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National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org

National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 Even where I work, I'm under a lot of pressure to hire more women engineers to the point we bend rules and relax standards. There is a ton of societal and economic pressure with slogans like "the future is female". I'm a mother and I do not think this is a good thing. I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him.

lgleason 4y ago
This ^^^
sfgoodforonce 4y ago
>I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him. Society is hostile against him. Anti-male prejudice is absolutely everywhere. Andrew Tate is a get-rich-quick grifter and possibly a criminal, but he’s right about some things.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  Maybe but his family isn't. I'm trying my best to protect him, which is why it was so shocking when I checked his internet usage.
  - sfgoodforonce 4y ago
    The most you can do to protect him is the same that people do in hostile regimes throughout the ages: make sure that by a certain age he understands that there’s a difference between what’s actually right and wrong and what the powers that be expect him to adhere to. It’s okay to make a stand but only if you’re very sure that the upside is worth the costs. The people blasting anti-feminist content under their real identity, to no personal or societal gain, are idiots.
    - kneel 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - sfgoodforonce 4y ago
        Happy to be at your service.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Are you a single mother? If so perhaps he is just looking for a male role model that tells him he is valued as a man and that its ok to be strong? Sometimes kids look for a stereotypically male role model. Someone that represents strength. I'm not defending all the bile that Tate puts out but dude is a well known figure that advocates for men to be manly. On the other hand, maybe he was just checking him out due to curiosity.
    - stuckinhell 4y ago
      Happily Married. His father/ My husband and I do our best to spend time with him, take him to little league, etc. We tightly control television time, monitor internet usage, and videogames, but I doubt it will ever be enough. Anyone with little kids knows, they absorb social messaging about gender roles, rank and hierarchy like sponges. Andrew Tate seems wildly popular on discord, tiktok, roblox, minecraft, and youtube comments right now. I think you are right, my son and his friends are looking for someone to teach them to be strong "manly" men. I don't think we've been teaching him how to physically and mentally strong. We've been pushing things more in line with our tech careers ... Thank you for your comment. It's really given me something to think about.
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    Protect him from what, exactly?
    - stuckinhell 4y ago
      People who aren't looking out for his best interests or use him as fodder for their various agendas. Some people on hackernews think I need to educate my son on being guilty for being born male. Some men like Andrew Tate would just grift off of him. Some women on twitch would try to leech money from him. I want to protect him from all the things that would destroy him.
- SapporoChris 4y ago
  https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-gap/ https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-ga... Yes, the anti-male prejudice is just awful. /s
  - sidlls 4y ago
    It can be true that entrenched systems favor males in some areas, and new social and cultural phenomena disfavor them in others at the same time. My wife has made the observation that there seems to be so much more media, events, toys, etc., targeted at girls in a positive way than for boys. We have two boys, and she has been quite the feminist in the time I’ve known her. As a guy I tend to err on the side of being skeptical of my own initial reactions to women who remark about the sexism rampant in our society. So when she brought this up it certainly carried more weight.
    - SapporoChris 4y ago
      The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice. Media events targeted to girls, like the super bowl, Mardi Gras, military conflicts, just naming a few. Sorry, I'm missing it. What media events favored women.
      - ascar 4y ago
        > The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice No they don't indicate that at all. Equal pay day is in fact anti-male propaganda. It's the opposite of meritocracy to expect people to earn the same regardless of career and life choices and that's exactly what the equal pay day would require. The controlled pay gap is at 1% (based on the same source you linked).
      - sidlls 4y ago
        I seem not to have communicated my point clearly: inequity in one direction can exist in some areas (e.g., payscales) and in the other in other areas (e.g., social validation in the form of the availability of positive media, toys, and events such as birthday parties, etc.). So, yes, payscale inequality is a thing. That doesn't mean we haven't "overcorrected" in the opposite direction in other areas.
Zetice 4y ago
It’s funny, for men to think society is against them, when in reality they define society. As a straight white male, there are very few rooms, very few jobs, very few situations where I don’t have absolute confidence that I belong there. Is it so bad to think everybody should feel that way? Your son will be fine.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  You sure have a lot of assumptions there. Generational changes are occurring, he won't live the life you or I did. Also my son isn't white.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    [dead]
- ed25519FUUU 4y ago
  What are your thoughts on the study GP linked to? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - DSMan195276 4y ago
    The thing about these statistics is that the size of the underlying groups are not the same, and there's a whole lot of factors that impact them in complicated ways. The article you linked even gives a direct explanation of why the data is hard to interpret and suggests that the solution is encouraging more females to apply, because females are likely to self-select out of the field unless they are very likely to go further: > [See SI Appendix for descriptions of other audits of actual hiring that accord with this view, some dating back to the 1980s. Many studies have argued (see ref. 14) that because only the very top women persist in math-intensive fields, their advantage in being hired is justified because they are more competent than the average male applicant. This is why an accurate evaluation of gender preference in hiring depends on data from an experiment in which competence is held constant.] Thus, real-world hiring data showing a preference for women, inherently confounded and open to multiple interpretations because of lack of controls on applicant quality, experience, and lifestyle, are consistent with our experimental findings. The FA has the same thing going on, it says that females are 3-15 times more likely to be elected, but _also_ that they only make up 40% of elected members, so not even half. The only way that's possible is if significantly less of them are apply to begin with, and it's reasonable to assume there's some self-selecting going (or at the very least, since the groups are so different in size they're not directly comparable in terms of qualifications) on the same as the article you linked. The issue of men and women acceptance rates in college is even the exact example given on the Simpson's paradox Wikipedia page, because it's such a simple one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
epistasis 4y ago
Given the amount of harassment and pressure on women in science that men don't experience, I've always found that the women who stick around tend to be more capable than the average male scientist. If you have to relax standards to hire women, you're doing it 100% wrong and should evaluate your sourcing of candidates. And perhaps the evaluation process and environment itself. Women know bad environments, and capable women will stay far away.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  Sure but that's not incentives work in businesses. If I can get a women engineer onto a certain team of extremely high performing all male engineers at my firm, I can get a bonus of 20k easily, and hit a DIE initiative goal which is good for my career. It's good for my career unless the team stops performing well, but if I've already leveraged it into another position then who cares ? These are some of dynamics occurring in reality of many fortune 500 companies right now with recruiters, managers, directors, and executives.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    You get bonuses specifically for hiring certain demographics? That sounds incredibly toxic, and I'm glad that where I work doesn't have anything like that. Teams I've created have always been fairly balanced on gender, and it's been good for productivity. When I've taken over all-male teams, and hired women, it's been good for productivity. That's just my experience, and I know it runs counter to some others, but then I've never encountered the difficulties that others have had with hiring talented women who are great assets to their team. It's weird that I'm getting downvoted for what are very reasonable experiences, though. Makes me think that HN is trending more towards politics and less towards news for hackers...
    - stuckinhell 4y ago
      Yea pretty much. Toxic Dysfunction seems to be the natural state of most fortune 500 businesses. Money and Politics is an extremely corrupting influence. This kind of stuff is extremely common too. Most recruiting companies filtered non DIE candidates before our pipelines so we had deniability on this as well. Just for perspective, 20k was considered a low-end bonus before the economic downturns.
nodesocket 4y ago
As Jordan Peterson has been championing, equality of outcome is not the same as equality. Better candidates, more qualified students are being passed up because they are male, white, pick your stereotype of privilege here. It’s a serious societal problem leading to anger and extremism.
wpietri 4y ago
Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. Achieving equality will feel like oppression to those used to having a good deal. Society isn't generally hostile against your son; its hostility is to patriarchy, something Andrew Tate seeks to restore and extend. As a guy, I'm perfectly fine with things like "the future is female" for the same reason I'm fine with things like "gay pride" and "black pride" even though I'm straight and white. I recognize the historic inequality. As any good American should, I respect struggles for freedom and celebrate the successes of people seeking equality. I have no reason to think that any of those movements, no matter how successful they are, will shift into the same sort of oppression my fellow straight, white men have been perpetrating for centuries and that I benefited from. I get why your son got sucked in, and I feel for both you and him. He's having to make choices about his identity in a time when all sorts of things in flux. But you can help him understand that society is not hostile to him personally, and that any hostility he is seeing is mainly a reaction to past harm. That he gets to make choices about what parts of the old world get sustained or get left behind. And that as long as he's working for what's right, he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong.
- beebmam 4y ago
  > Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. You lost me here. If you were serious about fairness, you would propose reparations for past harm, and an equal system going forward. It's absurd to try to replace one unequal system with another unequal system.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Reparations for past harm is an example of asymmetric behavior.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  This might be my management role leaking, but in my experience you are being far too rational. Humans are emotional beings first and foremost, then rational. I do think society is hostile to him, but I don't want him to become a reactionary, or a culture warrior. I'm his mother, I want him to be happy. I won't sacrifice my son to some abstract societal goal no matter how noble it might seem. This is why I cannot agree with your idea of ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. It is wrong to rationalize away all the collateral damage that happens to living human beings under the guise of statistics and history.
safety1st 4y ago
In the US: * The majority of suicides are male * The majority of homeless are male * Men are less likely to go to college * The vast majority of prison inmates are male * The vast majority of workplace deaths are male * The majority of violent crime victims are male * The vast majority of police brutality victims are male Now if we were talking about say India it would be a different story, and this is not to suggest that being a woman doesn't come with its own hazards, like a higher risk of being sexually assaulted. But it's an objective, quantitative fact that there are way more men in awful life circumstances than there are women. Frankly in 2023 if a woman is strutting around an American college campus with a shirt that says "The future is female," she's a member of the ruling class who's rubbing it in. In fact men so overwhelmingly dominate the worst outcomes in our society that I would go as far as to say that we cannot fix its worst injustices until we recognize many of them are uniquely male problems. Police brutality will remain permanently unsolved. Our world-leading incarceration rate will remain permanently unsolved. But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter.
- exolymph 4y ago
  I directionally agree with you but there's definitely more nuance when you dig into any individual issue. For example, there are more male suicides because men use more effective methods, and more male prisoners because men are more violent. (I don't say that as a knock on men, either; it's a reflection of the biology-driven distribution of behavioral tendencies that each sex has evolved.)
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  > But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter. The roots are biological, men are the dispensable gender, given that a single man can potentially impregnate several women. On the other hand if a female is lost, her potential progeny is also lost. I'm not alluding to the fact that it is justified just because it's biological. What is also biological is that a large number of very responsible men have lone wolf tendencies, where they despair in loneliness due to the responsibilities, and burden of expectations placed on them. A some what workable solution ( though again the innate biology can hinder) would be for men to from support groups for each other. Most governments, family, society, and women are not going to do that for men in trouble. Let that cold fact sink in.
at_a_remove 4y ago
Well, your son has inherited your perspicacity, so be thankful for that. He's right: society is hostile to him. He's not even twenty. Twenty years ago, we had shirts like "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." Not long after, Obama was saying that we need more women in college ... despite them being fifty-five percent of the enrolled. And so on and so forth. Your son is only picking up his environment. If you want him to avoid people like Andrew Tate, provide some other positive male role model for him. Don't seem to be a lot around. Be honest with him: "Yes, you picked this up. Yes, it's true. Yes, I may have benefited from this. No, it's not fair. No, it isn't going to go away any time soon. No, I don't think it is a good idea either. I'm sorry." You'll have to prepare him against people who will say dumb things like "it only feels like oppression because they had it so good." Your child isn't a collective they, he's an individual, he never experienced it being Great to Be a Guy. The people who want to tell him that have visions of some elderly ass-pinching stereotype from Mad Men who is finally getting his comeuppance, not your child ... but they're pretty okay with your kid taking the hit by proxy. They're pretty okay with it, they're not going to lose any sleep at night. They'll tell you this to your face if you ask. You're going to have to warn him about the world he is entering.
tenpies 4y ago
> He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him. This really shouldn't be surprising. It's incredibly tough when from the moment you enter the education stream, every single chip is stacked against you, you are constantly blamed for problems you had no hand in, and are then bombarded with fundamental questions about your identity such as if you're sure you're even a boy. If you make it to the age where you realize that the adults are very wrong and your teachers can have specific biases against you, then you can make it. But until that point, there's a lot of confusing suffering to survive through.
alpineidyll3 4y ago
So do something about it? Certainly no male can advocate for simple merit based hiring in academia anymore.
kilgnad 4y ago
I feel you hold a different view then most women. Very different. In fact your views can get you attacked by other women and a few men who completely buy into the whole mainstream story. It's ok for a woman to say what you say in a forum of mostly men, because as a woman you have more credibility than men themselves to speak out against extremist feminist policies. Please answer honestly. If you never had a son, would you view things the same way? Would you have viewed things the same way when you were younger, before you had a son?
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  If I never had a son, I would have never understood what boys go through. It's so fundamentally different than girls, it's hard to believe. Watching a part of you grow up, learn, smile at you, its just something beyond what any words can describe. You want to protect them. You watch them closely. You slowly realize just how different your son is from yourself and your daughter. I still remember the first day he got a sports injury, and was trying so hard to not cry in front of his friends. Motherhood changed my life and opened my eyes a lot more.
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    I understand. However, the emphasis of my question is on your current viewpoint of the feminist policies at the workplace. How has having a son changed that? Did it change it at all? When I was younger and older male mentor told me this. He told me that many people don't know this but while society paints a picture of men being bumbling fools trying to crack the code that is this mysterious creature called a woman, the truth is actually the other way around. Men understand women better than women understand men. He said that both sexes are equally complex and very different but the cultural stereotype occurs because men have a strong desire to understand a woman while women simply view men through the most stereotypical lens possible without caring to understand anything deeper. He told me that it is a mans job to take care of a woman, to look after her needs and to be her rock. He told me to never to fully reveal the full truth of what a man is to a woman... that a man is in actuality a creature who is sensitive... with wants and needs and vulnerabilities. He said not to reveal any of this to another woman because the relationship a man has with a woman is more like a father to a daughter, the father cannot reveal the full reality of what he is to his daughter because it is frightening to her to know the full truth of what he faces outside of her world. If part of this truth is revealed during courtship the woman will find this aspect of a man despicable and disgusting, and moves on to another man that appears stronger. He also said to not get confused when a woman says she wants a sensitive man. He stated that she doesn't want a "sensitive" man, mainly what she is saying is that she wants a man "sensitive" to her needs. He believed that women simply don't care to understand men for what they really are. They don't want to and they aren't suppose to either. I think by suppose to he meant that this is biology... standard human behavior. He did tell me that what he told me was just a generality. He said occasionally I might encounter a woman who truly understands the psychology of men and he said usually that woman is a mother who has a son and has seen what her son has to go through growing up. Your son hasn't fully grown up yet, so I don't know how much of this applies to you. If he were telling this to you, I think he would say that an aspect of your son lives inside your husband but your husband and every man is in actuality hiding this aspect from you and their respective spouses. Would you say this is true? Would a lot of what's going on with modern society simply a lack of understanding?

lgleason 4y ago

This ^^^

sfgoodforonce 4y ago

>I have a son and I caught him and friends gravitating to Andrew Tate like content. He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him. Society is hostile against him. Anti-male prejudice is absolutely everywhere. Andrew Tate is a get-rich-quick grifter and possibly a criminal, but he’s right about some things.

stuckinhell 4y ago
Maybe but his family isn't. I'm trying my best to protect him, which is why it was so shocking when I checked his internet usage.
- sfgoodforonce 4y ago
  The most you can do to protect him is the same that people do in hostile regimes throughout the ages: make sure that by a certain age he understands that there’s a difference between what’s actually right and wrong and what the powers that be expect him to adhere to. It’s okay to make a stand but only if you’re very sure that the upside is worth the costs. The people blasting anti-feminist content under their real identity, to no personal or societal gain, are idiots.
  - kneel 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - sfgoodforonce 4y ago
      Happy to be at your service.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Are you a single mother? If so perhaps he is just looking for a male role model that tells him he is valued as a man and that its ok to be strong? Sometimes kids look for a stereotypically male role model. Someone that represents strength. I'm not defending all the bile that Tate puts out but dude is a well known figure that advocates for men to be manly. On the other hand, maybe he was just checking him out due to curiosity.
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    Happily Married. His father/ My husband and I do our best to spend time with him, take him to little league, etc. We tightly control television time, monitor internet usage, and videogames, but I doubt it will ever be enough. Anyone with little kids knows, they absorb social messaging about gender roles, rank and hierarchy like sponges. Andrew Tate seems wildly popular on discord, tiktok, roblox, minecraft, and youtube comments right now. I think you are right, my son and his friends are looking for someone to teach them to be strong "manly" men. I don't think we've been teaching him how to physically and mentally strong. We've been pushing things more in line with our tech careers ... Thank you for your comment. It's really given me something to think about.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Protect him from what, exactly?
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    People who aren't looking out for his best interests or use him as fodder for their various agendas. Some people on hackernews think I need to educate my son on being guilty for being born male. Some men like Andrew Tate would just grift off of him. Some women on twitch would try to leech money from him. I want to protect him from all the things that would destroy him.
SapporoChris 4y ago
https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-gap/ https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-ga... Yes, the anti-male prejudice is just awful. /s
- sidlls 4y ago
  It can be true that entrenched systems favor males in some areas, and new social and cultural phenomena disfavor them in others at the same time. My wife has made the observation that there seems to be so much more media, events, toys, etc., targeted at girls in a positive way than for boys. We have two boys, and she has been quite the feminist in the time I’ve known her. As a guy I tend to err on the side of being skeptical of my own initial reactions to women who remark about the sexism rampant in our society. So when she brought this up it certainly carried more weight.
  - SapporoChris 4y ago
    The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice. Media events targeted to girls, like the super bowl, Mardi Gras, military conflicts, just naming a few. Sorry, I'm missing it. What media events favored women.
    - ascar 4y ago
      > The pay scales seem to indicate that we are pretty damn far from having a general problem with anti-male prejudice No they don't indicate that at all. Equal pay day is in fact anti-male propaganda. It's the opposite of meritocracy to expect people to earn the same regardless of career and life choices and that's exactly what the equal pay day would require. The controlled pay gap is at 1% (based on the same source you linked).
    - sidlls 4y ago
      I seem not to have communicated my point clearly: inequity in one direction can exist in some areas (e.g., payscales) and in the other in other areas (e.g., social validation in the form of the availability of positive media, toys, and events such as birthday parties, etc.). So, yes, payscale inequality is a thing. That doesn't mean we haven't "overcorrected" in the opposite direction in other areas.

Zetice 4y ago

It’s funny, for men to think society is against them, when in reality they define society. As a straight white male, there are very few rooms, very few jobs, very few situations where I don’t have absolute confidence that I belong there. Is it so bad to think everybody should feel that way? Your son will be fine.

stuckinhell 4y ago
You sure have a lot of assumptions there. Generational changes are occurring, he won't live the life you or I did. Also my son isn't white.
- Zetice 4y ago
  [dead]
ed25519FUUU 4y ago
What are your thoughts on the study GP linked to? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- DSMan195276 4y ago
  The thing about these statistics is that the size of the underlying groups are not the same, and there's a whole lot of factors that impact them in complicated ways. The article you linked even gives a direct explanation of why the data is hard to interpret and suggests that the solution is encouraging more females to apply, because females are likely to self-select out of the field unless they are very likely to go further: > [See SI Appendix for descriptions of other audits of actual hiring that accord with this view, some dating back to the 1980s. Many studies have argued (see ref. 14) that because only the very top women persist in math-intensive fields, their advantage in being hired is justified because they are more competent than the average male applicant. This is why an accurate evaluation of gender preference in hiring depends on data from an experiment in which competence is held constant.] Thus, real-world hiring data showing a preference for women, inherently confounded and open to multiple interpretations because of lack of controls on applicant quality, experience, and lifestyle, are consistent with our experimental findings. The FA has the same thing going on, it says that females are 3-15 times more likely to be elected, but _also_ that they only make up 40% of elected members, so not even half. The only way that's possible is if significantly less of them are apply to begin with, and it's reasonable to assume there's some self-selecting going (or at the very least, since the groups are so different in size they're not directly comparable in terms of qualifications) on the same as the article you linked. The issue of men and women acceptance rates in college is even the exact example given on the Simpson's paradox Wikipedia page, because it's such a simple one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

epistasis 4y ago

Given the amount of harassment and pressure on women in science that men don't experience, I've always found that the women who stick around tend to be more capable than the average male scientist. If you have to relax standards to hire women, you're doing it 100% wrong and should evaluate your sourcing of candidates. And perhaps the evaluation process and environment itself. Women know bad environments, and capable women will stay far away.

stuckinhell 4y ago
Sure but that's not incentives work in businesses. If I can get a women engineer onto a certain team of extremely high performing all male engineers at my firm, I can get a bonus of 20k easily, and hit a DIE initiative goal which is good for my career. It's good for my career unless the team stops performing well, but if I've already leveraged it into another position then who cares ? These are some of dynamics occurring in reality of many fortune 500 companies right now with recruiters, managers, directors, and executives.
- epistasis 4y ago
  You get bonuses specifically for hiring certain demographics? That sounds incredibly toxic, and I'm glad that where I work doesn't have anything like that. Teams I've created have always been fairly balanced on gender, and it's been good for productivity. When I've taken over all-male teams, and hired women, it's been good for productivity. That's just my experience, and I know it runs counter to some others, but then I've never encountered the difficulties that others have had with hiring talented women who are great assets to their team. It's weird that I'm getting downvoted for what are very reasonable experiences, though. Makes me think that HN is trending more towards politics and less towards news for hackers...
  - stuckinhell 4y ago
    Yea pretty much. Toxic Dysfunction seems to be the natural state of most fortune 500 businesses. Money and Politics is an extremely corrupting influence. This kind of stuff is extremely common too. Most recruiting companies filtered non DIE candidates before our pipelines so we had deniability on this as well. Just for perspective, 20k was considered a low-end bonus before the economic downturns.

nodesocket 4y ago

As Jordan Peterson has been championing, equality of outcome is not the same as equality. Better candidates, more qualified students are being passed up because they are male, white, pick your stereotype of privilege here. It’s a serious societal problem leading to anger and extremism.

wpietri 4y ago

Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. Achieving equality will feel like oppression to those used to having a good deal. Society isn't generally hostile against your son; its hostility is to patriarchy, something Andrew Tate seeks to restore and extend. As a guy, I'm perfectly fine with things like "the future is female" for the same reason I'm fine with things like "gay pride" and "black pride" even though I'm straight and white. I recognize the historic inequality. As any good American should, I respect struggles for freedom and celebrate the successes of people seeking equality. I have no reason to think that any of those movements, no matter how successful they are, will shift into the same sort of oppression my fellow straight, white men have been perpetrating for centuries and that I benefited from. I get why your son got sucked in, and I feel for both you and him. He's having to make choices about his identity in a time when all sorts of things in flux. But you can help him understand that society is not hostile to him personally, and that any hostility he is seeing is mainly a reaction to past harm. That he gets to make choices about what parts of the old world get sustained or get left behind. And that as long as he's working for what's right, he doesn't have to worry too much if people's trauma leads them to mistake him as being part of something wrong.

beebmam 4y ago
> Ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. You lost me here. If you were serious about fairness, you would propose reparations for past harm, and an equal system going forward. It's absurd to try to replace one unequal system with another unequal system.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Reparations for past harm is an example of asymmetric behavior.
stuckinhell 4y ago
This might be my management role leaking, but in my experience you are being far too rational. Humans are emotional beings first and foremost, then rational. I do think society is hostile to him, but I don't want him to become a reactionary, or a culture warrior. I'm his mother, I want him to be happy. I won't sacrifice my son to some abstract societal goal no matter how noble it might seem. This is why I cannot agree with your idea of ending inequality requires asymmetric behavior. It is wrong to rationalize away all the collateral damage that happens to living human beings under the guise of statistics and history.

safety1st 4y ago

In the US: * The majority of suicides are male * The majority of homeless are male * Men are less likely to go to college * The vast majority of prison inmates are male * The vast majority of workplace deaths are male * The majority of violent crime victims are male * The vast majority of police brutality victims are male Now if we were talking about say India it would be a different story, and this is not to suggest that being a woman doesn't come with its own hazards, like a higher risk of being sexually assaulted. But it's an objective, quantitative fact that there are way more men in awful life circumstances than there are women. Frankly in 2023 if a woman is strutting around an American college campus with a shirt that says "The future is female," she's a member of the ruling class who's rubbing it in. In fact men so overwhelmingly dominate the worst outcomes in our society that I would go as far as to say that we cannot fix its worst injustices until we recognize many of them are uniquely male problems. Police brutality will remain permanently unsolved. Our world-leading incarceration rate will remain permanently unsolved. But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter.

exolymph 4y ago
I directionally agree with you but there's definitely more nuance when you dig into any individual issue. For example, there are more male suicides because men use more effective methods, and more male prisoners because men are more violent. (I don't say that as a knock on men, either; it's a reflection of the biology-driven distribution of behavioral tendencies that each sex has evolved.)
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
> But as a society we simply ignore the gendered nature of these atrocities. For some reason we can shrug off another human being's suffering when it's a son or a brother, far more easily than when it's a sister or daughter. The roots are biological, men are the dispensable gender, given that a single man can potentially impregnate several women. On the other hand if a female is lost, her potential progeny is also lost. I'm not alluding to the fact that it is justified just because it's biological. What is also biological is that a large number of very responsible men have lone wolf tendencies, where they despair in loneliness due to the responsibilities, and burden of expectations placed on them. A some what workable solution ( though again the innate biology can hinder) would be for men to from support groups for each other. Most governments, family, society, and women are not going to do that for men in trouble. Let that cold fact sink in.

at_a_remove 4y ago

Well, your son has inherited your perspicacity, so be thankful for that. He's right: society is hostile to him. He's not even twenty. Twenty years ago, we had shirts like "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." Not long after, Obama was saying that we need more women in college ... despite them being fifty-five percent of the enrolled. And so on and so forth. Your son is only picking up his environment. If you want him to avoid people like Andrew Tate, provide some other positive male role model for him. Don't seem to be a lot around. Be honest with him: "Yes, you picked this up. Yes, it's true. Yes, I may have benefited from this. No, it's not fair. No, it isn't going to go away any time soon. No, I don't think it is a good idea either. I'm sorry." You'll have to prepare him against people who will say dumb things like "it only feels like oppression because they had it so good." Your child isn't a collective they, he's an individual, he never experienced it being Great to Be a Guy. The people who want to tell him that have visions of some elderly ass-pinching stereotype from Mad Men who is finally getting his comeuppance, not your child ... but they're pretty okay with your kid taking the hit by proxy. They're pretty okay with it, they're not going to lose any sleep at night. They'll tell you this to your face if you ask. You're going to have to warn him about the world he is entering.

tenpies 4y ago

> He's so young, and he already feels that society is hostile against him. This really shouldn't be surprising. It's incredibly tough when from the moment you enter the education stream, every single chip is stacked against you, you are constantly blamed for problems you had no hand in, and are then bombarded with fundamental questions about your identity such as if you're sure you're even a boy. If you make it to the age where you realize that the adults are very wrong and your teachers can have specific biases against you, then you can make it. But until that point, there's a lot of confusing suffering to survive through.

alpineidyll3 4y ago

So do something about it? Certainly no male can advocate for simple merit based hiring in academia anymore.

kilgnad 4y ago

I feel you hold a different view then most women. Very different. In fact your views can get you attacked by other women and a few men who completely buy into the whole mainstream story. It's ok for a woman to say what you say in a forum of mostly men, because as a woman you have more credibility than men themselves to speak out against extremist feminist policies. Please answer honestly. If you never had a son, would you view things the same way? Would you have viewed things the same way when you were younger, before you had a son?

stuckinhell 4y ago
If I never had a son, I would have never understood what boys go through. It's so fundamentally different than girls, it's hard to believe. Watching a part of you grow up, learn, smile at you, its just something beyond what any words can describe. You want to protect them. You watch them closely. You slowly realize just how different your son is from yourself and your daughter. I still remember the first day he got a sports injury, and was trying so hard to not cry in front of his friends. Motherhood changed my life and opened my eyes a lot more.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  I understand. However, the emphasis of my question is on your current viewpoint of the feminist policies at the workplace. How has having a son changed that? Did it change it at all? When I was younger and older male mentor told me this. He told me that many people don't know this but while society paints a picture of men being bumbling fools trying to crack the code that is this mysterious creature called a woman, the truth is actually the other way around. Men understand women better than women understand men. He said that both sexes are equally complex and very different but the cultural stereotype occurs because men have a strong desire to understand a woman while women simply view men through the most stereotypical lens possible without caring to understand anything deeper. He told me that it is a mans job to take care of a woman, to look after her needs and to be her rock. He told me to never to fully reveal the full truth of what a man is to a woman... that a man is in actuality a creature who is sensitive... with wants and needs and vulnerabilities. He said not to reveal any of this to another woman because the relationship a man has with a woman is more like a father to a daughter, the father cannot reveal the full reality of what he is to his daughter because it is frightening to her to know the full truth of what he faces outside of her world. If part of this truth is revealed during courtship the woman will find this aspect of a man despicable and disgusting, and moves on to another man that appears stronger. He also said to not get confused when a woman says she wants a sensitive man. He stated that she doesn't want a "sensitive" man, mainly what she is saying is that she wants a man "sensitive" to her needs. He believed that women simply don't care to understand men for what they really are. They don't want to and they aren't suppose to either. I think by suppose to he meant that this is biology... standard human behavior. He did tell me that what he told me was just a generality. He said occasionally I might encounter a woman who truly understands the psychology of men and he said usually that woman is a mother who has a son and has seen what her son has to go through growing up. Your son hasn't fully grown up yet, so I don't know how much of this applies to you. If he were telling this to you, I think he would say that an aspect of your son lives inside your husband but your husband and every man is in actuality hiding this aspect from you and their respective spouses. Would you say this is true? Would a lot of what's going on with modern society simply a lack of understanding?