As one of Europe's first national men's health organisation, the Men's Health Forum England and Wales (MHF) marks its 15th birthday, Jim Pollard look back at decade and a half of change. Does the MHF's childhood offer any lessons for even younger organisations?
The MHF is fifteen years old this year. A spotty teenager, slouching and taciturn save for the odd indecipherable grunt?
The Forum's first short history, which I edited, will be published next year and as editor of both the MHF's and the EMHF's websites I found myself thinking about how much has changed.
Even as a toddler, the MHF used to make the news. In fact, Ian Banks, who is both MHF and EMHF president was quoted so often in the press that other organisations assumed we had an army of press officers when in fact we had barely any paid staff. Screaming kids get noticed.
The MHF punched well above its weight because, oddly enough, health is traditionally one of the few subjects in the media that is female-led. That sounds illogical but in the 90s, smarter journalists and editors looking for a new angle realised that their health coverage was neglecting 50% of the population. Suddenly, men were the new women. We even got our own magazines in the UK – GQ, Maxim, Men’s Health.
Now we’re no longer the bonny baby, our concerns are no longer a new angle. We’re old hat. We’re mainstream. But that’s OK. We want to be mainstream. We want gender to be mainstreamed when it comes to health – as automatic as blinking. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be any more newsworthy than the rising of the sun.
'It's not fair!!!!'
As a child, all the MHF was interested in was getting its voice heard, getting our issue on the agenda. What about us? What about men’s health? It’s not fair. We did that well. It got the policy makers to listen and a smart incoming Labour government got the message.
Suddenly a door that had been firmly locked was open. And, given the strength of the MHF’s arguments underpinned by the disaggregated gender-sensitive health statistics generated by Alan White (then soon to be the world’s first professor of men’s health), a new Labour government schooled in race, sex and class could hardly deny that here was a serious equalities issue.
The dialogue changed. It got more sophisticated. Like any child we discovered the subjects we were interested in and had to make some choices. Gender was complex. So was health care and health messaging. How do gender and health interweave with race and class and disability? The media have never really done race and class as equality issues. They may occasionally report on – or even exhibit – some knee-jerk racism but that’s about as far as it goes.
But it doesn't if the media aren’t interested so long as the government is. With the gender equality duty and other developments, the UK government has made progress that we shouldn’t turn our noses up at. And I’m not just saying that because the MHF is now an official strategic partner of the Department of Health. But for how long? There will be an election in 2010 - Labour may have won the last three but it very far from certain they'll win again.
Typical of today's teens
Yes, one striking thing about the teenage MHF is how damned sensible it is. (Typical of today’s teens, snort the baby-boomers.) Men’s health is the perfect example of the complexity of the equalities agenda. Yes, in most areas of life notably the workplace, education and child-care women have been disadvantaged. In health it is the other way round.
We don’t think women are the problem. In fact, some of our best friends are women. (Just as well since every minister responsible for men’s health under the Labour government has been a woman.) We think the system is the problem. It doesn’t understand us. It’s too rigid.
True, despite our sensible shoes and haircut, some of the kids we’d like to be our friends still avoid us in the playground. Some potential partners – mainly in the private rather than public sector - are still reluctant to ally with an organisation that promotes a male agenda as they think this is by definition anti-women. They don’t really get equality.
Equality of opportunity or outcome?
So now, in our new strategic partners, the Department of Health, has the young MHF discovered the equivalent of a genuinely sympathetic adult in authority who can understand what we’re saying and help change things?
Do they share our understanding of equalities? Are we talking about equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? The UK government would prefer not to get into this.
When it comes to jobs, genuine equality of opportunity may well result in equal outcomes – roughly gender-equal boardrooms, judicial and parliamentary benches and senior common rooms. But this is not the case with health. When it comes to health care, there are some equality of opportunity issues. You could argue that there is, in the health service, both direct discrimination – men and women presenting with the same conditions are treated differently – and indirect discrimination – it’s harder for working people to access health services and since men are more likely to work they’re most affected. But what we’re really talking about is equality of outcome.
In the UK, men in the most deprived areas of Glasgow have a life expectancy of 54. This is 8 years less than the average life expectancy for men in India and 28 years less than that of men in the more affluent areas of the same city. Equalising the health of a society in which male life expectancy in the same city can vary by nearly three decades will not be achieved simply by instructing GPs to open their surgeries at more sensible hours – important though that clearly is.
So the Men's Health Forum England and Wales may have come a long way but we’re still only a teenager with potential. We still haven’t fulfilled it. Will we get the chance or will it be cruelly snatched away as the unintended consequence of a change of government policy?
- Jim Pollard is editor of the EMHF and MHF websites and has been involved with the MHF since the 1990s.
- The MHF's short autobiography will be published in 2010.
