52 ms·
Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations
- bluetomcat 5y agoWhy is that a problem? There are countless other "immutable" characteristics on which an employer can discriminate candidates. It ultimately comes down to finding a good fit for the particular culture of the particular workplace. For every candidate that is discriminated at one workplace, there is another workplace which would welcome them and discriminate members from the first workplace.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoBecause power dynamics. What if one workplace becomes the next Google? Suddenly, those favoured by that workplace have a large advantage over those discriminated against. But it's usually sectors, rather than individual organisations, that blow up like that, and sectors tend to share culture. Don't think Google; think the entirety of Silicon Valley. You're an [immutable characteristic]? Tough; settle for lower working conditions, or retrain for another job.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago>Why is that a problem? There are countless other "immutable" characteristics on which an employer can discriminate candidates. Why should there be social equality? Equal opportunity has enabled egalitarian societies to be tremendously successful. You are fundamentally able to use greater talent base per capita than a society which doesn't. The results will force everyone to do this and this is a great thing. A problem arrives in which people arent in equal positions. So for us in Canada we have the legal right to discriminate against people so long as we are doing it to benefit a group defined as 'disadvantaged'. However, that doesn't account for anything. So for example hairdressing which is dominated by women can discriminate against men. Reverse sexism is legal. They call this 'leveling' but it is actually harmful. What you get is a situation in which the 'disadvantaged' are no longer disadvantaged and the advantaged are the disadvantaged.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> discriminate members from the first workplace. Well, no, there isn't. Organizations can and do get sued out of existence for specific types of discrimination.
- s7eu3b4u 5y agoI interviewed at a hair salon once. The owner/manager was female as were all other employees. I'm a guy. Needless to say, I did not hear back. The owner told me during the interview that her clients are all females, mostly wealthy, with many 40-50 years old and she basically explained I would not fit in.
- wonderwonder 5y agohmm, I have never really thought about it before but I don't think I have ever seen a single heterosexual male hairdresser in my life outside of a barbershop. Never really even registered I guess because that's how it has always been in my experience but interesting now that you mention it. I know there are a ton of male hairdressers just from going to barbershops. Wonder if they just gravitate towards barber shops or its extreme discrimination.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoYou have never been to an Asian hair salon. Its self chosen discrimination
- johnchristopher 5y agoWhen I was young AND I HAD HAIR, ahem, it was 50/50. I still think it is. Western Europe.
- praash 5y agoHeck, how would you identify a hairdresser walking by the street?
- ecshafer 5y agoFWIW there is a difference in certification to be a hair dresser vs a barber in most states in the US. So one has to specifically choose to be a barber or a hair dresser when they go through said process.
- kkielhofner 5y agoThis entire comment thread is identical to a "King of the Hill" episode: https://kingofthehill.fandom.com/wiki/My_Hair_Lady https://kingofthehill.fandom.com/wiki/My_Hair_Lady
- crate_barre 5y agoHumans gonna human. No one group is particularly more righteous, as much as the recent zeitgeist wants to lull us into this belief. Many people even believe that countries would be better off if mostly women ran it. Well, all you’d have is a bunch of corrupt women instead of a bunch of corrupt men.
- native_samples 5y agoWell, that's not what the study says. It says - or seems to say - that women discriminate against men but not vice versa.
- blitz_skull 5y agoHow dare you suggest the problem is intrinsically in us all!
- kreeben 5y agoHow dare you not try and cancel this evil person?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Loughla 5y agoThis actually hits on an argument that I don't understand that is actively and currently happening around me. I work in a place that is currently undergoing some diversity, equity, and inclusion education for staff. One camp sees it as an attack on themselves. "I'm not racist, I can't be racist, I would never act like that." One camp sees it as an opportunity to attack others. "My experience is that people like you are racist. My experience is that people like you treat me poorly." I can't get the two parts of this argument to understand that ---literally every human stereotypes and uses those stereotypes to make decisions--- and that's okay, as long as you identify them, and work to NOT make decisions based solely on stereotypes. There is no 'good' group or 'bad' group (outside of overt racists or something like that). Everyone sucks a little, but some groups have more power to turn their suck into policy. And everyone needs to know that to be able to try to fix it.
- echopurity 5y agoHN regularly posts the smallest, weakest studies in a delusional confirmation of its own biases against women and minorities.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bopbeepboop 5y ago> Granberg and his colleagues found that women had higher positive employer response rates than men on average, an effect that was primarily driven by female-dominated occupations. There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions. Duh? The only reason that organized misandry isn’t taken seriously is the pervasive misandry in HR, education, and other female dominated fields. Education has been female dominated for forty years — and becoming less equal. Universities are currently 60% women and 40% men. Have you heard of a single scholarship to help men reach “equity”? …anyone?
- ThrowItAway22 5y agoI worked with a senior female colleague (featuring on lists of Most Influential Women in XYZ at the national level) who would regularly say things like "I only want to hire women to work for me" in meetings. Apparently that's something you can say with impunity.
- xondono 5y ago> Apparently that's something you can say with impunity. I don’t know, but I do know that saying: "I only want to hire men to work for me" will get you fired before the end of the week..
- gampleman 5y agoMe looking at CVs. Female colleague: "Let's hire her, she's a woman." Me: "That's illegal." Female colleague: "oh well... make sure you interview her..."
- bayesian_horse 5y agoI think I may have experienced this...
- 1cvmask 5y agoThe original source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245513 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- wonderwonder 5y agoI think its pretty common in the US. Look at law firms there are very few male paralegals and nursing as well. Same concept applies to secretarial / admin / HR style roles. I have seen a hiring manager in real life skip over male applicants for an admin role.
- devnull3 5y agoAlso Porn industry. Funnily, straight men are responsible for this :)
- droopyEyelids 5y agoAny reddit thread where the subject of "men in nursing" arises quickly fills with tales of straightforward discrimination and gross sexual harassment.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoYeah but that's Reddit. You never know if you're getting 99% reality and 1% fantasy or 99% fantasy and 1% reality. The platform is intentionally built to fake the appearance of strong consensus where there is none so every appearance of consensus is suspect. I'm inclined to agree with the premise but "as evidenced by Reddit" is worth exactly zero in my mind.
- jounker 5y agoAlso note that these are lower paid roles are subordinate/adjunct to higher paid roles dominated by men. Those above are going to be setting the expectations about those below them.
- blakesterz 5y ago“that, at least in Sweden and the occupations we study, hiring discrimination in entry level jobs is primarily a problem for men in female-dominated occupations,” That's interesting. I work in a female-dominated occupation (libraries), but, it's only female dominated at the lower levels. Historically, at least, directors/managers and the upper level folks tended to be men, and those are of course the only jobs that pay very well. So while there's waaay more female librarians, there's way more male library directors. I think that's been slowly changing recently. I don't see that they look at libraries in this study, nor do they mention managers.
- bopbeepboop 5y agoLibrary directors would look like the entry-level workforce 20-30 years ago, right? One of the major faults in these analyses is to not account for cohorts — and so they discriminate against men in the here and now (fresh hires) to “balance” historic issues that haven’t aged out yet. That purposeful (and misguided) bigotry is the basis of a lot of modern movements, like “anti-racism”.
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoFor way more than 30 years women have dominated men in the librarian profession https://blog.oup.com/2011/06/librarian-census/ https://blog.oup.com/2011/06/librarian-census/
- harpersealtako 5y agoThere are at least a few spheres where purposeful discrimination is explicitly the intended goal, because advocates truly believe the solution will not be solved unless such things happen. The example of this is affirmative action. If you could wave a magic wand that perfectly equalized yearly pay between all races of people in the US, you would still see wealth disparities persist for many years (possibly generations, and possibly not get any better), because wealth and financial literacy are passed down through families and interracial marriage is somewhat uncommon. Affirmative action (explicit discrimination on the basis of race) deliberately and purposefully seeks to counterbalance against this effect. Now, I think that that issue is better solved by higher inheritance taxes, mandatory personal finance classes in schools, and more equitable school funding, but the point is that it's not always a lack of understanding of age cohorts that drives such policies. It's possible to understand the real logic behind such policies and still disagree with them.
- hirundo 5y ago" a profit maximizing firm should not discriminate between workers of equal productivity based on immutable characteristics " Gender is an immutable characteristic? That's debatable. But whether it is or isn't doesn't seem to make discriminating by it better or worse. That makes immutability a poor discriminator of tolerable discrimination.
- dash2 5y ago"should" here refers to predictions derived from rational behaviour, I think. In other words, if you want to maximize profits, you pay the same for equal-productivity workers. (If you paid two different wages you could just lower the higher wage, since you're able to hire equal-productivity people at the lower wage.)
- depaya 5y agoI believe the idea with gender being immutable is that people who transition to another gender are doing so to align their gender with what they believe it should be. In this way it is immutable; a person assigned male at birth, who later transitions to female, is no less female than someone assigned female at birth since neither truly chose to be female.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> Gender is an immutable characteristic? That's debatable Actually I don't think anybody's debating that - transexuals say that they were born as whatever gender they identify with, they just say it doesn't match what their body looks like. Everybody seems to agree that it's immutable, even if there are people who can't seem to quite agree on how it's identified.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Causality1 5y agoI mean it was obvious, but scientific study confirming things "everybody knows" is science in the purest and truest sense.
- echopurity 5y agoImagine believing this is obvious, confirmed, and the truest science. Now imagine a website that upvotes this. Welcome to HN.
- native_samples 5y agoIt's nonetheless useful to have rigorous evidence to justify what 'everyone knows' because inevitably, some people will vigorously assert the opposite regardless of how obvious it is.
- donohoe 5y agoI'm not disputing the article. Discrimination happens. Humans are human. But let's not lose sight or minimize that women are (currently and historically) discriminated against on a scale that dwarfs this - in hiring, salary, and society at large.
- kwere 5y agoas society change, its discriminations do too, we need to move from the idea of women being weak and good angels bcs a lot of womens in the first world can and will use their power as they want (not always in angelic ways)
- wonderwonder 5y agoWhy would acknowledging that men are discriminated against minimize the concern for discrimination against women? Its ok to focus on more than 1 thing. Discrimination is wrong, never really understood the purpose of 'whataboutism'.
- donohoe 5y agoI am not saying that. But there are many (typically men's rights orgs) who seize on stories like this to say that 'enough is enough and truly it is us men who are being marginalized [in ways beyond what the article says]' and thats not at all true.
- zwieback 5y agoThe article goes farther, saying: "There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions." Sweden, though.
- vanderZwan 5y agoMore importantly: they looked at hiring practices. That's an extremely narrow view of the problem domain.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoNot at all. If the employers let their pants down already at the interview stage, where everyone is at their best behaviour, it gets much worse down the line.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago>"they looked at hiring practices. That's an extremely narrow view of the problem domain." While true, the hiring process itself has an outsized influence on the problem domain because everything else depends on it. If you discriminate during the hiring stage you can confidently assert you aren't discriminating elsewhere by sheer merit of not having hired the kinds of people you are charged with discriminating against in the first place.
- treeman79 5y agoI found out after the fact that I was reluctantly hired, only with great stress because I was a white male of unspecified sexuality. They complained several times about being forced to hire me because they were in desperate need of a qualified individual. They were in deep technical trouble from over a dozen incompetent ones with one or more the “correct” checkboxes. I cleaned up the mess they had made. Then promptly quit. Biggest bunch of bigots I ever met. Female boss was extremely sexist and made it her mission to put me in my place. Owners thought this was great.
- 323 5y agoWay to spin it: more evidence for the wage inequality between man and female caused by the patriarchy which forces woman into low paying jobs and men into high paying ones. The few man who were willing to accept a low paying job were actively redirected towards higher paying ones.
- gruez 5y agohow does that explain females having better response rates than men?
- rmak 5y agoMore like gynocentrism actively directed those job seeking men to homelessness.
- naasking 5y ago"The patriarchy" has no problem giving men low paying jobs. How many restaurant dishwashers are women? Furthermore the data found no bias against women in male-dominated professions. Instead, the data here suggest that prejudice is not gender-specific but universal, and gender disparities naturally lead to people pigeonholing you and those professions (gender stereotyping).
- killjoywashere 5y ago"the p-value for the negative marginal effect for men would have been considered significant in high energy physics (p = .000000026 or, to use physicist notation, 5.57σ)"
- eckesicle 5y agoUpon reading the headline I immediately wondered if childcare and cleaning were in the set of the female dominated careers. My hypothesis is that men are considered much much riskier hires for certain roles. The reason I thought of these two roles in particular is because socially I've often heard expressed worries that men in daycare are more likely to be sex offenders, and for cleaning I've often come across the sentiment that men are more likely to steal (in Sweden). If those beliefs are pervasive the discrimination should be reflected in the data too, as employers steer away from hiring men. Indeed the discrimination effect is significantly weaker if you look at table 1 in the 'Data' section of study while discounting these two roles.
- dTal 5y agoThat sounds like pretty standard out-group stigmatization that you also hear applied to immigrants, people of color etc...
- guerrilla 5y agoI don't know about stealing but is it not the case that most sex offenders are men? That seems like an actual risk wherase the accusations at play in racism are just made up.
- dokem 5y agoThis comment is such a succinct example of doublethink.
- gambiting 5y agoNo, and absolutely not. That's the exact same argument used against black people in US("most prisoners in US are black[0], therefore it's not racist to be afraid of black people, it's clearly in the data!") You can spin it any way you want - majority of sexual abuse happens with family members, so actually leaving a child with a stranger is a lot safer, if all you care about is statistical data /s [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
- flerovium 5y agoIt's worth noting that Sweden falls on the far end of the political/social spectrum with respect to gender law and culture. EDIT: not sure why the downvote: being on the far end of a political spectrum isn't necessarily a bad thing. Citation: [1] [1] https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/last-mile-longest-gender-nordic-countries-brief.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/last-mile-longest-gender-nordic...
- finite_jest 5y agoI think this is a good reminder that if you are male and live in a Western country, it is quite likely that you are being overtly discriminated against. It even has an Orwellian name: "affirmative action" [1]. Women may face other types of workplace discrimination, as the article also says, but when it comes to hiring and college admissions there is overt and (mostly) legal discrimination against men. This is supported by data [2], procedure [3], and myriad anecdotes [4]. Some think this is necessary (even a moral imperative) for correcting historical injustices, but at the very least we should avoid gaslighting people and acknowledge in plain language that discrimination against men exists. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action [2]: The Atlantic: Men Are the New College Minority https://archive.md/CrAxH https://archive.md/CrAxH [3]: WSJ: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Men, Lawsuit Says https://archive.md/tl5lO https://archive.md/tl5lO [4]: I personally know about a brother and sister applying to the same college, where the brother got rejected with a higher GPA while the sister got in.
- skulk 5y agoUnder affirmative action is a hypothesis: that it reduces inequality among communities. Has the application of affirmative action been measured and compared to its outcomes? It's been a thing for about 50 years now, so I'd like to see some data.
- bdamm 5y agoDidn't the Supreme Court of the United States rule that it had been effective, with their primary evidence being the election of Barak Obama? That's not a study but in terms of legal doctrine it seems to be a settled issue.
- aerostable_slug 5y agoI'm not sure I take your meaning. Would you mind elaborating (not kidding - I don't quite get it)?
- dathinab 5y agoSurprise (not). Discrimination again Man in certain jobs (like kindergarten teacher) is long known and widespread. Even today people judging a man who want to become a Kindergarten teacher as likely pedophile is not uncommon. I believe that given that kindergarten teachers act to some degree as role models, the lake of male ones might have noticeable negative effects on some children. Especial such which have problematic parents.
- beebeepka 5y agoThis is not surprising to me. Not at all. In a previous life I ended up in a interview for a marketing position at a smallish company. I was in a room with 8 moderately attractive women aged 25 - 45. Before I left, I asked what's up with that. Their reply was literally: it just happened. Frankly, I don't mind. Sometimes it's for the better. Who wants to work for a company where everyone is the same? Not this guy The naughty part of me would have loved it there, though. At least for a while.
- bjourne 5y agoI took a quick look at the comments on this article and I find it fascinating that almost every commenter accepts the study's conclusions at face value. Having been a HN reader for several years, I know how incredibly rare that is! The top voted comment is always something like "Correlation is not causation", "Yeah, but did the authors consider <something obvious the authors probably did consider>?", or something about how the methods does not allow one to draw very far-reaching conclusions. Even studies about gender or race discrimination always have the same kind of objections. Usually about how the purportedly discriminated against group isn't discriminated against but actually is objectively less competent and thus its worse outcome is "natural". For example, that there are fewer female than male tech entrepreneurs, I have been told, is because women are more risk-averse than men. The reason is absolutely not that investors are biased against female tech entrepreneurs. However! In this discussion, no one has yet offered the hypothesis that the purported discrimination against men could be explained by men being objectively less suitable to work in female-dominated professions than women. Perhaps men have less "emotional iq" than women or something? I find it very fascinating how the general take from a supposedly knowledgeable group of people (HN commentators) changes when the topic changes from "women are discriminated against" to "men are discriminated against"!
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoThe people who have come out with viewpoints that "gender X is under-represented vs. gender Y in position Z due to the objective superiority of gender Y wrt. quality W which is important in position Z" have ... had a hard time of it.
- temp8964 5y agoThe researchers sent out identical resumes for job applications. If the general stereotype “men have less emotional iq” is the argument, it is actually discrimination based on gender stereotypes. You didn’t offer any valid methodological rebuttal to the study.
- klyrs 5y ago> You didn’t offer any valid methodological rebuttal to the study. On most studies regarding discrimination, HN readers clamor to rebut the methodology. That isn't happening here. Is the study bombproof, or is it possible that confirmation bias is at play?
- lemoncookiechip 5y agoWhile what I'm about to say is anecdotal, I think most people have experienced this, either themselves, or recounts from friends and family. Things such as kindergarten, secretary, a lot of jobs where you interact with the public favor female employees over males, such as receptionists. Just to name a few. >"There was no evidence of discrimination against women in male-dominated professions or in mixed-gender professions, but the researchers did find evidence of discrimination against men in female-dominated professions." Again, anecdotal, but I've seen discrimination from places like the military, construction work, police work to name a few. I don't think we needed a study to state the obvious, but I guess it helps creating more conversations about the topic.
- stewx 5y agoThese were the positions for which men were most discriminated against: - Men were half as likely as women to get a response when applying for a child care position (25.7% of men vs. 52.8% of women) - Men were half as likely as women to get a response when applying for a cleaner position (12.1% men vs. 27.8% women) Link to study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245513 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- cinntaile 5y agoThe first one I get. People distrust the combination of men and children. For whatever reason. The second one I don't get?
- stewx 5y agoOthers have commented there is a perception that male cleaners will steal valuables. And it may very well be statistically true, given men's much greater criminal behaviour in general compared to women.
- Jensson 5y agoWomen and men are equally likely to shoplift, so I don't think there is a difference there as shoplifting is the closest you'd get to sneaking out a valuable from someone's home.
- Wohlf 5y agoYou could make this exact same argument to justify racism in hiring cleaners as well, so probably not one you want to make.
- beaunative 5y agoI'm not surprised. Gender discrimination hurts us all, this should go without saying. Man are expected to be certain things, woman are expected to be certain things. Those social expectations, implicit or explicit, effect our actual behavior, and are the root and cause of the discriminiation.
- adolph 5y agoI have a developing conjecture that in order to address the perceived problem of higher male per capita in certain occupations, attracting males into occupations with higher female ratios is as important as incentivizing female participation in high-male occupations. I'm no mathematician but I see it in terms of system numbers: Given a set of occupations with different sex ratios, to change the ratio of any specific occupation the ratios of other occupations must also change. Incentivizing a specific sex population into an occupation may work for a while; they can boost the overall population in that occupation over the occupations the incentivized population would otherwise enter. However, the true outcome is an overpopulation in the incentivized occupation and underpopulation in others. The difference between incentivized and "natural" population size for an occupation becomes headwinds for any person to enter an occupation resulting in reduced incentive efficiency. In a simplistic rational "Homo economicus" world some portion of the male population that would enter the female-incentivized occupation would move to other occupations and the sex ratios would change. If it is true that males are discriminated against in occupations with high female ratios, then this would represent an even higher hurdle than the factors that result in sex ratio variance in occupations.
- ryanmarsh 5y agoI've not been able to wrap my head around this issue. What is the thinking behind the desire to even sex ratios in various profession? Why are some professions receiving more attention than others when it comes to evening sex ratios. Is a perfect world when every construction site, hospital, and dreary programming job (lets be honest most of them aren't fun) has an even mix of the sexes? What is the benefit? Can someone explain this in logical, non-political, terms. Surely there's some benefit to individuals or society but I can't figure out what that might be. I don't want my daughters sucked into dangerous oil field work prone to boom and bust cycles. Why would that be ideal? Help an autist out here.
- aaronax 5y agoA woman is interested in computers and gains skills in that area, then tries to get a job in the field. People making hiring decisions like their boys-club culture (maybe even subconsciously) so the woman doesn't get hired even though equivalently qualified, and somehow thinks or figures out that this is somewhat due to herself being a woman. Then the woman makes actions to fix this for herself and future women.
- AndrewThrowaway 5y ago> Among those prisoners, about fifteen men were in prison for every woman in prison. https://www.acrosswalls.org/sex-ratio-prisoners-across-world/ https://www.acrosswalls.org/sex-ratio-prisoners-across-world... One "occupation" where discrimination against men is shocking.
- todd8 5y agoIt's going on here in the USA in some male dominated occupations too. I have a friend that is on the board of directors for a number of large companies. Not surprisingly, he says that boards are all looking for women and minorities. Publicly traded companies are naturally in competition for the best board members they can find in these categories. In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2015), the investigators determined that faculty comittees prefer female candidates 2 to 1 over male candidates with equally strong resumes. See [1]. [1] “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | April 2015
- GoodJokes 5y agoI think hackernews needs a study moderator because yeah, how does some of this stuff get posted and then seriously considers as anything but anecdotal in this situation. When it comes tech and perceived high intelligence, the emperor has no clothes.
- 66fm472tjy7 5y agoThis is done completely overtly here in Austria. Many job offers contain language like "bei gleicher Qualifikation werden Frauen bevorzugt", which roughly translates to "when applicants are equally qualified, women are given preference". Examples: [0][1][2] [0] https://archive.md/YERoT https://archive.md/YERoT [1] https://archive.ph/R6agn https://archive.ph/R6agn [2] https://archive.ph/3zrn0 https://archive.ph/3zrn0