5 ms·

To speak frankly, what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education? I don't exactly see turning tides in terms of women beginning to dominate ma

To speak frankly, what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education? I don't exactly see turning tides in terms of women beginning to dominate markets or leadership positions because they're starting businesses and startups and taking over boards and middle management positions. Anecdotally, I've seen these single women, they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them. I don't see as much of a concept of growing up together off the foundations of who you are as a person today as I've heard it expressed from older colleagues I've worked with. Plainly, women are asking for too much, and too late in life.

aaomidi 3y ago
> Plainly, women are asking for too much, and too late in life. Ah yes, the hive mind of women.
sho_hn 3y ago
> they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them I don't think this is female-specific. I see a lot of young men around me delaying "getting serious" into their mid-30s too, and have very high standards by that point. I'd include myself. I met my wife at 30, and by that time I was also looking for someone in a similar life stage to mine.
- andrewmcwatters 3y ago
  Yeah, I see the same problem with young men, too. People say the dating pool turns in their favor by the time they get to their 30s, but you've missed out on an entire possible era of your life together with someone at that point. And the dating pool absolutely does not look the same.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    It's definitely true that my wife I say "I wish I had met you five years earlier" a lot, e.g. around things like starting a fam. There's something to what you say there, it gives you more runway in HN parlance.
    - throw-ru-938 3y ago
      Then again, it's not guaranteed she would appreciate you-but-five-years-earlier, and vice versa. A person probably undergoes a bit more character development than a VC firm does.
      - sho_hn 3y ago
        Given that we're no longer with the people who we were seeing 5 years earlier ... yep.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    "More people are waiting until their 30s to settle down" is a wildly different claim than "women are asking too much." If the dating pool looks a lot different after that decade that also suggests that a lot of people are still "settling down" earlier, too. So is the claim that "women are asking for too much, and too late in life" based in 30something men who fucked around in their 20s not having grown up as much as the women during that decade or something? I met my wife in my 30s, on an app even, I also found I had lost patience for women who acted like they were in their early or mid 20s still.
- throw-ru-938 3y ago
  Yeah, that's possibly me in five years.
JimtheCoder 3y ago
"what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education?" Maybe a surplus of education just means...they spent more time and money on school? Dominating markets and leadership positions, building businesses...how much formal education you have rarely plays a big role in these endeavors... Just my personal experience.
- andrewmcwatters 3y ago
  Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. It's not a useful social signal: it just means you spent more time and money and incurred more debt than men without any additional context.
scarmig 3y ago
They are outcompeting men in their premarriage years; in the most significant metros, single women's income matches or exceeds single men's. And as of 2016 40% of managers are female. I agree that women tend to not be going for the riskiest jobs or those that require significant tradeoffs in work-life balance; for those, you need a supportive spouse, and there are both demand- and supply-side issues in pairings where males play the supportive role to a female primary earner.
- tester457 3y ago
  > I agree that women tend to not be going for the riskiest jobs or those that require significant tradeoffs in work-life balance; for those, you need a supportive spouse, and there are both demand- and supply-side issues in pairings where males play the supportive role to a female primary earner. Choosing more risky jobs may be male biology and the gender equality paradox. No increase in supply of supportive husbands would significantly increase the amount of women choosing riskier careers. > Iceland consistently ranks as the most gender-equal nation. It is also the nation where men and women are most likely to pursue sex-typical jobs.[1] Also does a person truly need a supportive spouse to undertake a risky career? My assumption is that people decide their career paths well before marriage, and some men choose their career to be a more attractive dating prospect. [1] https://bigthink.com/the-present/gender-equality-paradox/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/gender-equality-paradox/
  - scarmig 3y ago
    That was badly stated on my part, and I mostly agree with you on the risky-career part (though the work-life tradeoff is a separate axis and one where I think my point holds). Men probably do choose riskier careers early on in significant part because it increases payouts in the relationship market relative to women. Going from well-off to rich doesn't actually improve material well-being much for either men or women, but it does significantly improve relationship prospects for men in a way it doesn't for women. It becomes a matter of economics: the real payout (inclusive of non-monetary elements) for success in a risky bet is higher for men than women, and so men choose to take those risky bets more often.
swozey 3y ago
> they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them. I'm in my 30s and never married. I fully expect someone to come as a full person with an education and career. I am beyond glad that I didn't get married to my high school sweet heart or someone I dated in my early 20s when I was still a kid. I am nothing like I was when I was 20, or 25. Maybe even 30. I know way, way too many people who did that and are now divorced. And a lot of the women in those relationships had children very early and didn't have a chance to get an education or start a career so now that they're divorced and on their own they're having a very hard time securing good income. Women are definitely not "asking for too much." I would rather be happily single than compromise heavily on my expectations, and I'd wager the sort of women we're talking about feel the same.
- Multicomp 3y ago
  > I know way, way too many people who did that and are now divorced. And a lot of the women in those relationships had children very early and didn't have a chance to get an education or start a career so now that they're divorced and on their own they're having a very hard time securing good income. My parents talked about how when they were married 'they were just kids' even though they married in their mid 20s. I wonder if this trend of marriages happening more into the late 20s to early 30s has a large source from the difficulty of obtaining financial stability, and additionally if it is part of the causes of the US low fertility rate. Would we still wait to mid/late 20s to get serious if all else were equal but the financial stability to buy a house etc. were there as easily as it was for previous generations?
  - swozey 3y ago
    I think a big part of it is a huge portion of millennials are the children of divorced families. I have zero desire or itch to be married. If a partner of mine really wanted to be married I'd be fine with it. I also have no desire to have children. The other poster mentioned that eventually I'll get married or "life will pass me by". At least that's how I'm reading it. I don't need a partner or to be married to enjoy life. I don't feel that I'm missing anything. I can do whatever I want.
EatingWithForks 3y ago
I don't believe women past their 20s are "too late in life" to be seeking a partner. I for one would not want to have a long-term partner with someone below their 20's. They're too young, cannot even go for a casual heart-to-heart over beers/wine, and have no understanding of budgeting, tax analysis, healthcare planning, or any other number of basic adult administration. I'll have to parent them though this, which is supremely un-sexy.
- Dudester230602 3y ago
  If she wants kids and she is ~35 then one bad shot means missing out on kids.
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    The poster above specifies <20, so I'm talking about <20 year old women.
    - Dudester230602 3y ago
      You said "I don't believe women past their 20s are "too late in life" to be seeking a partner.". That means 30s. It's not too late, but certain risks are much higher.
      - EatingWithForks 3y ago
        I didn't say there is no upper limit. I disagreed that the 20s is the upper limit.
analog31 3y ago
Making more money in better jobs, in better towns, healthier, better lives.
orwin 3y ago
> To speak frankly, what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education? What's funny is that I talked about Bourdieu a whole afternoon during last week's strike, and today, two conversations where my 10 year old knowledge could be used. Women historically had low economic, symbolic and social capital, but could have high cultural one. They used this cultural capital to gain the others. But Bourdieu explain that capital structure is a chiasma, and that people with high economic capital will push to get their offspring to get cultural capital (or at least symbols, aka diploma), and people with high cultural capital will try to prevent it by creating other symbols (that was in the 70s, he basically predicted diploma inflation 40 years before it happened). In the meantime, people with high cultural capital will try to get high economic capital, and people with high economic capital will try to prevent that (basically having too much culture/knowledge is an hindrance to truly get on the highest march) And I realized I don't understand him well enough to correctly explain his theories, so I scraped my explanations and left the basic, you should read him, but basically, it's inconsious phenomenon that isn't really caused by inconsious sexism (it might but I don't think so) but by capital structure.
- andrewmcwatters 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing this.
dang 3y ago
Please don't do gender flamewar on HN. "Women are asking for too much" is not going to end well, and the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

aaomidi 3y ago

> Plainly, women are asking for too much, and too late in life. Ah yes, the hive mind of women.

sho_hn 3y ago

> they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them I don't think this is female-specific. I see a lot of young men around me delaying "getting serious" into their mid-30s too, and have very high standards by that point. I'd include myself. I met my wife at 30, and by that time I was also looking for someone in a similar life stage to mine.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Yeah, I see the same problem with young men, too. People say the dating pool turns in their favor by the time they get to their 30s, but you've missed out on an entire possible era of your life together with someone at that point. And the dating pool absolutely does not look the same.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  It's definitely true that my wife I say "I wish I had met you five years earlier" a lot, e.g. around things like starting a fam. There's something to what you say there, it gives you more runway in HN parlance.
  - throw-ru-938 3y ago
    Then again, it's not guaranteed she would appreciate you-but-five-years-earlier, and vice versa. A person probably undergoes a bit more character development than a VC firm does.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      Given that we're no longer with the people who we were seeing 5 years earlier ... yep.
- majormajor 3y ago
  "More people are waiting until their 30s to settle down" is a wildly different claim than "women are asking too much." If the dating pool looks a lot different after that decade that also suggests that a lot of people are still "settling down" earlier, too. So is the claim that "women are asking for too much, and too late in life" based in 30something men who fucked around in their 20s not having grown up as much as the women during that decade or something? I met my wife in my 30s, on an app even, I also found I had lost patience for women who acted like they were in their early or mid 20s still.
throw-ru-938 3y ago
Yeah, that's possibly me in five years.

JimtheCoder 3y ago

"what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education?" Maybe a surplus of education just means...they spent more time and money on school? Dominating markets and leadership positions, building businesses...how much formal education you have rarely plays a big role in these endeavors... Just my personal experience.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. It's not a useful social signal: it just means you spent more time and money and incurred more debt than men without any additional context.

scarmig 3y ago

They are outcompeting men in their premarriage years; in the most significant metros, single women's income matches or exceeds single men's. And as of 2016 40% of managers are female. I agree that women tend to not be going for the riskiest jobs or those that require significant tradeoffs in work-life balance; for those, you need a supportive spouse, and there are both demand- and supply-side issues in pairings where males play the supportive role to a female primary earner.

tester457 3y ago
> I agree that women tend to not be going for the riskiest jobs or those that require significant tradeoffs in work-life balance; for those, you need a supportive spouse, and there are both demand- and supply-side issues in pairings where males play the supportive role to a female primary earner. Choosing more risky jobs may be male biology and the gender equality paradox. No increase in supply of supportive husbands would significantly increase the amount of women choosing riskier careers. > Iceland consistently ranks as the most gender-equal nation. It is also the nation where men and women are most likely to pursue sex-typical jobs.[1] Also does a person truly need a supportive spouse to undertake a risky career? My assumption is that people decide their career paths well before marriage, and some men choose their career to be a more attractive dating prospect. [1] https://bigthink.com/the-present/gender-equality-paradox/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/gender-equality-paradox/
- scarmig 3y ago
  That was badly stated on my part, and I mostly agree with you on the risky-career part (though the work-life tradeoff is a separate axis and one where I think my point holds). Men probably do choose riskier careers early on in significant part because it increases payouts in the relationship market relative to women. Going from well-off to rich doesn't actually improve material well-being much for either men or women, but it does significantly improve relationship prospects for men in a way it doesn't for women. It becomes a matter of economics: the real payout (inclusive of non-monetary elements) for success in a risky bet is higher for men than women, and so men choose to take those risky bets more often.

swozey 3y ago

> they're all waiting until they're past their 20s to find a partner and they expect them all to be complete people by the time they meet them. I'm in my 30s and never married. I fully expect someone to come as a full person with an education and career. I am beyond glad that I didn't get married to my high school sweet heart or someone I dated in my early 20s when I was still a kid. I am nothing like I was when I was 20, or 25. Maybe even 30. I know way, way too many people who did that and are now divorced. And a lot of the women in those relationships had children very early and didn't have a chance to get an education or start a career so now that they're divorced and on their own they're having a very hard time securing good income. Women are definitely not "asking for too much." I would rather be happily single than compromise heavily on my expectations, and I'd wager the sort of women we're talking about feel the same.

Multicomp 3y ago
> I know way, way too many people who did that and are now divorced. And a lot of the women in those relationships had children very early and didn't have a chance to get an education or start a career so now that they're divorced and on their own they're having a very hard time securing good income. My parents talked about how when they were married 'they were just kids' even though they married in their mid 20s. I wonder if this trend of marriages happening more into the late 20s to early 30s has a large source from the difficulty of obtaining financial stability, and additionally if it is part of the causes of the US low fertility rate. Would we still wait to mid/late 20s to get serious if all else were equal but the financial stability to buy a house etc. were there as easily as it was for previous generations?
- swozey 3y ago
  I think a big part of it is a huge portion of millennials are the children of divorced families. I have zero desire or itch to be married. If a partner of mine really wanted to be married I'd be fine with it. I also have no desire to have children. The other poster mentioned that eventually I'll get married or "life will pass me by". At least that's how I'm reading it. I don't need a partner or to be married to enjoy life. I don't feel that I'm missing anything. I can do whatever I want.

EatingWithForks 3y ago

I don't believe women past their 20s are "too late in life" to be seeking a partner. I for one would not want to have a long-term partner with someone below their 20's. They're too young, cannot even go for a casual heart-to-heart over beers/wine, and have no understanding of budgeting, tax analysis, healthcare planning, or any other number of basic adult administration. I'll have to parent them though this, which is supremely un-sexy.

Dudester230602 3y ago
If she wants kids and she is ~35 then one bad shot means missing out on kids.
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  The poster above specifies <20, so I'm talking about <20 year old women.
  - Dudester230602 3y ago
    You said "I don't believe women past their 20s are "too late in life" to be seeking a partner.". That means 30s. It's not too late, but certain risks are much higher.
    - EatingWithForks 3y ago
      I didn't say there is no upper limit. I disagreed that the 20s is the upper limit.

analog31 3y ago

Making more money in better jobs, in better towns, healthier, better lives.

orwin 3y ago

> To speak frankly, what are women doing with all this supposed surplus of education? What's funny is that I talked about Bourdieu a whole afternoon during last week's strike, and today, two conversations where my 10 year old knowledge could be used. Women historically had low economic, symbolic and social capital, but could have high cultural one. They used this cultural capital to gain the others. But Bourdieu explain that capital structure is a chiasma, and that people with high economic capital will push to get their offspring to get cultural capital (or at least symbols, aka diploma), and people with high cultural capital will try to prevent it by creating other symbols (that was in the 70s, he basically predicted diploma inflation 40 years before it happened). In the meantime, people with high cultural capital will try to get high economic capital, and people with high economic capital will try to prevent that (basically having too much culture/knowledge is an hindrance to truly get on the highest march) And I realized I don't understand him well enough to correctly explain his theories, so I scraped my explanations and left the basic, you should read him, but basically, it's inconsious phenomenon that isn't really caused by inconsious sexism (it might but I don't think so) but by capital structure.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Thanks for sharing this.

dang 3y ago

Please don't do gender flamewar on HN. "Women are asking for too much" is not going to end well, and the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html