hadn't wanted to talk about it felt like they had a good support system to talk about it. So you have our very own Senator Maisie Hirona, who I like and respect in many other ways. We're basically calling men misogynists and telling men to stand up and shut up. That was, I think, her famous quote. That triggered a counterreaction on behalf of men to the term that I'd never even heard before, misundry, which is a misundry is when women hate men. I've never heard it. I know. It's always misogyny. But misundry is now women who hate men. And so just all that stuff tends to further devise. Well, it certainly hasn't come to rest, has it? I mean, it's in full play. People are, may I use the term divisive? We have a lot of divisiveness in this country. And I think divisive seems to apply to the gender gap, too. Oh, totally. I've never seen the country more divided. It's a real problem, especially between genders. If there is this instinctive gap between men and women, it's going to impact how you can hold marriages together. Or whether people are even going to get married at all. Because now, marriage oftentimes has been shown now that men benefit more from marriage than women do. I started by saying this was a surefire route to success for women. Now there are many, many, I don't know if you'd call them slack or guys. The guys have kind of alcoholism, video game addiction, the opioid crisis. That's mainly a pornography addiction. Those are mainly male habits, not some of their better habits. Women certainly, in their college years, they maybe drink too much and go on spring break and get into wet t-shirt contests and stuff like that. But women immediately start to change around. They get much more serious about life quickly. Usually by their late 20s, it's okay. If I'm going to get married, if I'm going to have a kid, I want a roof over the kid's house. I got to start saving for private school tuition, especially here in Hawaii. Women start getting the serious to-do list going and guys are still partying. Yeah, and that changes the relationship in dating, in marriage, and in the office place, and I suppose in divorce as well. The old thing about male dominance is really... The old thing? The old thing that doesn't really work anymore. Not in most of the country anyway. So this is a huge social change what you're talking about. Yeah, it really is. Like I say, women getting stronger, men getting weaker. It's not necessarily true that women are necessarily happy about it. Maureen Dowd is a famous writer. She's talked about how did feminist revolution wind up benefiting men more than women? And she talks about how the midlife crisis now is more of a women's issue because now women have got all the stress of their life in the professional world and they're still doing most of the heavy lifting around the house. So they can get a little resentful about that. Can we come to rest on this? As I say, I think we're still in process. We agree on that. But take the military. And without getting into the LB... LB2? Lesbrough? Yeah, right. And the trans issue that Trump raised this week. Before getting to that, the question was, can we have men and women serving on the same ship? In the same unit? In the same aircraft? In the same battlefield? Can we do that? And it seems clear that we have done that. Correct. And that in a 90%, I'm making that up, but in a very large percentage of the units in the military world, it works. It works. The women have found a place to men except the women. They're equals or so it seems. And they function well together. So does that tell us something about how it should work or is working in the office? Well, I think that's where it's got to go. I mean, obviously there's got to be an equal playing field for across the board. And that certainly will help promote the likelihood that the genders will get along. But again, it's one thing to get along in a context of maybe an office or a military unit. It's another thing to get along in marriages, which is again what I focus on, or relationships. 80% of all relationships are ended by women. Two-thirds of all divorce filings are started by women. What does that tell you? It means that women are unhappy more often than men are. Men will basically stay in even a bad marriage as long as they're getting fed regularly and as long as they're hopefully getting some sex and getting whatever. How many of those are the result of the fact that the fellow goes out and plays. He's having an affair where it's a woman cannot tolerate. Women do not tolerate that. A sort of catalytic result, catalytic reaction. In my experience, and I've handled, I don't know, it turns a thousand of divorces in the coats and fry law firm. If you're going to see a divorce started by a man, it's almost always because he's got some gal on the outside. And you're right, the wives don't think that's very funny at all. But that's about the only time guys will leave marriages. And how about the women? If a woman finds out that her husband is having an affair, doesn't that inevitably lead or great likelihood that will lead to a divorce? It certainly increases the likelihood. But women will get divorced for what you would call the right philosophical reason. Women will get divorced for lack of communication. A lot of guys don't even understand what that is. Physically, women have 20,000 communication signals a day. Guys have 7,000, whether it be rolling your eyes or speaking out actual spoken words or shrugging your shoulders, whatever. Women are totally turned on by and tuned into communication. And guys are not great at it. Guys are still cavemen in a lot of ways. So women get dissatisfied with that. They will literally leave a relationship just because a husband is not their dream guy anymore. Women, a guy will, like I say, as long as he's relaxed in his lazy boy lounger and getting to watch sports on TV and getting fed three meals a day, he'll stay in even a bad marriage. This also affects the affair itself. A fellow who has an affair or a woman who has an affair, that's probably part of the gender gap issue too, that that relationship is also affected by these changes. The relationship of the husband with an outside interest or the wife with an outside interest. That relationship is not like it used to be. It's different, right? It's hard for society to adjust to that, though. Multiple partners is not something that a Western society has ever been very comfortable with. I mean, certainly Muslim societies get used to it, Asian societies do, but not in the West. Well, you know, one thing that strikes me is that you're talking about here in the title of the show. The gender gap in America is growing, which suggests that they're further apart. The male, the female would have you further apart. But isn't, I mean, economically, aren't they closer and closer? Why do we talk about growing apart when in fact, you know, salaries, power in the office? Oh, yeah, no question. You know, possibilities of advancement are closer. I'm talking about as it affects the relationship. Certainly there, you know, the closer we come to equality, I mean, now we've got, you know, almost as many women in the House of Representatives as we do men. A lot of people say it's much better to have women, you know, run companies and that they're better mediators and, you know, better managing partners of law firms. I mean, all that stuff is very auspicious. The problem is what happens when, you know, when the woman who's been the managing partner of the law firm and has had a very stressful day comes back home and her husband is, you know, underachieving, you know, playing video games, watching porn, getting drunk, doing all the kind of things that guys are so great at and making half the money she is. How long does that, you know, how long does it take before that starts affecting her dissatisfaction with the relationship? One minute. It takes one minute. Yeah, exactly. And that's because we're going to have a one minute break right now. Brad Coates, matrimonial lawyer and philosopher. We'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Gwen Harris, the host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of the supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Aloha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me, because security matters. Aloha. Okay, we've had a minute to think about that. But you know, one thing is this discussion, this issue that you've raised, and I know you give talks about it, Hitherian, it's a little scary for men, isn't it? They no longer have the prerogatives they thought, maybe they thought when they were younger that they would have. Listen to this. The new trend, as published in a recent article by the American Psychology Association, has described toxic masculinity as a public health crisis and recommends treatment guidelines for men and boys which effectively pathologize the male half of humanity. The report asserts that traditional masculinity marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression is harmful to both themselves and society, which results in the oppression of women and minorities and an epidemic of violence. Holy men, they need conversion therapy just for being men. You know, this is, I always look at, and maybe this is an inaccurate way of looking at it, look at American cultures through American art, through movies of which we are covered these days. And I wonder, that's a fair way of looking at this, because do you think the movies we see, the shows we see on television, correctly inform us about these changes and about what is really happening and about, for example, this male conduct you described, toxic male conduct. Can we learn anything from popular art? Well, it certainly seems like, you know, now the superheroes are women. I mean, Wonder Woman, I thought was one of the best movies out of all of these superhero movies, and I guess the new Avenger movie focuses on Captain Marvel is actually a wahine. So, you know, the movie makers are going with this, maybe because Harvey Weinstein is not in charge of movie studios anymore. I mean, you know, the hashtag me too thing has definitely changed. I mean, it used to be that an alpha male approaching a woman in an elevator and saying, hey, that's an attractive dress or whatever, you know, was, you know, that was the confar for the course and it was a compliment. Now it's sexual harassment. So this gets to be very, very serious and could get serouser the more... Well, let's talk about that. I mean, so it's going to get worse. Maybe, you know, anything I say can be turned the wrong way against me in the elevator or otherwise and expose me to criticism or worse because of the gender gap or at least the sensitivity after the Weinstein change. At the very least, the genders are going to be more on guard vis-a-vis one another, which may be, you know, that may be okay. It also does kind of mess with, you know, the Darwinian theory in thousands of years of, you know, human history and biology. Yeah, you know, what about the old thing about male hormones? Male, you know, need to hunt, right? And, you know, be a warrior and come back with the beef and all that, you know, the necessary... I mean, historically, necessary role of the male. Are we going to lose that? Maybe we have to. We're going to have to neuter it to some degree. I mean, men are going to have to get to be more sensitive. What women want is sensitive, communicative males. They don't want a big brawny and, you know, kill the sabertooth tiger at the head of the cave type of guys anymore. You know, female athletes are doing stuff that you would have never even believed anymore. I mean, I watched some of these Wahini runners running a marathon, you know, five minutes slower than guys. You know, it's amazing. Just in Boston this week, that's right. So, you know, I just wonder, you talk about the future, and I'm interested in the future. I mean, I think we here think that we're always interested in moving into the future. So, yes, maybe it'll get more Harvey Weinstein concerned, you know. Better be careful. Don't say anything. You might offend anyone. The other side of it, though, maybe they'll be, and you referred to this earlier, sort of a backlash. You know, right now, for example, there's an organization called Women for Energy, Women in Energy. Wait a minute. All the energy organizations in the past have been people in energy. Women in energy. Are we going to see more men in energy? Is that what's going to happen, you know, sort of a loop back? Or are we going to continue to see the you know, the process by which women ascend, you know, to greater influence and the men really don't celebrate their malehood? Well, I think the ascension of women in the Western world anyway is very simple at this point. I don't think there's any question about that. I mean, women are able to do stuff that guys don't seem to be able to do, and the more the paradigm shifts to the focus in society being on that rather than on just, I mean, nowadays you fight a war by triggering a drone strike, you know, and women can do that. That's as well. It's not how many hands do you need to hold a browser? Information technology, computers, all these big companies that are very successful companies and women can do that just as well, if not better. I think it's probably a great thing for society and for the economy, and I mean, you know, by all means. I'd love to hire women in my law firm. The problem is, you know, what it's going to do to the traditional male-female romantic relationship and marriages. I mean, 51% of all females in the U.S. nowadays are unmarried. They don't want to get married. They have kids out of 50% of all kids who are out of wedlock. There's really almost no need for them and the world is becoming, the western world is becoming more secular and less religious and so the religious confines that they use constraints that used to keep society together. You don't need marriage anymore. Before it served the purpose of economic primarily, but other things. Now you don't need it because you can get what you want without marriage. And with a longer lifespan, you know, then you've got to try and have a relationship that actually sticks to that and continues to work and that gets less and less likely because oftentimes people need different partners for different stages of their lives. There's a guy named Charles Martel who's predicted the end of marriage between 2028 and 2034. This sociologist Charles Martel which that ain't that long away. Six years span there? Somewhere within the next 10 to 15 years he predicts the end of marriage altogether. As a matrimonial lawyer this should be of some concern to you. No kidding. Already we've changed our practice a lot to focus on maternity cases which are child rearing cases, custody and child support for kids born out of wedlock. Different issues now. And domestic abuse is a huge issue nowadays. Is it huge because of this? It's certainly been brought more to the forefront now. Because we're more civilized about it and we're more sensitive about it. Case loads in those areas for a matrimonial lawyer have gone up exponentially. So really what I want to get out of this here in the last few minutes of our discussion is some advice. Advice to men and for that matter advice to women about the gender gap how to deal with it how to adjust your thinking about it your worldview about it and your day to day conduct so that you don't cross a line and undermine your position in the community your relationships with people around you. What's your advice going forward knowing all this and thinking about the gender gap and how it's growing? Well, there's I think women's progress at least in the western world is virtually unstoppable. I think you got to take that as a given. There are some chemistry that might work. There's something called a vasosuppressor which is a bonding hormone where maybe people can literally take chemicals that make them be more empathetic and more emotional towards one another. Fixing the sexual problems would probably help but that's something that's gotten even worse. We'd have to do a whole other show about what the impact of instant dating the pornography something like 60% of all males but only about 30% of all females is important to their marriage. So maybe women with sexual sex counselor, sex therapist that can maybe improve those statistics. That's actually gotten even worse. It used to be that both genders sort of ran out of gas as far as their sexual needs sort of simultaneously as they age. Now men could take Viagra so even an old fart like you could theoretically feel sexy. No, you could believe that. So, you know, Guy pops a Viagra, gets an instant erection, now he wants to use it. Women don't want that. They want foreplay. That's more important than the actual sex act. For guys now, they're hard and erect and they want sex. And there's been no drug that makes women feel sexier that's really worked all that well. So the chemical part of this thing has actually gone kind of out. That's another fact. The chemistry is another factor. So that means in bed the way you conduct yourself in bed the sexual relationship, forget about all the other aspects of relationships. In bed, you may need to readjust your thinking about how to deal with the old line, hard like feminists hate the Viagra epidemic and the porn epidemic. Porn tends to make women make men, excuse me, view women as objects. They're watching all these 20 year old girls all siliconed up and doing all kinds of crazy stuff that their wife doesn't seem to be doing. And all of a sudden, guys are objectifying women. That makes women hate men even more. Some of these things are really seriously impacting relationships. Well, it sounds like it creates kind of a discomfort at some level and anxiety. And I suppose that some people would say well, thank you, Brad. But I think I like the old model better. You know, I was predictable. I knew where it was going. I knew my role and I really didn't know. It also opens to me the fact that you identified this on a geographical basis. The U.S. and for that matter, Europe these things have changed. There is a pronounced gender gap in the processes. But what about Asia? What about developing countries? What about rural parts of America and Europe? What about this divide between the Muslims and the Christians? Muslims can have four wives. How does that tie in with the liberated women's view of their ability to be equals in society? Maybe they can drive now in Saudi Arabia. That's a breakthrough. It's like there are major, major gaps. Asia, the more wealthy Asia gets, the less the idea of the old Chinese billionaire having four or five mistresses, the raise the red lantern thing, that starts to change. But Asia is still much more freewheeling than the West. The Muslim and Arab countries are totally different. The whole different grid that people function on. It's going to be hard to bridge. In America, if guys can be more in tune with their sensitive female side, that's probably the best advice you can give somebody here. Ironically, women get more satisfied as they age, and males get more satisfied with or without marriage. Guys in their 50s are happier than guys in their 40s. They've traced that. A male's time to be down on himself and be suicidal or whatever is in his 40s. Women, as they start to age out, they get less happy, although you would think that they would be maybe more happy, maybe they'd be even more stressed along the way. Self-image, image of their own looks and beauty, what not. It's complicated, but let me say that I'm always amazed that what you do in terms of the matrimonial practice is really at the center of multiple intersections. And you've written it up in your book, and you talk about it, and it's really right on the money. I'm not joking when I say you are that. Well, what's happened is it's turned into family law. It's turned into sociology, demographics, biology. There's all kinds of that that starts to interweave. I've been a divorce lawyer for a long time. I run the biggest divorce firm in the state, and we've probably done 30,000 divorces. I've probably personally done 8 or 9,000 of them. I got a little tired of just doing the meat ax down the middle kind of divorce law, and I kind of wanted to get more into what goes behind it. Very important that you've done that. Very important for any family law attorney. But it's also very important that all of us integrate what you're talking about. Thank you, Brad. Brad Kurtz, really appreciate you coming down. Good to see you, Jay. Yeah, do it again soon, right? Okay. Good.