In June near a memorial to homicide victims at Cylburn Arboretum, Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison pledged to search for “the root cause issues of why these young men even in the first place pick up a gun, let alone decide to pull that trigger.”
As E.R. Shipp pointed out in The Baltimore Banner on June 21, he shouldn’t have to do that. “We don’t need the police to be social workers,” she wrote.
We need our social workers to be social workers. We need our social workers to be addressing the root causes of Baltimore’s crime and violence. Why don’t they? Because social work, for all its talk about the benefits of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, is horribly, fatally, deathly gender-biased. The incoming class at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, the state’s largest producer of social workers, is 88 percent female.
If there is social benefit in STEM programs to make sure more women are involved in building and maintaining roads and bridges there would certainly be social benefit in social work diversity efforts to ensure more men are involved in building and maintaining families and communities.
Leaving men’s problems even more in the dark than the 88 percent imbalance suggests, according to at least one peer-reviewed study1 women exhibit 4.5 times more in-group bias than men do.
Now add to that the corrosive effects of groupthink.
“The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups.”2
Women are in. Men are out. Out there. On their own. Doing what they “have to do.” Getting by “by any means necessary.”
Consider this evaluation from an esteemed professor of social work near the end of his career.
“Social work literature has mainly focused upon females and gay males... heterosexual males are seldom discussed and when they are discussed they are portrayed in a very biased manner... [S]ocial workers do not receive necessary preparation for understanding and working with heterosexual males, especially from minority and immigrant groups, who are facing emotional, physical, interpersonal, and family problems. A stereotypic view of heterosexual males is both unfair and untrue, and precludes necessary attention in the classroom and in practice to their normative needs and special problems.”3
From City Hall to Annapolis to Capitol Hill, we should call Social Work into hearings and onto the carpet. We should not threaten to defund them, of course. Social work does many good and important things. But we can redirect their funding to be more focused on root causes of the problems that make our police look and — perhaps more importantly right now — feel bad.
This will be a tough transition. The female focus of social work runs deep. The Council on Social Work Education, the primary accreditation body for schools of social work, every year offers a Feminist Manuscript Award.
But the most sexist idea of all is the belief that only one sex is hurt by sexism. And everybody ought to realize by now that “hurt people hurt people.”
We need social work to help everybody.
Rudman, Laurie A. and Stephanie A. Goodwin (2004). “Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: Why do women like women more than men like men?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87(4): 494– 509. p. 506.
Janis, Irving L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. p. 13.
Kosberg, J. I. (2002). “Heterosexual males: A group forgotten by the profession of social work.” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 29(3): 51-70.