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Upon 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 consi
by eckesicle 5y ago
Upon 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...
- Chris2048 5y ago> majority of sexual abuse happens with family members, so actually leaving a child with a stranger is a lot safer This is the same argument used to argue planes are safer than cars, but there is a missing component: for individuals choosing which transport to take, they can evaluate the specifics of their case. If they know they are not a high-risk driver, the chance of dying in a car accident is much lower, but the chance of dying in a plane crash stays the same. As such, for high-risk drivers, travelling by plane is safer, but possibly so is taking a taxi. The choice here is between male or female carers all of which are non-family members, so it isn't a consideration.
- dathinab 5y ago> dying in a car accident is much lower This is a super faulty argument as _a lot_ of death related to driving accidents are caused by other people. If I look just in my environment all care related death have been caused by "other" people which some times but not always also died.
- Chris2048 5y agoIs it faulty because of the qualifier "much"? It has to be taken with further context, this was just an illustrative example. I'm sure if, for example, you ride motorbikes a vast number of deaths are the fault of the driver. > all care related death have been caused by "other" people this doesn't follow from the example I gave. The point is you can't use statistical averages for a decision that likely will have far more context to it. In this case the discrepancy between sex-offenders in the entire population vs all candidates for a carer position, the least of which is most abuse happening in-family, excluding all those example from the case of a carer that is not family.
- tuatoru 5y ago> If they know they are not a high-risk driver Nearly everybody sucks terribly at evaluating their own driving performance, and I have only met one or two people who have had their driving performance properly assessed by a trained evaluator. TL;DR: no-one knows that they're a low risk driver, and the people who claim "I'm a safe driver" are often much worse than average.
- Loughla 5y agoMost sex offenders are men, does not mean most men are sex offenders. Nor does it mean that most men who want to go into childcare are sex offenders. You're inferring results from faulty logic.
- guerrilla 5y ago> Most sex offenders are men, does not mean most men are sex offenders I didn't argue it does. It does mean that men are riskier hires though (by whatever marginal percent.)
- mikem170 5y agoA lot of people are being punished for this marginal percent you mention.
- guerrilla 5y agoHumans are by default pretty terrible at risk assessment, so yeah.
- dathinab 5y agoThat's not how it works as: Most sex offenders are not kindergarten teachers... Most are family members or "friends of the family". Also there is a strong bias leading to female sex offenders being much less often convicted (partially because they are also much less often reported).
- flavius29663 5y agobut it does mean that there's a higher chance that a stranger male is a sex offender than a stranger female.
- dathinab 5y agoBesides what other comments pointed out there is another problem: It's about convictions and about press reporting which are inherently influenced by bias. For example some years ago a couple was found to be the main heads some child pornography ring. But while the press mentioned it was a couple they basically only reported about the man, not the women. There where no indications that the women was forced into it. But due to biased-conservative thinking the press treated the man as the sole responsible person... Similar you will probably find many cases (with varying outcomes) against male kindergarten teachers because of pedophile actions in situations where no-one really can tell if a pedophile action was involved. But how many of this cases are their against woman?
- Ginden 5y ago> I 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. This conclusion seems to be quite controversial, because race is correlated with certain crimes in terms of "actual risk". It's likely because of social factors (because eg. black immigrants to US aren't significantly more likely to commit crimes than white immigrants to US, even after controlling for education), but it doesn't change "actual risk". If you argue that "actual risk" means actually "choice between two identical people, with skin color being only variable, after ideal control for socioeconomic factors", you should prove that of "identical people, with gender being only variable, after ideal control for socioeconomic factors" man is more likely to commit sexual crime. Personally I would argue that both race-crime and gender-crime statistics are largely or completely due to social factors.
- raffraffraff 5y agoEvery city, state, country has is it's own unique distribution of races and classes (muddled together in different ways) and each has its own level of systemic racism, even affecting different races wherever you go. I don't think you can draw any concrete conclusions about race from crime statistics. Males, in the other hand, exist across countries, races, creeds, cultures, social and economic classes etc. We can absolutely look at male crime statistics across the board and say whether or not they're different from the statistics for females.
- guerrilla 5y agoThis is an insightful point. > Personally I would argue that both race-crime and gender-crime statistics are largely or completely due to social factors. I think this is probably right too, but which social factors are you thinking about when it comes to sex offenses?
- Ginden 5y agoI think sex offenses are strongly related to "toxic masculinity" mindset (though, I don't like that name).
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoMen are also far more often convicted of murder, arson, vandalism, assault, and so on. You would think those would be problems in any workplace, no?
- guerrilla 5y agoApparently people are willing to risk that and not child abuse. They probably mistakenly see it as less of a risk as well.
- lodi 5y agoThe problem with this kind of argument from identity politics is that job applicants aren't ergodic. The arsonists probably aren't the ones applying to be day care attendants.
- mpweiher 5y agoThe prevalence of sex offenders is sufficiently low that the distribution within the tiny group of sex offenders is irrelevant to the overall risk. Last I checked, the majority of violence against children (including murder) is by women. So women should not be hired into this role. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- hajile 5y agoThe actual problem is basically unstudied. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-understudied-female-sexual-predator/503492/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-unde... What little is known hints that female predators may be just as prominent as male predators, but people just don't believe victims who claim female abusers. This all ties into the pervasive myths about how women are always passive, are generally good because they are women, have no sexual desire, etc.
- mbrodersen 5y agoMost violent criminals are men. So should we then ban men from doing any job and have woman doing all jobs in the world because it is safer? Really???
- karaterobot 5y agoWell, sure. Put another way: discrimination is highest in professions where a group is discriminated against the most, and ignoring the strongest sources makes the overall effect weaker. Not big surprises. Do we want to do that though?
- eckesicle 5y agoThe study says nothing about the underlying reasons for that discrimination though. The point of discounting those two roles in my post was to test my personal hypothesis of the underlying cause based on the data at hand - not to trivialise the findings of the authors.