June 2019 – Mens Health Edition

Fact #1: 66.2% of environmental engineers are male.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statics, environmental engineering is one of the fastest-growing STEM fields, as the demand for environmental engineers is projected to grow 8% from 2016 to 2026. As a result of the high demand, environmental engineering is an increasingly appealing field to engineering students. Of these students, an estimated 40% are female, making environmental engineering one of the most female-inclusive fields in engineering, as only about 17% of all engineers are female.

This could be because women are statically more environmentally conscious than men. However, according to Data USA, the wage gap still exists in environmental engineering, as the average male salary is $87,028 and the average female salary is $68,381.

Fact #2: Inactive men are 60% more likely to suffer from depression than consistently active men.

Physical health has been continuously linked to mental health, but according to www.qualityoflife.net, less than 5% of adult males participate in the recommended 30 minutes of physical activity daily. As a result, severe depression impacts men more often than women, and men are three times more likely to die from suicide than their female counterparts.

Although this is partly due to their inactivity, it is also likely a result of men being statically less likely to seek professional mental health help than women. In fact,
among working-age men, 34% admit to being embarrassed to take time off of work for mental health reasons. This is due to a fear of being judged as weak by their employers and peers for suffering from common mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

Fact #3: Men are twice as likely to die prematurely from diabetes than women.

Also linked to males’ inactivity, more men than women struggle with diabetes. According to Diabetes Statistics, only 29.3% of adult women have premature diabetes, compared to 36.6% of men. This is a result of men and boys being more likely to be overweight or obese than women and girls at every age— and the obesity epidemic is growing. Furthermore, the average height for men in the United States in 1960 was 5’8”, with the average weight being 166 lbs. Currently, the average height has gone up to just 5’9”, but the average weight has climbed to 190 lbs., which is a significant increase.

Fact #4: Men suffer from body image issues and eating disorders too.

Eating disorders and body image issue are commonly associated with women, but men struggle as well. However, rather than having a desire to be thin, a common body image issue for men is a dissatisfaction with their muscularity, and a desire to be larger. The idea that men need to have a low body fat percentage with well-developed muscle is encouraged by the media and even action figures, exposing boys to unrealistic body ideals from a young age.

Over the last decade, action figures have been reshaped to show a substantial amount of muscle, with less body fat. Unfortunately, according to clinical psychologist Dr. Raymond Lemberg, only 1-2% of males actually have this body type. As a result, according to The Gospel Coalition, 4% of male high school students have taken steroids in an attempt to be larger, while four out of five men in the United Kingdom confess to being unhappy with their muscle mass, and 5% of male undergrads are at risk of an eating disorder.

Fact #5: Research conducted by Scientific American found that men are less eco-friendly because they consider the act to be feminine.

According to Global News, men are statically less environmentally conscious than women. Women litter less, recycle more, and have smaller carbon footprints than males. Scientific American conducted a study to determine if this has anything to do with the association between environmental consciousness and femininity. In the study, half of the participating men were given a pink gift card with a floral design, and half were given a normal gift card.

The men given the pink gift card were less likely to buy eco-friendly
products than the ones given the normal gift card. This may have been an attempt to prove their masculinity. The Scientific American study concluded that “it’s not that men don’t care about the environment; but they also tend to want to feel macho, and they worry that eco-friendly behaviors might brand them as feminine.”