The fact you point out is a nice illustration of Simpson's paradox.
By education level (subdivided if you wish by educational specialty), women consistently make less than men. But women comprise about 60% of the entering college class, and a similar portion of recent college graduates. The result is that on the whole, women make more.
That's why "equivalent education and experience", as flawed as our attempts to measure them might be, is a very important qualifier.
> But women comprise about 60% of the entering college class, and a similar portion of recent college graduates.
Isn't it wonderful how easy it is to ignore that college education is biased towards women and women's needs , and that men are put at a giant disadvantage when it comes to education.
I can imagine how the headlines would read if the numbers would have been 60% men and 40% women in college.
60% of college students being women = "college education is biased towards women and women's needs."
80% of Silicon Valley engineers being men = "men and women choose different career paths based on preferences."
Things that will be said by the same people...
Glibness aside, you'll get no argument from me that the disparity in college education between men and women is a problem. That said, college attainment among white men from higher income families actually outpaces, slightly, college attainment for white women from higher income families. Much of the college gender gap is driven by 2:1 or greater ratios in college attainment, in favor of women, among blacks and hispanics. The increasing gender gap in college is intricately tied up with the country basically abandoning black and hispanic as well as lower-income white men.
Choosing between two careers, say engineering and being a marine zoologist are equivalent in socially attributed worth and both require a similar amount of effort education-wise. Most people wouldn't argue that being an engineer is in an obvious way "better".
Choosing between going to college or not, for most people isn't an equal choice. The vast majority of people view going to college as a better option.
The difference is that having a college degree is a more-and-more important requirement for basically everyone not wanting a blue-collar job. Programmer is just one career choice out of many.
So, yes, the first example is an example of discrimination (possibly non-intentional), while the second could be caused by choices (there are probably other industries where there are many more women than there are men).
> The difference is that having a college degree is a more-and-more important requirement for basically everyone not wanting a blue-collar job.
I hesitantly suggest that of the people who choose to go into blue-collar work, most are men.
(Of the people who go into blue-collar work not because that is what they want but rather because that is simply where their life takes them, I would expect more balanced numbers. I don't have any numbers at all to support any of this.)
It is fascinating that it is always possible to find a section of the society that has less representation is something than it's percentage in overall population and claim rampant discrimination in our society. Until we make the representation in any area match exactly the population demographics to three decimal places, we'll always find ample evidence we have rampant discrimination, all the affirmative action and "diversity" preferential treatment notwithstanding.
There are a lot of ways that society is biased in favor of women[1][2], including the education and justice systems. But feminism has taken over all the mainstream institutions and right-thinking minds, so it's un-PC to mention it.
Of course there are individual examples of advantages that women have over men in various areas. That does not equate to women being advantaged overall.
In the world of acting, dwarfs have some advantages over non-dwarfs. For example, a dwarf is far more likely than a non-dwarf to land a role as a dwarf, a christmas elf, a leprechaun, or a villain's creepy little minion. This advantage does not outweigh the disadvantage a dwarf has when trying to find work in any other type of role.
Feminism is a Marxist ideology, and it is fundamentally about political power. It is not about truth or fairness or anything that it claims to be about. Rather, it is about furthering the political interests of people that believe in feminism and punishing those who do not. It sees the world in terms of class conflict and it is dedicated to seeing the under-class triumph over the "oppressive" uber-class.
Consider a closely related group, Marxist anti-racists. They claim to be against racism, yet they reject color-blind policies on the part of government agencies or universities. Why would they do this, if they are truly against racism? It is because they seek power.
That makes no sense. People say that so that everyone will see they are bigots and ignore the rest of what they have to say? If people want to be ignored wouldn't they just not bother posting to begin with? The point of the phrase is to belittle people who dare to suggest that men are not some special privileged class of people who spend their time oppressing women.
> People say that so that everyone will see they are bigots and ignore the rest of what they have to say?
You have it backwards. It's pointing out that the person you're talking to has said something that's quite silly. Fighting for women's rights doesn't mean you don't care about men, and it doesn't mean that men are universally better off.
You're missing context. The phrase is used in instances like this:
Person A: "Women have it rough. Patriarchy."
Person B: "No, see, [bad thing happened to this guy one time], so there's no possible way there's systemic bias against women."
Person A: "Yeah, _what about teh menz?_"
Feminists deeply care about men's issues. But they won't tolerate using specific instances of things being bad for men as a means to deny that there is systemic bias against women.
I think you're way off. The phrase could be used in such a way, but even in this thread the person to whom this insult was leveled against did not say "there's no possible way there's systemic bias against women" or deny anything about women or anything like it. The way you're using "context" is a hand-waving, straw person, red herring. You should check the context.
What, exactly, are these abstract phrases of which you speak? Does how the phrase actually gets used matter to you? Or do we all get to invent imaginary conversations for abstract phrases and lilly-white motivations for our (imaginary) protagonists? You accused someone of ignoring context but you're inventing it.
Context is important, but your point that the phrase can be easily misinterpreted is well taken.
The phrase should certainly not be used if someone merely complains about a problem that men have. Rather, it is intended to be used when someone tries to derail a discussion about prejudice against women by talking about how hard it is for men.
Note that the comment I was replying to was in a thread about education, and it immediately started trying to shift the discussion to suicide rates and the judicial system.
Wasn't the whole point of Hacker News to not have inane gibberish like this on it?
If you have a problem with argument, refute it. But acting like a child and mocking it does nothing but raise the blood pressure of everyone else reading the post.
Most people who claim to be feminists say that being a feminist means treating both genders equally. Most people who claim to be feminists say that men also have a lot of problems, which are caused by gender biases.
It's a load of shit to say that feminism is all about fighting male privilege. But since these radical "feminists" are the most outspoken people who describe themselves as feminists, they effectively define what feminism means to the public. You can say, if you want, that you think the problems men face aren't as severe, so you think they deserve less attention. That's a value judgement which no-one can argue with. But behaving like only women have problems is simply not honest.
This is really fucking dangerous, if you think that feminism (whether that means gender equality, or women's rights) is a good thing.
Men (at least, the men at the top) are really more powerful than women, and this isn't changing in the foreseeable future. Men put in the hard yards in the high-risk careers, and end up dominating politics, law, and the corporate world. As long as feminism has the moral high ground, that won't be an issue for women, because the small number of men in really high positions still have to do what is seen as the right thing.
But there's no reason why gross gender inequality can't exist in a modern society. Look at most countries outside the US, UK, and some parts of the EU.
Feminism probably happened because women were needed for the war effort. The men were fighting the war, so the women were able to show they could do the work men generally did. There's no real reason that feminism needs to exist in a modern society, it's just path dependence (you can't take a bone out of dog's mouth - people tend to hang onto the rights they have), and the fact that most people (including most men) think that feminism is a "good" thing.
If feminism allows itself to be defined by the radicals (who use some weird Marxist analysis about the class struggle between men and women), that's exactly what they'll get - a class struggle. And if it does stop being about right and wrong (as it has been, up to this point) and simply about men versus women, I have no doubt that the men will gradually try to chip away at the progress feminists have made.
Equality is a great thing. Equality is a thing which most people see as right, and that most people will support. A class struggle is not something everyone agrees with, and it's a war I don't think we really want to have.
If things continue the way they are going, it's not going to be long before a conservative politician can repeat the more reasonable points that men's rights groups are making (not the angry crap about their evil ex, or stuff about sexual assault, but the bits about women having too many advantages in things like the justice system). What will the feminists say? Will they say that they are fighting biases of all kinds, or that feminism is simply about fighting teh menz?
If feminists start fighting against equality, there will no longer be a bright line (equality) which everyone can strive for. It will simply about the two sides trying to push each other around. If you really want to put your money where your mouth is, and bet that women will push harder, that's a matter for you. I'm not really well read on the history of sexism, but I'd bet there's a lot more historical examples of men eroding the rights of women than women eroding the rights of men.
"There's no real reason that feminism needs to exist in a modern society, it's just path dependence (you can't take a bone out of dog's mouth - people tend to hang onto the rights they have), and the fact that most people (including most men) think that feminism is a "good" thing."
Can you clarify your point here? Are you arguing that women shouldn't have equal rights and opportunities?
No, I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying that the reason feminism has won so much isn't because we are in some enlightened society (though it helps), but because we were lucky enough to have two enormous wars which gave women the leverage they needed to demand equal rights, and that feminists have so far been asking for things which they should have (which wins a lot of public support, from both men and women).
The good guys don't always win, especially if they stop being seen as the good guys.
Stop it. Feminist bigots like you need everyone to view women as the "true victims" in society, so any discussion of men's issues is inevitably and swiftly met with that bullying phrase.
Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. Being a man has sucked throughout history, but modern western feminists furiously point to the men at the top of society as evidence that things were worse for women, completely and conveniently ignoring the men at the middle and bottom of society.
Predictably, modern western feminists fight tooth and nail to preserve female privilege.
Despite their rhetoric, western feminists give hyperagency to men—they try to hold men responsible for the behavior of women. At the extreme, you get posts like this (hopefully satire, but apparently it isn't):
It's sickening to witness the absurd mental gymnastics western feminists perform to absolve women of all responsibility for their actions and failures, with the blame almost inevitably falling on a man or on men in general.
On the flip side, to justify their own existence, western feminists do everything they can to make women feel helpless, scared, and powerless. The western world is a warzone for women, if you listened to their rhetoric. And any potentially empowering advice you give women for avoiding dangerous situations is considered "victim blaming".
These attitudes are not only ingrained in our legal system; they're completely ingrained in society at large. If a woman is struggling, men and women (and feminists) eagerly rush to save her and scold the mean men put her in that situation.
If a man is struggling, th—WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?! Why are we even talking about him?!
>Stop it. Feminist bigots like you need everyone to view women as the "true victims" in society, so any discussion of men's issues is inevitably and swiftly met with that bullying phrase.
Do you need to go to the powder room and have a good cry about it?
But in all seriousness, no I don't need everyone to view women as victims. That's absurd. I also don't think that there's anything wrong with discussing situations where gender inequality harms men. In fact, I think that it is essential to the larger discussion, because there is often an intrinsic connection between harms to women and men caused by gender prejudice.
Would I would like however, is for obscenely privileged morons to stop acting like female privilege is anywhere close to (much less greater than) male privilege.
Yes, there are some feminists who disempower women and men alike by treating women as the frail victims of sex-crazed men who are biologically incapable of showing empathy or controlling their emotions. There are feminists who don't consider valid the intersection of sexism and other forms of oppression. There are feminists who accuse trans women of "objectifying" the female body. Fuck all of those people. They're idiots. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence. If someone thinks that all sex is rape, and that same dipwad thinks that male privilege is a problem, that is not evidence that male privilege isn't a problem.
Little Miss Geek is by the way Belinda Parmar, who has come out and said specifically she will no longer speak or attend women-only events in tech. But somehow she still fails to see the obvious.
"In 1997, Metropolitan Life examined the way boys and girls were treated and concluded that “contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers’ expectations, everyday experiences at school, and interactions in the classroom.”[28] You did not read about this study in the media. And it had virtually no impact on the schools.
The impact of our belief in women-as-minority? It takes The New York Times almost two decades after women are exceeding men in college to acknowledge it in a significant story.[29] When they do, they devote more space to how the gap creates problems for the female students (“There aren’t many guys to date”[30] ) and how it turns men into dominant oppressors (“[the guys] have their pick of so many women that they have a tendency to become players”).[31] In contrast, articles about men being in the majority at the Citadel, or in the armed services, never mention men as victims because they have few women to date."
Here's another juicy nugget:
"The Lace Curtain’s power exists even in male-dominated institutions. For example, Dr. Charles McDowell, formerly of the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, discovered that 27% of Air Force women who claimed they had been raped later admitted making false accusations of rape.[12] The admission usually came when they were asked to take a lie detector test. With these admitted false accusations he was able to develop 35 criteria distinguishing false accusations and those known to be genuine. Three independent judges then examined the remainder of the cases. Only if all three reviewers independently concluded the original rape allegations were false did they rank them as “false.” The total of false allegations became 60%."
Note that this is the same Warren Farrell who's been protested as a rape apologist and whose talks feminists have boycotted by pulling a fire alarm and blocking the doors, such as a few months ago at the University of Toronto.
Find me a feminist talk being protested in a similar fashion, and then we can talk about male privilege.
When you say "right-thinking minds", do you mean right-wing? As in conservative? Because to my knowledge and from my experience feminism has traditionally been and continues to be a very left-leaning philosophy and is actually rather heavily scorned and derided by many conservatives I know.
Also, which "mainstream institutions" do you mean? News media? Educational institutions? These are also generally thought to be rather left-thinking, in my experience.
By "right-thinking minds", I mean "correct-thinking minds". It is a fireable offense to say non-feminist or anti-feminist things, even in a dry academic way (look at Larry Summers) - it is politically incorrect. Non-feminist and anti-feminist thought is no longer an acceptable part of the mainstream conversation.
The range of permissible mainstream thought is determined by the left. Essentially, the mainstream follows Harvard with a ~30 year lag. The infrastructure which propagates what Harvard believes to everybody else and determines the constraints of acceptable thought is what Moldbug calls "the Modern Structure"[1] or "the Cathedral"[2].
> Isn't it wonderful how easy it is to ignore that college education is biased towards women and women's needs , and that men are put at a giant disadvantage when it comes to education.
I have no academic credentials to discredit her writing, and I probably won't read it because I'm not a misguided MRA, but my bullshit alarms are ringing wildly from having read the synopsis. The whole thing seems to be based around a preconceived notion of what a 'boy' should be, and that's flawed in itself.
Boys have never been in more trouble: They earn 70 percent of the D's and F's that teachers dole out. They make up two thirds of students labeled "learning disabled." They are the culprits in a whopping 9 of 10 alcohol and drug violations and the suspected perpetrators in 4 out of 5 crimes that end up in juvenile court. They account for 80 percent of high school dropouts and attention deficit disorder diagnoses. (Mulrine, A. (2001) Are Boys the Weaker Sex? U.S. News & World Report, 131 (4), 40-48.)
>They account for 80 percent of high school dropouts
Bullshit on several levels. First of all, the "never been in more trouble" in the first sentence gives the impression that these are all worsening trends. In fact, school dropout rates have been consistently declining over the last 40 years[0].
Secondly, as of 2009, the dropout rates for males and females were 3.5% and 3.4% respectively, so assuming equal numbers of boys and girls, that's 51% male and 49% female. But that report was published in 2011 and only goes back to 2009. Maybe back in 2001, the most recent year they had data for was 1999. Let's look at what it was then, shall we?
Oh look, the split between male/female was 4.6%/5.4%. In other words a sizable majority of high school dropouts were actually female that year (and the year before). At no point in four decades have dropouts been anywhere close to 80% male.
>and attention deficit disorder diagnoses.
It is likely that the actual rate of ADHD is about equal in males and females[1], and that it is simply more often diagnosed in males. Underdiagnosis of ADHD among girls is a disadvantage for female students, not an advantage.
A [dead] replier, after being a douche bag about it, made the valid point that the problem could be overdiagnosis of boys rather than underdiagnosis of girls.
Two things about that. One is that even in that case, it still doesn't put boys at a disadvantage to girls. There's no indication that treating someone for ADHD when they don't have it will be disadvantageous to them.
The second is that contrary to public and media perception, ADHD is probably not overdiagnosed. Hilariously, this commenter supplied the following article: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/adhd/problems-overdiagnosis-... . Apparently s/he did not actually read that article all the way through, or even skip to the concluding paragraph, which begins:
>The public’s fear that ADHD is overdiagnosed and that stimulants are overprescribed is not generally supported by the current scientific research.
That doesn't indicate that collage education is biased against boy, it just indicates that by the time boys are part of that system they are more likely to be little shits who won't be helped.
In my experience (caveat: I'm a man who admits to knowing little of women, haven't been young myself for some time, and don't have kids, so take my suppositions with a grain of salt) boys seem both more inclined to follow bad examples from the "role models" available and less likely to be discouraged from doing so ("boys will be boys!").
There is little the education system can do about this once they get to that age - it needs nipping in the bud earlier than that. I'm not sure who I'd blame for this not happening, probably a mix of the images/sentiments thrown at them by TV/music/whatever and parents not being able/willing to effectively filter that flow - it certain won;t be a single factor answer.
That's one way to look at it. A more rational view is that "women skills" or what you might call them, are in higher demand in today's society than traditional male skills such as fighting, being agressive and lifting heavy things. Good riddance.
Hard data: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf Looks like HR departments, insurance underwriters & clerks, lots of healthcare positions, hostesses & waitstaff, and flight attendants. And as you mentioned, child care and teachers.
"Insurance underwriter" doesn't exactly fall under the umbrella of "traditional women's roles". That is, if we're speaking in ancient stereotypes. Hostess and waitress are a bit closer.
> That's why "equivalent education and experience", as flawed as our attempts to measure them might be, is a very important qualifier.
It's important, but how does one really qualify for equivalent education and experience? Usually when I see articles make assertions about the wage gap, the nature of the control for that equivalency is not stated, and the reader is left to assume that Simpson's paradox has been addressed. Never answered are the question about whether they've controlled for, say, two different MD specializations with different earning potential, different courses taken during a single degree program, or degrees from different institutions, or any of the other potential educational backgrounds that might be relevant.
Besides, in a market economy, education and experience are not valued, performance is, where sometimes future performance must be predicted. Education and experience are merely one predictor of performance.
This CEO study is interesting because it sidesteps the equivalent education and experience question. But that still limits its applicability and leaves plenty of unanswered questions about why the differences were found.
> It's important, but how does one really qualify for equivalent education and experience?
It's pretty easy to measure: Take all the men who are "of equivalent education and experience", and find the standard deviation of the plot. If that deviation is greater than the gender earnings gap, then you know your measure of "equivalent education and experience" is hooey.
I'm not disputing that--I'm trying to muddy the issue. I meant to link to the Time article that discusses how the gap increases over time, to segue into my point about child rearing: "While the economic advantage of women sometimes evaporates as they age and have families, Chung believes that women now may have enough leverage that their financial gains may not be completely erased as they get older." (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....).
By education level (subdivided if you wish by educational specialty), women consistently make less than men. But women comprise about 60% of the entering college class, and a similar portion of recent college graduates. The result is that on the whole, women make more.
That's why "equivalent education and experience", as flawed as our attempts to measure them might be, is a very important qualifier.