Where are the men?

Here’s a question that Inuit and government negotiators didn’t anticipate, probably, when they worked out Article 23 of the Nunavut land claims agreement: Why are so few Inuit men getting good government jobs?

In March of 2004, according to the GN’s numbers, there were 1,079 beneficiaries working at the GN and its various agencies. Of those, 775 were Inuit women, and only 304 were Inuit men.

For non-Inuit, the ratio was more even: 683 non-Inuit men versus 789 non-Inuit women.

Recent numbers also show that the education system echoes this gender imbalance. They show that too few Inuit men, for whatever reason, are getting the scholastic qualifications that make good jobs easier to get.

High school graduation figures over the past six years show that in Nunavut, women made up 54 per cent of high school graduates. That’s not bad – but in Nunavut, females make up only 48.5 per cent of the overall population, making their high school graduation rate more disproportionate that it seems.

But it’s at the post-secondary level that the numbers get totally off-kilter. This year, at the Nunatta campus of Arctic College, 64 women and 27 men are expected to graduate with various types of certificates and diplomas.

Nunavut Sivuniksavut, a pre-university preparation program based in Ottawa, graduated 17 women and only three men this year. Last year, they graduated 15 women and only two men.

Government jobs aren’t for everyone. Many capable people prefer to make a living in the private sector, even in government-dominated Nunavut. But for many others, a government job is a ticket to middle-class security and affluence: enough food to eat, good housing, money in the bank.

A government job also offers a path to status, prestige, and for the talented few, power. Those who rise through the ranks to become directors, assistant deputy ministers, and deputy ministers often exercise more power and influence than MLAs or cabinet ministers – and enjoy better job security than any politician.

Based on current trends, it’s Inuit women and non-Inuit men who will wield power and influence in the Nunavut of tomorrow. At the same time, the power and influence of Inuit men will likely decline.

The happy side of it is this: gender is not the barrier to either academic success or government employment that it once was in Nunavut. At the GN, women outnumber men by a wide margin.

But this is not, to say the least, a healthy situation, especially when you consider the ways in which men do outnumber women: crime, imprisonment, homelessness, and suicide.

As everyone knows now, nearly all suicides in Nunavut are by young males. That fact alone demonstrates that many men in Nunavut are suffering deeply, for reasons that none of us can claim to fully understand. Nunavut’s crime rates – which in most categories, especially violent crime, are many times higher than Canada’s rates – are driven by males. The prison population, in turn, is overwhelmingly male. And the growing numbers of homeless street people in Nunavut’s larger centres, such as Iqaluit or Rankin Inlet, are predominately male.

Nunavut’s men, clearly, are not benefiting from the opportunities offered by the creation of Nunavut to nearly the same extent as Nunavut’s women – and we don’t have enough information to begin to try to figure out why this is happening. The only sure things we know are the unanswered questions.

But education officials, and human resource staff at various government work places must take note.

They can start by trying to figure out who is accepted for which jobs, who is rejected, and why. Then they should try to figure out if a lack of trades training, which covers occupations normally more attractive to men than to women, is a factor in male unemployment. And, given Nunavut’s high rates of criminal convictions, they should figure out how many people are turned away from certain jobs because of a criminal record. JB