Even where I work, I'm under a lot of pressure to hire more women engineers to the point we bend rules and relax standards.
There is a ton of societal and economic pressure with slogans like "the future is female". I'm a mother and I do not think this is a good thing. I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.
* The vast majority of police brutality victims are male
Now if we were talking about say India it would be a different story, and this is not to suggest that being a woman doesn't come with its own hazards, like a higher risk of being sexually assaulted.
But it's an objective, quantitative fact that there are way more men in awful life circumstances than there are women. Frankly in 2023 if a woman is strutting around an American college campus with a shirt that says "The future is female," she's a member of the ruling class who's rubbing it in.
In fact men so overwhelmingly dominate the worst outcomes in our society that I would go as far as to say that we cannot fix its worst injustices until we recognize many of them are uniquely male problems. Police brutality will remain permanently unsolved. Our world-leading incarceration rate will remain permanently unsolved.
But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter.
> But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter.
The roots are biological, men are the dispensable gender, given that a single man can potentially impregnate several women. On the other hand if a female is lost, her potential progeny is also lost. I'm not alluding to the fact that it is justified just because it's biological. What is also biological is that a large number of very responsible men have lone wolf tendencies, where they despair in loneliness due to the responsibilities, and burden of expectations placed on them.
A some what workable solution ( though again the innate biology can hinder) would be for men to from support groups for each other. Most governments, family, society, and women are not going to do that for men in trouble. Let that cold fact sink in.
In my experience, it's women who have lost sons or husbands to suicide or gang violence who are among the most likely to offer and advocate for support for at-risk men.
The roots may be biological, but we rise above our biology every day. That is the essence of the liberal project - we protect the weak instead of leave them behind. Democracy, a system of justice, these things are unnatural. They exist to prevent us from degenerating into a Hobbesian state of nature where might makes right.
The inability of our society to protect victims and the weak when they happen to be male is one of the strongest signs that the left wing is no longer actually liberal.
I have plenty of cynical opinions about the state of society, but here's the rub: if you believe you're going to lose, your belief will come true 100% of the time.
I directionally agree with you but there's definitely more nuance when you dig into any individual issue. For example, there are more male suicides because men use more effective methods, and more male prisoners because men are more violent. (I don't say that as a knock on men, either; it's a reflection of the biology-driven distribution of behavioral tendencies that each sex has evolved.)
>I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.
Society is hostile against him. Anti-male prejudice is absolutely everywhere. Andrew Tate is a get-rich-quick grifter and possibly a criminal, but he’s right about some things.
The most you can do to protect him is the same that people do in hostile regimes throughout the ages: make sure that by a certain age he understands that there’s a difference between what’s actually right and wrong and what the powers that be expect him to adhere to. It’s okay to make a stand but only if you’re very sure that the upside is worth the costs. The people blasting anti-feminist content under their real identity, to no personal or societal gain, are idiots.
Are you a single mother? If so perhaps he is just looking for a male role model that tells him he is valued as a man and that its ok to be strong? Sometimes kids look for a stereotypically male role model. Someone that represents strength. I'm not defending all the bile that Tate puts out but dude is a well known figure that advocates for men to be manly. On the other hand, maybe he was just checking him out due to curiosity.
Happily Married. His father/ My husband and I do our best to spend time with him, take him to little league, etc. We tightly control television time, monitor internet usage, and videogames, but I doubt it will ever be enough.
Anyone with little kids knows, they absorb social messaging about gender roles, rank and hierarchy like sponges.
Andrew Tate seems wildly popular on discord, tiktok, roblox, minecraft, and youtube comments right now. I think you are right, my son and his friends are looking for someone to teach them to be strong "manly" men.
I don't think we've been teaching him how to physically and mentally strong. We've been pushing things more in line with our tech careers ...
Thank you for your comment. It's really given me something to think about.
People who aren't looking out for his best interests or use him as fodder for their various agendas.
Some people on hackernews think I need to educate my son on being guilty for being born male.
Some men like Andrew Tate would just grift off of him.
Some women on twitch would try to leech money from him.
I want to protect him from all the things that would destroy him.
I'm not sure that link is actually helping your point. From the link:
> The controlled gender pay gap is $0.99 cents for every $1 men make, which is one cent closer to equal but still not equal. The controlled pay gap tells us what women earn compared to men when all compensable factors are accounted for — such as job title, education, experience, industry, job level, and hours worked. This is equal pay for equal work. The gap should be zero. It’s not zero.
> In other words, women who are doing the same job as a man, with the exact same qualifications as a man, are still paid one percent less than men at the median for no attributable reason.
Given these circumstances and given the development of recent years, I can't help but hear their clear agenda and it's very likely that this development is partially attributable to overcorrections as in the context discussed here.
Also, since male/females have some differences due to our different biology (especially thinking about hormones influencing behavior to some degree, e.g. causing males to be more aggressive in salary negotiations), the notion of it having to be zero and "no attributable reason" doesn't seem rational to me, but again just underlining their agenda.
I think that link is actually a good example for the current anti-male societal tendencies.
You're correct, I didn't pick a good link. I picked one that admits the problem and then downplays it. Please note that no evidence exists on the page for the controlled gender pay gap.
> Please note that no evidence exists on the page for the controlled gender pay gap.
What are you trying to say with this? The controlled gender pay gap is the actual relevant indicator. That women make other life choices than man can have a multitude of reasons and I strongly disagree that striving for equal ratios across career and life choices is a desirable goal. Man and women should have equal opportunities. Them making the same choices is not a consequence of that.
edit: Looking at their prime example of jobs with a controlled gender pay gap:
The controlled gender pay gap between male and female waitresses is at 82%. I can't help but feel this isn't properly controlled. A waiter at a higher class restaurant is likely to earn more than at your regular dinner place and though this is purely anecdotal, I tend to see nearly exclusively male waiters in fine dining restaurants. If these are grouped together with all waiters, differences in career and life choices are again not controlled for. There is a big difference between a "career waiter" (such as those you encounter in fine restaurants) and someone working in that job as a means to an end, often on a temporary basis.
edit2: also considering there is quite a number of jobs significantly below the median of 0.99, I would be curious to see the jobs where women are paid more than men and how big the differences are there. Afterall, the topic at hand isn't that female discrimination exists (it does, no question there!), but that male discrimination (often as a correctional method) becomes more and more of a problem that gets wilfully ignored or is even socially acceptable and encouraged! Discriminating men to solve female discrimination isn't a solution, meritocracy and equal opportunities are the solution.
It can be true that entrenched systems favor males in some areas, and new social and cultural phenomena disfavor them in others at the same time.
My wife has made the observation that there seems to be so much more media, events, toys, etc., targeted at girls in a positive way than for boys. We have two boys, and she has been quite the feminist in the time I’ve known her. As a guy I tend to err on the side of being skeptical of my own initial reactions to women who remark about the sexism rampant in our society. So when she brought this up it certainly carried more weight.
The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice. Media events targeted to girls, like the super bowl, Mardi Gras, military conflicts, just naming a few. Sorry, I'm missing it. What media events favored women.
> The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice
No they don't indicate that at all. Equal pay day is in fact anti-male propaganda. It's the opposite of meritocracy to expect people to earn the same regardless of career and life choices and that's exactly what the equal pay day would require. The controlled pay gap is at 1% (based on the same source you linked).
I seem not to have communicated my point clearly: inequity in one direction can exist in some areas (e.g., payscales) and in the other in other areas (e.g., social validation in the form of the availability of positive media, toys, and events such as birthday parties, etc.).
So, yes, payscale inequality is a thing. That doesn't mean we haven't "overcorrected" in the opposite direction in other areas.
Well, your son has inherited your perspicacity, so be thankful for that. He's right: society is hostile to him. He's not even twenty. Twenty years ago, we had shirts like "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." Not long after, Obama was saying that we need more women in college ... despite them being fifty-five percent of the enrolled. And so on and so forth. Your son is only picking up his environment.
If you want him to avoid people like Andrew Tate, provide some other positive male role model for him. Don't seem to be a lot around. Be honest with him: "Yes, you picked this up. Yes, it's true. Yes, I may have benefited from this. No, it's not fair. No, it isn't going to go away any time soon. No, I don't think it is a good idea either. I'm sorry."
You'll have to prepare him against people who will say dumb things like "it only feels like oppression because they had it so good." Your child isn't a collective they, he's an individual, he never experienced it being Great to Be a Guy. The people who want to tell him that have visions of some elderly ass-pinching stereotype from Mad Men who is finally getting his comeuppance, not your child ... but they're pretty okay with your kid taking the hit by proxy. They're pretty okay with it, they're not going to lose any sleep at night. They'll tell you this to your face if you ask. You're going to have to warn him about the world he is entering.
> He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.
This really shouldn't be surprising. It's incredibly tough when from the moment you enter the education stream, every single chip is stacked against you, you are constantly blamed for problems you had no hand in, and are then bombarded with fundamental questions about your identity such as if you're sure you're even a boy.
If you make it to the age where you realize that the adults are very wrong and your teachers can have specific biases against you, then you can make it. But until that point, there's a lot of confusing suffering to survive through.
Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. Achieving equality will feel like oppression to those used to having a good deal. Society isn't generally hostile against your son; its hostility is to patriarchy, something Andrew Tate seeks to restore and extend.
As a guy, I'm perfectly fine with things like "the future is female" for the same reason I'm fine with things like "gay pride" and "black pride" even though I'm straight and white. I recognize the historic inequality. As any good American should, I respect struggles for freedom and celebrate the successes of people seeking equality. I have no reason to think that any of those movements, no matter how successful they are, will shift into the same sort of oppression my fellow straight, white men have been perpetrating for centuries and that I benefited from.
I get why your son got sucked in, and I feel for both you and him. He's having to make choices about his identity in a time when all sorts of things in flux. But you can help him understand that society is not hostile to him personally, and that any hostility he is seeing is mainly a reaction to past harm. That he gets to make choices about what parts of the old world get sustained or get left behind. And that as long as he's working for what's right, he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong.
This might be my management role leaking, but in my experience you are being far too rational.
Humans are emotional beings first and foremost, then rational.
I do think society is hostile to him, but I don't want him to become a reactionary, or a culture warrior.
I'm his mother, I want him to be happy.
I won't sacrifice my son to some abstract societal goal no matter how noble it might seem.
This is why I cannot agree with your idea of ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. It is wrong to rationalize away all the collateral damage that happens to living human beings under the guise of statistics and history.
Ok? I don't think society is overall hostile to men. I'm a man. I think I might have noticed.
I'm not telling you to sacrifice your son to some abstract goal. I'm telling you that his happiness depend on things more meaningful than a gender label. Your son doesn't have to attach his identity to an oppressor class that is ending, which surely would impact his happiness. He can instead attach it to the end of oppression, something he can feel happy working toward.
And it's not my idea that ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. It's a basic fact that if Bucket A has 4 apples and Bucket B has 2 apples, asymmetric behavior will be required to get an equal number of apples in the buckets. Similarly, reducing my male privilege is going to require behaviors that are not perfectly the same toward all people. Should we try to minimize "collateral damage" as we move forward? Absolutely! But we should also keep in mind that not moving forward means ongoing damage. If we treat the collateral damage to men (from improvement) as more important than the damage to women (from not improving), that's just another flavor of patriarchy.
You don't notice because you aren't the same generation. You seem to have a blindspot around the idea of generational differences.
My son did not get advantages from being part of the oppressor class, YOU did.
My son and you might both be male, but the generation experience is not the same. My son is a innocent child.
You an old white man telling me I should tell my son to to accept an identity he does not deserve. I will not force my son to pay for your oppressor sin/guilt.
There is a way forward for both young women and young men,but its not your way.
Your way only works if humans were robots.
I have young male family members and also try to keep up with what's going on. So I think painting me as out of touch is incorrect. If you'd like to demonstrate that patriarchy entirely ended sometime in the last few years I'm certainly willing to look at your data.
I certainly believe that the generational experience is different. But I also believe that we have not get achieved gender equality. For example, dating and sexual violence for high schoolers in 2019: https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/snapshots/DataSnapshot_YRBS20...
> You an old white man telling me I should tell my son to to accept an identity he does not deserve.
I am not in fact telling you that. That's what people like Andrew Tate want: for him to see himself as a Big Man who gets his bigness from lording it over women, an identity he does not deserve. I'm telling you that he should accept an identity he can earn: a person in the world who can feel empathy for the people around him, appreciate that he, like everybody, is caught up in the vast flows of history, and that he can participate in steering those flows in the direction he thinks for the better.
> Ok? I don't think society is overall hostile to men. I'm a man. I think I might have noticed.
Your left wing ideology is so extreme that it's causing you to hopelessly contradict yourself, are you aware of that? It looks ridiculous.
You already said "I'm perfectly fine with things like the future is female" - that's objectively a very hostile statement against men but because you yourself are a part of the woke misandrist social movement you keep trying to rationalize it. So you say things like "Society isn't generally hostile against your son; its hostility is to patriarchy" which is meaningless ideological babble. Woke people consider all men to be members of the "patriarchy" so it's the same thing. You also claimed "that as long as he's working for what's right, he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong" except this so-called trauma is a lie. Men are not oppressing anyone, you haven't benefited from any such oppression and if people identify that young man as "part of something wrong" then he does in fact have to worry about that, because they will oppress him in false vengance even though he is innocent.
Ah, a spew of right-wing ideological talking points without the slightest bit of data. How surprising to find this in a discussion relating to feminism! I am perfectly ok with people who spout stuff like this claiming I'm ridiculous, so you just keep going, bub.
Why would I cite data when you didn't? What data can even be cited to refute totally subjective statements like the ones in this thread?
If you want points with data look at the usual suspects: percentage of men in prison, ratios of men/women in higher education, or the one this thread is about (women more likely to be elected in ....).
Huh? This feels like a response from a chatbot. I just did cite several data points. This whole thread is about a specific data point that backs up the claim that society is overall hostile to men.
You lost me here. If you were serious about fairness, you would propose reparations for past harm, and an equal system going forward. It's absurd to try to replace one unequal system with another unequal system.
I hope you're young because this level of naivety in an older person would be very concerning. As others have pointed out, the real world does not work based on rationality, and assuming it does will lead to some very bad decisions.
>I hope you're young because this level of naivety in an older person would be very concerning.
I do not know about this particular fellow, but I think at least some part of the current generation of older people have similar views, much more than in the previous centuries. Relative prosperity in recent times has ensured that many of these dimwits now have the opportunity to survive and now that they are in positions of power or influence.
Good thing I never said that the real world is based in rationality. But we should use our rationality both to make sense of the world and to shape the world so it is more reasonable.
> we should use our rationality both to make sense of the world and to shape the world so it is more reasonable.
Recommending that groups take revenge on one another for past behavior and wrapping it in some Orwellian term like "Asymmetric Behavior" is neither rational nor reasonable. It's immoral.
If you believe you understand what they're saying, feel free to be explicit about it. As far as I can tell, their point is based in confusion and ignorance, and I can't address the particulars when they're cloaked in insults and vague accusations.
> he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong.
We're not talking about mature adults capable of reasoning and addressing historical and generational nuance. Children are internalizing the idea that they're bad by virtue of being born a certain way and that's terrible. It's not something they can "not worry too much about". Inflicting pain and trauma on children who had nothing to do with the past in the name of progress is stupid.
The idea is that letting a generation of young boys think they're personally responsible for a history of oppression and discrimination inflicts pain and trauma.
Ok? I'm not avocating for that idea. If somebody is, you should go talk to them. If I ever see it happen, I'll talk to them too.
What I do believe is that those of us with privilege are personally responsible for how we use it. We can use it to support the oppression that gave it to us, or we can use it to undermine it. I think it's perfectly fine to tell everybody, children included, that whatever power they have, they're responsible for how the use their power in the world.
I don't agree with your framing that all asymmetric behavior is necessarily wrong. But accepting it for the moment, wrongs are sometimes necessary to make rights.
A good example here is the American Revolution. Oppression by force is an obvious wrong. So is killing people. Was it wrong for Americans to revolt, knowing they would have to commit wrongs along the way?
It's not always wrong to kill someone. It's both legal and moral to kill someone in self defense if they're threatening your life and you have no alternative.
It is legal and moral for police to use violence against someone who poses an immediate threat to those around them, preferably detaining, but if necessary killing them.
It was by and large moral (though not legal) for all colonies and colonized people to violently oppose and overthrow the colonial powers that oppressed them. When enemy soldiers arrived and they killed those soldiers, they did the right thing.
None of these cases are examples of two wrongs making a right. They are examples of people doing the right thing in response to a wrong, even though it was difficult.
I agree with your point, but think you're using a different definition of "a wrong" than the person I was replying to.
Surely there were very few British soldiers whose dying thoughts were "this bayonet in my guts is right and proper". That's not to deny that the anti-colonials stabbing them were right, of course. My point is just that writing a wrong via harm will seem like a wrong to the harmed. Of course, the writing of a wrong even with no harm will often be taken as a wrong by the people losing privilege, so I'd also agree that we can't use mere feelings of being wronged as wrongs themselves.
I thought my answer was direct enough, but if you need it spelled out further, I'm glad to give it a go.
It is possible that there are some people seeking "retribution". It is also possible that somebody might seek to whitewash retribution under the label of asymmetric behavior.
However, I am not doing that. I specifically chose that phrase because it's extremely broad, because in encompasses all sorts of things. If you are choosing to see anything asymmetric as retribution, that's not about me. That's about you.
You choose to be passive aggressive and use extremely broad terminology because you know full well retribution is a core part of that and you are fine with it.
You admit being part of the oppressor class and likely have guilt. You simply don't care about that retribution falls under your broad scope and ideas because you are old and will not have to pay for it.
"Asymmetric retribution" is your way to whitewash the damage you wish to inflict on a different generation of men for your guilty conscience.
It's clear you know full well what all this implies but choose to play ignorant as seen in your replies with other commentators.
I'm glad the young men and I guess some women and mothers too here on hackernews see through your tactics and are rejecting them.
I never said those words that you quote. You keep hearing what I said that way for reasons of your own.
Just in case I have't been explicit enough for reasonable participants: I am not interested in "retribution". I am interested in ending oppression. Even if I didn't find retribution repugnant on its own, I find it counterproductive in relation to my goal.
I chose a broad term because I did not want to get bogged down in endless nitpicking over particular approaches to ending oppression. The people who agree that oppression exists and that we must work to ending it will not have much problem seeing that something asymmetrical must take place. (If you have examples of oppression ended without asymmetric behavior, I look forward to it.) But it's not surprising that even the broadest term has itself generated endless nitpicking, because there are a lot of people who are invested in the oppressive systems themselves.
I feel you hold a different view then most women. Very different. In fact your views can get you attacked by other women and a few men who completely buy into the whole mainstream story. It's ok for a woman to say what you say in a forum of mostly men, because as a woman you have more credibility than men themselves to speak out against extremist feminist policies.
Please answer honestly. If you never had a son, would you view things the same way? Would you have viewed things the same way when you were younger, before you had a son?
If I never had a son, I would have never understood what boys go through.
It's so fundamentally different than girls, it's hard to believe.
Watching a part of you grow up, learn, smile at you, its just something beyond what any words can describe. You want to protect them. You watch them closely.
You slowly realize just how different your son is from yourself and your daughter. I still remember the first day he got a sports injury, and was trying so hard to not cry in front of his friends.
Motherhood changed my life and opened my eyes a lot more.
I understand. However, the emphasis of my question is on your current viewpoint of the feminist policies at the workplace. How has having a son changed that? Did it change it at all?
When I was younger and older male mentor told me this. He told me that many people don't know this but while society paints a picture of men being bumbling fools trying to crack the code that is this mysterious creature called a woman, the truth is actually the other way around.
Men understand women better than women understand men.
He said that both sexes are equally complex and very different but the cultural stereotype occurs because men have a strong desire to understand a woman while women simply view men through the most stereotypical lens possible without caring to understand anything deeper.
He told me that it is a mans job to take care of a woman, to look after her needs and to be her rock. He told me to never to fully reveal the full truth of what a man is to a woman... that a man is in actuality a creature who is sensitive... with wants and needs and vulnerabilities. He said not to reveal any of this to another woman because the relationship a man has with a woman is more like a father to a daughter, the father cannot reveal the full reality of what he is to his daughter because it is frightening to her to know the full truth of what he faces outside of her world. If part of this truth is revealed during courtship the woman will find this aspect of a man despicable and disgusting, and moves on to another man that appears stronger.
He also said to not get confused when a woman says she wants a sensitive man. He stated that she doesn't want a "sensitive" man, mainly what she is saying is that she wants a man "sensitive" to her needs.
He believed that women simply don't care to understand men for what they really are. They don't want to and they aren't suppose to either. I think by suppose to he meant that this is biology... standard human behavior.
He did tell me that what he told me was just a generality. He said occasionally I might encounter a woman who truly understands the psychology of men and he said usually that woman is a mother who has a son and has seen what her son has to go through growing up. Your son hasn't fully grown up yet, so I don't know how much of this applies to you.
If he were telling this to you, I think he would say that an aspect of your son lives inside your husband but your husband and every man is in actuality hiding this aspect from you and their respective spouses.
Would you say this is true? Would a lot of what's going on with modern society simply a lack of understanding?
I think you are asking me a very emotionally charged and complex question, that I can't really answer over the internet.
But I'm going to try . . .
I stand by my original answer, having a son changed my perspective on boys/men for nearly everything. We are different. My view point on feminist policies changed because of my son, but also from my experiences in the real world outside of the university bubble. I was probably the most feminist in university, but softened heavily after my brother's suicide. Then working for a long time now, it's clear that 95% of women and men are just workers subject to whims of the rich in america.
As to your specific points about men and women, I have no idea. I suspect the normal curve and percentages in relation to ones culture matter a lot there. But
I do think there is bit of overthinking there. When a woman says she wants a sensitive man, the hidden part is she wants a sensitive and handsome man.
I think this is the same for both women and men, but I could be wrong.
When men say they want a "gamer"/"nerd"/"etc, I assume they also mean "x" and cute.
Also I suspect the vast majority people women and men do not understand themselves. I work with very very smart people, but its extremely common to see people not understand their own emotional reactions, traumas and desires.
I agree most standard human behavior is extremely selfish. If you understand this, its also clear why "asymmetrical" responses like what wpietri means are extraordinary dangerous to society.
IMO modern society's biggest failure is thinking we are better than our predecessors. Modern society lacks understanding or refuses to admit our animal natures and worst behaviors need strong cultural safeguards to be reigned in. I don't think we will ever be able to force people to be enlightened and you can't force empathy.
Sometimes I really fear I'm stuck in hell.
> I think you are asking me a very emotionally charged and complex question, that I can't really answer over the internet.
The internet is the only place I can ask this question. I can't ask this to my gf or friends. Anyway thank you for your answer.
> When men say they want a "gamer"/"nerd"/"etc, I assume they also mean "x" and cute.
Yeah, your answer is satisfactory, I'll just touch briefly on this topic. There are differences in what you're referring to here. Male attraction is truly uni-dimensional. A woman who has a nice average personality and works at the grocery store as a clerk but is very attractive and cute is infinitely better than a high paid female lawyer who is also a gamer/nerd/etc and has a great personality but is only average looking at best. The key here is physical attraction, that is the only dimension where the grocery store clerk beats the lawyer and really the only dimension that matters to a man. I do not believe women share the same overtly narrow preference.
So when a woman says she wants a sensitive man, I think she does place some importance in it, more so then a man would when he says he wants a "gamer" girl.
I suspect some of the confusion arises from the fact that even though women are more multi-dimensional in their attraction preferences then men it does not mean they place less emphasis on physical attraction. No, women are so selective that many women often set a bar higher then men for physical attractiveness despite the more multi-dimensional nature of their attraction pallet.
This is also an aspect of what I'm talking about. The scenario with the grocery store clerk is obvious to men, but I've often encountered women who simply don't get it. The concept was so foreign that they attempted to dispute with me what is in general just completely obvious to most men. Meanwhile, men more or less completely understand the complexity of female attraction preferences. Men all know about height, success, confidence and looks and how those are important to women and we're very clear about how these are different from what men want.
It's one of the things my mentor was referring to when he said that men understand women better then women understand men.
As Jordan Peterson has been championing, equality of outcome is not the same as equality. Better candidates, more qualified students are being passed up because they are male, white, pick your stereotype of privilege here. It’s a serious societal problem leading to anger and extremism.
Given the amount of harassment and pressure on women in science that men don't experience, I've always found that the women who stick around tend to be more capable than the average male scientist.
If you have to relax standards to hire women, you're doing it 100% wrong and should evaluate your sourcing of candidates. And perhaps the evaluation process and environment itself. Women know bad environments, and capable women will stay far away.
Sure but that's not incentives work in businesses.
If I can get a women engineer onto a certain team of extremely high performing all male engineers at my firm, I can get a bonus of 20k easily, and hit a DIE initiative goal which is good for my career.
It's good for my career unless the team stops performing well, but if I've already leveraged it into another position then who cares ?
These are some of dynamics occurring in reality of many fortune 500 companies right now with recruiters, managers, directors, and executives.
You get bonuses specifically for hiring certain demographics? That sounds incredibly toxic, and I'm glad that where I work doesn't have anything like that.
Teams I've created have always been fairly balanced on gender, and it's been good for productivity. When I've taken over all-male teams, and hired women, it's been good for productivity. That's just my experience, and I know it runs counter to some others, but then I've never encountered the difficulties that others have had with hiring talented women who are great assets to their team. It's weird that I'm getting downvoted for what are very reasonable experiences, though. Makes me think that HN is trending more towards politics and less towards news for hackers...
Yea pretty much.
Toxic Dysfunction seems to be the natural state of most fortune 500 businesses.
Money and Politics is an extremely corrupting influence.
This kind of stuff is extremely common too.
Most recruiting companies filtered non DIE candidates before our pipelines so we had deniability on this as well.
Just for perspective, 20k was considered a low-end bonus before the economic downturns.
It’s funny, for men to think society is against them, when in reality they define society.
As a straight white male, there are very few rooms, very few jobs, very few situations where I don’t have absolute confidence that I belong there. Is it so bad to think everybody should feel that way?
The thing about these statistics is that the size of the underlying groups are not the same, and there's a whole lot of factors that impact them in complicated ways. The article you linked even gives a direct explanation of why the data is hard to interpret and suggests that the solution is encouraging more females to apply, because females are likely to self-select out of the field unless they are very likely to go further:
> [See SI Appendix for descriptions of other audits of actual hiring that accord with this view, some dating back to the 1980s. Many studies have argued (see ref. 14) that because only the very top women persist in math-intensive fields, their advantage in being hired is justified because they are more competent than the average male applicant. This is why an accurate evaluation of gender preference in hiring depends on data from an experiment in which competence is held constant.] Thus, real-world hiring data showing a preference for women, inherently confounded and open to multiple interpretations because of lack of controls on applicant quality, experience, and lifestyle, are consistent with our experimental findings.
The FA has the same thing going on, it says that females are 3-15 times more likely to be elected, but _also_ that they only make up 40% of elected members, so not even half. The only way that's possible is if significantly less of them are apply to begin with, and it's reasonable to assume there's some self-selecting going (or at the very least, since the groups are so different in size they're not directly comparable in terms of qualifications) on the same as the article you linked.
The issue of men and women acceptance rates in college is even the exact example given on the Simpson's paradox Wikipedia page, because it's such a simple one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
No one group defines society. It's fair to say men hold a disproportionate amount of power, and its admirable to acknowledge your own privilege as you are doing here, but it's critical to not start believing that the cultural narrative du jour is somehow the ground truth. The minute we do this, we feed political polarization between genuinely good people, and open the door for liars and sociopaths to manipulate us like herd animals to their own ends.
Sorry but no, it is completely accurate to say not only do men hold a disproportionate amount of power, but that they obtained that power by virtue of being men.
It’s institutional misogyny, it’s morally bankrupt, and it needs to change.
Essentially every tech firm is run by a man, yet, they were not awarded those jobs because they are men. They tended to get them by founding those companies successfully, or being very early employees who did major successful initiatives. The US President has always been a man, but that's because the men always win the votes, not because the competition is tipped in their favor.
On the other hand, in some countries there are now laws forcing women into corporate boards. You have to have women there even if they did nothing to deserve it.
> It’s institutional misogyny, it’s morally bankrupt, and it needs to change
This is so far from reality you need to do some grounding exercises. Institutional misogyny would look like written down, formal and openly acknowledged mechanisms that systematically block women from certain opportunities. Can you write down a list of such things? Probably not because in the west, no such mechanisms exist. The same is not true in reverse, where there are actually many such mechanisms that specifically grant women those opportunities by banning men from competing. Board seats, all-women selection lists in politics, recruiters told to only search for women, jobs that are earmarked only for women, laws that grant women child custody by default, the US VP being selected because it had to be a black woman and so on.
People like Andrew Tate get audiences because it's completely accurate to say our society is institutionally misandrist. To claim the opposite is to simply replace reality with ideology, which is always dangerous.
Straight, white men have the privilege of being taken seriously, of being heard. The further you drift from that "ideal" mold, the less seriously you are taken. The roles that men fill in society are filled because people don't attach negative connotations to what those people do or say, and therefore leadership roles are massively disproportionately filled by men.
There are so many more qualified women in this world that could do as good of a job, if not better, than the men who are leading, but those women are never given a chance because of their gender.
People like Andrew Tate get an audience because hatred is easy to fall for, and misogyny is sadly all to common in western society. Our society not only is not misandrist, it's actively pro-men in so many ways, on so many levels, that the mere notion that the playing field should be leveled gets thought of as "misandrist".
If you're a healthy straight white man and you're struggling in western society, it's got nothing to do with other people; it's firmly a you problem. Andrew Tate gives those people a way to pretend it isn't their fault, but that's all it is, pretend.
No, Tate exists because people want to avoid taking responsibility for their lack of success; anyone who gives them an excuse will be welcomed.
I’m not giving examples because I’m replying to you while taking a shit. If you want concrete examples of how misogyny hurts women, thousands of those specific examples are one Google away.
The problem you have with claiming I’m “completely disconnected from reality” is that there’s a lot of evidence I have to know otherwise. It’s like claiming I have a second head growing out of my neck; it’s so obviously untrue if you knew anything about me, that when you do it you ruin your entire argument.
Society is misogynistic at every institutional level, and the healthy straight white men who can’t succeed are failing because of their own decisions and actions.
Okay so what institutions do you trust? Can you name five?
Also what terms did you Google?
Also also there is no "the rest of us". You don't belong to or speak for a group. It's just you and I talking, so don't think you've got some kind of majority in this conversation or in this idea.
a) We both made claims, no sure why I'm the only one being asked to provide evidence, b) I'd love to provide evidence but in order to do so credibly, I need to know which institutions to source that data from, so we don't go back and forth on whether or not the data was collected with bias or some other excuse and, c) this is HN, which is neither equipped for conversations like this nor are they encouraged.
If you actually are interested in learning about the negative impacts of misogyny in the US, there are classes you can take online, people you can talk to, papers to read, etc. Demanding your entire learning experience be run through HN exclusively is only done by folks who have no intellectual curiosity and just want to annoy others.
You'll notice he hasn't responded to my basic question for clarity, as that would require some form of baseline cooperation on his part, which runs counter to his clear desire to be a pain for the sake of it.
It's been three days since this conversation started. Is the expectation that I'm to sit here and engage for eternity with a person who I don't know on a topic it's clear they're not interested in understanding better?
> no sure why I'm the only one being asked to provide evidence
You're not. You're just the only one who has refused to provide evidence for your claims.
The root comment provided evidence for a 2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM fields. And of course there was the fine article itself...
So there's evidence. There's tons more.
You have provided: zero, zip, nada, zilch.
> interested in learning about ... learning experience
You are making several incorrect assumptions. The first is that the people you are talking to are not aware of the evidence. They are. It is you who is not aware of the evidence, despite it being quoted here (see above).
The second incorrect assumption you are making is that your position is obviously correct and does not need to be supported by evidence, but rather that it is simply a matter of the other side being "educated".
This is also not correct, and you are not in that position. You are making a claim, you don't get to adjudicate that your claim is obviously correct and the only remaining work is for others to inform themselves as to the obvious correctness of your claim.
I feel you are fundamentally in agreement with my point and splitting hairs to satisfy a pedantic desire to make a very specific semantic distinction. It might feel good, but you're not going to win anyone over with this type of nitpicking.
It's actually an important point. For example, one of the most misogynistic societies I can think of are the polygamous communities like Bountiful, BC, which are basically ruled by a small cadre of elite senior men with multiple wives. Women are very oppressed. However young men are just as oppressed; they are treated as competition by the elite, and essentially exiled or put to work as child labour in dangerous jobs. This community is very misogynistic and ruled by a patriarchy, and clearly the power is concentrated in the hands of men; at the same time it is not a community that you would want to be born into as a man or a woman, and the median man will end up with none of that patriarchal power or status.
This is why it's important not just to average over groups. Dear Leader might always be a man, but that's not relevant to the fate of 99.99% of men who will never be Dear Leader, nor will they receive favour from him for sharing his gender.
This is why a lot of people are sensitive to arguments that use language that equivocates between the entirely non-equivalent propositions "if you have power, you probably are a man" and "if you are a man, you probably have power".
And yet the confusion between these two propositions is so widespread that probably most of the arguments in this HN comment section will come down to it.
It is pedantic because it's nitpicking my choice of words to make a completely separate point. This attracts people with the same concern (like you), but does nothing to bridge the gap to people with an alternate viewpoint (like the OP I responded to).
Put another way, I could have made my point with a different choice of words that would not have drawn the response from mpweiher (and you). The problem is, any choice of words is open to be misinterpreted by someone with an axe to grind.
If you want to be angry and find like-minded angry individuals, be my guest. If you want to build empathy and mutual understanding, then it's worth it to try to engage with people's primary point rather than seizing on an uncharitable interpretation of a particular phrasing or choice of words.
As a male engineer, whose grandmother got PhD in Physics around 1960 when overall PhDs were more strict than today, and especially for women, I think it is both bad when women are being held back “because they should stay at home and raise a family”, and when we want to right a historic wrong by having double standards so we could hire more women in STEM roles. We need meritocracy.
I get that, and I have been there before. But how do you fairly judge true merit in an oppressive world? A lot of the typical ways just support or amplify existing biases. That's not to say it's impossible, but an awful lot of people crying "meritocracy" do so in defense of conspicuously unexamined hiring practices.
Anecdotally, an executive recruiter friend I talked to recently here in Europe said that she now has to get approval from corporate headquarters in the US for a straight white male candidate.
If you read that article they believe it is due to women self-selecting out of the field before ever applying for those positions. Or IE. the hiring standards for both groups are not necessarily different, but female candidates are less likely to apply and those that are willing to apply are better qualified:
> Our research suggests that the mechanism resulting in women’s underrepresentation today may lie more on the supply side, in women’s decisions not to apply, than on the demand side, in antifemale bias in hiring. The perception that STEM fields continue to be inhospitable male bastions can become self-reinforcing by discouraging female applicants (26–29), thus contributing to continued underrepresentation, which in turn may obscure underlying attitudinal changes.
> Thus, real-world hiring data showing a preference for women, inherently confounded and open to multiple interpretations because of lack of controls on applicant quality, experience, and lifestyle, are consistent with our experimental findings.
> We hope the discovery of an overall 2:1 preference for hiring women over otherwise identical men will help counter self-handicapping and opting-out by talented women at the point of entry to the STEM professoriate, and suggest that female underrepresentation can be addressed in part by increasing the number of women applying for tenure-track positions.
Edit: Hence why this is complicated. You're clearly suggesting the 2:1 ratio indicates it must be unfair in some way, but the article itself suggests it's not. Fundamentally, you cannot assume that merit-based hiring would result in a 1:1 ratio of male/female, at least not initially.
The point is that the mechanism behind the underrepresentation and behind the 2:1 hiring advantage is the same.
Consider: The groups compared in that study are the same size, but we also agree women are underrepresented in the overall group, due to facts that likely cause less-qualified women to leave the group. What do you think happens if you then pick an equal number of men and women from both groups and compare them? Which group will have more qualified candidates? Obviously the women.
We are living in the matriarchy now, and it will only increase in the future.
Women now get 60% of all degrees, and I've read somewhere that projections are that they will get 70-75% in the next 10-15 years.
The only reason men are still most of the Fortune 500 CEOs, president of the USA, and other positions of power is because of legacy reasons - men who graduated 30 or 40 years ago and were in the workforce for a long time.
With fewer men graduating from university, now and even more in the future, it's logical that women will take over all forms of power in society in the medium-term future - starting now but snowballing faster and faster until in 25 years, it will be all females ruling most of society. Sure there still will be powerful men, but I'm talking about society as a whole.
Title IX started in 1972 to make an equal academic playing field for women. At that time, in 1972, the diparity between men and women was men had 12% more of university graduates. Now women are 20% more and rising.
We are living in the matriarchy but it's like that "he who must not be named" kind of thing. If you say that we live in a matriarchy, it is instant banishment from the kingdom in the form of instantly being labeled as a misogynist or incel, just for saying we live in the matriarchy.
In physics at least, it's been my experience that even though the percentage of women physics professors is low, almost every one is an above-average researcher. They are certainly harder working on average. Meanwhile, there will be several men in the department who have just coasted. This isn't among new profs, but among those who have been around long enough that they definitely experienced gender discrimination in hiring. I don't think this is a biological thing, just an interesting side effect of strong gender discrimination, where the women who make it in have to be exceptional to do so.
This is undoubtedly true for almost all women who have advanced significantly in any field up until about a decade ago.
Since then however, things have turned so sharply it’s almost the opposite now.
Some people think it’s fine, they are so mad at the men of the 1950s that they’re perfectly willing to inflict their revenge on the young men of today.
Then everyone is surprised when young men start listening to political operatives that don’t talk to them like they’re the scum of the universe.
This isn’t particularly surprising to me. I’m a scientist, and in my field, women have outnumbered men in my undergraduate and graduate programs, and also in every lab I’ve worked in as a professional.
The hard sciences haven’t had the gender imbalance currently seen in engineering and tech jobs for decades now.
Unless the majority of academy is female, I would guess that you probably have a lower number of women running and a lot of pressure to get more women into these positions. This is what happens when you favor equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity.
How is this an "accomplishment for gender equity." Isn't this still inequity? I think the fact that the writer couldn't perceive how this is still, logically speaking, "inequity" speaks to the bias at play in this area.
But then again is true equity even possible? Is it a logical possibility given the biological differences between men and women? Perhaps it's a scientific fact that women are superior to men in science that's why we see this difference.
There is also more women attending universities then men. This also speaks to the possibility of greater intellectual superiority in women than in men.
What about the fact that virtually all of science, technology and modern infrastructure was created by men? It is clear from any layman that the frameworks and foundation of advanced civilization were built (with some exceptions) exclusively by men. This of course does not obviously speak to any intellectual differences between men or women but speaks more to oppression. Before modern movements toward gender equality, men regularly oppressed women making it impossible for women to display their superior intellect.
But is this the real narrative? Or is equality actually real? This is a controversial opinion but I think men are in fact much stupider then women and equality is a made up fantasy.
This is the real question everyone is tip-toeing around. At the end of the day how are men and women different in raw terms of absolute performance and intelligence? And are the elections a reflection of raw performance OR not?
Greater intellectual superiority because of the % entering college?
College is a status symbol and women are buying into it more than males. It shows men are more independent thinkers and feel confident they can get along without a degree. It also because entry level jobs in fields women are interested in require college where men have more options in the trades.
As women are dominating college entry over men a college degrees is less a proxy for intelligence and more for a middle class status symbol.
As companies fight over the pools of women grads the smart companies are picking up the males who are being excluded and reaping the rewards
>College is a status symbol and women are buying into it more than males.
Isn't this a sexist statement? You're saying that women are more into superficial status symbols than males. This clearly isn't true and is sexist.
What isn't sexist at all is to say women are, from a biological perspective, intellectually superior to men. This is the only logical and scientific conclusion when you look at everything from an analytical perspective.
Think about it. Any other formulation of what's going on inevitably leads to a sexist conclusion which automatically, by fundamental logic, precludes it from consideration.
I wonder if for many righting a historic wrong ends up spilling into retribution territory, where it feels justified to inflict vengeance upon one demographic group for a past injustice.
We’re all human. People who are in charge today aren’t biologically better/worse people than the people they oppress. Change the social norms and the oppressed group will adapt. Some of the oppressed will seek reconciliation. Others will seek retribution and they might succeed.
To pretend that marginalized groups DON’T work this way is (imo) soft racism/sexism/classism. We’re all the same human species.
That doesn't mean there aren't morphological differences between sex. Men in general have bigger muscles and penises, while women have breasts.
There is nothing logical or scientific that precludes differences in intelligence either. Clearly women are significantly smarter then men in practically every area.
You can't post this here it's sexist and against the rules. It is, however, not sexist at all to say women are intellectually superior to men. But both sentences have the same underlying meaning, just one conveys the meaning through subtle absurdity.
>How is this an "accomplishment for gender equity". Isn't this still inequity? I think the fact that the writer couldn't perceive how this is still, logically speaking, "inequity" speaks to the bias at play in this area.
There are various definition of equity and equality: equality of outcomes, of opportunities etc...
If you have a person who has been in chains for ten years and one who has been training daily compete in a race is it really surprising that they won't perform equally?
> Perhaps it's a scientific fact that women are superior to men in science
The only valid broad generalization is that there are no valid broad generalizations.
My take? I think we men are used to having things handed to us, and women in our society are used to having to try hard, and with more or less equal opportunity, they're kicking ass.
When women are behind, it's because systematic inequality holds them back. When men are behind, it's because women actually kick ass and are better than men at whatever it is they're behind in.
> Female researchers in mathematics, psychology and economics are 3–15 times more likely to be elected as members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences than are male counterparts who have similar publication and citation records
That line doesn't really match with men being asked to try equally hard.
It seems to me that academic and professional societies are desparate to hit a 50/50 balance in new inductees, but they are finding that there is a paucity of qualified candidates due to upstream issues. (Remember that the current crop of peak career researchers started their training in the 80s and 90s, when the gender split among new trainees in the sciences skewed heavily male and when DEI programs for early career researchers did not exist nearly to the extent that they do now.)
But if you admit a class of inductees that's 80% men and 20% women in this day and age, it's very difficult to explain in a way that doesn't put you in a hot seat. It's much easier to apply asymmetric standards until you get a neat 50/50 split (or at least something close) because this is less likely to raise questions. So that's what the societies do.
That’s not what’s happening though. It’s a highly imbalanced class, just “the right way”.
You’re also quite incorrect about when DEI programs started, they’re just actually called that now. Women have outnumbered men in universities since around 1980 because of attempts to get more women into college.
Edit: hard to keep up with the ninja edits, the point in the last paragraph is significantly changed.
Sorry, I have a habit of refining my thinking a bit and editing my posts to match. I didn't realize that there was already a reply. I didn't really change much of substance though - mainly just added the point about historical gender disparity in PhDs and added the last paragraph.
> Women have outnumbered men in universities since around 1980 because of attempts to get more women into college.
Outnumbered in undergrad, when you account for all fields. But that’s not what's relevant here. What's relevant is PhDs, specifically in the sciences, because that's the pool from which scientific researchers are drawn. And the gender ratios there have changed dramatically since the 80s [1].
> You’re also quite incorrect about when DEI programs started
I never said that these programs hadn't yet started. I said that they didn't exist to the same extent that they do now. There is plenty of data showing a uptrend in the number of university positions dedicated to DEI over the past few decades. And it's not just an issue of naming.
But that would imply anyone who goes through hardship becomes superior. So for example war. Men historically have been exclusively sent to war and suffer through hardships unimaginable to most people who aren't sent to war. Women are generally not sent to war so it's arguable in terms of raw stress and pressure they have suffered less than men.
Yet one still cannot say in this day an age just because men experience raw violence and combat in the arena of war that men are smarter. No in fact women are still better than men in every possible way even though they don't go to war.
So hardship isn't part of the equation. The only thing left is biological. Sexual morphology gives women biological advantages in terms of intellectual capacity and performance. This is utterly clear. That is why these women are getting elected far more than men. It is the only logical explanation.
> The paper finds that since 2019, female researchers have comprised around 40% of new members in both prestigious academies1. Historically, across disciplines in each academy, there have been substantially fewer female researchers than male ones. Before the 1980s, female members comprised less than 10% of total academy membership across all scientific fields.
So, if you choose a random person getting admitted, they'll probably be a man.
They claim that if you equalise for "achievement" then woman are overrepresented. Which you can interpret as "woman are inferior, even if we give them an advantage they're still not good enough" or "woman are broadly equal to men, but are held back by the predominance of men in science (and society) and consequent sexism"
Even where I work, I'm under a lot of pressure to hire more women engineers to the point we bend rules and relax standards.
There is a ton of societal and economic pressure with slogans like "the future is female". I'm a mother and I do not think this is a good thing. I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.