As we saw in 2012, gender wars get ratings, so you can hardly blame Seven’s Weekend Sunrise for organising what turned out to be a viral hit on a sleepy Sunday: a “Special Investigation” into the question ‘Have Australian men become second-class citizens?’.

We saw one feminist being brow-beaten by two vocal anti-feminists in studio and another columnist from Brisbane, the latter who suggested if aliens came to Australia and read the media they’d conclude our men were wife-beating porn consumers and that women “would not rest” until they had achieved a gender-apartheid.

The two main arguments that yes, men are “second class citizens” were: a) masculinity that has protected human kind for time immemorial has now been criminalised, especially by the Federal Government’s new family violence awareness campaign, and in Australia the prevailing sentiment is men-bad, women-good; and b) men in outer suburbs are 200 times worse off than everyone else (especially inner city feminists) and the pay gap is crap anyway.

No prizes for guessing it was Mark Latham, the would-be nemesis of Inner City Feminists everywhere, who put that second set of points.

media_camera Mark Latham: friend of Inner City Feminists. Or not.

The main argument against the proposition “Australian men are second class citizens” lay in factual statistics about the actual experience of Australian women.

Statistics such as according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) the gender pay gap is still between 17 and 18 per cent (according to the Federal Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency); women are four times more likely to experience violence by a partner than men and 10 times more likely to be killed by their partner and women still do twice the unpaid household labour of men even if both are bread-winning. These were reeled off by host Andrew O’Keefe, who has worked as a high-profile ambassador for White Ribbon.

Putting aside the fact any chance this conversation had of being conducted civilly evaporated when it played out as a pile-on (with O’Keefe as referee and occasional human shield), a more detached assessment of which gender “has it worse” — if we go on numbers alone — would suggest that unfortunately in many key areas, especially to do with security, women have this race-to-the-bottom won.

Here are just a few more statistics about the state of gender well-being revealed by a speedy Google on a sleepy Sunday night.

To go to Mr Latham’s point about men having it worse on the employment/income front: according to the ABS Gender Indicators 2016 (which came out in February), there is a four percentage point difference between underemployment rates for men and women: 5.8 per cent of men and 9.7 per cent of women aged 20-74 in the labour force were underemployed (that is they wanted, and were available for, more hours of work than they currently had).

The overall unemployment rate was equal for men and women at 5 per cent in 2013-14 but the unemployment rate “has been trending upwards for women for the last five years”. Males still earned a starting salary that was $2000 more than females in 2015.

In 2014 the average female wage was 87 per cent of the average male wage (non-managerial adult hourly ordinary time cash earnings). The median female wage was 90 per cent of the median male wage. This gap has remained relatively steady over the past decade.

Men aged 55-64 in 2013-14 had a much higher average superannuation balance than women the same age: $321,993 compared with $180,013.

media_camera Co-host Angela Cox, pictured with Andrew O’Keefe, played peacemaker during the fiery Weekend Sunrise debate.

It’s worth noting here that according to the 2015 PwC Women in Work Index, female economic empowerment in Australia fell down six places, to 15th of 27 OECD countries on measures such as earnings equality, proportion of women in work and women’s labour force participation.

As for the corridors of power: In January 2016, just 30.5 per cent of federal parliamentarians were women, exactly the same as January 2015.

The proportion of female CEOs actually decreased between 2013-14 and 2014-15, from 15.7 per cent to 15.4 per cent; and women only occupied 27.4 per cent of “key management” jobs (at least this was up by one per cent). Just 14.2 per cent of chairs of governing bodies/boards were women.

On health, in 2014-15, females were slightly more likely to report a long-term condition than males, “continuing the long-term trend”. In 2014-15, 13.7 per cent of women compared with 9.8 per cent of men aged 18 years and over experienced “high or very high levels of psychological distress”.

Between 2010 and 2014, females were around five to six times more likely than males to be a victim of sexual assault.

Look, we could go on all night. We could delve into the debut speech of Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins when she started the job this month for more statistics on attitudes to violence against women (which are alarmingly tolerant, with a good chunk of the population believing it is sometimes justified or ‘her fault’), and prevalence of sexual harassment and discrimination across workplaces.

We could rake over the terrible family violence death toll on Australian women in 2015 – a year when the usual horrendous rate of one death a week of a woman at the hands of an intimate (male) partner upped to an average two deaths a week for many months.

Or, we could acknowledge that any secondary school kid, boy or girl, who witnessed what became an ugly spat on TV among intelligent Australians over whether the imagined subjugation of men or the actual statistics about women’s welfare mattered more would have been left wondering what kind of adult society they had to look forward to.

media_camera Now this doesn’t look awkward at all.

As besieged host Andrew O’Keefe highlighted, yes, it is important and valid that we discuss why fewer men than women are getting tertiary education, and if the family law system is fair to both genders (and for that matter, if the best way to educate people about how family violence starts is to ‘demonise’ boys, which I agree could make boys feel persecuted and work against the message).

I would add to that list of concerns for Australian men’s welfare that, as reflected by the ABS gender indicators, more needs to be done about the much higher rates of suicide, fatal heart attacks and cancer deaths among Australian men than Australian women.

All of this stuff matters; it should all be on the table and we all have a stake in addressing this stuff.

But, to borrow from O’Keefe, it is fruitless to strive for improvements simply “by running down feminism”.

Sorry, but according to the numbers, if you really want to paint Australian men as hapless victims, you will need to work a fair bit harder than that.