Where are the men?

    I appreciate everyone who works in some volunteer capacity in the Applegate—or in any community. But I find it curious how few of those community leaders are men.

    I have served on the board of the Applegater, a quarterly newsmagazine of the Applegate, for many years. Currently it has six members. Five of them are women. This or a similar ratio has been usual for as long as I have been on the board.

    A Greater Applegate is the only nonprofit I know of in the Applegate that has more men than women on its board (5 men, 3 women). However, the balance shifts when you add the staff, all eight of whom are women.

    Other boards: Williams Community Forest Project: 4 women, 2 men. Applegate Siskiyou Alliance: 4 women, 2 men. Friends of Ruch Library: one man among five or six women. Voices of the Applegate, a local choir: at least one man, sometimes maybe two; women sing tenor.

    Similar ratios hold among nonprofit boards in the Rogue Valley in general.

    Reading the names for the board of the Jackson County Library District, I deduce 3 women, 1 man, plus one name that could refer to either a man or a woman.

    Carpenter Foundation: 5 women, 3 men.

    The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an exception (9 women, 13 men), but it's worth noting that only two of those men live in the area.

     It's true that there are more women than men in the Rogue Valley (95 men to 100 women), which is a larger gap than in either the state (98 men to 100 women) or the nation (97 men to 100 women). Still, the proportions don't work. Proportionately, there should be more men willing to serve on boards in the Applegate.

    Women far outnumber men in yoga classes. My first yoga teacher was male; all but one of the students in the class were female. My current yoga instructor is female; there might be one man among the students each class period—or not. Nationwide, 87% of yoga instructors are women. 75% of practitioners are women. 

    Sixty percent of the students at colleges and universities in the United States are women.

    What happened to the men? 

    My theory is that when women start encroaching on what used to be a man's domain—college, yoga, board positions, whatever—the men disappear from that thing. It's like what happened with names. Shirley and Carol used to be common names for men. Now men think, "I can't name my son Shirley. That's a girl's name." They think, "Yoga is for women." They think, I guess, that boards for nonprofits are women's clubs.

    What a pity.