There's likely an element that's certainly cultural, or a biologically based differences, but it seems like there are some very straight forward explanations for this.
There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?).
There is also significant difficulty in even articulating these issues as its been broadly taboo to discuss biases that advantage women, such as a positive bias toward women in education[1]. That being said, the mere fact that this is now a publicly discussable issue seems to imply our standards for discussion are changing.
Two things to consider when thinking on your points:
On no initiatives to get straight men into HR, is there a great clamoring to get into the field of HR, or nursing (the other often cited example), do you perceive them as high prestige or high paying? You’re probably referencing subsidizing efforts to get into law, med school, finance, etc which are high paying and prestigious.
Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men. Which to your final point of difficulty of discussion, the structural biases are well documented but often derided when brought up in a discussion against complaints about the overt support provided to women.
We definitely need to address the issues about “the boys are not alright” but re-establishing old basis is not the way.
There are initiatives for women to get into things like firefighting and many trades that aren't super high paying jobs. They exist because these jobs are deemed to have 'too many men'. But the opposite is never a problem. An all female board of directors is lauded as being the best thing, while an all male one is considered exclusionary. All these messages are being received by young men.
Would the AAMN be allowed to offer scholarships for men to enter nursing school where only men are eligible for the award in the same way such awards can be made women-only for male-dominated fields?
> Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men.
I don't see much effort to balance scales in areas where women have had much greater assistance and support available for an extremely long time while men have had little if anything. Parental rights, domestic violence, criminal justice, and physical and mental health, etc.
In many of these areas the "old basis" was mainly favoring women and there's been little effort to change that situation.
As a gay man, why specify straight men? It just shows your subconscious thought of gay man = femmy = hr. Most gay men are just average dudes and you'd never be able to tell, no matter how many overly dramatic portrayals of gay dudes there are on TV.
But primarily, I've not seen a single diversity initiative for gay people in my life. Based on skin colour, sure, for women, always. But not once have I seen anything prompting or requiring hiring of gay employees ever.
> As a gay man, why specify straight men? It just shows your subconscious thought of gay man = femmy = hr.
I can't say if it was intended that way, but that's not how I read that comment.
I took it to mean that there's a popular cultural attitude that straight men (and more specifically straight white men) are "problematic" and undesirable generally, while gay men are considered different enough from straight men that they're often given a pass in certain circles. In my experience, how many "diversity points" being gay earns you vs the deduction you suffer for being born a man varies widely from setting to setting. It's also been my experience that being gay doesn't carry the same weight in those same crowds that it did decades ago.
I have seen workplaces that promote hiring for diversity which explicitly included LGBT folk as well as racial minorities. Depending on where you live these types of employers may be much harder to find, but a good place to start might be sites like this:
> Most gay men are just average dudes and you'd never be able to tell, no matter how many overly dramatic portrayals of gay dudes there are on TV.
Let's not be obtuse. You're acting as if most gay men are completely straight coded in society. That's just not even remotely true. Most gay men I know are "obviously" gay to straight women because straight women find most straight men to be a threat. Code switching like that is very common within the gay community when present around women. Very much being more flamboyant than they would otherwise as to make women feel more safe and allied with them.
I have dozens of gay male friends (yes, dozens) and I have rarely ever met a man and thought, "wow, he's gay? I never imagined! Seemed straight to me!" It happens but it's very uncommon.
> straight women find most straight men to be a threat
What do you mean by this?
I have many female connections and don't think any of them perceive me as a "threat".. my wife never indicated this either, yet I'm clearly heterosexual.
I don't think acting civil with the opposite gender has anything to do with one's sexual orientation.
What you're seeing is called confirmation bias. That most of your gay male friends are flamboyant says more about the company you keep around (Which is great btw, and not a judgement call) than all the other gay and bi guys just going about their day, unnoticed.
Whenever I've tried to discuss this in cases of obvious tokenism and what I call "reverse discrimination" (which is when minority groups are particularly favored for their PR value), my language has always seemed to appear charged with privilege or something which causes people to attack me for it. I absolutely do not mean to come off that way though.
Someone once asked something relating to a literal "diversity quota" that they had to specifically hire only minorities in order to meet, and I was removed from that entire community for raising concerns of preferential treatment. I believe my exact words were "isn't that just discrimination in the other direction?"
So I think, this is still very much taboo? Either that, or I just suck at communicating. (Which is fair.)
The issue with "diversity quota" is that it only target "visible" diversity. But I guarantee if you want your SV tech startup to be really diverse, your next hire should be the white man from Pocahantas conuty, WV rather than the black man from Mill Valley, CA [0].
Anyway, i'm largely against quotas, i'd rather have blind resume and have hiring stat done on really big companies to prevent them from gaming too much. If you want to hire diversity for diversity sake (which in tech is a good thing, you want multiple point of view), hire outside of your zone of control, seek people who won't send you a resume.
[0] I've been twice in the US, and visited both places, i guarantee the culture is extremely different, although the National Park crowd is the same (i.e: extremely cool and interesting) in both place.
Diversity hiring has the specific goal of equalizing the mix a little bit, which requires hiring particular people. Same as education quotas which aim to bring in more students from unprivileged backgrounds, an attempt to correct historical discrimination over generations.
Your question demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of this, which could be obtained in half an hour of reading; from this perspective being kicked out of the room is not an unexpected response.
I do strongly agree with the principle that any discrimination is still discrimination, but reality is more nuanced than that.
Agreed, and I think a key thing to note here is that discrimination against marginalized groups/minorities has historically run much deeper than hiring strategies, and so hiring strategies themselves provide a pretty superficial picture of how close we are to "solving" inequality.
It's not always this dramatic, but sometimes you can chalk up the difference between two people's opportunities in life (at least partly) to the fact that Person A's great-great-grandparents had a thriving family business, and each generation was able to provide a safety net for the next, versus Person B's great-great-grandparents who weren't allowed to own property. There are other factors, obviously, but advantages or disadvantages can accrue over time like compound interest. If Person B gets a good job, that's beneficial for them, but it might be exponentially more beneficial for their own great-great-grandchildren down the line—it just takes a while to see that change!
So my impression is this: in a vacuum, if everyone hired only minorities, then non-minorities would be at a disadvantage, instead of minorities being at a disadvantage. Your argument seems to be that since there is still so much discrimination against minorities, some companies only hiring minorities serves to make the job market as a whole more fair for them, by "balancing out more" against those who only hire non-minorities. If those companies "only" treated everyone equally, then everyone else only hiring non-minorities would have even more of an impact, and the job market would be even more unfair for those minorities. Do I understand you correctly?
(Also: sorry for constantly using the term minorities/non-minorities. I don't have a better word to use here. I know talking about things this way could be seen as being part of the problem.)
You don't suck at communicating. The people who want to discriminate against you want to do it badly and don't care what you think about it. They don't believe in a colorblind society and equal treatment under the law, they believe in getting what they can get at your expense while crying victim. I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice to people, because some of them might legitimately feel disadvantaged by their minority status. But keep in mind that some of them know exactly what they're doing to abuse our sympathy.
Same with nursing. Of course there is discrimination against men, but there are so few that it's mostly based on other things (like which island you're from).
In Poland it is opposite. Public Health Service raised salaries for nurses, since average age of nurses was around 54 years old. This is seriously demanding job, so I assume not a lot of people were willing to take it. But when salaries were raised more men appeared.
It's a very demanding job, physically and emotionally, as well as, specialized training and liability since you literally have people's lives in your hands. You have to deal with people at their worst. Pay is quite high, and it's challenging to get into a nursing school program, but still only ~10-12% male (and about 1/3-1/2 are gay). Social dynamics are really different in nursing from school, to work, to supervision and management.
> There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?).
Or we might no know of the efforts that is made to recruit more men for these female fields because most people on this site work in tech which is male dominated?
In education for example the lack of male teachers has been seen as a problem for years. Teaching here is a well paid job but men here don't want to do it, despite there being active measures to recruit more men for this profession. It's basically the opposite of tech.
My take is for young women there are a bunch of real economic and social benefits to women that go to college and so they do.
The oldest of them is you go to college to meet men. It's the old 19th century reason. Send your daughter to college and next thing you know she's engaged to her roommates older brother a son of a wealthy industrialist.
Don't discount four years of college is four years of not being under anyones thumb.
College educated women have high social status. And job opportunities that don't involve gross low end work normally done by women.
Maybe it's just because I have to work with the HR department a lot, but I know plenty of straight guys in HR. HR attracts gregarious people, sexual orientation doesn't play much of a role.
> In 2020-21, the average young man earned £24,032 and the average young woman £23,021. Those figures cross the following year. Then, as male wages virtually stagnate, female wages climb significantly. By 2022-3, the average young man earned £24,283 and the average young woman £26,476, which is 9 per cent more.
Translated to freedom dollars: that's $30.2k vs $28.9k in 2020-1, and $30.5k vs $33.2k in 2022-3. Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period.
But also:
> The report blames the decline of traditionally “male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction” for causing a rapid fall in “secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated young men”.
This, combined with the fact that the "most recent" time period of this study is still smack in the middle of COVID seems like there could be more to the story here. Were industries that traditionally hire a lot of women already bouncing back from the pandemic in ways that industries that traditionally hire a lot of men did not? Did COVID make some companies realize that they can get away with short-staffing/underpaying and we're seeing the effects of that here?
> Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period.
Those are pretty typical wages for the UK. American wages are in a universe unto themselves and aren't a useful comparison for these purposes (it would be less than the minimum wage in some regions of the US).
I always find of hard to tell was wages mean in terms of what they represent after taxes, retirement savings, and medical costs they way they're reported regardless of country.
In the UK it is before income tax or national insurance (public healthcare), and also before pension saving. However most jobs give you an additional bit of pension on top of your salary (usually 5%).
Pension at 5% or more is only the norm for ‘professional’ jobs.
For many people they only started getting employer pension contributions with auto-enrolment which is 3% of qualifying earnings, not your whole salary. In 2013 only 49% of workers were participating in a workplace pension scheme but it’s over 80% now.
We've been in a recession for years now, at least since 2020. The lockdowns were basically on the way out by 2022.
>Were industries that traditionally hire a lot of women already bouncing back from the pandemic in ways that industries that traditionally hire a lot of men did not?
Yes, probably. The difference could be due to health care jobs or restaurant jobs doing disproportionately well compared to construction or manufacturing during those two years, for example. And I think there may also be some effect related to getting laid off and rehired at a higher salary.
I remember hearing a lot of whining about how the pandemic affected women more because of the type of work they tend to do. So here's another angle. If you lost your job and got rehired at a higher salary, that could actually turn out better than keeping your job for those two years with all the inflation we've had.
Is it called that because those with the dollars get the freedom?
On another point, both in the original article, and in the above comment: the lack of trade based career opportunities.
I have doubts about this. Obviously much manufacturing was sent to China by ownership, so the balance is still probably in the negative overall, but many trade service operators are complaining about the inability to hire. Specifically trades like plumber, electrician, and handy man.
There have also been reports of agricultural operators offering over $20/hour and still being unable to hire workers.
I'm working with a couple of young people as electricians and plumbers on a project here. The cost is not small. They make good money, but still find it hard to hire.
Maybe if World of Warcraft, or Call of Doom could be replaced with a video game glorifying unstopping a toilet, we could get the kids to pay attention? (just thought I'd end with another laugh)
Is it a wage gap or a socialization gap? My spouse works in schools, and even in elementary school, let alone later grades, a surprising number of boys are exhibiting a lot of sexualized anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes. If a solid % end up basically toxic and unemployable, I'm not shocked.
I used to be a youth camp counselor, my SO is in that field, my best friend is a teacher in Spain, i have a lot of acquaintance left in that field, and my father used to lead a team of counselor (weird to explain in english tbh, that' the closest translation i found).
This might be more advanced in the US, because this isn't seen in elementary school in my country yet (not until 11-12 at least), but in the last 5 years at least (pre-covid) people i speak with have definitely observed this behavior among teenage boys, a sort of anti-social personna they put on and never let go (helped by phones).
Bullying moved online mostly, which is a real issue in our country, because the school personnel are only taught how to spot and stop usual bullying, not the online one (spain seems to be better from what i've heard, but they do respect teaching more than us it seems, which help getting teachers who aren't total jackass). Overall, the school is worse for everyone, even in private education (public education isn't helped by spending "cuts" and 36+ children by teacher in some cases, but it seems the bullying is way, way less prevalent)
> a surprising number of boys are exhibiting a lot of sexualized anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes. If a solid % end up basically toxic and unemployable, I'm not shocked.
As someone totally clueless about this field, I think question is "Can we do something about this?" because writing them off isn't a great option either.
I don't know. I continue to be surprised that there aren't more lawsuits from parents about some of the things I hear about.
In general my personal opinion is that a lot of parents can't put enough personal time towards raising their kids, or refuse to (or mix of both). Like kid keeps doing stuff that by policy schools have to call about and the parents care less about what their kid is doing than that the school just stops calling them.
I'm pretty sure that whatever your spouse perceived as "anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes" in group of elementary school children is not a reasonable indicator that men in the UK are unfit for schooling and employment. It's kind of troubling that you'd jump there from such poor evidence.
When they're talking about 16-24 year olds, I think having familiarity with what seems to be some kind of culturally driven generational implosion that occurs and starts before working age is pertinent. The stuff I'm referring to keeps starting younger but is by no means some elementary school phase, and has been going on for at least a decade in the sense that it was starting before pandemic times and seemed accelerated but it. And I don't think the factors that lead to it are particularly bound by national borders.
Meaning you think they be more employable than I expect (because them not being employed would represent a just world or something else)? I mostly don't think they'll be employable because they don't seem like they can function very well, but obviously if they do end up more capable than I expect there's no reason to think that toxicity is enough to prevent accomplishment.
I don't think it's bias when I'm aware of actual incidents. Obviously I could be wrong and these incidents aren't long run indicators, and obviously some proportion will likely eventually end up okay because nothing is set in stone.
But when kids are doing things that would get adults jailed I don't think it's bias, though. It's more like a depressing probability.
Many bullies go on to become leaders and get high positions, and it isn't rare for sex scandals with leaders etc. So no such things aren't really god indicators for how they do in a job market.
Of course you don't want people to do that anyway, but being nice and being competent are two completely separate things.
In my country, we have the same issue. Historically, women low-wage jobs (retail, secretary, care) paid less than industry. That is equalizing. I think the "wage gap" between men and women (in my country) is ~20% for people aged 45+, and 8% between 30 and 45 (which could be explained by the years "lost" by maternity). For people working, aged 20-30, the wage gap is almost 0 (i think it still favor men, but i could be wrong, also the stats i saw was only about the mean, not the median, and high-class people could certainly skew the data[0]), but if you count NEET and exclude students, it favor women greatly (although men are more likely than women to work without declaring it)
[0] I've read an article a few years ago about employement "test" for lawyers (with fake CV), it was pretty clear that both poor men (black, then white) and women from the bourgeoisie (CV with "horse, ballet" as hobbies, high-QOL address and "elite" school) were the most discriminated against. I wonder if that population skew the "wage gap" towards men a lot, as often bourgeois women don't have a well paying job (author, artist, but also volunteering and/or coordinating volonteers, pro-bono head of the family fundation) unlike their men conterpart (your chief manager who is 25 and dropped out of a big uni with a lot of legacy student and paid thrice your rate? His sister coordinate volonteer in a soup kitchen)
everyone in here arguing about women this, man that, meanwhile i'm just...
...jesus... £24k... £26k... honestly god bless every man and woman who wakes up in the morning and choses to go to work, cos they can't possibly be doing it for the money lol.
Note that this is specifically for people aged 16-24 in full time work.
And people that go to university don't appear in the statistics until age 22 or so, as they're not in full-time work. Meaning people who leave school at 16 contribute to the annual statistics 8 times, while university graduates only contribute 2 times. And among those who leave school at 16 and become apprentice plumbers or electricians - they're not going to be making decent money until they're good enough not to need close supervision.
My kids are both girls. If I had boys I'd be really concerned about the lack of positive role models. You have... what exactly? Andrew Tate? Elon Musk? I'd take 2012 Elon Musk as a role model, not so much 2020s Elon Musk. Most of the men out there who are well known, might pose as role models, and would appeal to the kids are radiating this kind of fragile fake masculinity and behave like dumb thirteen year old boys or shock jocks. Following them is a great way to make oneself utterly repulsive to women, and unemployable in a lot of areas.
I'm sure I could look around, but the problem is that whatever I'd find probably wouldn't appeal to the kids. There seem to be at least positive-ish female role models with appeals to young people, and a variety of them with a variety of viewpoints and that model a variety of life paths. I don't see that with male ones.
Role models don’t have to be para social relationships with attention economy celebrities.
Look within your own community, those are the people that can have a bigger more direct effect anyway. Camp counselors, teachers, neighbors, creatives, local government officials, coaches, etc. there are all sorts of people who don’t suck who are doing great things right near you, right now, who not only have time to mentor kids, but actually want to.
It's the parent's job to make sure it doesn't. Glorifying hyper-successful figures isn't healthy without understanding how they came to be hyper-successful (99% cases it's inheritance/nepotism/luck).
By the way, could you share some female role models who appeal to girls? What I noticed is that some people look good when viewed at a distance. But it sometimes happens that when you look closer, or time passes, the people who seemed very positive (Bill Cosby and many others) show some other aspects.
Hell, even AOC or Kamala Harriss altrought not cool, they are not openly toxic. There is no female equivalent of Trump o, you have to be a man to consistently fail upwards and be enabled that consistently.
I have no kids, but perhaps positive role models can be found in more specific categories like music. For example, I think Jacob Collier sets a great example. And I think my parents had similar concerns. I was raised on gangster rap and Eminem, and my parents were very concerned about that. But overall, I think I turned out alright. My feeling is that it’s much more important to have role models closer to home. The light that Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are cast in can be greatly influenced by the people around your kids if not directly by parents
I know that list was off the top of your head, but if a quickly-assembled list of male role models includes guys who died almost 40 years ago that probably indicates that there aren't enough of them.
This is the most boomer comment I’ve ever read. On what planet are these any child’s role model? Elie Wiesel? Desmond Tutu? Those are like NPR lifetime achievement award winners, they have no social capital among any generic guy under 18. 0
The issue is that one has no control over what gets modeled by those looking at "role models".
Many of the best role models are the kind of folks who large systems or structures refuse to teach about en mass because these role models are uniquely subversive. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr being the classic example of this.
I think this is the wrong framing. You should not be expecting to find role models on the internet to begin with. This is not an environment designed to produce examples of healthy human life. (This was also generally true of TV, btw, excluding PBS.) I do have many people, including some men, on the internet I respect and try to model my own behavior on. None of them are trying to rake up views on YouTube, twitch, or any social media platform. hasanabi is the closest this gets and he's clearly trying to cater to teenage boys/young men and is irrelevant to my life, although I do admire his commitment to being a bulwark against reactionary takes.
Secondly, we need to be teaching emotional identification, regulation, and how to make yourself happy without comparing yourself to others. How to be a valuable member of a community. None of this is specific to men, of course, but the masculinity of that will reveal itself in how people choose to present themselves—nobody is saying men shouldn't try to provide for the people around them or shouldn't protect them or shouldn't be a basis of emotional stability. Notably, it's also masculine (to others) to abandon your family and community. Two very different conceptions that are equally real in our society. If you start from the assumption of some platonic ideal of "masculinity" you'll end up very confused.
If you can figure out how to sell this to a bunch of teenage boys you can conquer the world. Personally, I think men are gonna need to feel a generation of pain or two before the obvious incentives are going to align with boys learning to take care of themselves.
All of my role models as a child were fictional characters, only about half of them were men, and little of their attraction had to do with helping me feel secure in my masculinity. So perhaps I'm just missing the point entirely.
I don't 100% disagree with this, but I think it's being way exaggerated.
There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions.
Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads.
Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there.
Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted.
> This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action!
This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real.
Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too.
It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it.
Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better.
Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance?
BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.
Even if we accept the premise, which I do not, I still do not understand why a role model would have to be of the same gender as the child.
Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa? Do they also need to have other matching traits, like skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation?
I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
You can look up to the character and actions of people of any gender, sure!
However, a teenager in a society with gender roles is probably going to explore which of those they're going to adopt and which they're going to ignore. Could be they'll want to adopt a male gender role, in which case it's good if they've got positive examples of how to do that.
I grew up in and around factories - where I saw that skilled workers can be incredibly gentle, careful, calm, thoughtful and honest at the same time as being hard-working, providing for their family, and having a unquestionably male gender identity.
Women can model all those virtues - but they can't model them as a way of being a man.
If your teen wants to adopt a male gender role but the only examples they've seen are from the entertainment industry, they'll have a rather blinkered view.
The problems facing the two sexes are different and the expectations of them are different, at least in many societies. The expectations of a young man have been around self-sacrifice, self-control, and self-reliance, and looking towards female role models for cues on that would lose a lot of nuance particular to the male condition.
Women do not have the same physical capabilities of men in either size or strength, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of restraint. Women have, by and large, a different way of processing emotions than men, and and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how to handle things like intense anger. Women are rewarded for consensus and co-support in a way that men are not, so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how and when to step out of line and take your licks. Women do not have the same utility in things like warfare or manual labor, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of patriotic duty or chivalry.
It's fine and well to have role models for other purposes, mind you--plenty of great examples of other qualities--but you can't look towards women for how to be a good man with the same efficacy you can look at men. The opposite argument is of course laughed at out of hand: nobody would seriously suggest that a young woman look towards men to learn how to be a proper woman.
I see no difference in what it means to be a good person, whether you are a man or a woman.
If you find that laughable, perhaps we were raised very differently. The suggestion of learning "how to be a proper woman", as you put it, rather than "a good person" indeed suggests a degree of sexism that doesn't align with the values I embrace.
> Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa?
I believe, in life, girls can look up to men but boys do not look up to women. I suspect, but am not sure, that is built into the biology of each.
> I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
I agree. However, I think that we can make observations that show it does happen. E.G. the non-historical release of the Black Panther movie.
I also grappled with this issue until I lived in a community that was highly, highly gendered. Children naturally try to mimic the social behaviors around them. If these social behaviors are gendered, they will attempt to gender themselves and view these behaviors through the lens of social expectations of gender. Especially if they are proactively gendered by the adults in their community (i.e. socialized as male or female with explicit expectations), as most communities do.
I don't really have any beef with gender roles, but sometimes the roles communicate simply antisocial behavior. One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads. And yea, maybe some people just shouldn't be around children, but once you observe how this passes down generations with your own eyes it's very difficult to un-see.
In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community.
What I don't get is that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are also, erm, not very masculine by the standards of many if not most communities here in america except in the sense of "thinking being an asshole is funny". Neither is Trump, for that matter. Something tells me that there are other factors at play here than just "masculine role models".
But the root of that problem is indoctrinating children that they are expected to follow certain paths because of their gender or skin color. Not the absence of role models that match those traits.
My sister and I were educated in a gender-agnostic fashion and neither of us fell into the trap of thinking that we must do this or that because of our gender. As a result, we each carved our own different path. I don't see why my children will be any different, unless their own peers indoctrinate them with arbitrary gender roles.
Gender roles aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Calling it "indoctrination" is unlikely to convince many to see the benefits of abandoning gender entirely (or gender roles, not sure which one you're advocating for).
You can either get along with people or not, you can either communicate with people or not, it's really up to you. But this doesn't change the fact that kids will be raised in this environment, and it's our collective responsibility to care for them regardless of how you judge the parenting. That, or we collectively bear the consequences of shirking this duty.
Anyway, what is the idea of a role model if not a positive case of indoctrination? What are we even discussing here?
> One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads.
Unlike women, men don't have a say in the birthing process but are nonetheless saddled with the consequences. Unlike women, they have no recognized right to unilaterally relinquish parenthood and the costs associated with it. Being a "deadbeat dad" is the result of a lack of agency against the legal fiction of paternal obligation. It's not like these men would prefer to be deadbeats if availed the free choice of parenthood rather than the legal imposition of it. If there was a database of every abortion undertaken and every child given away by a woman, akin to the Federal Case Registry for child support, it would be evident that women are just as likely to be deadbeats as men.
> In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community.
In a world of 8 billion people and countless permutations of social cohesion, it takes a severe case of naïveté or hubris to believe that "healthy" is or could ever be a well-defined term and not a moving target only a small proportion of people have the wherewithal to live up to. Gender expectations are all simplifications and fictions that often put people into neat little boxes without accounting for their individual circumstances. This has done more to harm self-image than build it, especially when people fall short of these expectations and later resent themselves or the world for their perceived inadequacy to fulfill standards they never consented to.
> Unlike women, men don't have a say in the birthing process but are nonetheless saddled with the consequences.
Men don't have any say in whether or not they have unprotected sex? No. You've lost me. Not a single absentee father I've ever met has accused their baby mommas of sexual assault. That would obviously be a wildly different situation than the general trend I'm describing. It's also hugely offensive.
If you don't want kids, you have a responsibility to not have unprotected sex. Take some damn accountability for your actions and accept the consequences.
> Not a single absentee father I've ever met has accused their baby mommas of sexual assault
When did anyone say anything about sexual assault? Sexual assault isn't the only way to violate an individual's agency in matters of parenthood. But since you brought it up, there have also been cases where a male victim was raped and still had to pay child support.
> If you don't want kids, you have a responsibility to not have unprotected sex. Take some damn accountability for your actions and accept the consequences.
There's more to birth than just unprotected sex. If you're suggesting that sex necessarily implies parental responsibility, that's on you to prove. The law already recognizes that sex is not an agreement to parenthood for women. However, the law is incoherent and inconsistent when it comes to men, a number of whom may not even be the biological fathers of the children they're "responsible" for.
Why is that unacceptable to say to women, but acceptable to say to men? When people say that to women they call them sexist, but the same people say that to men themselves, so obviously there is sexism here.
I think if you accept that for men, you should accept it for women, and vice versa.
> Why is that unacceptable to say to women, but acceptable to say to men?
Because this is typically in response to allegations of rape? I haven't really noticed any stigma associated with this sentiment outside of that context.
This is expected after using policy to close the wage gap artificially quickly. Fast movement towards a goal means overshoot (under damped). Letting the wage gap naturally close as societial enlightenment increases could've resulted in no overshoot (critically damped).
We should strive to dampen the oscillation to a minimum around the desired setpoint (wage equity). If the oscillation grows rather than dampens, the instability will eventually break the larger system that it's operating in.
Take the analogy of 'the pendulum swings both ways' for societal norms. If you apply pressure to the pendulum you could slow it to a stop, or you could speed it up enough that it breaks it's chain and becomes a cannonball.
I think that's backwards, and not substantiated. The "policy to close the wage gap quickly" was primarily removing roadblocks: more access to high wage jobs and high-status educational paths, higher wages for traditionally "female" professions, etc...
The problem detailed are actually endemic: women do better in primary education, and always have. So if you take the roadblocks out of their way they'd be expected to do better in early career paths that "look like school". I don't know that this is really that surprising.
So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix?
(Edit: the whiplash on the votes in this comment is dizzying, but I guess unsurprising. I do think that an awful lot of people on this forum aren't mentally prepared for the case of "What if women actually are better at entry level corporate work than men are?")
>So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix?
It's funny you put it this way. Feminists were never satisfied when men suggested that maybe men got paid more because they were more hard-working or talented, and maybe their success was simply the result of good choices and higher natural ability, or biological life cycle differences, or the preferences of women themselves to not work as hard.
To actually answer the question, I think the fix that should be put in place is to stop assuming that sex differences are because of discrimination, and immediately end policies that promote quotas on people based on characteristics like sex. It's clear that women have not been actually disadvantaged in general for a very long time, and pretending otherwise is harming men. Treat people equally as possible, and let the outcomes be what they must.
In my opinion I think men are also losing motivation because all the jobs they might like are being outsourced and undercut. They're told they are oppressors even though they have little real power in society. Most of them aren't getting any attention from the opposite sex either, because women don't want to date down. Demographic imbalances also make the dating pools skewed in favor of women.
In many/most cases women will regret choosing career over a husband and kids, or even be tricked into thinking they can have it all at 40. But by then it is too late.
So... you reject the idea that women might be inherently superior workers than men, despite data in the linked article showing that they seem to be. Instead, the reason is social and governmental repression of a disadvantaged class, and regulatory action is needed to address the unfair results.
How exactly is that not just DEI for men?
> In many/most cases women will regret choosing career over a husband and kids
>So... you reject the idea that women might be inherently superior workers than men, despite data in the linked article showing that they seem to be.
Yes! I don't care that you gave a reference. Men invented practically the whole world around us and are more physically capable than women. They have been doing half of the work or more for millenia, and aspire to do great things (for women's benefit no less). You think some pissant DEI-funded result that only applies to modern times, where men are abandoning college because it's not worth it and women proceed because they are highly conformist and do what they're told, changes that?
>How exactly is that not just DEI for men?
What I said was to stop favoring women. If I was a woman I could have my pick of jobs or at least a leg up. I might have also gotten scholarships and other opportunities in school. That is not even possible for men. Try to make a scholarship or other benefit for boys and see how much shit you'll get. Even the Boy Scouts were forced to take girls. Somehow you think treating people equally according to their characteristics is DEI for men. I think you're a woman trying to justify discrimination against men.
>And that's just plain sexist. Yikes.
So, me acknowledging that women may regret letting 100% of their eggs fall out before trying to have a kid is sexist, but saying something as stupid as women are better workers than men in general isn't? Yikes indeed.
> saying something as stupid as women are better workers than men in general
Is it? Girls do better than boys in school, period. Women are more likely to attend college and to graduate once they're there. The fact that they do better in school and not in early career earnings has, in fact, been a long time point of evidence that gender imbalance exists. Yet the instant it looks like that might be reverting to mean, we see men screaming that it's somehow unfair and we need to put the finger back on the scale.
This is what I meant upthread about people being mentally unprepared. Seriously: what if it's true? For myself, I think it's probably true that women are more valuable blue collar employees. It's the theory that fits the data best.
Schools have been changed since the 80s to specifically improve the performance of girls, particularly in maths and science. Is it unsurprising that this has worked, at the expense of boys?
Girls have outperformed boys up through high school since before they were keeping track of statistics like that. It's a cliché, even. This is not a new or surprising effect.
And I repeat my point: there are a lot of men here on HN who seem unprepared to accept a world where women's performance in entry level career work is actually higher than men's, even though that would seem like an obviously extrapolation from well-understood data.
I repeat my point from other comments again here: If women are so cheap and so talented, they don't need preferential treatment. They will be rewarded naturally according to their abilities without all that. You seem unprepared to accept a world where women aren't given preferential treatment over men under the pretense of victimhood. You claim women are better at various things but refuse to acknowledge that men are discriminated against purely to promote women (because DEI, not because they are better in any way).
> Girls do better than boys in school, period. Women are more likely to attend college and to graduate once they're there.
There are many reasons for this. They get more support at every turn, and they conform to rules and systems more easily than men who are inclined to think for themselves. They also believe in the narrative that college is necessary and if you don't do it you've missed out big time. That isn't necessarily true. Most of the degrees issued are overpriced and/or worthless now, and even 20 years back.
Most of the women who go to college now don't need a college degree. They would be better served by community college to do a useful job, or else taking that time to start a family. But they've been sold the lie that college always pays off, and they get lots of help to pay for it and survive it.
>The fact that they do better in school and not in early career earnings has, in fact, been a long time point of evidence that gender imbalance exists.
Men have to work hard in life to get the affection of a woman, and that skews everything. Then there is also the fact that women choose stability and flexibility to deal with children and their own social preferences (such as higher amounts of travel for leisure). A woman could literally be on the verge of homelessness and be able to find a man to take care of her.
If women are really such better and cheaper workers than men, why doesn't every employer hire women? They could quickly put everyone else out of business.
> Yet the instant it looks like that might be reverting to mean, we see men screaming that it's somehow unfair and we need to put the finger back on the scale.
There is no reversion to the mean here. I reject your claim that men are somehow inferior workers. Cut out all the DEI programs and go strictly based on merit, and you'll see how quick things turn around. Although I'm not sure that would necessarily happen. Women have not been disadvantaged in any area in at least about 50 years, but they've received preferential treatment the whole time.
This isn't a simple matter of fairness. Shitting on men constantly and propping up women is going to lead to a demographic collapse. Women don't want to date men who they outperform. They want men to provide for them so they can take it easy with the kids. That's fine but don't expect that while doing everything you can to make that as hard as possible.
>This is what I meant upthread about people being mentally unprepared. Seriously: what if it's true? For myself, I think it's probably true that women are more valuable blue collar employees. It's the theory that fits the data best.
Considering that blue collar jobs are the hard physical ones, women absolutely aren't preferred for those jobs by default. They might be favored by guys who appreciate having women around but they just can't do what men do (at least, with the same high level of output, in general). There are many better jobs that are naturally leaning toward women, such as waiting tables or tending bar in nice restaurants, certain sales jobs, nursing, teaching, child care. Good luck getting one of those jobs if you're a man. At the same time, you'll almost never see a woman welder or oil worker, or construction worker. The real high-pressure jobs that shave years off your life have no appeal to women because they don't need money that bad. Men do them because they need to support their families, or else their wives will hate them and/or leave.
In all that wall of text, did you really not hear yourself applying exactly the same arguments in exactly the same way that feminists have been for decades? Is there no moment where you maybe stopped to think that maybe there's a middle ground, but that when all is finally said that there (1) may indeed be a small divergence in gender performance but (2) it may not cut the way you want it to? Are you prepared to live in that world?
(FWIW, I wrote "blue collar" when I meant "white collar", apologies.)
>In all that wall of text, did you really not hear yourself applying exactly the same arguments in exactly the same way that feminists have been for decades?
Maybe a little. Are you suggesting that discrimination against men is fine because you think men did it like a hundred years ago?
> Is there no moment where you maybe stopped to think that maybe there's a middle ground, but that when all is finally said that there (1) may indeed be a small divergence in gender performance but (2) it may not cut the way you want it to? Are you prepared to live in that world?
If there is a difference, it isn't the way you want it to be. Cut out the favoritism toward women and let's find out. You can't just rest on your laurels as women enjoy all the benefits of DEI and men are denied advancement due to quotas, and lecture me about how much better women are than men at stuff in general.
For my part I think men are slightly better at most things, but left to their own devices they are extremely competitive (as women DEMAND of them, as this is their role in society) and they will collectively outperform by a lot because they are motivated. If men are unmotivated, we're in deep shit, because things will fall apart without men. We will be defeated by some other society that doesn't treat its men like the scum of the earth.
> So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix?
Your libertarian perspective is missing the individual humanity of the issue. It's not about systemic roadblocks, it's about society's values.
Our society has pushed a lot of messaging towards girls and women that encouraged academic and professional excellence. Media unabashedly points out examples of successful women. That's encouraged girls to dream and women to persevere.
As a middle-class white man, the messaging I've heard is that success shouldn't be celebrated because anyone with my level of privilege should be successful. It's not uncommon for me to feel shame from national media. I second guess myself on my masculine traits being toxic.
I'm NOT advocating to be less encouraging of women. But I think we should be more loving and encouraging of little white boys so they don't grow up to become NEETs, MAGAs, or DOGEs.
Edit - Sorry to have not answered your question.
>if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix?
Maybe. Action could be useful, but only a delicate touch that doesn't exacerbate overshoot in the other direction.
What are you talking about here. It is conservative men who constantly demand women being given to them while ... women are either single or not and don't demand men being assigned to them.
Then don't go around judging and saying that all women are whores.
Edit: Define exactly which large group of people you're carrying the water and making excuses for, in spite of the fact that they are neither fair nor constructive themselves, and why you think they deserve to be treated so much better than they treat other people?
This is something a teenager (of both sexes) would say after a painful breakup. For an adult person, I'd expect that (1) that person apologises if they are stupid to say things like that online, (2) if they do that, other adult people don't hunt them.
My kid asked me if I'd ever heard of Andrew Tate back before I had. He informed me that Tate was this "piece of shit online guy" who says awful things about women. Do my kid and his friends who agree with him deserve to get bad jobs?
I want good things for all my kids, regardless of their gender.
Women go further in school in the west because they are better able to keep track of and incorporate the miscellaneous social dogma one must peddle to advance in the academic world. Men are more “cocky” perhaps being the appropriate word, and are more repulsed by the idea of having to parrot certain things in order to gain social or academic capital. Hence you have literal geniuses working in blue collar jobs, maintaining farms or whatever. This, while high academia has huge amounts of people worried about something called “imposter syndrome” because they actually are imposters. This is part of the etiology of western decline in technology and innovation going back to the 80s and reaching crisis points now.
The main issue is that schools don’t serve nonconformists well, and many geniuses and high IQ people are nonconformist, or simply don’t feel rewarded to have to lie to please social norms that they disagree with. This is generally what leads to the cyclical revolution. At a certain point, the most productive and innovative members of society are disincentivized thoroughly so that the economy collapses, because this occurs alongside the incentivization of compliance and anti-risk behavior which is stagnation.
Those boys who aren’t geniuses, but just disengage from academia because they feel that there is no place for them in society also fuels this crisis because you are left with generations of young men who have no stake in the establishment. The conspiracy alarm in me suggests that the establishment is pushing this outcome by creating a system thoroughly repulsive that mobilizes the prerequisite sentiments for an anti egalitarian revolution in the future because such a system is very profitable (e.g. you can’t invade the third world and plunder their resources under the current regime, but sure can in a more “fascist” regime, and generally fascism is the penultimate phase of a socialist system that needs to coerce sufficient productivity to keep the system going before final collapse/revolution (this cycle has repeated itself countless times in the last 300 years since socialism became the primary organization of people as nations)).
This is all the outcome of 4chans /pol/ and similar places rhetoric becoming fully accepted by normies.
This got started at least as far back as the “original Q disclosure”.
Men are from mars and women from Venus, and the rise of AI sexbots or relationshipbots is going to further fan the flames of the war of the sexes. Marriage rates will likely never go up again in human history.
I feel the "War of the sexes" as you call it is still a relatively fringe phenomenon. I mean, I see it discussed online, and I personally know people who have strong opinions on the subject, but, at least in my circles, I don't know anyone who is a model representative of the "incel/neet" male archetype on the one hand, and the "kill-all-white-cis-men" female archetype.
I believe it's because social media amplify extremes.
It's also that they are using a bad metric, as pay has always heavily depended on the kind of job and qualifications they require.
I bet that being a male doctor still pays more than being a female one because employers are not forced to risk-balance men and women by giving both the exact same parenthood related benefits, even if men could be working around the birth period while women clearly shouldn't.
So, women, who've been second-rate players in the workplace since practically forever, are finally seeing some empowerment and wage equality, and it's a social crisis?!
Call it an overshoot past intended targets, sure, but I'm having difficulty accepting the alarmist tone.
The problem is women still contributed to/supported society in the past. Comments I've received here from these types of men (who are semi-successful tech types) jump straight to 'not my society' 'I don't can if it all burns'. It never works out well for society having large groups of young, indifferent, angry manboys.
Looking back at my own high school experience, the girls were way smarter than the boys. The boys at least in highschool were far more concerned with cracking a good joke and goofing off. The girls were actually studying. They had the best outcomes too in terms of professional success generally in my cohort.
I think it is because girls mature emotionally a lot sooner than boys. Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. I wouldn’t be surprised if mentally they were years apart in highschool.
Now today we have a society that is no longer so biased in terms of opportunities along gender lines. And what do you know, girls are generally eating boys lunch here. They are outnumbering them in college. They have higher GPAs. They are starting to outnumber them in post grad programs. And eventually in the workforce this will happen as well, as this cohort gets jobs and supersedes older male dominated cohorts from before the silent cultural revolution over the last 30 years.
Eventually we should see this effect find an equilibrium where the number of women in high impact jobs vs men reflects the underlying intelligence bias women have over men.
Well it goes beyond school and into the workplace as well. Easily the most successful people in my cohort from school are women in terms of what they've accomplished in their life and careers thus far. Most of the boys are relatively middling or have made some pivots to their detriment by now, the most successful of them attempted to spread their wings for a time before being offered a good position at fathers company back at home that was assured since birth.
> Easily the most successful people in my cohort from school are women in terms of what they've accomplished in their life and careers thus far.
Really no guys in your class became programmers or engineers? Its really common for guys to go into those fields, on average its a few per class depending on country.
Or do you mean success as in they have started families? Women do that much earlier, but that has nothing to do with competence.
Schools aren't designed to give girls an advantage. They're designed to make productive workers and members of society. Boys may have more asocial, even antisocial, tendencies on average. That still doesn't mean the system is stacked against them. It just means they have to learn to work within it, not burn it down and rebuild it to oppress the 'other'.
> They're designed to make productive workers and members of society.
Let's say that is correct. Wouldn't the observed failure of school to make boys productive workers and members of society then indicate that it should be changed to meet its goal?
Something to note, most testing seems to show women/men are about average in intelligence but there is slight variability between the two. So thinking one gender is smarter doesn't bear out.
I've read excerpts "Of Boys and Men" that indicate academic changes to assist girls may have harmed boys.
For example, in schooling, it was shown that girls do better on homework while boys would do better on testing. So, teachers realizing this, would increase the homework mix into final grade which helps girls but harmed boys.
Getting rid of recess or PE earlier may have had an impact as well.
Something to note, these changes were not made deliberately to hurt men, it's just accidental on part of educators trying to fix what was clearly a flaw system.
> Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college.
Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)
> Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)
Well that is the entire point of my thesis really. This is no fault of the boys character but just a realization of what is going on biologically that generally boys like cackling with the other tribsemen out on the hunt perhaps. Of course not every boy has that behavioral phenotype of being a sort of simple slackjawed chummy individual, but it is certainly present. Plenty of examples of such people both in terms of public people and probably people you personally know that fit this description to a tee, maybe without ever growing out of it truly. And of course not all women are perfectly smart. But I think in terms of the raw numbers of the sort of people who can make use of the vines of society and best swing to their own benefit, assuming they aren't encountering total bigotry hobbling them along the way, those people are more likely to be women. And indeed, as we see the old bigots age out and be replaced with more sensible generations in charge of hiring, we see more women in the workforce often outnumbering men these days in many knowledge work domains.
There's likely an element that's certainly cultural, or a biologically based differences, but it seems like there are some very straight forward explanations for this.
There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?).
There is also significant difficulty in even articulating these issues as its been broadly taboo to discuss biases that advantage women, such as a positive bias toward women in education[1]. That being said, the mere fact that this is now a publicly discussable issue seems to imply our standards for discussion are changing.
[1]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2...