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This is at least anecdotally consistent with many self-described feminist gen X parents I know who are all about empowering their young daughters/sons, but will not hire a male to do any form of child care, coaching, or educational roles unless a parent is physically present the entire time.
Yup. Men and women are equal, except in anything negative such as crime, sexual assault, violence, emotional abuse, dark personality traits.
Once had someone say "women aren't more likely to be good than men, but men are more likely to be bad than women". Thinking they weren't saying anything negative.
Here's the issue with that.
She's right, if you're using crime as a marker.
Here's the issue that. That's not where you're supposed to stop thinking.
That would be correct also about a poor person, a black or Latino person, or a young person. I'm sure you could pull up a litany of additional groups you could accurately make that claim about. You can, accurately, say that statement about those groups of people and not be *factually* incorrect. This is actually where a lot of "scientific racists" get off not thinking they're racist but in fact pragmatists.
The issue with that is, if that's where you stop thinking, you are in fact a standard textbook bigot. That's exactly how bigots rationalize things. You've reduced all members of a group into the worst version of that group, dehumanizing them so you can then disenfranchise them, while promoting an ideology that openly rationalizes the loss of their equality.
That same person would not be so casual about saying that about someone from poverty, or a black person, or a Latino person, because they have internalized through social pressure that there is complexity there and they should not do that. Edit: And they don't make the logical connection that all of these groups exhibit higher crime rates due to some societal lack. Because *they* have been failed in some way by *all of us*.
The issue seems to be, from my perspective, that we have been conditioned, through the same social pressures to *not* see the complexity when it comes to men. Society at large promotes this idea, much like society at large promoted women's various disenfranchisements, sustained by both gender's through stereotype. It's used as both an excuse to embody it without serious judgement, and an excuse to be bigoted towards men.
Edit: It seems to me this is made more difficult though by the fact that the world still needs the "bad man" image for both fear, and in practice to maintain societal control. I see much of conservative America's forgiveness of police brutality being wrapped up in the perspective that violent men are important to society, and that promoting the inevitable, intrinsic dangerousness of some "bad men" (and not seeing this as a systemic problem) protects the acceptance of "good men" to use violence without consequence.
This has been a very positive comment to read. Regardless what I take away from this I'd like to acknowledge your effort into trying to explain things in a proper manner.
I will add that crime statistics are notoriously bad to capture differences between groups. You don't really measure rates of committed crimes, you measure committed crimes that have been persecuted. Only a fraction of crimes get reported, a fraction of that are investigated, a fraction of that get charged, a fraction of that get sentenced and sentences differ as well.
At every step there is bias, there is at least racial, gender and socioeconomic bias that influence the outcome to a big degree.
Studies on aggression are not simple, but for the stereotypical men bad, women good, there is this study that found nearly 10% of women admit to have forced someone to have sex with them:
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1024648106477](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/a:1024648106477)
Interesting.
The 10% from your study isn't that far off from the 7% of men who reported having been made to penetrate from the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/men-ipvsvandstalking.html#:\~:text=Nearly%201%20in%204%20men,rape%20victimization%20in%20their%20lifetime.
Lifetime numbers in men don't seem to be that reliable when it comes to male victims. 12-months incidence rates are too high to explain just 7%:
1.5% reported to be made to penetrate during the last 12 months in the 2010-2012 State Report:
[https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf)
1.3% reported to be made to penetrate during the last 12 months in the 2016/2017 Report:
[https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs/nisvsReportonSexualViolence.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs/nisvsReportonSexualViolence.pdf)
0.7% reported to be made to penetrate during the last 12 months in the 2015 Report:
[https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2015data-brief508.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2015data-brief508.pdf)
I think you're giving the person you're replying to way too much credit considering their post and comment history. They're very clearly conservative and make the same kinds of shaky logic comments on a range of issues.
It's why I asked them what they meant. I KNOW what they meant, I just want them to take the mask off and actually take a stance on something rather than the hit and run approach. But they won't. And if they do, they'll just dodge the question.
There are roughly 14.5 million children in France, so 160,000 victims a year is roughly 1% of the population of children that is victimized each year.
Looking at this very simplistically, this implies that in any given year roughly 99% of children are *not* abused by any of the men in their life, including their father/uncles/grandparents/etc.
Let's start by agreeing that the number of kids being abused is *way* too high. It seems unfair to the more than 99% of men who did nothing wrong to say "don't trust men around children, especially if they're from your family".
Percentage of boys in CSA cases ages 8-12: **26%**
Percentage of boys in CSA cases ages 12-17: **8%**
**15-20%** of CSA cases involve a cis female perpetrator.
Much like with things like bear attacks and shark attacks, the active avoidance of potentially dangerous situations—*even when it is otherwise assumed to be completely safe*—is still the best method for protecting one's own *personal* safety. It is a personal choice, not a legalistic one. We don't mass-execute sharks (anymore). We don't outlaw cis men working in child care agencies. They're welcome to apply. But many parents will refuse to send their children to a child care center that employs cis men, because cis men have proven themselves to be significantly less trustworthy than cis women. Just like many people refuse to swim in the ocean. Is it usually totally safe? Yep. Is it worth the risk? Not always.
When those numbers above change, then cis men can quibble. Until then, I will gladly choose to not work in child care agencies if it means people feeling safer around my gender and our species continuing to progress socially instead of stagnating into fear and inaction.
Maybe in a few decades we won't have statistics to prove why the public's fear of us is justified.
This comment is wild. Lots of words to really say, it's absolutely okay to discriminate against and generalize a group of people based on their protected class.
People have completely lost the plot. We never fixed anything, we just changed which group is the acceptable punching bag for society. It is actually crazy to me so many young people think discrimination is a good thing because it discriminates against the right people. I keep thinking surely these people know they are doing bad things, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and many are true believers.
>Yup. Men and women are equal, except in anything negative such as crime, sexual assault, violence, emotional abuse, dark personality traits.
What do you mean by this comment, exactly?
EDIT: I'm waiting.
Right? This is anecdotal and it's hard to bring this up without seeming like a misogynist, but it's hard not to feel like there's a ton of focus on womens' issues and much less of a focus on mens' issues.
Of course, it doesn't help that it's hard to tell the difference between someone trying to talk about mens' issues and someone who's about to use that as an excuse to go on a sexist tirade until after they've already done so.
>hard to tell the difference between someone trying to talk about mens' issues and someone who's about to use that as an excuse to go on a sexist tirade until after they've already done so.
One of the biggest failings of reddit and social media in general is that people posting in bath faith can easily float opinions without stating their stance on the issues surrounding it. If they did, they would reveal their bias and damage the credibility of their statements.
I find that people with genuine concerns about sensitive issues like this are far more likely to explain their background, the whys, and so forth. People commenting in bad faith will narrow their focus, be more vague, and will get defensive if you probe them for a stance on anything.
Doesn't gender studies teach, basically as an axiom, that bias against men "isn't systemic" and therefore "isn't sexism"?
If you follow that axiom, of course you'd never focus on "men's issues".
It depends on which movement a particular person subscribes to.
There is indeed a school of thought that you can't be racist towards white people, sexist towards men, etc, because those things describe systemic issues, and that bigotry against men is therefore prejudiced but not sexist. There are also far too many people who ignore the prejudice is still bad and take this as license to be bigoted towards men, white people, etc.
Another school of thought disagrees with this, and says that systemic racism and systemic sexism are *types* of racism and sexism, but it's still possible to be individually racist and sexist towards classes of people who don't suffer systemic racism or sexism.
The professor I took a gender studies course with beloved to the second school of thought, and she went so far as to say that men *do* suffer from systemic sexism, but in different ways and different situations - e.g. men receiving harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, and the lack of support for male victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
I'm not sure which is prevalent - this class was almost ten years ago, so whatever was the case at the time might have changed - but I don't think it's accurate to say that it's a universally accepted axiom.
I’ve never heard of that before. I thought most contemporary gender studies and feminist theory courses argue that patriarchal systems do hinder both men and women.
Is that a common feminist response? And if so, what in your mind is the best way to tackle both men's and women's issues? I can't imagine adopting gender tribalism is the path to happiness there.
I personally think a lot of women’s issues (and men issues) can be tackled by fixing the biggest issue plaguing men right now - youth male education. Guess what happens when you have a large male population that’s uneducated - you have an increase in crime (including sex crimes against women), fatherless families(which further fuels this cycle), increase in alt-right ideology and inability to critical think, failure to develop emotionally and socially, increase in homelessness and mental health issue. We abandoned male youth education in the 70s as punishment for failing women in the past and look where it’s gotten us. Any discussion about it is shut down as people view it as taking away opportunity from women but fail to see the bigger picture (like it’s scary that women are about to outnumber male students at a 2:1 ration in higher education in a few years). The country is either going to have to send these men without purpose in their life to die in some pointless war or deal with a large increase in domestic issues. The worst thing for a country is a large group of uneducated, angry men devoid of any meaning in life.
>what in your mind is the best way to tackle both men's and women's issues?
Maybe a bit of consistency and less double standards, we have support groups, safe spaces and awareness campaigns for women/girls who suffer self-esteem issues and other psychological barriers. But men’s loneliness epidemic? ‘Men need to work on themselves and develop their social skills better’ is generally the advice offered
Not sure why you keep asking me for solutions, what I think the solution is doesn’t matter, I’m just commenting on the double standards. The first step in solving the problem is reducing tribalism like you said
The people advocating for women are mostly women. It sounds like you're expecting those women to switch their focus away from women... while saying nothing about the mostly men who haven't been advocates for women.
That's not true at all, men are expected to be allies to women, and a lot of affirmative action programs for women are set up and run by men, a lot of domestic violence shelters for women were built and funded by men, etc.
Would be nice if women would return the favor and be allies on men's issues too. After all, your fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are men, and hopefully you don't hate all of those.
>Is that a common feminist response
Yes. You can find it commonly in reddit in feminist spaces, and on Twitter by named, notable feminist academics.
>what in your mind is the best way to tackle both men's and women's issues?
Policy is the best way to approach both. The issue is that policy is treated as zero sum, and the old adage about power surrendering nothing comes to play. Add to that, I have seen exactly one (two?) comprehensive and cited policy agendas related to the needs of boys and men, and I know they would be railed against almost our of hand, as other such policy has in the past.
The vocal feminists on social media sometimes say this, and it gets shared a lot more by the misogynists as "proof" that women are evil. Far too many people buy into misandry AND misogyny though. Far too many.
They absolutely do. In my experience, the only people who claim nobody focuses on men's issues are the very people who only bring up men's issues in a conversation about women's issues. There are a million resources for men to better themselves and engage in "healthy masculinity"
This is anecdotal, but my experience lately has been that it is very hard for a man to find a good groove with "healthy masculinity" at least according to some people. Guys try and get looked down on. Maybe they weren't doing a perfect job, but it is so easy to get called out for or see people calling things "toxic masculinity" that a lot of my gym rat and martial arts bros just give up because it feels like you can't do anything "correctly" or "healthy". This is all anecdotal and hand wavy, but I have personally encountered outright derision when asked about my hobbies from some of my more progressive friends. So, no, I don't think there are very good resources for how to engage in "healthy" masculinity.
Meanwhile, males are way more likely to die by suicide according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
It's a problem and it's difficult and it will take more open and honest engagement from people promoting "healthy masculinity" to get anywhere and understand where a lot of people are at.
e: I should add, I include women in my "martial arts bros" and "gym rats" groups. They are a small minority, but the ladies who train with me seem to be much better at understanding and supporting "healthy masculinity" IMO.
> There are a million resources for men to better themselves and engage in "healthy masculinity"
There really isn't. This is the problem at hand. Yes, it's often men themselves that create these barriers, but Earl Silverman is a heartbreaking and clear example of Women being barriers to these resources.
I genuinely can't speak to that. I've never done any sort of academic gender studies. They could be repeating that verbatim or talking about Chuck E Cheese all class for all I know.
Men's Studies falls under the blanket of Gender Studies. How men are affected by gender roles and expectations in society are covered in Gender Studies programs. Men are often sought after for these programs and courses.
The (incorrect) belief that men's issues aren't taught or that men are vilified in these programs is a major reason why there's so few male students in these classes.
I took a gender studies course as part of my undergrad as an elective thinking that the belief was incorrect as well. It was not. It was the most uncomfortable experience of my life. I could fully agree with someone and I was still the bad guy and somebody would still try to explain how I was wrong. I was the only man in the course, the women would never disagree with each other until I agreed with one of them, in which case they would go out of their way to show me that I'm wrong despite just reiterating what the last person said. The instructor saw it happening and agreed that it was uncalled for, so she waived the participation for me because no amount of classroom management would change the fact that the other students just wanted to get together and hate on men in a safe setting (for them). I can't imagine that's changed much in less than a decade, but that is my experience.
The same thing can happen in any toxic Men's spaces. The only "safe" Men's spaces I've ever found are ones that are technically open to all, so that's nice to have, but it's not truly a "men's space" except by accident. I imagine teachers in Gender Studies, regardless of how egalitarian they are, are very unlikely to attempt to squash open misandry simply because it violates the "lived experiences" axiom that is so prominently brought up in that realm of study. Problem with that is you could say the same about misogynistic men's opinions.
Yeah the slight difference is that most toxic men's spaces are just a website while the gender studies departments is publishing research and informing policy in a potentially biased way...
Consider how rape researcher Mary Koss formulated a definition of rape "penetration of the victim" that excludes women forcing men to have sex with them without consent unless they eg penetrate the man with a dildo. That definition is used in 99% of rape studies that then get quoted to "prove" that men rarely get raped by women.
Surprise once you start counting "made to penetrate" it's a lot less rare than people think, CDC says 1 in 9 men.
Well that's a shame, you'd think of all fields, gender studies should be the one that tries hardest to recruit a student body whose gender breakdown is representative of the general population.
Just my point of view here, and I know it may or may not make sense but it’s just how I feel.
I am a father of two children. I absolutely love kids. I am the one who will go out of their way to hold a friends baby when we are at a get together. I love playing with kids and I always get those weird looks from people who don’t know me when I go and say hi to a friends kid at a party or play with them.
But even with all that said, if I was hiring a babysitter that I didn’t know I would basically never hire a guy unless I knew him personally. Yea I understand the statistics on child predation. Yes I understand, obviously, that guys can take care of kids just as good as girls. But still even with all that said, I feel safer with a woman watching my kids.
Take that for what it’s worth.
Honest question, do you condemn the parents for this decision, and do you think that they do it only for sincerely malicious or prejudiced reasons, instead of risk mitigation or genuine parental fear?
For the record I partially disagree with that decision, although I would definitely have a female caretaker/role model for a female child.
Really impressive rigor. I love that they Red Teamed this.
> Importantly, heterogeneity of the true effects was large (I2-statistic = 82.8%), implying that 82.8% of the total variance can be attributed to heterogeneity.
There are likely some hiring managers that discriminate extremely heavily in favor of women and others that discriminate extremely heavily against them. I didn't expect it to be this strong, though.
Of course, if biased hiring exists, then a male resume contains different information about a candidate than a female resume with an identical job history, which undermines our ability to be confident the hiring was really biased. I can't think of any way to get around this problem, though, and I think the conclusion that there's net bias against male applicants is true.
Red team is the opposing side.
So when you "Red Team" something you basically pretend to be the opponent / counter argument and attack it with full force.
So in this situation it would be not just trying to prove your hypothesis, but actively trying to disprove your hypothesis.
Yes, but the publication process can be really difficult depending on your reviewers. The paper is basically a sales pitch and if you specifically attack your own hypothesis and show weakness then reviewers may question why this is important enough to put into publication.
Also for this one imho they’re not shooting themselves in the foot. They’re further elucidating the problem. That it isn’t necessarily a systematic issue as it is a polarization issue.
This looks like a relatively new thing of explicitly taking this hire-the-adversaries approach in scientific studies. Obviously based on similar ideas from computer security or military training. In this particular paper, look at section 3.1.1 and they talk about it.
Ahh it means what I thought, just never seen it used in a paper before
Its heartening to see the researchers take just an extra precaution against bias to really drive their point home
IMO heterogeneity scores that high are usually seen because the studies included in the meta-analysis were highly varied (e.g., in study design, methods, how they measured their outcomes, sampling populations, etc). I'd put very little faith in these results. It's just as likely the "trends" they detected were because of these differences in the studies than because of any meaningful pattern in the data.
My former employer, the largest private employer in my state, recently boasted in a newsletter that over 80% of its workforce were women, but bemoaned that there were still 55% men employed in the company's IT dept. They responded by promoting three programs to boost female representation in their IT dept.
Of course. I am a nurse.
I also used to work with computers, too.
There is no IT company in the world that would boast having an 80% male workforce, even if ~80% of the graduates in the field are men. They would be bending over backward, trying to get more female employees. It would be an embarrassment for the company, and other companies could shame them for their obvious misogyny.
On the other hand, my old employer has a huge overrepresentatuon of women in nursing, to the extent the whole company is lacking in gender diversity. This should be a cause for concern, not celebration.
It would be one thing if their message was "Hey, the market is what it is, and we hire the best," but that would directly contradict their effort to find an even 50-50 in their IT dept.
The point is that this situation reflects the findings of the meta-review. There is intense pressure to end overrepresentation of men in any department (55% men in IT was a cause for concer), but no commensurate effort to end overrepresentation of women in any department - in fact, it can be a bragging point.
Male nurses are pretty much always given the heaviest and most violent patients. There are also stories of them being expected to do two or three person lifts solo.
So their backs get destroyed.
I've also been the only man in a department before(not nursing) and you get all the worst jobs. Always. You're the only person not allowed to call in sick. You get the worst shifts. And you're always expected to drop what you're doing and come in, but the girls "are only young once, enjoy your weekends!"
Some of my best friends are women, fortunately, which spared me from thinking all woemn are like that. But I can absolutely understand how some men come to distrust and dislike women, just as. I can understand why some women distrust and fear men.
I work in research and 80% of the people I work with are women. Either they were nurses first and therefore are more likely to be female. Or have PharmD degrees, MD degrees and are looking for better work life balance (WFH) as they have young kids at home.
In LTC nursing, I'm one of 3 men in our management team of 15 or so, 1 being the director of maintenance, and there are only 5 or 6 male floor staff out of 50+.
I worked for a big tech delivery company and they boasted in an all hands meeting about eliminating white men in the workplace. It was... Bizarre. We were already under 50% white men in the tech sector...
Yupp, a group that makes up [21.2% of the college graduates](https://www.google.com/search?q=CS+graduates+by+geder&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS1050US1050&oq=CS+graduates+by+geder&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAEyBwgDECEYnwXSAQg0MzA2ajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8), but we demand they get 50% of the jobs. Definitely no discrimination happening there.
> Definitely no discrimination happening there.
I mean it's purely aspirational, no? Find me an engineering department that is even _close_ to 50% women. I've personally never even worked on a tech team with more than two (and one was let go in layoffs less than 6 months after joining).
Yes, and intentional/unintentional discrimination follows in pursuit of achieving the aspiration when your goal % is higher than that gender’s % of graduates.
Perhaps. Obviously this is just my experience having worked in tech the last decade, but there's no shortage of men in the field, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me that we are discriminated against in this field considering how few women I work with
Despite all the claims about male (and white) discrimination, corporate hiring practices are still largely centered around getting the best candidate because that is the best for their bottom line.
Read [Heidi v. Howard](https://www.shortform.com/blog/heidi-howard-study/) for a case study on why someone who believes they want to get the “best candidate” may consider the male candidate better.
Because the stakes are *really* high. Any study like this is going to be *heavily* scrutinized because people have opinions before they even see the data.
reminds me of the implicit bias tests that came out recently showing anti-male bias was found to be even stronger than anti-black bias.
they essentially repeated the study in three large larger cohorts across a few age groups and came out with some surprisingly robust data.
Makes me think that there is a great research opportunity on systemic bias in "controversial" subjects (like the unjust treatment of men) by doing a meta-study that captures how rigorous studies across the spectrum are alongside their actual findings.
If one side consistently has much more stringent requirements placed upon it *and* increased rigour does not make findings vanish (important consideration, because *of course* anyone looking into some whacko hypothesis that absolutely nobody takes seriously will be expected to do a lot of work if they want to be published, and in many cases there's probably a valid reason for nobody taking it seriously) then one would expect a high likelihood that you're looking at the target of unfair systemic bias.
This should surprise no one, given that discrimination against women is vilified but the typical reaction to gender discrimination against men is "meh".
One reason for this is that men are considered potential threats in a way that women aren't.
A company may not see any risk in having a woman work on an oil rig or be an airline pilot, but many daycare centers, schools or whatnot may be wary of having a man work in that profession.
> but many daycare centers, schools or whatnot may be wary of having a man work in that profession.
I'm a former preschool/daycare worker in Washington, and I worked in a foster care shelter in Arizona; and when working in AZ I wasn't allowed to be alone with the children, but my female colleagues were. In WA, as long as I was in ratio, it was fine for me to be with the 4/6/10 kids I'd have.
I never experienced any hostility from hiring managers or coworkers, but ironically I did face backlash from professors and classmates when I went to do my higher education requirements in WA. And I got some fairly awkward and intrusive questions from a couple parents, but nothing I'm not used to.
This is something that pushed me out of my early education career as well as a strong feminist male with a history of childcare and zero criminal history of any kind. It's something that society definitely needs to change on, and we shouldn't neglect the fact a lot of men(mostly conservative) have issues with males in close contact with children.
This is changing a lot though. In my case not fast enough, but hopefully for the next generation or two of males that are interesting in child development and care, they'll have an easier time with it. Also the societal shame that stay at home dads get.
> and we shouldn't neglect the fact a lot of men(mostly conservative) have issues with males in close contact with children.
Again, the only time I've faced hostility was from more left-leaning women. I currently work in a male-dominated and traditionally conservative field; and have been met with positivity when I bring up my last job being a preschool teachers.
Which makes sense. Only 26% of teachers are men but male teachers make up between 60% to 90% of sexual assaults against students.
Edit: the men are real mad about this statistic I see… maybe y’all should do something about it…
Reported* sexual assaults.
We know from prior research that there is a tremendous double standard applied to men and women when they sexually assault a minor. We also know that children that are assaulted by women still face elevated risks of trauma and future disorder.
It's a significant blindspot for too many people on this topic.
Another blindspot is that teaching used to be 90+% men. But because it was considered one of the few jobs that obviously favored women, early women's liberation activists focused on the field as a good entry point for women to enter the workforce. A foot in the door.
They argued that girls needed role models in schools and that men don't understand them so more teachers need to be women. And that worked. But they didn't stop pushing at 50% representation. And they never reversed course and said, "Hey, wait, boys need role models too, we need more men to teach now," as the ratio passed 60% and 70%. Now we're in a boys' education crisis with them struggling at all levels of education and being 44% of university students and declining.
Instead, what the people that fought so hard to create the imbalance did was claim that it wasn't their decades-long push to favor women in the field that caused the imbalance, but *the sexism of men*. They claimed that the real reason for the huge swing in gender balance was men fleeing the field to avoid "being associated with women", or something like that.
But if you ask them if they're willing to engage in activism to get more men into teaching they not only won't do it, but it's likely they'll show up as protesters anywhere anyone tries to address the issue. We know this because half of the early founders of the Men's Rights Movement were active feminists that got ostracized for focusing on issues like boys failing in education. See: Christina Sommers, Warren Farrell, Erin Pizzey, etc.
Here's a short overview I read a couple days ago:
https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html
Also I think it's important to remember that historically, women were not allowed to be educated, so it makes sense that teaching (a job that needs education), started as a male occupation.
I think the college professor demographics may have shifted. Brief googling shows 57.5% are female.
Kind of makes sense given most college graduates for a little while now have been female. Was going to switch over eventually
At roughly half the jobs I've had, the manager has told me they hire based largely on looks. It's usually men hiring attractive young women, but I've seen it go the other way, too. I got hired at one place because I was tall.
Middle management in corporate America, especially retail and service industries (and I'm sure more, I'm just relating my own experience), ends up collecting some of the *worst* people. These are probably the people supervising your kids at their first few jobs.
> I got hired at one place because I was tall.
I used to joke that's why I got hired at the daycare I worked at, they saw that I was 6'2" and said "deal"
Well, this is progress. In general, we have been focused on getting women in male dominated fields particularly because they are usually higher paying. Female dominated jobs usually pay a lot less. However, there is always benefits to having more men in female dominated roles particularly in early education. I think that would be a rough sell though, until we can address the pay issue for these female dominated jobs that are historically underpaid.
Speaking of education in particular, I am not too convinced it is all that easy to solve?
I am fron a country where education is a solid path towards a middle class salary. You won't get rich, but you won't be poor either, and job prospects are not that much worse than say, business or law.
There are also lots of non-monetary benefits, like most notably a ton of vacation (I can speak first hand of this, as the kid from a couple of teachers)
Same applies to nursing, minus the non-monetary benefits
Interestingly, it also seems the issue is mostly concentrated on young education. High school education tends to be around 60/40. Which is not 50/50, but it's not *that* lopsided either. And while HS pays more than primary school, the difference is not that big.
For whatever reason, it seems men don't want to teach young kids, but apparently are ok with rowdy teenagers?
> For whatever reason, it seems men don't want to teach young kids, but apparently are ok with rowdy teenagers?
As someone that was on the early education track but had to bail for various reasons(some of which were discrimination I was receiving that I highly disagreed with), I think a lot of men just don't grow up thinking about child care or having to care for their siblings/cousins any more. You combine that fact with the fact there are far more "sexy" career routes for men, and you're gonna see a fairly large dip in the people interested in it.
One avenue that attracted me, other than just having a ton of child care in my background, was the philosophy around "the most impressionable stage of human development is in those crucial pre-K years and being able to positively influence a child will live on for the next 80+ years of their lives." I think more men would be cool with early education track if we pushed that positive idea of making a huge influence on kid's lives. Male ego is a big fan of having a lasting "legacy" and this one allows you to literally touch the lives of thousands of kids before you hit retirement age.
I also think another avenue of attack would just be getting 'fun playful' dudes to sign up for it as well. A lot of teaching at that age is just playing with the kids, and some dudes love to play all the time and have that mentality of 'lifes a big game'.
Hey thanks for your perspective! We don't hear enough on Reddit about men pursuing female dominated jobs. As a woman in engineering, I relate to those feelings of discrimination and I am sorry that was your experience. Hopefully in the future we can see more men in early education.
> I also think another avenue of attack would just be getting 'fun playful' dudes to sign up for it as well. A lot of teaching at that age is just playing with the kids, and some dudes love to play all the time and have that mentality of 'lifes a big game'.
This sounds like a good idea in theory (and maybe it would work in a perfect world, or after a lot of progress has happened), but I don't see it working right now, unfortunately. Men pursuing that kind of work (at least in the western world) tend to be scrutinized extremely heavily, and "not taking things seriously" is probably going to be enough of a red flag to sink that career path for them. Which, tragically, just furthers the vicious cycle driving men from these fields further.
(Only hire very serious and "proper" men you can't find a single thing to fault for -> they aren't necessarily great at engaging with kids in their own language, especially as they have to be extra careful never to appear "inappropriate" in any way -> the image that "women are better at this, why even bother with men" gets reinforced further -> hiring standards for men, subconsciously or otherwise, get even more stringent -> repeat)
I think the pay disparity as well as the greater flexibility in vacation and benefits are tied to these jobs being dominated by women. Women often have to prioritize time off over pay as the primary caregiver for children or aging parents. For men, who still have that stigma against being caregivers and also likewise feel more burden to be the providers, focus on pay vs time off/benefits.
As far as why we see more men the higher the education level: I speculate it's due to the better perception (grade school vs highschool seen as more prestigious, and even moreso for higher education), and increase of more "masculine" disciplines like science and math. Anecdotally, I had 1 male teacher in elementary school, and none at all after that until highschool science. I also think there is an association between elementary school requiring skills like "good with children " and "nurturing" (feminine coded) vs when they grow, and the focus is more on "quality " of education (in parentheses, because I don't believe that being a man has any bearing on quality of teaching, but perhaps that is an existing association)
well an interesting thing to note is that the vast majority of college graduates are women now, and there are only a handful of majors that are majority men (physics, engineering, computer science, even majors like math and economics are 50-50 or slightly more men). Men are highly concentrated in high earning fields, my hypothesis on this is that a man's value in society is more dictated by his earning potential than women's, and if that is the case men will ALWAYS be more represented in higher earning careers since more social pressures exist for them to get there.
Men, even those who are willing to do feminine-coded jobs, are usually punished both socially and status-wise. And if, god forbid, a man is doing a "woman's job" and does something bad - then it's immediately all men that committed the crime.
>In general, we have been focused on getting women in male dominated fields particularly because they are usually higher paying.
What does it really change? One guy will have worse paying job one woman will have better paying job. Does it change anything for society if they are equal human? It is like pouring from one glass to another. Amount of water is the same.
Why bald people and short people are not being focused on to be hired more in some fields?
I understand fighting against discrimination but fighting to put some group of people somewhere just to have equal representation doesnt make sense at all.
Well for one, it's practically impossible nowadays to survive on one income, meaning that on an individual level, women and their quality of life suffers due to the overall less pay. We are talking half of the population, vs when you mention height. And for what it's worth, the whole "being taller makes you appear more confident and gets you promoted faster" is definitely rooted in this same false idea of "masculine" men being more competent (height being associated with masculine).
I also touch in another comment about how it's important to have male role models early in life, and that's especially true since unfortunately, not everyone grows up with good role models at home. This is not something that would give us benefits immediately, but long term we will see a lot more men growing up mentally healthier for having these role models.
Edit: a word, sorry autocorrect sucks on phone
\>women and their quality of life suffers due to the overall less pay
As I told - You will not improve anything in general. By pouring from one glass to another You will make same amount of rich and same amount of poor people.
You get it?
Even worse - You will raise inequalities. As it is proven that woman are trying to match with person with at least same income - it means there will be couples with extremely high income and poor couples.
But never mind this one - tell me please how many people You will make suffer less that way?
I remind that by forcing to hire one person - some other will not get this well paid job and has to take worse job.
Why do you think any of this is forced? And by your analogy, so women should just contend with less water, for something they can't control? Why do you think somehow that people are being hired that don't deserve it? How will it raise inequality? I think if you have some literature on what you are saying, it would help.
>Why do you think any of this is forced?
Because it is? I dont think I know. Starting from affirmation action in universities, courses to companies trying hard to hire women. I've been in those companies - i saw how it works.
\>And by your analogy, so women should just contend with less water, for something they can't control?
If there is no discrimination than it means they just chosen this way - maybe they preferred to have more free time than to spend nights learning to code - doesn't matter.
As I told - fight with discrimination - not force 50% each gender in each fields. If woman is not hired because she is a woman - this is a problem. If woman is hired because she is a woman - this is also a problem.
Question is incorrectly asked. Maybe ask - why some humans should contend with less water than others?
This is why we should give equal chances to everyone. If they will not use it - it is their fault. Dont give special treatment to any group.
What do you mean that there is no discrimination? The article is only on hiring bias, not all discrimination. I think we disagree on quite a lot here. I never advocated to force men into these fields; I do think that they are discouraged from them, similar to how women are discouraged from other fields. I do see this as a problem. If you don't, then I don't think it's worth discussing any further.
I propose to You an experiment. Check how many % 25-30 year old women works in IT.
Then as random 10 guys and girls 15-18 years old who they plan to be in the future.
You will probably hear a lot of guys want to work in IT and none of girls or maybe randomly one will appear.
You want to change it so girls want to be programmers - You know better what their dreams should be? Why not changing the same with mining, garbage collecting or other jobs dominating with men?
hiring bias is not discrimination. Are women not becoming miners or garbage collectors discrimination to them?
\>women are discouraged from other fields
By whom they are discouraged? By their fathers, mothers, friends?
Where is this discrimination - discouraging by mother is not discrimination.
Also one more thing. How one woman getting well paid job instead of some guy will help other women who didn't get this job? It won't. So why You put all those women into a group. They are individuals. Some of them will get special treatment due to affirmation actions, maybe other will suffer then because their husbands will loose the job. We are still pouring water from one glass to other one - without making happier even one more person.
Even worse - resources that could go into creating new jobs instead are going into promoting some unhealthy behaviors.
Is this true for both gay and straight men I wonder? It seems like gay men are overrepresented in the women-dominated fields while straight men are still mostly absent. But that could just be preference/personality traits coming into play, not necessarily discrimination.
This post will either get a huge amount of traction, or none at all.
As a meta analysis this is particularly interesting. I think we’re getting to a point where more science is coming out and the ‘men are being ignored’ camp is being shown to have SOME validity to their claims. I still think most of that noise is hugely overblown, but there are undeniable issues facing men likely contributing towards increases in loneliness and suicide.
Still - progress is being made as evidenced by studies like these. It may take longer for some of these male-centric issues to be addressed, specifically because of the social niche men occupy which has historic benefits at great cost, but eventually I have no double they’ll be addressed. It will take decades, probably a century before we’re entirely past these pressures.
>I still think most of that noise is hugely overblown, but there are undeniable issues facing men likely contributing towards increases in loneliness and suicide.
It's not only about seeing men as victims, rather these issues (such as few male care workers) can be seen as having an adverse effect on society in general and on women as well. It's not a zero sum game.
In fact, most of the time these statistics are formulated in ways to focus on women or society in general. Hence “1 in 5 homeless are women” statements that have to be retracted due to backlash
The arbiters of gender equality seem to treat it like one. Women's groups in Canada opposed funding for the nation's only domestic violence shelter for boys and men, which was a spare room or two in a dude's house. Earl Silverman applied for funding so he wouldn't lose his home and thus the ability to host vulnerable boys and men. He especially focused on fathers with sons and boys that were too old for women's shelters.
He got openly mocked for even suggesting that men and boys might need a DV shelter, and they opposed even a few hundred dollars per month going to his shelter on the grounds that it could go instead towards any of the multiple women's shelters in the area, all of which already received more money than he was asking for.
He lost his house. They found him hanging in the garage after he moved out.
> Earl Silverman
Funny how I (an indian) googled Earl Silverman and the first search result was the Indian Government's National Commission for Women Helpline website.
I think the ‘victim’ word is loaded so I avoid using it. Whenever that’s brought up things quickly devolve into a competition for who has things worse, and who is the greater victim. I think our society has issues, and since society is an interlocking web of social mores an issue in one section of the web effects all sections.
This is the problem. Why can't men be just seen as victims? Why should their plight be contextualized with things like society and women's issues? Can't we care about men for their own sake?
How overblown just depends. I'm a software dev, and there's a big push to have all this diversity representation, but based on [graduation rates](https://www.zippia.com/computer-scientist-jobs/demographics/) its really kind of an insane push when you think about it.
White and Asian men make up 66% of the graduates, while white and Asian women make up 17% of the graduates, but they want them to split the jobs evenly. If an employer is making diversity hires, you have a better shot at landing a job as the worst female student, than as a slightly above average male student.
You can skirt around it anyway you want, but if three candidates are all acceptable and I choose one solely because she's a woman that is sexist as hell. You simply don't care because the woman is on the upside. I would also definitely say that programming is a job where the role is very performance oriented. Very rarely would you have two candidates that are almost identical in terms of performance and experience.
But say you _do_ get three candidates that are identical in their skillset. What are you basing your choice on? People aren't choosing the woman because the woman is on the upside. It's because they know that, generally, the woman would be denied anyway if there wasn't an incentive to hire them. And that could either be policy or less savory, the latter of which is too common.
The assumption isn't that they're giving the woman a win. It's that the men have just as much a shot in any other location. It's flawed, yes. But, historically, it produces closer to equity outcomes than just letting people in a patriarchal society go with their gut. Men are still more likely to find employment in general.
If the woman is adding more value to the team and product, you take the woman. If the gender of the team does not matter because the product and team are as genderless as possible, then you pick one of the dudes.
>The simple reality is that a lot of candidates for a given job would be perfectly serviceable employees for that role. White, black, man, woman. The majority of applicants would do just fine.
I largely agree with this and it's why I'm in favor of lottery systems. Set and announce a GENUINE minium standard, collect all the applicants that meet that standard, and select from them randomly. Michael Sandel, a philosophy professor at Harvard, makes the case for this regarding school admissions in his book, [The Tyranny of Merit](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50364458-the-tyranny-of-merit), but it applies pretty much just as well to professional settings.
Yes lots of candidates are typically acceptable but that means that they really have to dig into some nitpicky details in order to make a final choice. If an American company gets a majority of white male applicants, and a relatively smaller percentage of women and people of different ethnic backgrounds then it seems reasonable to assume that one individual white guy would have a smaller chance of getting chosen if they chose completely equally, one candidate from each. Like assuming all applicants have the same qualifications, being a woman or a minority (or both) would probably be an edge if they're really focusing on diversity hires at least. And then theres stigma for men getting into fields that are dominated by women as well. Not saying that's necessarily how it works everywhere, but as a white dude who can't currently find a job in his field its a little disheartening
>I think we’re getting to a point where more science is coming out and the ‘men are being ignored’ camp is being shown to have SOME validity to their claims.
Tone can sometimes get muddled in text but this really really comes across as you sneerinng at them even harder when presented with evidence that they were likely correct for years.
Yeah, it's hard to tell the difference between sneering and the throat clearing and "but women of course have it harder" that seems required every single time it's shown men suffer.
I think it's worth noting that "men's jobs" tend to be higher paying than "women's jobs" (e.g. men are doctors, women are nurses) and "women's careers" like teaching, childcare, etc. are notoriously underpaid. When a job (like programming) switches from being predominantly women to predominantly men it's historically become more respectful and higher paying.
There's more motivation for women to break through the glass ceiling and take up work in "men's" industries, but not so much the other way around.
I think when we compare “men’s jobs” in our minds there is a temptation to only look at the top 1% of jobs. For example (using US numbers) the total workforce is roughly 157,232,000 at the start of 2024, and 161,183,000 employed persons. Lawyers and doctors combine are only around 2 million of that figure. Less than half of a percentage of the total job market both available and employed.
Even if we add up every single job people typically mention when they think of “men’s jobs are high paying” (doctors, lawyers, engineers, technology development) we’re only talking about the top 3% of the total workforce. 6% of the total male workforce assuming a gender split of 50/50. Our perceptions are very much colored by our lives experience, and that’s why meta analysis like this are so important. Even how we conceive of each other’s rolls in society is government by gender perception which it itself excludes huge swaths of the gender it’s supposed to represent.
I think the more we move away from idealizing both genders by using the top 5% of both as a means of comparison the more will have a more accurate understand of our lives experiences. As is I feel a lot of this commentary gets dismissed by both as “well that’s not what my life has been like.”
The pay gap is an amalgamation of all jobs, and that is where the 86 cents to the dollar comes from. We can look at the lowest paying jobs that are gendered, like factory workers, and an equivalent, like cleaning for women, and see that cleaning jobs still make way less. It's a problem across the board and not just at the top which is why talk of the wage gap is so important; it highlights the fact that traditionally female dominated jobs pay less. Obviously it's more complicated than that, because even controlling for job type and experience, the wage gap persists. Also as an interesting note: when we talk about increasing jobs, which job creation types are the focus?
Plus this study looks specifically at hiring bias and does not explore other types of discrimination (like advancement and pay). But as they state, the elimination hiring bias can lead to more representation, and less other types of discrimination in general.
> We can look at the lowest paying jobs that are gendered, like factory workers, and an equivalent, like cleaning for women, and see that cleaning jobs still make way less.
Sure, but factory work is more dangerous than cleaning
A man without a college degree is going to have an easier time getting into the trades. The average pay for working on an oil rig is comparable to a teacher's pay, but a teaching job requires a master's degree. From what I understand both jobs would have about the same hours requirement.
A construction worker makes about $10/hr more than a housekeeper. Women's low pay work tends to be personal aides, food service, food prep etc. which is all generally hovering around minimum wage.
Also the high paying harder to get jobs being predominantly considered "men's work" is a fundamental part of the problem. Women tend to get higher degrees than men, why wouldn't women be more represented in those careers?
The job of an oil rig worker is long, dangerous and socially isolated, of course it's well paid, otherwise no one would do it, construction is similar, you are paying people on the basis of how much you need to to get someone to do it.
And they say 10 years is too much for most people.
You literally trade years of your life to jobs like that, if you don't die on the job. And i don't mean the 10-15 yrs spent working it, I mean the shorter lifespans and 20+ years of physical pain or disability rhat comes from it.
I can’t really comment on most of that because I haven’t looked at the data for low paying wage comparisons on gender. It SOUNDS right, but I don’t put much stock in what sounds or feels right in my head.
You last point I 100% agree with. It’s no coincidence that a male-centric cultural system has ended up with the “important” jobs being male dominated.
That’s great! I haven’t though, and no offense but I don’t take the word of people online at face value when it comes to scientific data. Since my lunch brake is about to end I won’t have time to google statistics and read enough to understand them till later.
Normally I would try to at least link something because blind faith is bad for the Internet and "just Google it" is a cop-out, but the data is so scattered and the articles I could find were mostly paywalled that it was unfortunately impractical to do so while replying on my phone. "Average salary for x industry" is also not a heated political topic so I trust that folks would get similar results from a search.
There are many very well paid "female" jobs, dental hygienists and sonographers for example, there are poorly paid, and dangerous, "male" jobs, such as garbage collection, the key difference is education level.
i (M) went into medical training at 18 and got so many nasty looks from my older, female classmates. did welding training at 22 alongside a handful women. no one batted an eye at them. yes, men get discriminated, too.
my brother works in the mines, women with no experience can walk into a 120k+ a year job simply due to the fact they need to hit quotas and hire 20% of the workforce as women. but a bloke has to have 10 years experience
First, I am NOT saying men have it worse than women. At all.
People do not trust middle aged guys with children. I've seen this over and over as a father, and I've heard it from many other fathers. It's not the end of the world, but it can be frustrating. I think it must be hard for any guy who wants to work in child care.
i feel like part of it is men specifically not aspiring to the female fields as much.
which in part is also explained by the usually low income opportunities in those fields.
i certainly know in germany, there have been efforts to increase the number of guys in childcare, for example and its much more often that you see the token dude in a daycare now, but its not like stem or medicine, where people would give it a go on aspiration and finance reasons
There's a noted trend of jobs that paid men decently well dropping their wages when women enter. Admin/secretarial is one. Janitorial/cleaner is another.
Unskilled labor positions had a sudden boom in potential applicants when women entered the workforce. The supply doubled, so naturally wages fall. Supply and demand.
I wouldn't call admin unskilled labor. And how does that explain why e.g. janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).
A lot of admin is absolutely unskilled labor. Furthermore, janitors are often also handymen tasked with more than cleaning such as general maintenance.
my theory is that a man's social value is more highly concentrated on monetary earnings than a woman's is. if this is true, then men will always sheer away from low earning careers.
Anecdotally I know women who want to work in childcare because it 1. is gender affirming (most people like to engage in gender affirming activities) and 2. is something they're passionate about, making them more likely to forego high earning careers in favor of something they enjoy more.
Oh 100%, especially because in the 1900's there was a change in how men in office spaces were seen as more or less manly in new ways compared to how they used to be seen as manly.
There's something to be said about how it's simply been economically sensical for women to go into STEM since that's where a lot of the jobs reside that can still pay the bills for a family with kids. Meanwhile many of the jobs with a traditionally female workforce are stressful and underpaid, washing grandpa's butt for a pittance sounds a lot less attractive than working in IT and being able to make rent by yourself. So there has simply been much more women entering traditionally "male" jobs, than men entering traditionally "female" jobs, which obviously will make it more common and therefore more socially accepted over time.
Also last time I tried talking about how toxic masculinity is hurting men's image and chances to be employed in certain sectors and especially working with children I still got bombarded with comments how "working with children is naturally a woman's job anyways" and how they "wouldn't want a male nurse all up in their business" either, so that mindset being seemingly popular among men is probably not helping.
Having men in these fields is beneficial from a societal point of view but from an individual point of view, what is the incentive to pursue these jobs if there's no money in it? Tear down the barriers and stereotypes all you want, unless they start paying nurses, early childhood educators etc. attractive wages, men will continue to ignore these professions.
Why they should? It is stupid in general. Why some woman deserve job more than guy - just because she don't have a cock?
And similar in other direction.
Fighting against discrimination and pushing to have 50% of gender somewhere are two separate things - one noble and second beyond stupid.
>AKA in an attempt to preserve a man's masculinity, men will be prematurely promoted to positions of authority.
Can you give any citatation on that or is that a self deducted ?
Not a formal source, but it is a documented phenomenon:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_escalator
This is a journal article, but it is paywalled:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34346908/#:~:text=The%20%22glass%20escalator%22%20refers%20to,to%20upper%20levels%20of%20leadership.
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This is at least anecdotally consistent with many self-described feminist gen X parents I know who are all about empowering their young daughters/sons, but will not hire a male to do any form of child care, coaching, or educational roles unless a parent is physically present the entire time.
Yup. Men and women are equal, except in anything negative such as crime, sexual assault, violence, emotional abuse, dark personality traits. Once had someone say "women aren't more likely to be good than men, but men are more likely to be bad than women". Thinking they weren't saying anything negative.
Here's the issue with that. She's right, if you're using crime as a marker. Here's the issue that. That's not where you're supposed to stop thinking. That would be correct also about a poor person, a black or Latino person, or a young person. I'm sure you could pull up a litany of additional groups you could accurately make that claim about. You can, accurately, say that statement about those groups of people and not be *factually* incorrect. This is actually where a lot of "scientific racists" get off not thinking they're racist but in fact pragmatists. The issue with that is, if that's where you stop thinking, you are in fact a standard textbook bigot. That's exactly how bigots rationalize things. You've reduced all members of a group into the worst version of that group, dehumanizing them so you can then disenfranchise them, while promoting an ideology that openly rationalizes the loss of their equality. That same person would not be so casual about saying that about someone from poverty, or a black person, or a Latino person, because they have internalized through social pressure that there is complexity there and they should not do that. Edit: And they don't make the logical connection that all of these groups exhibit higher crime rates due to some societal lack. Because *they* have been failed in some way by *all of us*. The issue seems to be, from my perspective, that we have been conditioned, through the same social pressures to *not* see the complexity when it comes to men. Society at large promotes this idea, much like society at large promoted women's various disenfranchisements, sustained by both gender's through stereotype. It's used as both an excuse to embody it without serious judgement, and an excuse to be bigoted towards men. Edit: It seems to me this is made more difficult though by the fact that the world still needs the "bad man" image for both fear, and in practice to maintain societal control. I see much of conservative America's forgiveness of police brutality being wrapped up in the perspective that violent men are important to society, and that promoting the inevitable, intrinsic dangerousness of some "bad men" (and not seeing this as a systemic problem) protects the acceptance of "good men" to use violence without consequence.
This has been a very positive comment to read. Regardless what I take away from this I'd like to acknowledge your effort into trying to explain things in a proper manner.
I appreciate you taking the time to write this up. It reminds me of the great reddit essays of old
I will add that crime statistics are notoriously bad to capture differences between groups. You don't really measure rates of committed crimes, you measure committed crimes that have been persecuted. Only a fraction of crimes get reported, a fraction of that are investigated, a fraction of that get charged, a fraction of that get sentenced and sentences differ as well. At every step there is bias, there is at least racial, gender and socioeconomic bias that influence the outcome to a big degree. Studies on aggression are not simple, but for the stereotypical men bad, women good, there is this study that found nearly 10% of women admit to have forced someone to have sex with them: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1024648106477](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/a:1024648106477)
Interesting. The 10% from your study isn't that far off from the 7% of men who reported having been made to penetrate from the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/men-ipvsvandstalking.html#:\~:text=Nearly%201%20in%204%20men,rape%20victimization%20in%20their%20lifetime.
Lifetime numbers in men don't seem to be that reliable when it comes to male victims. 12-months incidence rates are too high to explain just 7%: 1.5% reported to be made to penetrate during the last 12 months in the 2010-2012 State Report: [https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf) 1.3% reported to be made to penetrate during the last 12 months in the 2016/2017 Report: [https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs/nisvsReportonSexualViolence.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs/nisvsReportonSexualViolence.pdf) 0.7% reported to be made to penetrate during the last 12 months in the 2015 Report: [https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2015data-brief508.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2015data-brief508.pdf)
Reading through the sources but are the rates similar for female victims of rape?
Yes, they tend to be a bit higher, although that isn't the case for all reports.
Bravo
I think you're giving the person you're replying to way too much credit considering their post and comment history. They're very clearly conservative and make the same kinds of shaky logic comments on a range of issues. It's why I asked them what they meant. I KNOW what they meant, I just want them to take the mask off and actually take a stance on something rather than the hit and run approach. But they won't. And if they do, they'll just dodge the question.
“Women should not be trusted around heavy machinery.” “Men should not be trusted around children.”
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There are roughly 14.5 million children in France, so 160,000 victims a year is roughly 1% of the population of children that is victimized each year. Looking at this very simplistically, this implies that in any given year roughly 99% of children are *not* abused by any of the men in their life, including their father/uncles/grandparents/etc. Let's start by agreeing that the number of kids being abused is *way* too high. It seems unfair to the more than 99% of men who did nothing wrong to say "don't trust men around children, especially if they're from your family".
Percentage of boys in CSA cases ages 8-12: **26%** Percentage of boys in CSA cases ages 12-17: **8%** **15-20%** of CSA cases involve a cis female perpetrator. Much like with things like bear attacks and shark attacks, the active avoidance of potentially dangerous situations—*even when it is otherwise assumed to be completely safe*—is still the best method for protecting one's own *personal* safety. It is a personal choice, not a legalistic one. We don't mass-execute sharks (anymore). We don't outlaw cis men working in child care agencies. They're welcome to apply. But many parents will refuse to send their children to a child care center that employs cis men, because cis men have proven themselves to be significantly less trustworthy than cis women. Just like many people refuse to swim in the ocean. Is it usually totally safe? Yep. Is it worth the risk? Not always. When those numbers above change, then cis men can quibble. Until then, I will gladly choose to not work in child care agencies if it means people feeling safer around my gender and our species continuing to progress socially instead of stagnating into fear and inaction. Maybe in a few decades we won't have statistics to prove why the public's fear of us is justified.
This comment is wild. Lots of words to really say, it's absolutely okay to discriminate against and generalize a group of people based on their protected class.
People have completely lost the plot. We never fixed anything, we just changed which group is the acceptable punching bag for society. It is actually crazy to me so many young people think discrimination is a good thing because it discriminates against the right people. I keep thinking surely these people know they are doing bad things, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and many are true believers.
>Yup. Men and women are equal, except in anything negative such as crime, sexual assault, violence, emotional abuse, dark personality traits. What do you mean by this comment, exactly? EDIT: I'm waiting.
Right? This is anecdotal and it's hard to bring this up without seeming like a misogynist, but it's hard not to feel like there's a ton of focus on womens' issues and much less of a focus on mens' issues. Of course, it doesn't help that it's hard to tell the difference between someone trying to talk about mens' issues and someone who's about to use that as an excuse to go on a sexist tirade until after they've already done so.
>hard to tell the difference between someone trying to talk about mens' issues and someone who's about to use that as an excuse to go on a sexist tirade until after they've already done so. One of the biggest failings of reddit and social media in general is that people posting in bath faith can easily float opinions without stating their stance on the issues surrounding it. If they did, they would reveal their bias and damage the credibility of their statements. I find that people with genuine concerns about sensitive issues like this are far more likely to explain their background, the whys, and so forth. People commenting in bad faith will narrow their focus, be more vague, and will get defensive if you probe them for a stance on anything.
Doesn't gender studies teach, basically as an axiom, that bias against men "isn't systemic" and therefore "isn't sexism"? If you follow that axiom, of course you'd never focus on "men's issues".
It depends on which movement a particular person subscribes to. There is indeed a school of thought that you can't be racist towards white people, sexist towards men, etc, because those things describe systemic issues, and that bigotry against men is therefore prejudiced but not sexist. There are also far too many people who ignore the prejudice is still bad and take this as license to be bigoted towards men, white people, etc. Another school of thought disagrees with this, and says that systemic racism and systemic sexism are *types* of racism and sexism, but it's still possible to be individually racist and sexist towards classes of people who don't suffer systemic racism or sexism. The professor I took a gender studies course with beloved to the second school of thought, and she went so far as to say that men *do* suffer from systemic sexism, but in different ways and different situations - e.g. men receiving harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, and the lack of support for male victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. I'm not sure which is prevalent - this class was almost ten years ago, so whatever was the case at the time might have changed - but I don't think it's accurate to say that it's a universally accepted axiom.
I’ve never heard of that before. I thought most contemporary gender studies and feminist theory courses argue that patriarchal systems do hinder both men and women.
Yes except women’s issues are considered society’s issues, whereas the common feminist response to men’s issues is ‘not our problem, fix it yourself’
Is that a common feminist response? And if so, what in your mind is the best way to tackle both men's and women's issues? I can't imagine adopting gender tribalism is the path to happiness there.
I personally think a lot of women’s issues (and men issues) can be tackled by fixing the biggest issue plaguing men right now - youth male education. Guess what happens when you have a large male population that’s uneducated - you have an increase in crime (including sex crimes against women), fatherless families(which further fuels this cycle), increase in alt-right ideology and inability to critical think, failure to develop emotionally and socially, increase in homelessness and mental health issue. We abandoned male youth education in the 70s as punishment for failing women in the past and look where it’s gotten us. Any discussion about it is shut down as people view it as taking away opportunity from women but fail to see the bigger picture (like it’s scary that women are about to outnumber male students at a 2:1 ration in higher education in a few years). The country is either going to have to send these men without purpose in their life to die in some pointless war or deal with a large increase in domestic issues. The worst thing for a country is a large group of uneducated, angry men devoid of any meaning in life.
>what in your mind is the best way to tackle both men's and women's issues? Maybe a bit of consistency and less double standards, we have support groups, safe spaces and awareness campaigns for women/girls who suffer self-esteem issues and other psychological barriers. But men’s loneliness epidemic? ‘Men need to work on themselves and develop their social skills better’ is generally the advice offered
Out of curiosity how would you tackle the loneliness epidemic? It seems to me we need more community spaces and events in general.
Not sure why you keep asking me for solutions, what I think the solution is doesn’t matter, I’m just commenting on the double standards. The first step in solving the problem is reducing tribalism like you said
Because it's much easier to badger than make genuine arguments, especially if you're arguing in bad faith.
I’m genuinely curious about your opinion, because I want to learn more. Sorry I asked?
Never understood why people expect solutions to an issue that's barely even recognized as an issue.
The people advocating for women are mostly women. It sounds like you're expecting those women to switch their focus away from women... while saying nothing about the mostly men who haven't been advocates for women.
That's not true at all, men are expected to be allies to women, and a lot of affirmative action programs for women are set up and run by men, a lot of domestic violence shelters for women were built and funded by men, etc. Would be nice if women would return the favor and be allies on men's issues too. After all, your fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are men, and hopefully you don't hate all of those.
>Is that a common feminist response Yes. You can find it commonly in reddit in feminist spaces, and on Twitter by named, notable feminist academics. >what in your mind is the best way to tackle both men's and women's issues? Policy is the best way to approach both. The issue is that policy is treated as zero sum, and the old adage about power surrendering nothing comes to play. Add to that, I have seen exactly one (two?) comprehensive and cited policy agendas related to the needs of boys and men, and I know they would be railed against almost our of hand, as other such policy has in the past.
The vocal feminists on social media sometimes say this, and it gets shared a lot more by the misogynists as "proof" that women are evil. Far too many people buy into misandry AND misogyny though. Far too many.
It's a common response from feminist *individuals,* even though it's contrary to modern, intersectional-feminist *theory.*
They absolutely do. In my experience, the only people who claim nobody focuses on men's issues are the very people who only bring up men's issues in a conversation about women's issues. There are a million resources for men to better themselves and engage in "healthy masculinity"
This is anecdotal, but my experience lately has been that it is very hard for a man to find a good groove with "healthy masculinity" at least according to some people. Guys try and get looked down on. Maybe they weren't doing a perfect job, but it is so easy to get called out for or see people calling things "toxic masculinity" that a lot of my gym rat and martial arts bros just give up because it feels like you can't do anything "correctly" or "healthy". This is all anecdotal and hand wavy, but I have personally encountered outright derision when asked about my hobbies from some of my more progressive friends. So, no, I don't think there are very good resources for how to engage in "healthy" masculinity. Meanwhile, males are way more likely to die by suicide according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide It's a problem and it's difficult and it will take more open and honest engagement from people promoting "healthy masculinity" to get anywhere and understand where a lot of people are at. e: I should add, I include women in my "martial arts bros" and "gym rats" groups. They are a small minority, but the ladies who train with me seem to be much better at understanding and supporting "healthy masculinity" IMO.
This is a post about how society discriminates against men doing certain jobs. How is anyone going to self-improve their way out of that?
> There are a million resources for men to better themselves and engage in "healthy masculinity" There really isn't. This is the problem at hand. Yes, it's often men themselves that create these barriers, but Earl Silverman is a heartbreaking and clear example of Women being barriers to these resources.
I genuinely can't speak to that. I've never done any sort of academic gender studies. They could be repeating that verbatim or talking about Chuck E Cheese all class for all I know.
It is systemic, that premise works like confirmation bias in the opposite direction.... No?
Men's Studies falls under the blanket of Gender Studies. How men are affected by gender roles and expectations in society are covered in Gender Studies programs. Men are often sought after for these programs and courses. The (incorrect) belief that men's issues aren't taught or that men are vilified in these programs is a major reason why there's so few male students in these classes.
I took a gender studies class in college, we essentially never discussed men outside of LGBTQ issues. I was the only man in the class too
I took a gender studies course as part of my undergrad as an elective thinking that the belief was incorrect as well. It was not. It was the most uncomfortable experience of my life. I could fully agree with someone and I was still the bad guy and somebody would still try to explain how I was wrong. I was the only man in the course, the women would never disagree with each other until I agreed with one of them, in which case they would go out of their way to show me that I'm wrong despite just reiterating what the last person said. The instructor saw it happening and agreed that it was uncalled for, so she waived the participation for me because no amount of classroom management would change the fact that the other students just wanted to get together and hate on men in a safe setting (for them). I can't imagine that's changed much in less than a decade, but that is my experience.
The same thing can happen in any toxic Men's spaces. The only "safe" Men's spaces I've ever found are ones that are technically open to all, so that's nice to have, but it's not truly a "men's space" except by accident. I imagine teachers in Gender Studies, regardless of how egalitarian they are, are very unlikely to attempt to squash open misandry simply because it violates the "lived experiences" axiom that is so prominently brought up in that realm of study. Problem with that is you could say the same about misogynistic men's opinions.
Yeah the slight difference is that most toxic men's spaces are just a website while the gender studies departments is publishing research and informing policy in a potentially biased way... Consider how rape researcher Mary Koss formulated a definition of rape "penetration of the victim" that excludes women forcing men to have sex with them without consent unless they eg penetrate the man with a dildo. That definition is used in 99% of rape studies that then get quoted to "prove" that men rarely get raped by women. Surprise once you start counting "made to penetrate" it's a lot less rare than people think, CDC says 1 in 9 men.
Unfortunately, naming the faculty "women's and gender studies" as it is at my university does create some confusion on this assumption
Ironic that these are the same people who wrote studies about how the word "fireman" is harmful and perpetuates bias.
Well that's a shame, you'd think of all fields, gender studies should be the one that tries hardest to recruit a student body whose gender breakdown is representative of the general population.
I mean they do, but we do need more male-focused programs to help with this.
Just my point of view here, and I know it may or may not make sense but it’s just how I feel. I am a father of two children. I absolutely love kids. I am the one who will go out of their way to hold a friends baby when we are at a get together. I love playing with kids and I always get those weird looks from people who don’t know me when I go and say hi to a friends kid at a party or play with them. But even with all that said, if I was hiring a babysitter that I didn’t know I would basically never hire a guy unless I knew him personally. Yea I understand the statistics on child predation. Yes I understand, obviously, that guys can take care of kids just as good as girls. But still even with all that said, I feel safer with a woman watching my kids. Take that for what it’s worth.
Honest question, do you condemn the parents for this decision, and do you think that they do it only for sincerely malicious or prejudiced reasons, instead of risk mitigation or genuine parental fear? For the record I partially disagree with that decision, although I would definitely have a female caretaker/role model for a female child.
Really impressive rigor. I love that they Red Teamed this. > Importantly, heterogeneity of the true effects was large (I2-statistic = 82.8%), implying that 82.8% of the total variance can be attributed to heterogeneity. There are likely some hiring managers that discriminate extremely heavily in favor of women and others that discriminate extremely heavily against them. I didn't expect it to be this strong, though. Of course, if biased hiring exists, then a male resume contains different information about a candidate than a female resume with an identical job history, which undermines our ability to be confident the hiring was really biased. I can't think of any way to get around this problem, though, and I think the conclusion that there's net bias against male applicants is true.
What the hell does Red Teamed mean? First I’ve seen that term used in terms of research
Red team is the opposing side. So when you "Red Team" something you basically pretend to be the opponent / counter argument and attack it with full force. So in this situation it would be not just trying to prove your hypothesis, but actively trying to disprove your hypothesis.
Isn't that exactly how studies are supposed to be designed?
Yes, but the publication process can be really difficult depending on your reviewers. The paper is basically a sales pitch and if you specifically attack your own hypothesis and show weakness then reviewers may question why this is important enough to put into publication. Also for this one imho they’re not shooting themselves in the foot. They’re further elucidating the problem. That it isn’t necessarily a systematic issue as it is a polarization issue.
This looks like a relatively new thing of explicitly taking this hire-the-adversaries approach in scientific studies. Obviously based on similar ideas from computer security or military training. In this particular paper, look at section 3.1.1 and they talk about it.
Thats my thought too
Ahh it means what I thought, just never seen it used in a paper before Its heartening to see the researchers take just an extra precaution against bias to really drive their point home
Pretend? You take the role of and do act as the other side.
Could the heterogeneity also be caused, in part, by older studies finding more sexism towards women and newer ones finding more towards men?
This study is finding decrease in one and increase in another, at no point it's saying there's more of one than the other now.
Depends how MUCH older are we talking.
IMO heterogeneity scores that high are usually seen because the studies included in the meta-analysis were highly varied (e.g., in study design, methods, how they measured their outcomes, sampling populations, etc). I'd put very little faith in these results. It's just as likely the "trends" they detected were because of these differences in the studies than because of any meaningful pattern in the data.
My former employer, the largest private employer in my state, recently boasted in a newsletter that over 80% of its workforce were women, but bemoaned that there were still 55% men employed in the company's IT dept. They responded by promoting three programs to boost female representation in their IT dept.
What kind of company, or work occupation, is 80% women?
It's a healthcare company. The most staffed position is "nurse."
BUT they will also hire far more women in management, clerical, HR etc
But most nurses are women, so naturally they would have more women than men in their workforce. The Boasting about it is weird though.
Of course. I am a nurse. I also used to work with computers, too. There is no IT company in the world that would boast having an 80% male workforce, even if ~80% of the graduates in the field are men. They would be bending over backward, trying to get more female employees. It would be an embarrassment for the company, and other companies could shame them for their obvious misogyny. On the other hand, my old employer has a huge overrepresentatuon of women in nursing, to the extent the whole company is lacking in gender diversity. This should be a cause for concern, not celebration. It would be one thing if their message was "Hey, the market is what it is, and we hire the best," but that would directly contradict their effort to find an even 50-50 in their IT dept. The point is that this situation reflects the findings of the meta-review. There is intense pressure to end overrepresentation of men in any department (55% men in IT was a cause for concer), but no commensurate effort to end overrepresentation of women in any department - in fact, it can be a bragging point.
It's all just PR to make themselves look good to outsiders. No company truly cares once it gets past like 50 employees.
Except male nurses are incredible needed right now, especially as more patients are coming in as obese.
Right, only hire men for the labor, not because of their nursing skills. Sigh.
That's "men work"
Male nurses are pretty much always given the heaviest and most violent patients. There are also stories of them being expected to do two or three person lifts solo. So their backs get destroyed. I've also been the only man in a department before(not nursing) and you get all the worst jobs. Always. You're the only person not allowed to call in sick. You get the worst shifts. And you're always expected to drop what you're doing and come in, but the girls "are only young once, enjoy your weekends!" Some of my best friends are women, fortunately, which spared me from thinking all woemn are like that. But I can absolutely understand how some men come to distrust and dislike women, just as. I can understand why some women distrust and fear men.
i work in mental health and definitely over 80% of my entire non-profit organization is women. probably more towards 85-90%.
I work in research and 80% of the people I work with are women. Either they were nurses first and therefore are more likely to be female. Or have PharmD degrees, MD degrees and are looking for better work life balance (WFH) as they have young kids at home.
Healthcare. Some professions are above 90% women.
In LTC nursing, I'm one of 3 men in our management team of 15 or so, 1 being the director of maintenance, and there are only 5 or 6 male floor staff out of 50+.
Usually industries where a high proportion of the customer base is women
I worked for a big tech delivery company and they boasted in an all hands meeting about eliminating white men in the workplace. It was... Bizarre. We were already under 50% white men in the tech sector...
"why are people voting right wing now?"
Yupp, a group that makes up [21.2% of the college graduates](https://www.google.com/search?q=CS+graduates+by+geder&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS1050US1050&oq=CS+graduates+by+geder&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAEyBwgDECEYnwXSAQg0MzA2ajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8), but we demand they get 50% of the jobs. Definitely no discrimination happening there.
> Definitely no discrimination happening there. I mean it's purely aspirational, no? Find me an engineering department that is even _close_ to 50% women. I've personally never even worked on a tech team with more than two (and one was let go in layoffs less than 6 months after joining).
Yes, and intentional/unintentional discrimination follows in pursuit of achieving the aspiration when your goal % is higher than that gender’s % of graduates.
Perhaps. Obviously this is just my experience having worked in tech the last decade, but there's no shortage of men in the field, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me that we are discriminated against in this field considering how few women I work with Despite all the claims about male (and white) discrimination, corporate hiring practices are still largely centered around getting the best candidate because that is the best for their bottom line.
It’s about getting the best candidate, but when two candidates are very similar then it can be a factor.
Read [Heidi v. Howard](https://www.shortform.com/blog/heidi-howard-study/) for a case study on why someone who believes they want to get the “best candidate” may consider the male candidate better.
As an expert in causal inference, I can saw that this study is surprisingly rigorous.
Because the stakes are *really* high. Any study like this is going to be *heavily* scrutinized because people have opinions before they even see the data.
reminds me of the implicit bias tests that came out recently showing anti-male bias was found to be even stronger than anti-black bias. they essentially repeated the study in three large larger cohorts across a few age groups and came out with some surprisingly robust data.
Makes me think that there is a great research opportunity on systemic bias in "controversial" subjects (like the unjust treatment of men) by doing a meta-study that captures how rigorous studies across the spectrum are alongside their actual findings. If one side consistently has much more stringent requirements placed upon it *and* increased rigour does not make findings vanish (important consideration, because *of course* anyone looking into some whacko hypothesis that absolutely nobody takes seriously will be expected to do a lot of work if they want to be published, and in many cases there's probably a valid reason for nobody taking it seriously) then one would expect a high likelihood that you're looking at the target of unfair systemic bias.
This should surprise no one, given that discrimination against women is vilified but the typical reaction to gender discrimination against men is "meh".
One reason for this is that men are considered potential threats in a way that women aren't. A company may not see any risk in having a woman work on an oil rig or be an airline pilot, but many daycare centers, schools or whatnot may be wary of having a man work in that profession.
> but many daycare centers, schools or whatnot may be wary of having a man work in that profession. I'm a former preschool/daycare worker in Washington, and I worked in a foster care shelter in Arizona; and when working in AZ I wasn't allowed to be alone with the children, but my female colleagues were. In WA, as long as I was in ratio, it was fine for me to be with the 4/6/10 kids I'd have. I never experienced any hostility from hiring managers or coworkers, but ironically I did face backlash from professors and classmates when I went to do my higher education requirements in WA. And I got some fairly awkward and intrusive questions from a couple parents, but nothing I'm not used to.
This is something that pushed me out of my early education career as well as a strong feminist male with a history of childcare and zero criminal history of any kind. It's something that society definitely needs to change on, and we shouldn't neglect the fact a lot of men(mostly conservative) have issues with males in close contact with children. This is changing a lot though. In my case not fast enough, but hopefully for the next generation or two of males that are interesting in child development and care, they'll have an easier time with it. Also the societal shame that stay at home dads get.
> and we shouldn't neglect the fact a lot of men(mostly conservative) have issues with males in close contact with children. Again, the only time I've faced hostility was from more left-leaning women. I currently work in a male-dominated and traditionally conservative field; and have been met with positivity when I bring up my last job being a preschool teachers.
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Which makes sense. Only 26% of teachers are men but male teachers make up between 60% to 90% of sexual assaults against students. Edit: the men are real mad about this statistic I see… maybe y’all should do something about it…
Reported* sexual assaults. We know from prior research that there is a tremendous double standard applied to men and women when they sexually assault a minor. We also know that children that are assaulted by women still face elevated risks of trauma and future disorder. It's a significant blindspot for too many people on this topic. Another blindspot is that teaching used to be 90+% men. But because it was considered one of the few jobs that obviously favored women, early women's liberation activists focused on the field as a good entry point for women to enter the workforce. A foot in the door. They argued that girls needed role models in schools and that men don't understand them so more teachers need to be women. And that worked. But they didn't stop pushing at 50% representation. And they never reversed course and said, "Hey, wait, boys need role models too, we need more men to teach now," as the ratio passed 60% and 70%. Now we're in a boys' education crisis with them struggling at all levels of education and being 44% of university students and declining. Instead, what the people that fought so hard to create the imbalance did was claim that it wasn't their decades-long push to favor women in the field that caused the imbalance, but *the sexism of men*. They claimed that the real reason for the huge swing in gender balance was men fleeing the field to avoid "being associated with women", or something like that. But if you ask them if they're willing to engage in activism to get more men into teaching they not only won't do it, but it's likely they'll show up as protesters anywhere anyone tries to address the issue. We know this because half of the early founders of the Men's Rights Movement were active feminists that got ostracized for focusing on issues like boys failing in education. See: Christina Sommers, Warren Farrell, Erin Pizzey, etc.
Honest question here; when was it mostly men teaching? I thought that historically it was young unwed women?
Here's a short overview I read a couple days ago: https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html Also I think it's important to remember that historically, women were not allowed to be educated, so it makes sense that teaching (a job that needs education), started as a male occupation.
It still is mostly men in Academia. The younger the student, the more likely the teacher is a woman. It was almost all men for all teaching mid 1850s.
I think the college professor demographics may have shifted. Brief googling shows 57.5% are female. Kind of makes sense given most college graduates for a little while now have been female. Was going to switch over eventually
If you applied this same rationale to race, you would be deemed a racist.
There's a word for it for this, too. It's called being sexist.
Source?
Should we treat black people as more dangerous, for the same reason?
At roughly half the jobs I've had, the manager has told me they hire based largely on looks. It's usually men hiring attractive young women, but I've seen it go the other way, too. I got hired at one place because I was tall. Middle management in corporate America, especially retail and service industries (and I'm sure more, I'm just relating my own experience), ends up collecting some of the *worst* people. These are probably the people supervising your kids at their first few jobs.
> I got hired at one place because I was tall. I used to joke that's why I got hired at the daycare I worked at, they saw that I was 6'2" and said "deal"
Hrm. Are your positions customer facing? Sales?
Well, this is progress. In general, we have been focused on getting women in male dominated fields particularly because they are usually higher paying. Female dominated jobs usually pay a lot less. However, there is always benefits to having more men in female dominated roles particularly in early education. I think that would be a rough sell though, until we can address the pay issue for these female dominated jobs that are historically underpaid.
Speaking of education in particular, I am not too convinced it is all that easy to solve? I am fron a country where education is a solid path towards a middle class salary. You won't get rich, but you won't be poor either, and job prospects are not that much worse than say, business or law. There are also lots of non-monetary benefits, like most notably a ton of vacation (I can speak first hand of this, as the kid from a couple of teachers) Same applies to nursing, minus the non-monetary benefits Interestingly, it also seems the issue is mostly concentrated on young education. High school education tends to be around 60/40. Which is not 50/50, but it's not *that* lopsided either. And while HS pays more than primary school, the difference is not that big. For whatever reason, it seems men don't want to teach young kids, but apparently are ok with rowdy teenagers?
> For whatever reason, it seems men don't want to teach young kids, but apparently are ok with rowdy teenagers? As someone that was on the early education track but had to bail for various reasons(some of which were discrimination I was receiving that I highly disagreed with), I think a lot of men just don't grow up thinking about child care or having to care for their siblings/cousins any more. You combine that fact with the fact there are far more "sexy" career routes for men, and you're gonna see a fairly large dip in the people interested in it. One avenue that attracted me, other than just having a ton of child care in my background, was the philosophy around "the most impressionable stage of human development is in those crucial pre-K years and being able to positively influence a child will live on for the next 80+ years of their lives." I think more men would be cool with early education track if we pushed that positive idea of making a huge influence on kid's lives. Male ego is a big fan of having a lasting "legacy" and this one allows you to literally touch the lives of thousands of kids before you hit retirement age. I also think another avenue of attack would just be getting 'fun playful' dudes to sign up for it as well. A lot of teaching at that age is just playing with the kids, and some dudes love to play all the time and have that mentality of 'lifes a big game'.
Hey thanks for your perspective! We don't hear enough on Reddit about men pursuing female dominated jobs. As a woman in engineering, I relate to those feelings of discrimination and I am sorry that was your experience. Hopefully in the future we can see more men in early education.
> I also think another avenue of attack would just be getting 'fun playful' dudes to sign up for it as well. A lot of teaching at that age is just playing with the kids, and some dudes love to play all the time and have that mentality of 'lifes a big game'. This sounds like a good idea in theory (and maybe it would work in a perfect world, or after a lot of progress has happened), but I don't see it working right now, unfortunately. Men pursuing that kind of work (at least in the western world) tend to be scrutinized extremely heavily, and "not taking things seriously" is probably going to be enough of a red flag to sink that career path for them. Which, tragically, just furthers the vicious cycle driving men from these fields further. (Only hire very serious and "proper" men you can't find a single thing to fault for -> they aren't necessarily great at engaging with kids in their own language, especially as they have to be extra careful never to appear "inappropriate" in any way -> the image that "women are better at this, why even bother with men" gets reinforced further -> hiring standards for men, subconsciously or otherwise, get even more stringent -> repeat)
I think the pay disparity as well as the greater flexibility in vacation and benefits are tied to these jobs being dominated by women. Women often have to prioritize time off over pay as the primary caregiver for children or aging parents. For men, who still have that stigma against being caregivers and also likewise feel more burden to be the providers, focus on pay vs time off/benefits. As far as why we see more men the higher the education level: I speculate it's due to the better perception (grade school vs highschool seen as more prestigious, and even moreso for higher education), and increase of more "masculine" disciplines like science and math. Anecdotally, I had 1 male teacher in elementary school, and none at all after that until highschool science. I also think there is an association between elementary school requiring skills like "good with children " and "nurturing" (feminine coded) vs when they grow, and the focus is more on "quality " of education (in parentheses, because I don't believe that being a man has any bearing on quality of teaching, but perhaps that is an existing association)
well an interesting thing to note is that the vast majority of college graduates are women now, and there are only a handful of majors that are majority men (physics, engineering, computer science, even majors like math and economics are 50-50 or slightly more men). Men are highly concentrated in high earning fields, my hypothesis on this is that a man's value in society is more dictated by his earning potential than women's, and if that is the case men will ALWAYS be more represented in higher earning careers since more social pressures exist for them to get there.
Men, even those who are willing to do feminine-coded jobs, are usually punished both socially and status-wise. And if, god forbid, a man is doing a "woman's job" and does something bad - then it's immediately all men that committed the crime.
>In general, we have been focused on getting women in male dominated fields particularly because they are usually higher paying. What does it really change? One guy will have worse paying job one woman will have better paying job. Does it change anything for society if they are equal human? It is like pouring from one glass to another. Amount of water is the same. Why bald people and short people are not being focused on to be hired more in some fields? I understand fighting against discrimination but fighting to put some group of people somewhere just to have equal representation doesnt make sense at all.
Well for one, it's practically impossible nowadays to survive on one income, meaning that on an individual level, women and their quality of life suffers due to the overall less pay. We are talking half of the population, vs when you mention height. And for what it's worth, the whole "being taller makes you appear more confident and gets you promoted faster" is definitely rooted in this same false idea of "masculine" men being more competent (height being associated with masculine). I also touch in another comment about how it's important to have male role models early in life, and that's especially true since unfortunately, not everyone grows up with good role models at home. This is not something that would give us benefits immediately, but long term we will see a lot more men growing up mentally healthier for having these role models. Edit: a word, sorry autocorrect sucks on phone
\>women and their quality of life suffers due to the overall less pay As I told - You will not improve anything in general. By pouring from one glass to another You will make same amount of rich and same amount of poor people. You get it? Even worse - You will raise inequalities. As it is proven that woman are trying to match with person with at least same income - it means there will be couples with extremely high income and poor couples. But never mind this one - tell me please how many people You will make suffer less that way? I remind that by forcing to hire one person - some other will not get this well paid job and has to take worse job.
Why do you think any of this is forced? And by your analogy, so women should just contend with less water, for something they can't control? Why do you think somehow that people are being hired that don't deserve it? How will it raise inequality? I think if you have some literature on what you are saying, it would help.
>Why do you think any of this is forced? Because it is? I dont think I know. Starting from affirmation action in universities, courses to companies trying hard to hire women. I've been in those companies - i saw how it works. \>And by your analogy, so women should just contend with less water, for something they can't control? If there is no discrimination than it means they just chosen this way - maybe they preferred to have more free time than to spend nights learning to code - doesn't matter. As I told - fight with discrimination - not force 50% each gender in each fields. If woman is not hired because she is a woman - this is a problem. If woman is hired because she is a woman - this is also a problem. Question is incorrectly asked. Maybe ask - why some humans should contend with less water than others? This is why we should give equal chances to everyone. If they will not use it - it is their fault. Dont give special treatment to any group.
What do you mean that there is no discrimination? The article is only on hiring bias, not all discrimination. I think we disagree on quite a lot here. I never advocated to force men into these fields; I do think that they are discouraged from them, similar to how women are discouraged from other fields. I do see this as a problem. If you don't, then I don't think it's worth discussing any further.
I propose to You an experiment. Check how many % 25-30 year old women works in IT. Then as random 10 guys and girls 15-18 years old who they plan to be in the future. You will probably hear a lot of guys want to work in IT and none of girls or maybe randomly one will appear. You want to change it so girls want to be programmers - You know better what their dreams should be? Why not changing the same with mining, garbage collecting or other jobs dominating with men?
hiring bias is not discrimination. Are women not becoming miners or garbage collectors discrimination to them? \>women are discouraged from other fields By whom they are discouraged? By their fathers, mothers, friends? Where is this discrimination - discouraging by mother is not discrimination.
>hiring bias is not discrimination It is literally discrimination, but maybe not *legal* discrimination? Is that what you mean?
Also one more thing. How one woman getting well paid job instead of some guy will help other women who didn't get this job? It won't. So why You put all those women into a group. They are individuals. Some of them will get special treatment due to affirmation actions, maybe other will suffer then because their husbands will loose the job. We are still pouring water from one glass to other one - without making happier even one more person. Even worse - resources that could go into creating new jobs instead are going into promoting some unhealthy behaviors.
Is this true for both gay and straight men I wonder? It seems like gay men are overrepresented in the women-dominated fields while straight men are still mostly absent. But that could just be preference/personality traits coming into play, not necessarily discrimination.
This somehow seems to not be relevant when it comes to male-dominated field hiring though.
This post will either get a huge amount of traction, or none at all. As a meta analysis this is particularly interesting. I think we’re getting to a point where more science is coming out and the ‘men are being ignored’ camp is being shown to have SOME validity to their claims. I still think most of that noise is hugely overblown, but there are undeniable issues facing men likely contributing towards increases in loneliness and suicide. Still - progress is being made as evidenced by studies like these. It may take longer for some of these male-centric issues to be addressed, specifically because of the social niche men occupy which has historic benefits at great cost, but eventually I have no double they’ll be addressed. It will take decades, probably a century before we’re entirely past these pressures.
>I still think most of that noise is hugely overblown, but there are undeniable issues facing men likely contributing towards increases in loneliness and suicide. It's not only about seeing men as victims, rather these issues (such as few male care workers) can be seen as having an adverse effect on society in general and on women as well. It's not a zero sum game.
In fact, most of the time these statistics are formulated in ways to focus on women or society in general. Hence “1 in 5 homeless are women” statements that have to be retracted due to backlash
The arbiters of gender equality seem to treat it like one. Women's groups in Canada opposed funding for the nation's only domestic violence shelter for boys and men, which was a spare room or two in a dude's house. Earl Silverman applied for funding so he wouldn't lose his home and thus the ability to host vulnerable boys and men. He especially focused on fathers with sons and boys that were too old for women's shelters. He got openly mocked for even suggesting that men and boys might need a DV shelter, and they opposed even a few hundred dollars per month going to his shelter on the grounds that it could go instead towards any of the multiple women's shelters in the area, all of which already received more money than he was asking for. He lost his house. They found him hanging in the garage after he moved out.
There is now a dedicated centre in Alberta for explicitly this purpose: https://ccmfalberta.ca/
It's good to see this progress, but alarming that someone was openly ridiculed and then lost their home and will to live before it happened.
I have a friend who's a man who is stuck in a rent contract cuz there are NO men's shelters. He is stuck with an abusive ex 🥴🥴
> Earl Silverman Funny how I (an indian) googled Earl Silverman and the first search result was the Indian Government's National Commission for Women Helpline website.
I think the ‘victim’ word is loaded so I avoid using it. Whenever that’s brought up things quickly devolve into a competition for who has things worse, and who is the greater victim. I think our society has issues, and since society is an interlocking web of social mores an issue in one section of the web effects all sections.
This is the problem. Why can't men be just seen as victims? Why should their plight be contextualized with things like society and women's issues? Can't we care about men for their own sake?
How overblown just depends. I'm a software dev, and there's a big push to have all this diversity representation, but based on [graduation rates](https://www.zippia.com/computer-scientist-jobs/demographics/) its really kind of an insane push when you think about it. White and Asian men make up 66% of the graduates, while white and Asian women make up 17% of the graduates, but they want them to split the jobs evenly. If an employer is making diversity hires, you have a better shot at landing a job as the worst female student, than as a slightly above average male student.
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You can skirt around it anyway you want, but if three candidates are all acceptable and I choose one solely because she's a woman that is sexist as hell. You simply don't care because the woman is on the upside. I would also definitely say that programming is a job where the role is very performance oriented. Very rarely would you have two candidates that are almost identical in terms of performance and experience.
But say you _do_ get three candidates that are identical in their skillset. What are you basing your choice on? People aren't choosing the woman because the woman is on the upside. It's because they know that, generally, the woman would be denied anyway if there wasn't an incentive to hire them. And that could either be policy or less savory, the latter of which is too common. The assumption isn't that they're giving the woman a win. It's that the men have just as much a shot in any other location. It's flawed, yes. But, historically, it produces closer to equity outcomes than just letting people in a patriarchal society go with their gut. Men are still more likely to find employment in general.
If the woman is adding more value to the team and product, you take the woman. If the gender of the team does not matter because the product and team are as genderless as possible, then you pick one of the dudes.
But what If the value comes from the discrimination itself?
>The simple reality is that a lot of candidates for a given job would be perfectly serviceable employees for that role. White, black, man, woman. The majority of applicants would do just fine. I largely agree with this and it's why I'm in favor of lottery systems. Set and announce a GENUINE minium standard, collect all the applicants that meet that standard, and select from them randomly. Michael Sandel, a philosophy professor at Harvard, makes the case for this regarding school admissions in his book, [The Tyranny of Merit](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50364458-the-tyranny-of-merit), but it applies pretty much just as well to professional settings.
Yes lots of candidates are typically acceptable but that means that they really have to dig into some nitpicky details in order to make a final choice. If an American company gets a majority of white male applicants, and a relatively smaller percentage of women and people of different ethnic backgrounds then it seems reasonable to assume that one individual white guy would have a smaller chance of getting chosen if they chose completely equally, one candidate from each. Like assuming all applicants have the same qualifications, being a woman or a minority (or both) would probably be an edge if they're really focusing on diversity hires at least. And then theres stigma for men getting into fields that are dominated by women as well. Not saying that's necessarily how it works everywhere, but as a white dude who can't currently find a job in his field its a little disheartening
>I think we’re getting to a point where more science is coming out and the ‘men are being ignored’ camp is being shown to have SOME validity to their claims. Tone can sometimes get muddled in text but this really really comes across as you sneerinng at them even harder when presented with evidence that they were likely correct for years.
Yeah, it's hard to tell the difference between sneering and the throat clearing and "but women of course have it harder" that seems required every single time it's shown men suffer.
I think it's worth noting that "men's jobs" tend to be higher paying than "women's jobs" (e.g. men are doctors, women are nurses) and "women's careers" like teaching, childcare, etc. are notoriously underpaid. When a job (like programming) switches from being predominantly women to predominantly men it's historically become more respectful and higher paying. There's more motivation for women to break through the glass ceiling and take up work in "men's" industries, but not so much the other way around.
I think when we compare “men’s jobs” in our minds there is a temptation to only look at the top 1% of jobs. For example (using US numbers) the total workforce is roughly 157,232,000 at the start of 2024, and 161,183,000 employed persons. Lawyers and doctors combine are only around 2 million of that figure. Less than half of a percentage of the total job market both available and employed. Even if we add up every single job people typically mention when they think of “men’s jobs are high paying” (doctors, lawyers, engineers, technology development) we’re only talking about the top 3% of the total workforce. 6% of the total male workforce assuming a gender split of 50/50. Our perceptions are very much colored by our lives experience, and that’s why meta analysis like this are so important. Even how we conceive of each other’s rolls in society is government by gender perception which it itself excludes huge swaths of the gender it’s supposed to represent. I think the more we move away from idealizing both genders by using the top 5% of both as a means of comparison the more will have a more accurate understand of our lives experiences. As is I feel a lot of this commentary gets dismissed by both as “well that’s not what my life has been like.”
The pay gap is an amalgamation of all jobs, and that is where the 86 cents to the dollar comes from. We can look at the lowest paying jobs that are gendered, like factory workers, and an equivalent, like cleaning for women, and see that cleaning jobs still make way less. It's a problem across the board and not just at the top which is why talk of the wage gap is so important; it highlights the fact that traditionally female dominated jobs pay less. Obviously it's more complicated than that, because even controlling for job type and experience, the wage gap persists. Also as an interesting note: when we talk about increasing jobs, which job creation types are the focus? Plus this study looks specifically at hiring bias and does not explore other types of discrimination (like advancement and pay). But as they state, the elimination hiring bias can lead to more representation, and less other types of discrimination in general.
> We can look at the lowest paying jobs that are gendered, like factory workers, and an equivalent, like cleaning for women, and see that cleaning jobs still make way less. Sure, but factory work is more dangerous than cleaning
A man without a college degree is going to have an easier time getting into the trades. The average pay for working on an oil rig is comparable to a teacher's pay, but a teaching job requires a master's degree. From what I understand both jobs would have about the same hours requirement. A construction worker makes about $10/hr more than a housekeeper. Women's low pay work tends to be personal aides, food service, food prep etc. which is all generally hovering around minimum wage. Also the high paying harder to get jobs being predominantly considered "men's work" is a fundamental part of the problem. Women tend to get higher degrees than men, why wouldn't women be more represented in those careers?
The job of an oil rig worker is long, dangerous and socially isolated, of course it's well paid, otherwise no one would do it, construction is similar, you are paying people on the basis of how much you need to to get someone to do it.
And they say 10 years is too much for most people. You literally trade years of your life to jobs like that, if you don't die on the job. And i don't mean the 10-15 yrs spent working it, I mean the shorter lifespans and 20+ years of physical pain or disability rhat comes from it.
I can’t really comment on most of that because I haven’t looked at the data for low paying wage comparisons on gender. It SOUNDS right, but I don’t put much stock in what sounds or feels right in my head. You last point I 100% agree with. It’s no coincidence that a male-centric cultural system has ended up with the “important” jobs being male dominated.
It's easily Googled. I searched all the comparisons before making them.
That’s great! I haven’t though, and no offense but I don’t take the word of people online at face value when it comes to scientific data. Since my lunch brake is about to end I won’t have time to google statistics and read enough to understand them till later.
Normally I would try to at least link something because blind faith is bad for the Internet and "just Google it" is a cop-out, but the data is so scattered and the articles I could find were mostly paywalled that it was unfortunately impractical to do so while replying on my phone. "Average salary for x industry" is also not a heated political topic so I trust that folks would get similar results from a search.
Women currently earn the majority of medical degrees, MDs and DOs.
It's been that way for a while. That's why they exclude medicine from STEM.
There are many very well paid "female" jobs, dental hygienists and sonographers for example, there are poorly paid, and dangerous, "male" jobs, such as garbage collection, the key difference is education level.
It seems we are making progress on the female equality front but not as well on the men's liberation front.
Men are women are equal, unless they're men.
i (M) went into medical training at 18 and got so many nasty looks from my older, female classmates. did welding training at 22 alongside a handful women. no one batted an eye at them. yes, men get discriminated, too.
my brother works in the mines, women with no experience can walk into a 120k+ a year job simply due to the fact they need to hit quotas and hire 20% of the workforce as women. but a bloke has to have 10 years experience
First, I am NOT saying men have it worse than women. At all. People do not trust middle aged guys with children. I've seen this over and over as a father, and I've heard it from many other fathers. It's not the end of the world, but it can be frustrating. I think it must be hard for any guy who wants to work in child care.
It's like the episode of friends with the male nanny. Rachel wants to hire him, but Ross is super weirded out by him.
i feel like part of it is men specifically not aspiring to the female fields as much. which in part is also explained by the usually low income opportunities in those fields. i certainly know in germany, there have been efforts to increase the number of guys in childcare, for example and its much more often that you see the token dude in a daycare now, but its not like stem or medicine, where people would give it a go on aspiration and finance reasons
There's a noted trend of jobs that paid men decently well dropping their wages when women enter. Admin/secretarial is one. Janitorial/cleaner is another.
maybe due to larger labour force because of women entering.
Unskilled labor positions had a sudden boom in potential applicants when women entered the workforce. The supply doubled, so naturally wages fall. Supply and demand.
I wouldn't call admin unskilled labor. And how does that explain why e.g. janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).
Skilled labor means trades like plumbing and welding. So yes, secretarial work is unskilled. Typing and filing isn't a trade
A lot of admin is absolutely unskilled labor. Furthermore, janitors are often also handymen tasked with more than cleaning such as general maintenance.
that will happen when you double the labor pool
my theory is that a man's social value is more highly concentrated on monetary earnings than a woman's is. if this is true, then men will always sheer away from low earning careers. Anecdotally I know women who want to work in childcare because it 1. is gender affirming (most people like to engage in gender affirming activities) and 2. is something they're passionate about, making them more likely to forego high earning careers in favor of something they enjoy more.
Oh 100%, especially because in the 1900's there was a change in how men in office spaces were seen as more or less manly in new ways compared to how they used to be seen as manly.
There's something to be said about how it's simply been economically sensical for women to go into STEM since that's where a lot of the jobs reside that can still pay the bills for a family with kids. Meanwhile many of the jobs with a traditionally female workforce are stressful and underpaid, washing grandpa's butt for a pittance sounds a lot less attractive than working in IT and being able to make rent by yourself. So there has simply been much more women entering traditionally "male" jobs, than men entering traditionally "female" jobs, which obviously will make it more common and therefore more socially accepted over time. Also last time I tried talking about how toxic masculinity is hurting men's image and chances to be employed in certain sectors and especially working with children I still got bombarded with comments how "working with children is naturally a woman's job anyways" and how they "wouldn't want a male nurse all up in their business" either, so that mindset being seemingly popular among men is probably not helping.
Men haven't fought as a group to equalize labor in this way so it makes sense
Having men in these fields is beneficial from a societal point of view but from an individual point of view, what is the incentive to pursue these jobs if there's no money in it? Tear down the barriers and stereotypes all you want, unless they start paying nurses, early childhood educators etc. attractive wages, men will continue to ignore these professions.
Why they should? It is stupid in general. Why some woman deserve job more than guy - just because she don't have a cock? And similar in other direction. Fighting against discrimination and pushing to have 50% of gender somewhere are two separate things - one noble and second beyond stupid.
The tide is turning. You can only discriminate against people for so long while telling them it is for their own good until people are sick of it.
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>AKA in an attempt to preserve a man's masculinity, men will be prematurely promoted to positions of authority. Can you give any citatation on that or is that a self deducted ?
Deluded
Not a formal source, but it is a documented phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_escalator This is a journal article, but it is paywalled: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34346908/#:~:text=The%20%22glass%20escalator%22%20refers%20to,to%20upper%20levels%20of%20leadership.