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> This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement

> This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement remains relatively under developed. Not really surprising IMHO. Yes, there has been a huge focus on accepting women in the workplace and no, there has not really been a push accepting men as primary caregivers in the family. This likely uncovers underlying motives for the feminist movements such as increasing the size of economies - the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue, so why accept men into them?

jorvi 2y ago
It also fits into the larger societal trend of horribly underserving Zoomer and Alpha (maybe young Millennials too) young boys and men. I've heard someone put it very succinctly: people like Andrew Tate are asking the right questions, but giving abominable answers. I can drop some very simple statistics: women have been getting more bachelors degrees since the 80s. Most university gender ratios are 40/60 trending towards 30/70 [correction: 35/65]. And in the 20s-30s age bracket women have been outearning men. Yet all you see in high school is pushes for more women to attend university, posters, massive amounts of female-only scholarships. Or in terms of wage, constant talk of closing the gender wage gap for women. Etc. etc. Its being talked about as an issue more and more, but it took more than 40 years for it being okay to speak of.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I am forever unsympathetic to feminism so long as it's about forcing the pendulum to the other end. As someone who sincerely believes in gender equality, any argument (other than something stemming from unchangable facts of biology) that involves "men" or "women" specifically is hogwash. No, it should be for man as in mankind. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally.
  - dTal 2y ago
    >No, it should be for man as in mankind You undermined your own point with such impressive brevity that it could be satire.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Thank you for beautifully illustrating my point, I could not ask for a better performance.
    - cheschire 2y ago
      I’m interested what you saw here that I clearly missed when I read it. Were you keying into something with the contemporary effort to replace a lot of language with gender neutral terms?
      - dTal 2y ago
        Yes. "Man" and "mankind" are already low key deprecated terms, because they reinforce a very strong historical bias towards male being the "default" sex. In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories. Modern language prefers more egalitarian terms like "humans" and "humanity". The parent was arguing for "egalitarianism" in favor of so-called "reverse sexism" - a point of view I am very sympathetic with - but went out of their way to avoid contemporary sexually neutral terminology in favor of outdated and overtly sexist terminology. Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined. Given the overtness of the rhetorical maneuver and the response of the poster, I have to believe it was intentional and possibly bait.
        Izkata 2y ago
        If we're going to go that kind of linguistic route, then "human" is also just a type of "man". Making "man" still the default. This kind of argument doesn't make sense to me.
        2y ago
  - jorvi 2y ago
    I'd say we should strive for equal opportunity, not equal outcome. But a long as equal outcome is the goal, it is insanity that a 65/35 ratio is considered a societal emergency that billions of dollars have to be poured into to fix, but a 35/65 ratio is totally fine. I do trend libertarian so I'd say, spend another few billions to correct the overcorrection of the past decades, so everyone is on the same starting line in the rat race. Then outlaw any gender discrimination in either direction. Remove regulations for equal distribution in boardrooms or politics or whatever. Let people choose what they want, even if you end up with skewed ratios. And if research shows that after a decade, women or men are disadvantaged, apply small corrective action so that opportunity remains the same.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      In case I wasn't clear, I too believe in equal opportunity. Equal outcome is a farce that only brings everyone down to the floor.
  - Akronymus 2y ago
    That reminds me of the argument that feminism is for equality. Hell no, it isn't. Otherwise they'd advocate for mens issues as well, rather than taking any mens advocacy as being inherently misogynistic.
    - Llamamoe 2y ago
      The problem is that a lot of the time, at least online, any ground you give to men's issues is almost immediately overtaken by bad faith misogyny with the original, meaningful discourse drowning in it :/
      - Akronymus 2y ago
        It could be argued that because the ability to discuss mens issues openly is only in few places, because in other places such discussions are almost immediately overtaken by talk about womens issues, often by accusing the original discussion of being misogynistic, it leads to a certain hostility towards discussing womens issues. I have personally witnessed it multiple times when a discussion about mens issues was turned into a talk about womens issues via that very method. So I get why people turn hostile towards discussing womens issues at all, but I also get how that can come across as misogynistic.
    - Log_out_ 2y ago
      Its a thinly veiled social powergrab .. and not very different to what came before it. There is always a parade, there is always a priest caste, there is always original sin and martyrs. The ideas claim to be different, but the outcome stays the very same. If you see the world in social contracts, all attempts to fix it become a religion. And this synthetic religion violates the Separation between church and state.
  - renegat0x0 2y ago
    I have been discussing this topic many times, in various contexts. Some argue that some groups are oppressed, and require "help", or "boost". Without it they will not be able to break through. It is true, that some groups were wrongly marginalized. It is also true that some groups do have not integrated well into workforce because of their life decisions. Not everybody has to be CEO of company. It is impossible to make everyone equal. As someone from past-soviet country I know well who wants to make everyone equal. This topic often returns with actions of corporations, which try to fight inequalities. Corporations do not have morality, but they do have an image, and they want to have a good image. They need to have statistics that show that they are moral. They need equality programs. They need hiring quotas. All just to "appear" moral. It is all about perceived morality. PR. It is also a difficult discussion that requires a lot knowledge, and requires knowledge about many nuances. People like to shoot comments as bullets, but often these are not their own ideas, but ideas of political parties they align to. We may force, or bribe more women into work force. We may force, or bribe more marginalized social groups. I wonder how longer it will required, and what will happen if we stopped at some point. It is also a question about equality and equity, and while the latter is often discussed as more fair, for me it is also a PR engineering. It is all about reaching the right stats to not be attacked by leftist mob, that you do not have the right amount of X group. If you decided to treat equally people, you would not be able to integrate marginalized groups. So that is also a little bit disappointing. There is no easy answer in that. There need to be social programs to help people, but they should not harm our society. People need to be able to compete, and to do that you need environment based on abilities, not on gender, or skin color.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      Equity, sometimes understood as total equality is a totalitarian nightmare. Not saying I don't favor a society where the bar for participation is lowered for all members of society. It should usually be a discussion in society itself, nobody can force any solidarity anyway. For me these secondary discussions around fairness only showed me political parties as well as companies that probably should not be trusted. I do forgive populism in political campaigns, but the opportunism I saw here hints to something quite ugly. In software I am thinking of a few companies here, mostly larger ones. They are very vocal about gender or racism issues and I believe it simply is a 100% hit rate to detect a very authoritarian leadership style. Most devs probably go there for the money, but it describes the opposite to a relaxed working environment and instead subjects to to some artificial and dogmatic way of thinking. Less of that please. And you never will seem tolerant of minority opinions if you cannot even restrain yourself from trying to police language. The equation will never resolve itself sensibly.
  - ejdhshsuwisjsh 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    I usually hear feminism defined as "pro-equality", equality being defined by women.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  > I've heard someone put it very succinctly: people like Andrew Tate are asking the right questions, but giving abominable answers. People like Andrew Tate are the only ones talking to men in those generations at all. As you said, we've left men behind in schooling which is a bad start in life. After that, we have a lot of programmes for women, both educational ("girls who code", etc.) to business things (women-owned businesses can get 3k eur to help them start in my country, many business-women awards, etc.), to healthcare (especially mental), economic (especially pensions, where up until recently men had to work more years and get lower pensions at same paychecks in my country... this has been fixed a bit recently, but men still live less on average but have to work the same years and get the same pensions even though they'll get them for less time). Also hollywood, where they replaced a lot of the traditional men roles with women (from superheroes to "fun nerds") while making men more and more incompetent (and that's not a new thing, just look at an average sitcom, especially from the 80s).... well, and lets not forget who has to die in wars, if the want to, or not. So yeah... after all that, there are a few people who actually talk to those men (be it Tate, Milo, or whoever), and give them men-oriented advice (good, or bad), that doesn't revolve around women. ... no shit the kids will like the only fw people who talk to them. A video version of this made in a fun way, but not far from truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQv8VuLpKN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQv8VuLpKN4
  - fwungy 2y ago
    Women often eventually discover they want children and are on a tight timeline. Men do too, but they are not on the timeline. They can start families at virtually any time in their life. By biasing work income towards men it gives women a larger selection of men to choose from to start families with while they are fertile. It also incents them to move sooner rather than work their own career longer to achieve their lifestyle goals, which conflicts with their fertility timeline. It's sad seeing my older female friends reaching the end of their fertility and realizing they don't want to live lives without children and families, but being at a disadvantage in the relationship market because the men they consider to be at their level are seeking younger women. "Woke-ism" is looking more and more like the inversion of reality. It is the denial of fundamental realities in the service of highly questionable ideals. In fact the ideals of "woke-ism" are so questionable that it only survives because they aren't allowed to be questioned.
- nlnn 2y ago
  What's the source for the 30/70 by the way? Someone else I spoke to recently mentioned that stat as well, but I couldn't see it reflected here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1345939/gender-distribution-world-leading-universities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1345939/gender-distribut... I'm guessing it might be at smaller Universities, or country specific?
  - jorvi 2y ago
    Devil is in the details. Your source is about top universities, which are highly competitive. Any process that is highly competitive will trend male, which counterbiases for universities in general trending female for decades. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women-outnumber-men-college-enrollment https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women... > Since 1980, the female-to-male ratio in two-year college enrollment continued to increase until it hit about 1.4 in 1995, stabilizing at that point. The relative female-to-male ratio in four-year college enrollment, however, increased steadily throughout this time period, reaching 1.3 in the fall of 2019. https://pnpi.org/women-in-higher-education/ https://pnpi.org/women-in-higher-education/ > In Fall 2020, female students made up 58.6% of all postsecondary enrollment. If you look at the EU, its generally 45/55 to 40/60. But it gets iffy because within the EU, countries' their student populations are quite different. For example, the East Bloc has an outsized ratio of female STEM students because this was very normal in the Soviet Union. This is in large part because scientist wasn't seen as a prestigious job, just like computer scientist was an administrative job in the US in the 60s. That's a different conversation though.. Asia I don't know enough about to speak to with enough accuracy. Especially with how countries there are also very different from each other (say Japan/Korea/Singapore vs China vs Thailand/Vietnam vs Indonesia) In hindsight, "trending 35/65" would have been a more accurate statement. Thanks for checking me, I've added a correction to the OP :)
    - nlnn 2y ago
      Thank you for the links and update, much appreciated :)
- ejdhshsuwisjsh 2y ago
  I see this in stem areas and it clearly doesn't work.
- Akronymus 2y ago
  > constant talk of closing the gender wage gap for women. Which is mostly an artifact of bad statistics. As it is the average over all working men and women. Where men disproportionally take on dangerous but high paid jobs.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    I remember hearing over a decade ago that when correcting for that by comparing similar jobs, the gap actually flips - women out-earn men by a very small percent (like somewhere around 2-5%).
  - rurp 2y ago
    In addition to this, men value top line salary more than women relative to other benefits like PTO, medical, commute, etc. So in many cases men are actually taking worse jobs but get counted as increasing the wage gap.
- justonenote 2y ago
  If you accept a couple of other facts its even worse. Presuming you accept iq or related tests of cognitive ability as useful, (even if not capturing the entirety of human qualities) and you accept that males have higher variance in cognitive abilities, more around the extremes of low and high cognitive abilities, whereas women on average fall closer to the mean, then if higher education was based on ability you would expect to see more men in higher education. This is if course, verboten speak. I think as a society we have a lot to unpack.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    If you accept those priors, men would be over-represented when attending college was rare and would become less dominant (and eventually a minority) when attending college became vastly more common.
jl6 2y ago
> the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue This is not the whole story according to the divorce courts, with women often being awarded compensation for their contribution to their husband’s career, recognizing that they are a key enabling factor for the man - and why not? Men who don’t need to spend their time on childcare and household duties can dedicate that time to more work -> more pay.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  That is a reasonable assessment. And there are two ways to counter that on a macro scale 1. Getting women in the same role as men - earning money. 2. Getting men in the same role as women - taking care of the family and enabling women. Contemporary political discourse solely focuses on the first - and why wouldn't it? It doesn't seem right to setup a ministry to get men to work less (... In modern politics focused around economics).
  - madeofpalk 2y ago
    You don't see efforts to push for equal parental leave? "Stay at home dads", which is looked at as a novel idea, but is increasing?
    - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
      Not really.. at least not over here in my small eu country. There were talks about mandatory split in parental leave (the 'standard' is that the mother takes it all), and 'women' complained (politicians complained that women complained that this means that women will have to return to work earlier, complained about the bond with the kid, etc.)
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  "Revenue" in this sense strictly means increased profits for shareholders and increased tax revenue for the government. Not idiotic wastes of time, such as supporting a partner's career or raising children.
ben_w 2y ago
I don't get the impression that's the underlying motivation of feminism. Also, I see a degree of annoyance from women regarding how little men are able to take part in caregiving, as the current status quo is an expectation for women to simultaneously perform that role while also having a career — if I imagine myself in their shoes, the idea of going from one unpaid full-time role to two full time roles where only one gets paid, is perhaps a contributing factor as to why developed nations have smaller families or no families.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  Political movements are made up of many constituencies, often with different motivations. Some constituencies within feminism are very enthusiastic about the economy-growing aspects of it. The treasury loves that working women increase the tax yield of a population and corporates love bigger customer bases. Universities like having a greater demand for education. None of these constituencies really have an interest in men taking up caregiving activities.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  > I don't get the impression that's the underlying motivation of feminism. What do you think it is? The initial movements were surely about equality and human rights. But this seems to have been achieved decades ago. In the UK, for example, women have had equal rights to vote for almost 100 years. And note that this only happened 10 years after men got rights to vote (prior to this only some men had these rights). There's something else going on now. The push to get everyone to work more is clear and some people are benefitting from this. The rest of us our suffering. To afford a reasonable quality of life most couples have to both work, leaving no time for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and, god forbid, relaxing. The people benefitting from this (a few men mostly, oligarchs, "billionaires") are laughing while the lower echelons battle it out amongst themselves. You've now got generations of women fighting against "patriarchy" when they should be joining men and fighting against oligarchy.
serial_dev 2y ago
In the end, it was not mainly about empowering women, it was about doubling the worker pool. And with all the money you now as a couple earn, you can pay someone else to care for and raise your children. Then, we are all surprised that the bonds in the family aren't strong anymore, boys grow up without a father figure, and everybody feels they need to go to a therapist because they have nobody in the family and amongst friends they can trust.
- fHr 2y ago
  I don't want to believe this but it actually almost is, we earn probably more than any generation before us but with inflation, lifestyle creep and social media we also need to keep up with our peers to go to the flashiest places and have the craziest experiences and buy all the cool things we are just on a grind were meanwhile we outsource things like taking care of our children and relatives like our old parents. Wow hits very close to home.
- benterix 2y ago
  > In the end, it was not mainly about empowering women, it was about doubling the worker pool. This is a cynical take. I'm unhappy with the situation we ended up with, but the primary factor was to give women a choice, not to force them to sit home by default and only pursue what they love if they put enormous effort to it. I'd go as far as to say the failure of single-income household was unintended effect of several good changes that people fought for over decades. And I believe you're wrong about the lack of father figure because in the traditional model he was ever more absent as today - Cat's in the Cradle is 50 years old now.
farleykr 2y ago
What’s interesting to me is that (if I understand correctly) they’re using GPT as a source of information to make this claim. Usually you see conclusions like these being drawn from some sort of sociological study. But here they’re just talking to GPT and using its answers to determine things about the real world. Not disputing the claims. But talking to GPT to get answers about the real world that have to do with value judgements is just weird. There’s a big difference between asking GPT to give you a recipe for a cake and asking GPT to help you understand the value the world places on different people.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  Yes, this is not sound and constitutes severe critism of the work. ChatGPT is heavily aligned in order to reduce What society sees as biases. This study likely just reverse engineers some of these alignments.
- ath92 2y ago
  The paper is about biases in GPT-4. They're not talking to GPT-4 to determine things about the real world. They're talking to GPT-4 to determine things about GPT-4.
  - farleykr 2y ago
    > This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement remains relatively under developed. Not challenging you. Maybe it’s just the phrasing. But that sentence to me reads as if they think the presence of the biases in GPT means that they exist in the real world. And again, not challenging that the biases do exist. Just noting the trend toward trusting GPT in increasingly subjective areas that have to do with moral judgement. To me it’s not too much different than drawing conclusions about the world from religious texts.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      I read as suggesting that the underlying bias is contained in the text corpus that GPT-4 was trained on, which in turn suggests it was put there by the humans who authored the original corpus. That seems an entirely plausible mechanism to me.
DrScientist 2y ago
A classic example of this is the way parental leave is addressed in many countries. The fact that, in many countries, women have much greater rights in terms of paid parental leave, means it's economically logical for employers to discriminate against them, plus women miss out dis proportionally on time building career. The obvious way to solve this is to have equal parental leave rights - this then entirely removes the cost imbalance to the employer.[1] However in many countries you don't see major campaigns for true equality - often you see campaigns to increase the inequality ( improve womens rights, but not mens ). This is clearly driven by the worry about the cost of equalising the rights by giving men significant paid parental leave. [1] Obviously there are biological differences - but if you widen the window during which parental leave can be taken to beyond just after birth, then both parents can participate equally - and there are working models in some Scandinavian countries.
- kolinko 2y ago
  I feel that parental leave is a strawman argument used in lieu of true issues. That is - I’ve heard radical feminists use it as a way of showing that they care about mens’ rights, while ignoring education/father/violence issues.
  - DrScientist 2y ago
    Not sure I follow. It's not really about 'mens rights' it's about whether you are interested in true quality above economic output. Sure you could paint the lack of engagement in true equality in this area as a sign of one-sided gender based campaigning - but I think the original poster is saying that what's really driving a lot of this are bigger economic factors - increasing the output by getting women into the workforce etc, while pretending it's about equality. So for example, there was a big push for equal pay in the BBC in the UK ( quite right ) - however what tended to happened in practice was the higher paid men getting the push as oppose to bringing up female salaries to match. This is because salaries for 'talent' are negotiated by agents based on perceived rarity - if it becomes more acceptable for women to be a presenter then you have doubled supply. And in general people the lower end of pay is based on what they need to survive - so in a societal model where only one person in a family was working, then you needed to pay them X - if both are working you can afford to halve the salary without the workers not being able to live. It takes a while for these effects to filter through as employers are loathed to generally out and out cut existing wages - but increased supply of labour will surely impact salaries over the long term. Note none of the above is a reason to not pursue equality - it's just you have to have your eyes open to the bigger picture in terms of who's hands does the benefit of the increased economic output end up in....
ejdhshsuwisjsh 2y ago
This is a huge and weird assumption that this is an underlying motive.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
n4r9 2y ago
> there has not really been a push accepting men as primary caregivers in the family As a father of one year, I disagree with this. There's been steady progress towards giving men the opportunity to take on caregiving duties compared to a generation ago, for example: * Plenty of US/UK companies now offer paternity leave of between 12 and 52 weeks. * I know multiple recent fathers who've used their leave to be primary caregivers for blocks of 6 weeks. * A surprising number of pubs/restaurants have baby-change tables in the men's toilets. > the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue, so why accept men into them? There's still a struggle for men to take up places in traditionally "feminine" jobs such as midwifery and early childcare. I found a report on this here - https://ilostat.ilo.org/blog/where-women-work-female-dominated-occupations-and-sectors/ https://ilostat.ilo.org/blog/where-women-work-female-dominat.... Some of the statistics are mindblowing - high 90's percentage points for women in midwifery positions. How much is that down to men's career preference vs difficulty of getting in or peer pressure towards more "manly" careers?
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  Do you experience that it would be OK to be a stay at home dad? Is that encouraged? While you are absolutely right about the things you list, the motivation is not to accept men as caregivers, but to get women in the workforce.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    I feel it would be OK in the sense that my friends and family would accept and support me if that's what I chose to do in my life at this moment. It's definitely socially acceptable in my circles.

jorvi 2y ago

It also fits into the larger societal trend of horribly underserving Zoomer and Alpha (maybe young Millennials too) young boys and men. I've heard someone put it very succinctly: people like Andrew Tate are asking the right questions, but giving abominable answers. I can drop some very simple statistics: women have been getting more bachelors degrees since the 80s. Most university gender ratios are 40/60 trending towards 30/70 [correction: 35/65]. And in the 20s-30s age bracket women have been outearning men. Yet all you see in high school is pushes for more women to attend university, posters, massive amounts of female-only scholarships. Or in terms of wage, constant talk of closing the gender wage gap for women. Etc. etc. Its being talked about as an issue more and more, but it took more than 40 years for it being okay to speak of.

Dalewyn 2y ago
I am forever unsympathetic to feminism so long as it's about forcing the pendulum to the other end. As someone who sincerely believes in gender equality, any argument (other than something stemming from unchangable facts of biology) that involves "men" or "women" specifically is hogwash. No, it should be for man as in mankind. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally.
- dTal 2y ago
  >No, it should be for man as in mankind You undermined your own point with such impressive brevity that it could be satire.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Thank you for beautifully illustrating my point, I could not ask for a better performance.
  - cheschire 2y ago
    I’m interested what you saw here that I clearly missed when I read it. Were you keying into something with the contemporary effort to replace a lot of language with gender neutral terms?
    - dTal 2y ago
      Yes. "Man" and "mankind" are already low key deprecated terms, because they reinforce a very strong historical bias towards male being the "default" sex. In this worldview, society is made of men, and women are accessories. Modern language prefers more egalitarian terms like "humans" and "humanity". The parent was arguing for "egalitarianism" in favor of so-called "reverse sexism" - a point of view I am very sympathetic with - but went out of their way to avoid contemporary sexually neutral terminology in favor of outdated and overtly sexist terminology. Pushback against the overwhelming backlog of casual male-dominating sexism that they deliberately exemplified is the entire reason for the "pushing the pendulum the other way" that they attack. Hence their point was immediately undermined. Given the overtness of the rhetorical maneuver and the response of the poster, I have to believe it was intentional and possibly bait.
      - Izkata 2y ago
        If we're going to go that kind of linguistic route, then "human" is also just a type of "man". Making "man" still the default. This kind of argument doesn't make sense to me.
        2y ago
- jorvi 2y ago
  I'd say we should strive for equal opportunity, not equal outcome. But a long as equal outcome is the goal, it is insanity that a 65/35 ratio is considered a societal emergency that billions of dollars have to be poured into to fix, but a 35/65 ratio is totally fine. I do trend libertarian so I'd say, spend another few billions to correct the overcorrection of the past decades, so everyone is on the same starting line in the rat race. Then outlaw any gender discrimination in either direction. Remove regulations for equal distribution in boardrooms or politics or whatever. Let people choose what they want, even if you end up with skewed ratios. And if research shows that after a decade, women or men are disadvantaged, apply small corrective action so that opportunity remains the same.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    In case I wasn't clear, I too believe in equal opportunity. Equal outcome is a farce that only brings everyone down to the floor.
- Akronymus 2y ago
  That reminds me of the argument that feminism is for equality. Hell no, it isn't. Otherwise they'd advocate for mens issues as well, rather than taking any mens advocacy as being inherently misogynistic.
  - Llamamoe 2y ago
    The problem is that a lot of the time, at least online, any ground you give to men's issues is almost immediately overtaken by bad faith misogyny with the original, meaningful discourse drowning in it :/
    - Akronymus 2y ago
      It could be argued that because the ability to discuss mens issues openly is only in few places, because in other places such discussions are almost immediately overtaken by talk about womens issues, often by accusing the original discussion of being misogynistic, it leads to a certain hostility towards discussing womens issues. I have personally witnessed it multiple times when a discussion about mens issues was turned into a talk about womens issues via that very method. So I get why people turn hostile towards discussing womens issues at all, but I also get how that can come across as misogynistic.
  - Log_out_ 2y ago
    Its a thinly veiled social powergrab .. and not very different to what came before it. There is always a parade, there is always a priest caste, there is always original sin and martyrs. The ideas claim to be different, but the outcome stays the very same. If you see the world in social contracts, all attempts to fix it become a religion. And this synthetic religion violates the Separation between church and state.
- renegat0x0 2y ago
  I have been discussing this topic many times, in various contexts. Some argue that some groups are oppressed, and require "help", or "boost". Without it they will not be able to break through. It is true, that some groups were wrongly marginalized. It is also true that some groups do have not integrated well into workforce because of their life decisions. Not everybody has to be CEO of company. It is impossible to make everyone equal. As someone from past-soviet country I know well who wants to make everyone equal. This topic often returns with actions of corporations, which try to fight inequalities. Corporations do not have morality, but they do have an image, and they want to have a good image. They need to have statistics that show that they are moral. They need equality programs. They need hiring quotas. All just to "appear" moral. It is all about perceived morality. PR. It is also a difficult discussion that requires a lot knowledge, and requires knowledge about many nuances. People like to shoot comments as bullets, but often these are not their own ideas, but ideas of political parties they align to. We may force, or bribe more women into work force. We may force, or bribe more marginalized social groups. I wonder how longer it will required, and what will happen if we stopped at some point. It is also a question about equality and equity, and while the latter is often discussed as more fair, for me it is also a PR engineering. It is all about reaching the right stats to not be attacked by leftist mob, that you do not have the right amount of X group. If you decided to treat equally people, you would not be able to integrate marginalized groups. So that is also a little bit disappointing. There is no easy answer in that. There need to be social programs to help people, but they should not harm our society. People need to be able to compete, and to do that you need environment based on abilities, not on gender, or skin color.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Equity, sometimes understood as total equality is a totalitarian nightmare. Not saying I don't favor a society where the bar for participation is lowered for all members of society. It should usually be a discussion in society itself, nobody can force any solidarity anyway. For me these secondary discussions around fairness only showed me political parties as well as companies that probably should not be trusted. I do forgive populism in political campaigns, but the opportunism I saw here hints to something quite ugly. In software I am thinking of a few companies here, mostly larger ones. They are very vocal about gender or racism issues and I believe it simply is a 100% hit rate to detect a very authoritarian leadership style. Most devs probably go there for the money, but it describes the opposite to a relaxed working environment and instead subjects to to some artificial and dogmatic way of thinking. Less of that please. And you never will seem tolerant of minority opinions if you cannot even restrain yourself from trying to police language. The equation will never resolve itself sensibly.
- ejdhshsuwisjsh 2y ago
  [flagged]
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  I usually hear feminism defined as "pro-equality", equality being defined by women.
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
> I've heard someone put it very succinctly: people like Andrew Tate are asking the right questions, but giving abominable answers. People like Andrew Tate are the only ones talking to men in those generations at all. As you said, we've left men behind in schooling which is a bad start in life. After that, we have a lot of programmes for women, both educational ("girls who code", etc.) to business things (women-owned businesses can get 3k eur to help them start in my country, many business-women awards, etc.), to healthcare (especially mental), economic (especially pensions, where up until recently men had to work more years and get lower pensions at same paychecks in my country... this has been fixed a bit recently, but men still live less on average but have to work the same years and get the same pensions even though they'll get them for less time). Also hollywood, where they replaced a lot of the traditional men roles with women (from superheroes to "fun nerds") while making men more and more incompetent (and that's not a new thing, just look at an average sitcom, especially from the 80s).... well, and lets not forget who has to die in wars, if the want to, or not. So yeah... after all that, there are a few people who actually talk to those men (be it Tate, Milo, or whoever), and give them men-oriented advice (good, or bad), that doesn't revolve around women. ... no shit the kids will like the only fw people who talk to them. A video version of this made in a fun way, but not far from truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQv8VuLpKN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQv8VuLpKN4
- fwungy 2y ago
  Women often eventually discover they want children and are on a tight timeline. Men do too, but they are not on the timeline. They can start families at virtually any time in their life. By biasing work income towards men it gives women a larger selection of men to choose from to start families with while they are fertile. It also incents them to move sooner rather than work their own career longer to achieve their lifestyle goals, which conflicts with their fertility timeline. It's sad seeing my older female friends reaching the end of their fertility and realizing they don't want to live lives without children and families, but being at a disadvantage in the relationship market because the men they consider to be at their level are seeking younger women. "Woke-ism" is looking more and more like the inversion of reality. It is the denial of fundamental realities in the service of highly questionable ideals. In fact the ideals of "woke-ism" are so questionable that it only survives because they aren't allowed to be questioned.
nlnn 2y ago
What's the source for the 30/70 by the way? Someone else I spoke to recently mentioned that stat as well, but I couldn't see it reflected here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1345939/gender-distribution-world-leading-universities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1345939/gender-distribut... I'm guessing it might be at smaller Universities, or country specific?
- jorvi 2y ago
  Devil is in the details. Your source is about top universities, which are highly competitive. Any process that is highly competitive will trend male, which counterbiases for universities in general trending female for decades. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women-outnumber-men-college-enrollment https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women... > Since 1980, the female-to-male ratio in two-year college enrollment continued to increase until it hit about 1.4 in 1995, stabilizing at that point. The relative female-to-male ratio in four-year college enrollment, however, increased steadily throughout this time period, reaching 1.3 in the fall of 2019. https://pnpi.org/women-in-higher-education/ https://pnpi.org/women-in-higher-education/ > In Fall 2020, female students made up 58.6% of all postsecondary enrollment. If you look at the EU, its generally 45/55 to 40/60. But it gets iffy because within the EU, countries' their student populations are quite different. For example, the East Bloc has an outsized ratio of female STEM students because this was very normal in the Soviet Union. This is in large part because scientist wasn't seen as a prestigious job, just like computer scientist was an administrative job in the US in the 60s. That's a different conversation though.. Asia I don't know enough about to speak to with enough accuracy. Especially with how countries there are also very different from each other (say Japan/Korea/Singapore vs China vs Thailand/Vietnam vs Indonesia) In hindsight, "trending 35/65" would have been a more accurate statement. Thanks for checking me, I've added a correction to the OP :)
  - nlnn 2y ago
    Thank you for the links and update, much appreciated :)
ejdhshsuwisjsh 2y ago
I see this in stem areas and it clearly doesn't work.
Akronymus 2y ago
> constant talk of closing the gender wage gap for women. Which is mostly an artifact of bad statistics. As it is the average over all working men and women. Where men disproportionally take on dangerous but high paid jobs.
- Izkata 2y ago
  I remember hearing over a decade ago that when correcting for that by comparing similar jobs, the gap actually flips - women out-earn men by a very small percent (like somewhere around 2-5%).
- rurp 2y ago
  In addition to this, men value top line salary more than women relative to other benefits like PTO, medical, commute, etc. So in many cases men are actually taking worse jobs but get counted as increasing the wage gap.
justonenote 2y ago
If you accept a couple of other facts its even worse. Presuming you accept iq or related tests of cognitive ability as useful, (even if not capturing the entirety of human qualities) and you accept that males have higher variance in cognitive abilities, more around the extremes of low and high cognitive abilities, whereas women on average fall closer to the mean, then if higher education was based on ability you would expect to see more men in higher education. This is if course, verboten speak. I think as a society we have a lot to unpack.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  If you accept those priors, men would be over-represented when attending college was rare and would become less dominant (and eventually a minority) when attending college became vastly more common.

jl6 2y ago

> the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue This is not the whole story according to the divorce courts, with women often being awarded compensation for their contribution to their husband’s career, recognizing that they are a key enabling factor for the man - and why not? Men who don’t need to spend their time on childcare and household duties can dedicate that time to more work -> more pay.

tossandthrow 2y ago
That is a reasonable assessment. And there are two ways to counter that on a macro scale 1. Getting women in the same role as men - earning money. 2. Getting men in the same role as women - taking care of the family and enabling women. Contemporary political discourse solely focuses on the first - and why wouldn't it? It doesn't seem right to setup a ministry to get men to work less (... In modern politics focused around economics).
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  You don't see efforts to push for equal parental leave? "Stay at home dads", which is looked at as a novel idea, but is increasing?
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    Not really.. at least not over here in my small eu country. There were talks about mandatory split in parental leave (the 'standard' is that the mother takes it all), and 'women' complained (politicians complained that women complained that this means that women will have to return to work earlier, complained about the bond with the kid, etc.)
carlosjobim 2y ago
"Revenue" in this sense strictly means increased profits for shareholders and increased tax revenue for the government. Not idiotic wastes of time, such as supporting a partner's career or raising children.

ben_w 2y ago

I don't get the impression that's the underlying motivation of feminism. Also, I see a degree of annoyance from women regarding how little men are able to take part in caregiving, as the current status quo is an expectation for women to simultaneously perform that role while also having a career — if I imagine myself in their shoes, the idea of going from one unpaid full-time role to two full time roles where only one gets paid, is perhaps a contributing factor as to why developed nations have smaller families or no families.

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spacebanana7 2y ago
Political movements are made up of many constituencies, often with different motivations. Some constituencies within feminism are very enthusiastic about the economy-growing aspects of it. The treasury loves that working women increase the tax yield of a population and corporates love bigger customer bases. Universities like having a greater demand for education. None of these constituencies really have an interest in men taking up caregiving activities.
globular-toast 2y ago
> I don't get the impression that's the underlying motivation of feminism. What do you think it is? The initial movements were surely about equality and human rights. But this seems to have been achieved decades ago. In the UK, for example, women have had equal rights to vote for almost 100 years. And note that this only happened 10 years after men got rights to vote (prior to this only some men had these rights). There's something else going on now. The push to get everyone to work more is clear and some people are benefitting from this. The rest of us our suffering. To afford a reasonable quality of life most couples have to both work, leaving no time for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and, god forbid, relaxing. The people benefitting from this (a few men mostly, oligarchs, "billionaires") are laughing while the lower echelons battle it out amongst themselves. You've now got generations of women fighting against "patriarchy" when they should be joining men and fighting against oligarchy.

serial_dev 2y ago

In the end, it was not mainly about empowering women, it was about doubling the worker pool. And with all the money you now as a couple earn, you can pay someone else to care for and raise your children. Then, we are all surprised that the bonds in the family aren't strong anymore, boys grow up without a father figure, and everybody feels they need to go to a therapist because they have nobody in the family and amongst friends they can trust.

fHr 2y ago
I don't want to believe this but it actually almost is, we earn probably more than any generation before us but with inflation, lifestyle creep and social media we also need to keep up with our peers to go to the flashiest places and have the craziest experiences and buy all the cool things we are just on a grind were meanwhile we outsource things like taking care of our children and relatives like our old parents. Wow hits very close to home.
benterix 2y ago
> In the end, it was not mainly about empowering women, it was about doubling the worker pool. This is a cynical take. I'm unhappy with the situation we ended up with, but the primary factor was to give women a choice, not to force them to sit home by default and only pursue what they love if they put enormous effort to it. I'd go as far as to say the failure of single-income household was unintended effect of several good changes that people fought for over decades. And I believe you're wrong about the lack of father figure because in the traditional model he was ever more absent as today - Cat's in the Cradle is 50 years old now.

farleykr 2y ago

What’s interesting to me is that (if I understand correctly) they’re using GPT as a source of information to make this claim. Usually you see conclusions like these being drawn from some sort of sociological study. But here they’re just talking to GPT and using its answers to determine things about the real world. Not disputing the claims. But talking to GPT to get answers about the real world that have to do with value judgements is just weird. There’s a big difference between asking GPT to give you a recipe for a cake and asking GPT to help you understand the value the world places on different people.

tossandthrow 2y ago
Yes, this is not sound and constitutes severe critism of the work. ChatGPT is heavily aligned in order to reduce What society sees as biases. This study likely just reverse engineers some of these alignments.
ath92 2y ago
The paper is about biases in GPT-4. They're not talking to GPT-4 to determine things about the real world. They're talking to GPT-4 to determine things about GPT-4.
- farleykr 2y ago
  > This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement remains relatively under developed. Not challenging you. Maybe it’s just the phrasing. But that sentence to me reads as if they think the presence of the biases in GPT means that they exist in the real world. And again, not challenging that the biases do exist. Just noting the trend toward trusting GPT in increasingly subjective areas that have to do with moral judgement. To me it’s not too much different than drawing conclusions about the world from religious texts.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    I read as suggesting that the underlying bias is contained in the text corpus that GPT-4 was trained on, which in turn suggests it was put there by the humans who authored the original corpus. That seems an entirely plausible mechanism to me.

DrScientist 2y ago

A classic example of this is the way parental leave is addressed in many countries. The fact that, in many countries, women have much greater rights in terms of paid parental leave, means it's economically logical for employers to discriminate against them, plus women miss out dis proportionally on time building career. The obvious way to solve this is to have equal parental leave rights - this then entirely removes the cost imbalance to the employer.[1] However in many countries you don't see major campaigns for true equality - often you see campaigns to increase the inequality ( improve womens rights, but not mens ). This is clearly driven by the worry about the cost of equalising the rights by giving men significant paid parental leave. [1] Obviously there are biological differences - but if you widen the window during which parental leave can be taken to beyond just after birth, then both parents can participate equally - and there are working models in some Scandinavian countries.

kolinko 2y ago
I feel that parental leave is a strawman argument used in lieu of true issues. That is - I’ve heard radical feminists use it as a way of showing that they care about mens’ rights, while ignoring education/father/violence issues.
- DrScientist 2y ago
  Not sure I follow. It's not really about 'mens rights' it's about whether you are interested in true quality above economic output. Sure you could paint the lack of engagement in true equality in this area as a sign of one-sided gender based campaigning - but I think the original poster is saying that what's really driving a lot of this are bigger economic factors - increasing the output by getting women into the workforce etc, while pretending it's about equality. So for example, there was a big push for equal pay in the BBC in the UK ( quite right ) - however what tended to happened in practice was the higher paid men getting the push as oppose to bringing up female salaries to match. This is because salaries for 'talent' are negotiated by agents based on perceived rarity - if it becomes more acceptable for women to be a presenter then you have doubled supply. And in general people the lower end of pay is based on what they need to survive - so in a societal model where only one person in a family was working, then you needed to pay them X - if both are working you can afford to halve the salary without the workers not being able to live. It takes a while for these effects to filter through as employers are loathed to generally out and out cut existing wages - but increased supply of labour will surely impact salaries over the long term. Note none of the above is a reason to not pursue equality - it's just you have to have your eyes open to the bigger picture in terms of who's hands does the benefit of the increased economic output end up in....

ejdhshsuwisjsh 2y ago

This is a huge and weird assumption that this is an underlying motive.

deleted 2y ago
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n4r9 2y ago

> there has not really been a push accepting men as primary caregivers in the family As a father of one year, I disagree with this. There's been steady progress towards giving men the opportunity to take on caregiving duties compared to a generation ago, for example: * Plenty of US/UK companies now offer paternity leave of between 12 and 52 weeks. * I know multiple recent fathers who've used their leave to be primary caregivers for blocks of 6 weeks. * A surprising number of pubs/restaurants have baby-change tables in the men's toilets. > the traditional feminine roles does not generate revenue, so why accept men into them? There's still a struggle for men to take up places in traditionally "feminine" jobs such as midwifery and early childcare. I found a report on this here - https://ilostat.ilo.org/blog/where-women-work-female-dominated-occupations-and-sectors/ https://ilostat.ilo.org/blog/where-women-work-female-dominat.... Some of the statistics are mindblowing - high 90's percentage points for women in midwifery positions. How much is that down to men's career preference vs difficulty of getting in or peer pressure towards more "manly" careers?

tossandthrow 2y ago
Do you experience that it would be OK to be a stay at home dad? Is that encouraged? While you are absolutely right about the things you list, the motivation is not to accept men as caregivers, but to get women in the workforce.
- n4r9 2y ago
  I feel it would be OK in the sense that my friends and family would accept and support me if that's what I chose to do in my life at this moment. It's definitely socially acceptable in my circles.