9 ms·

The lost boys: how a generation of young men fell behind women on pay

57 points by iLoveOncall 2y ago

jurenbert 2y ago
[flagged]
iLoveOncall 2y ago
Archive: https://archive.ph/9IdwR https://archive.ph/9IdwR
api 2y ago
My kids are both girls. If I had boys I'd be really concerned about the lack of positive role models. You have... what exactly? Andrew Tate? Elon Musk? I'd take 2012 Elon Musk as a role model, not so much 2020s Elon Musk. Most of the men out there who are well known, might pose as role models, and would appeal to the kids are radiating this kind of fragile fake masculinity and behave like dumb thirteen year old boys or shock jocks. Following them is a great way to make oneself utterly repulsive to women, and unemployable in a lot of areas. I'm sure I could look around, but the problem is that whatever I'd find probably wouldn't appeal to the kids. There seem to be at least positive-ish female role models with appeals to young people, and a variety of them with a variety of viewpoints and that model a variety of life paths. I don't see that with male ones.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Shouldn’t a parent be a role model of their own
  - api 2y ago
    Oh yeah, you are, but I'm talking about outside in the culture. This becomes very important in the teens.
    - antisthenes 2y ago
      > This becomes very important in the teens. It's the parent's job to make sure it doesn't. Glorifying hyper-successful figures isn't healthy without understanding how they came to be hyper-successful (99% cases it's inheritance/nepotism/luck).
  - watwut 2y ago
    For a teenager that is not locked and isolated?
- peterlk 2y ago
  I have no kids, but perhaps positive role models can be found in more specific categories like music. For example, I think Jacob Collier sets a great example. And I think my parents had similar concerns. I was raised on gangster rap and Eminem, and my parents were very concerned about that. But overall, I think I turned out alright. My feeling is that it’s much more important to have role models closer to home. The light that Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are cast in can be greatly influenced by the people around your kids if not directly by parents
- rhapsodic 2y ago
  [dead]
- trillic 2y ago
  LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Richard Feynman, Keanu Reeves, Fred Rogers, Desmond Tutu, Linus Torvalds, Elie Wiesel.
  - hkt 2y ago
    Media centrality somewhat matters
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Make a large enough list of men, I’ll find the example of why any of these folks are terrible role models. Linus Torvalds famously loves to verbally abuse others working with him, just for one small example…
    - moi2388 2y ago
      So? Doesn’t mean he can’t be a role model. Just don’t emulate all behaviour exactly from any person. People have flaws. Every single one of them.
      - Der_Einzige 2y ago
        The issue is that one has no control over what gets modeled by those looking at "role models". Many of the best role models are the kind of folks who large systems or structures refuse to teach about en mass because these role models are uniquely subversive. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr being the classic example of this.
  - BJones12 2y ago
    I know that list was off the top of your head, but if a quickly-assembled list of male role models includes guys who died almost 40 years ago that probably indicates that there aren't enough of them.
  - juniperus 2y ago
    This is the most boomer comment I’ve ever read. On what planet are these any child’s role model? Elie Wiesel? Desmond Tutu? Those are like NPR lifetime achievement award winners, they have no social capital among any generic guy under 18. 0
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  I think this is the wrong framing. You should not be expecting to find role models on the internet to begin with. This is not an environment designed to produce examples of healthy human life. (This was also generally true of TV, btw, excluding PBS.) I do have many people, including some men, on the internet I respect and try to model my own behavior on. None of them are trying to rake up views on YouTube, twitch, or any social media platform. hasanabi is the closest this gets and he's clearly trying to cater to teenage boys/young men and is irrelevant to my life, although I do admire his commitment to being a bulwark against reactionary takes. Secondly, we need to be teaching emotional identification, regulation, and how to make yourself happy without comparing yourself to others. How to be a valuable member of a community. None of this is specific to men, of course, but the masculinity of that will reveal itself in how people choose to present themselves—nobody is saying men shouldn't try to provide for the people around them or shouldn't protect them or shouldn't be a basis of emotional stability. Notably, it's also masculine (to others) to abandon your family and community. Two very different conceptions that are equally real in our society. If you start from the assumption of some platonic ideal of "masculinity" you'll end up very confused. If you can figure out how to sell this to a bunch of teenage boys you can conquer the world. Personally, I think men are gonna need to feel a generation of pain or two before the obvious incentives are going to align with boys learning to take care of themselves. All of my role models as a child were fictional characters, only about half of them were men, and little of their attraction had to do with helping me feel secure in my masculinity. So perhaps I'm just missing the point entirely.
- hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
  When I think about it, it makes sense. By the way, could you share some female role models who appeal to girls? What I noticed is that some people look good when viewed at a distance. But it sometimes happens that when you look closer, or time passes, the people who seemed very positive (Bill Cosby and many others) show some other aspects.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo. Hell, even AOC or Kamala Harriss altrought not cool, they are not openly toxic. There is no female equivalent of Trump o, you have to be a man to consistently fail upwards and be enabled that consistently.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Role models don’t have to be para social relationships with attention economy celebrities. Look within your own community, those are the people that can have a bigger more direct effect anyway. Camp counselors, teachers, neighbors, creatives, local government officials, coaches, etc. there are all sorts of people who don’t suck who are doing great things right near you, right now, who not only have time to mentor kids, but actually want to.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  Even if we accept the premise, which I do not, I still do not understand why a role model would have to be of the same gender as the child. Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa? Do they also need to have other matching traits, like skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation? I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    I also grappled with this issue until I lived in a community that was highly, highly gendered. Children naturally try to mimic the social behaviors around them. If these social behaviors are gendered, they will attempt to gender themselves and view these behaviors through the lens of social expectations of gender. Especially if they are proactively gendered by the adults in their community (i.e. socialized as male or female with explicit expectations), as most communities do. I don't really have any beef with gender roles, but sometimes the roles communicate simply antisocial behavior. One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads. And yea, maybe some people just shouldn't be around children, but once you observe how this passes down generations with your own eyes it's very difficult to un-see. In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community. What I don't get is that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are also, erm, not very masculine by the standards of many if not most communities here in america except in the sense of "thinking being an asshole is funny". Neither is Trump, for that matter. Something tells me that there are other factors at play here than just "masculine role models".
    - david-gpu 2y ago
      But the root of that problem is indoctrinating children that they are expected to follow certain paths because of their gender or skin color. Not the absence of role models that match those traits. My sister and I were educated in a gender-agnostic fashion and neither of us fell into the trap of thinking that we must do this or that because of our gender. As a result, we each carved our own different path. I don't see why my children will be any different, unless their own peers indoctrinate them with arbitrary gender roles.
- maplant 2y ago
  How can you say that no positive male role models exist when the most positive male role model Northernlion streams Monday through Friday from 12-5pm
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    Any non bold role models?
    - maplant 2y ago
      No
- anonym29 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - api 2y ago
    I don't 100% disagree with this, but I think it's being way exaggerated. There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions. Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads. Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there. Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted. > This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action! This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real. Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too. It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it. Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better. Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance? BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.
- deleted 2y ago
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Der_Einzige 2y ago
This is all the outcome of 4chans /pol/ and similar places rhetoric becoming fully accepted by normies. This got started at least as far back as the “original Q disclosure”. Men are from mars and women from Venus, and the rise of AI sexbots or relationshipbots is going to further fan the flames of the war of the sexes. Marriage rates will likely never go up again in human history. Get ready. This is the era of NEETs and Incels.
- hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
  I feel the "War of the sexes" as you call it is still a relatively fringe phenomenon. I mean, I see it discussed online, and I personally know people who have strong opinions on the subject, but, at least in my circles, I don't know anyone who is a model representative of the "incel/neet" male archetype on the one hand, and the "kill-all-white-cis-men" female archetype. I believe it's because social media amplify extremes.
  - swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
    They exist IRL, I’d say more than 1/3rd of men are in the Incel/NEET category. They just are often isolated and rarely do social activities outside of video game. This “war” is more of a disengagement and ennui where nobody participates except for discourse.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      The idea that half or over half of all men are in this category in the next 10-20 years seems totally plausible. Many types types of "third spaces" and in person establishments are on the decline and its been this way for 20+ years.
DonHopkins 2y ago
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- david-gpu 2y ago
  Judging or punishing a large group for the actions of some individuals is neither fair nor constructive.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Then don't go around judging and saying that all women are whores. Edit: Define exactly which large group of people you're carrying the water and making excuses for, in spite of the fact that they are neither fair nor constructive themselves, and why you think they deserve to be treated so much better than they treat other people?
    - hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
      This is something a teenager (of both sexes) would say after a painful breakup. For an adult person, I'd expect that (1) that person apologises if they are stupid to say things like that online, (2) if they do that, other adult people don't hunt them.
      - DonHopkins 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - david-gpu 2y ago
      Have I done that? Or are you again judging all members of a large group based on the actions of a handful of extremists?
- kstrauser 2y ago
  My kid asked me if I'd ever heard of Andrew Tate back before I had. He informed me that Tate was this "piece of shit online guy" who says awful things about women. Do my kid and his friends who agree with him deserve to get bad jobs? I want good things for all my kids, regardless of their gender.
johntitorjr 2y ago
This is expected after using policy to close the wage gap artificially quickly. Fast movement towards a goal means overshoot (under damped). Letting the wage gap naturally close as societial enlightenment increases could've resulted in no overshoot (critically damped). We should strive to dampen the oscillation to a minimum around the desired setpoint (wage equity). If the oscillation grows rather than dampens, the instability will eventually break the larger system that it's operating in. Take the analogy of 'the pendulum swings both ways' for societal norms. If you apply pressure to the pendulum you could slow it to a stop, or you could speed it up enough that it breaks it's chain and becomes a cannonball.
- ajross 2y ago
  I think that's backwards, and not substantiated. The "policy to close the wage gap quickly" was primarily removing roadblocks: more access to high wage jobs and high-status educational paths, higher wages for traditionally "female" professions, etc... The problem detailed are actually endemic: women do better in primary education, and always have. So if you take the roadblocks out of their way they'd be expected to do better in early career paths that "look like school". I don't know that this is really that surprising. So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix? (Edit: the whiplash on the votes in this comment is dizzying, but I guess unsurprising. I do think that an awful lot of people on this forum aren't mentally prepared for the case of "What if women actually are better at entry level corporate work than men are?")
  - avmich 2y ago
    > So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix? Yes. Why not?
  - johntitorjr 2y ago
    Your libertarian perspective is missing the individual humanity of the issue. It's not about systemic roadblocks, it's about society's values. Our society has pushed a lot of messaging towards girls and women that encouraged academic and professional excellence. Media unabashedly points out examples of successful women. That's encouraged girls to dream and women to persevere. As a middle-class white man, the messaging I've heard is that success shouldn't be celebrated because anyone with my level of privilege should be successful. It's not uncommon for me to feel shame from national media. I second guess myself on my masculine traits being toxic. I'm NOT advocating to be less encouraging of women. But I think we should be more loving and encouraging of little white boys so they don't grow up to become NEETs, MAGAs, or DOGEs. Edit - Sorry to have not answered your question. >if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix? Maybe. Action could be useful, but only a delicate touch that doesn't exacerbate overshoot in the other direction.
spondylosaurus 2y ago
> In 2020-21, the average young man earned £24,032 and the average young woman £23,021. Those figures cross the following year. Then, as male wages virtually stagnate, female wages climb significantly. By 2022-3, the average young man earned £24,283 and the average young woman £26,476, which is 9 per cent more. Translated to freedom dollars: that's $30.2k vs $28.9k in 2020-1, and $30.5k vs $33.2k in 2022-3. Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period. But also: > The report blames the decline of traditionally “male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction” for causing a rapid fall in “secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated young men”. This, combined with the fact that the "most recent" time period of this study is still smack in the middle of COVID seems like there could be more to the story here. Were industries that traditionally hire a lot of women already bouncing back from the pandemic in ways that industries that traditionally hire a lot of men did not? Did COVID make some companies realize that they can get away with short-staffing/underpaying and we're seeing the effects of that here?
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  > Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period. Those are pretty typical wages for the UK. American wages are in a universe unto themselves and aren't a useful comparison for these purposes (it would be less than the minimum wage in some regions of the US).
  - Glyptodon 2y ago
    I always find of hard to tell was wages mean in terms of what they represent after taxes, retirement savings, and medical costs they way they're reported regardless of country.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      In the UK it is before income tax or national insurance (public healthcare), and also before pension saving. However most jobs give you an additional bit of pension on top of your salary (usually 5%).
Arubis 2y ago
The common adage is “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression”.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  It's also that they are using a bad metric, as pay has always heavily depended on the kind of job and qualifications they require. I bet that being a male doctor still pays more than being a female one because employers are not forced to risk-balance men and women by giving both the exact same parenthood related benefits, even if men could be working around the birth period while women clearly shouldn't.
orange_joe 2y ago
Without trying to start a flame war... There's likely an element that's certainly cultural, or a biologically based differences, but it seems like there are some very straight forward explanations for this. There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?). There is also significant difficulty in even articulating these issues as its been broadly taboo to discuss biases that advantage women, such as a positive bias toward women in education[1]. That being said, the mere fact that this is now a publicly discussable issue seems to imply our standards for discussion are changing. [1]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2...
- hellisothers 2y ago
  Two things to consider when thinking on your points: On no initiatives to get straight men into HR, is there a great clamoring to get into the field of HR, or nursing (the other often cited example), do you perceive them as high prestige or high paying? You’re probably referencing subsidizing efforts to get into law, med school, finance, etc which are high paying and prestigious. Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men. Which to your final point of difficulty of discussion, the structural biases are well documented but often derided when brought up in a discussion against complaints about the overt support provided to women. We definitely need to address the issues about “the boys are not alright” but re-establishing old basis is not the way.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - IshKebab 2y ago
    > deep structural support given to men Genuine question, obviously in the past men had an enormous advantage, but what is that deep structural support today (in the West)?
temptemptemp111 2y ago
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- watwut 2y ago
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  - temptemptemp111 2y ago
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- desert_rue 2y ago
  Or maybe discourse has an inertia and it takes time to change the conversation.
- AlexeyBelov 2y ago
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  - temptemptemp111 2y ago
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isoprophlex 2y ago
So, women, who've been second-rate players in the workplace since practically forever, are finally seeing some empowerment and wage equality, and it's a social crisis?! Call it an overshoot past intended targets, sure, but I'm having difficulty accepting the alarmist tone.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  The problem is women still contributed to/supported society in the past. Comments I've received here from these types of men (who are semi-successful tech types) jump straight to 'not my society' 'I don't can if it all burns'. It never works out well for society having large groups of young, indifferent, angry manboys.
  - isoprophlex 2y ago
    Agreed, good point... better to channel their energies into something that benefits society, and i agree that we're not really doing that right now
Glyptodon 2y ago
Is it a wage gap or a socialization gap? My spouse works in schools, and even in elementary school, let alone later grades, a surprising number of boys are exhibiting a lot of sexualized anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes. If a solid % end up basically toxic and unemployable, I'm not shocked.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  > a surprising number of boys are exhibiting a lot of sexualized anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes. If a solid % end up basically toxic and unemployable, I'm not shocked. As someone totally clueless about this field, I think question is "Can we do something about this?" because writing them off isn't a great option either.
  - Glyptodon 2y ago
    I don't know. I continue to be surprised that there aren't more lawsuits from parents about some of the things I hear about. In general my personal opinion is that a lot of parents can't put enough personal time towards raising their kids, or refuse to (or mix of both). Like kid keeps doing stuff that by policy schools have to call about and the parents care less about what their kid is doing than that the school just stops calling them.
- imtringued 2y ago
  Your comment reeks of just world fallacy.
  - Glyptodon 2y ago
    Meaning you think they be more employable than I expect (because them not being employed would represent a just world or something else)? I mostly don't think they'll be employable because they don't seem like they can function very well, but obviously if they do end up more capable than I expect there's no reason to think that toxicity is enough to prevent accomplishment.
    - 2y ago
webdevver 2y ago
everyone in here arguing about women this, man that, meanwhile i'm just... ...jesus... £24k... £26k... honestly god bless every man and woman who wakes up in the morning and choses to go to work, cos they can't possibly be doing it for the money lol.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Note that this is specifically for people aged 16-24 in full time work. And people that go to university don't appear in the statistics until age 22 or so, as they're not in full-time work. Meaning people who leave school at 16 contribute to the annual statistics 8 times, while university graduates only contribute 2 times. And among those who leave school at 16 and become apprentice plumbers or electricians - they're not going to be making decent money until they're good enough not to need close supervision.
- physicsguy 2y ago
  £24k is minimum wage in the U.K as of this year
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Looking back at my own high school experience, the girls were way smarter than the boys. The boys at least in highschool were far more concerned with cracking a good joke and goofing off. The girls were actually studying. They had the best outcomes too in terms of professional success generally in my cohort. I think it is because girls mature emotionally a lot sooner than boys. Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. I wouldn’t be surprised if mentally they were years apart in highschool. Now today we have a society that is no longer so biased in terms of opportunities along gender lines. And what do you know, girls are generally eating boys lunch here. They are outnumbering them in college. They have higher GPAs. They are starting to outnumber them in post grad programs. And eventually in the workforce this will happen as well, as this cohort gets jobs and supersedes older male dominated cohorts from before the silent cultural revolution over the last 30 years. Eventually we should see this effect find an equilibrium where the number of women in high impact jobs vs men reflects the underlying intelligence bias women have over men.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Something to note, most testing seems to show women/men are about average in intelligence but there is slight variability between the two. So thinking one gender is smarter doesn't bear out. I've read excerpts "Of Boys and Men" that indicate academic changes to assist girls may have harmed boys. For example, in schooling, it was shown that girls do better on homework while boys would do better on testing. So, teachers realizing this, would increase the homework mix into final grade which helps girls but harmed boys. Getting rid of recess or PE earlier may have had an impact as well. Something to note, these changes were not made deliberately to hurt men, it's just accidental on part of educators trying to fix what was clearly a flaw system. > Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    > Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;) Well that is the entire point of my thesis really. This is no fault of the boys character but just a realization of what is going on biologically that generally boys like cackling with the other tribsemen out on the hunt perhaps. Of course not every boy has that behavioral phenotype of being a sort of simple slackjawed chummy individual, but it is certainly present. Plenty of examples of such people both in terms of public people and probably people you personally know that fit this description to a tee, maybe without ever growing out of it truly. And of course not all women are perfectly smart. But I think in terms of the raw numbers of the sort of people who can make use of the vines of society and best swing to their own benefit, assuming they aren't encountering total bigotry hobbling them along the way, those people are more likely to be women. And indeed, as we see the old bigots age out and be replaced with more sensible generations in charge of hiring, we see more women in the workforce often outnumbering men these days in many knowledge work domains.
orwin 2y ago
In my country, we have the same issue. Historically, women low-wage jobs (retail, secretary, care) paid less than industry. That is equalizing. I think the "wage gap" between men and women (in my country) is ~20% for people aged 45+, and 8% between 30 and 45 (which could be explained by the years "lost" by maternity). For people working, aged 20-30, the wage gap is almost 0 (i think it still favor men, but i could be wrong, also the stats i saw was only about the mean, not the median, and high-class people could certainly skew the data[0]), but if you count NEET and exclude students, it favor women greatly (although men are more likely than women to work without declaring it) [0] I've read an article a few years ago about employement "test" for lawyers (with fake CV), it was pretty clear that both poor men (black, then white) and women from the bourgeoisie (CV with "horse, ballet" as hobbies, high-QOL address and "elite" school) were the most discriminated against. I wonder if that population skew the "wage gap" towards men a lot, as often bourgeois women don't have a well paying job (author, artist, but also volunteering and/or coordinating volonteers, pro-bono head of the family fundation) unlike their men conterpart (your chief manager who is 25 and dropped out of a big uni with a lot of legacy student and paid thrice your rate? His sister coordinate volonteer in a soup kitchen)
juniperus 2y ago
Women go further in school in the west because they are better able to keep track of and incorporate the miscellaneous social dogma one must peddle to advance in the academic world. Men are more “cocky” perhaps being the appropriate word, and are more repulsed by the idea of having to parrot certain things in order to gain social or academic capital. Hence you have literal geniuses working in blue collar jobs, maintaining farms or whatever. This, while high academia has huge amounts of people worried about something called “imposter syndrome” because they actually are imposters. This is part of the etiology of western decline in technology and innovation going back to the 80s and reaching crisis points now. The main issue is that schools don’t serve nonconformists well, and many geniuses and high IQ people are nonconformist, or simply don’t feel rewarded to have to lie to please social norms that they disagree with. This is generally what leads to the cyclical revolution. At a certain point, the most productive and innovative members of society are disincentivized thoroughly so that the economy collapses, because this occurs alongside the incentivization of compliance and anti-risk behavior which is stagnation. Those boys who aren’t geniuses, but just disengage from academia because they feel that there is no place for them in society also fuels this crisis because you are left with generations of young men who have no stake in the establishment. The conspiracy alarm in me suggests that the establishment is pushing this outcome by creating a system thoroughly repulsive that mobilizes the prerequisite sentiments for an anti egalitarian revolution in the future because such a system is very profitable (e.g. you can’t invade the third world and plunder their resources under the current regime, but sure can in a more “fascist” regime, and generally fascism is the penultimate phase of a socialist system that needs to coerce sufficient productivity to keep the system going before final collapse/revolution (this cycle has repeated itself countless times in the last 300 years since socialism became the primary organization of people as nations)).
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Dude, every non-conformist I knew in school was ridiculed, made fun of, and physically bullied by the "cocky" men you refer to.

57 points by iLoveOncall 2y ago

jurenbert 2y ago

[flagged]

iLoveOncall 2y ago

Archive: https://archive.ph/9IdwR https://archive.ph/9IdwR

api 2y ago

My kids are both girls. If I had boys I'd be really concerned about the lack of positive role models. You have... what exactly? Andrew Tate? Elon Musk? I'd take 2012 Elon Musk as a role model, not so much 2020s Elon Musk. Most of the men out there who are well known, might pose as role models, and would appeal to the kids are radiating this kind of fragile fake masculinity and behave like dumb thirteen year old boys or shock jocks. Following them is a great way to make oneself utterly repulsive to women, and unemployable in a lot of areas. I'm sure I could look around, but the problem is that whatever I'd find probably wouldn't appeal to the kids. There seem to be at least positive-ish female role models with appeals to young people, and a variety of them with a variety of viewpoints and that model a variety of life paths. I don't see that with male ones.

Apocryphon 2y ago
Shouldn’t a parent be a role model of their own
- api 2y ago
  Oh yeah, you are, but I'm talking about outside in the culture. This becomes very important in the teens.
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    > This becomes very important in the teens. It's the parent's job to make sure it doesn't. Glorifying hyper-successful figures isn't healthy without understanding how they came to be hyper-successful (99% cases it's inheritance/nepotism/luck).
- watwut 2y ago
  For a teenager that is not locked and isolated?
peterlk 2y ago
I have no kids, but perhaps positive role models can be found in more specific categories like music. For example, I think Jacob Collier sets a great example. And I think my parents had similar concerns. I was raised on gangster rap and Eminem, and my parents were very concerned about that. But overall, I think I turned out alright. My feeling is that it’s much more important to have role models closer to home. The light that Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are cast in can be greatly influenced by the people around your kids if not directly by parents
rhapsodic 2y ago
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trillic 2y ago
LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Richard Feynman, Keanu Reeves, Fred Rogers, Desmond Tutu, Linus Torvalds, Elie Wiesel.
- hkt 2y ago
  Media centrality somewhat matters
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Make a large enough list of men, I’ll find the example of why any of these folks are terrible role models. Linus Torvalds famously loves to verbally abuse others working with him, just for one small example…
  - moi2388 2y ago
    So? Doesn’t mean he can’t be a role model. Just don’t emulate all behaviour exactly from any person. People have flaws. Every single one of them.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      The issue is that one has no control over what gets modeled by those looking at "role models". Many of the best role models are the kind of folks who large systems or structures refuse to teach about en mass because these role models are uniquely subversive. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr being the classic example of this.
- BJones12 2y ago
  I know that list was off the top of your head, but if a quickly-assembled list of male role models includes guys who died almost 40 years ago that probably indicates that there aren't enough of them.
- juniperus 2y ago
  This is the most boomer comment I’ve ever read. On what planet are these any child’s role model? Elie Wiesel? Desmond Tutu? Those are like NPR lifetime achievement award winners, they have no social capital among any generic guy under 18. 0
ForTheKidz 2y ago
I think this is the wrong framing. You should not be expecting to find role models on the internet to begin with. This is not an environment designed to produce examples of healthy human life. (This was also generally true of TV, btw, excluding PBS.) I do have many people, including some men, on the internet I respect and try to model my own behavior on. None of them are trying to rake up views on YouTube, twitch, or any social media platform. hasanabi is the closest this gets and he's clearly trying to cater to teenage boys/young men and is irrelevant to my life, although I do admire his commitment to being a bulwark against reactionary takes. Secondly, we need to be teaching emotional identification, regulation, and how to make yourself happy without comparing yourself to others. How to be a valuable member of a community. None of this is specific to men, of course, but the masculinity of that will reveal itself in how people choose to present themselves—nobody is saying men shouldn't try to provide for the people around them or shouldn't protect them or shouldn't be a basis of emotional stability. Notably, it's also masculine (to others) to abandon your family and community. Two very different conceptions that are equally real in our society. If you start from the assumption of some platonic ideal of "masculinity" you'll end up very confused. If you can figure out how to sell this to a bunch of teenage boys you can conquer the world. Personally, I think men are gonna need to feel a generation of pain or two before the obvious incentives are going to align with boys learning to take care of themselves. All of my role models as a child were fictional characters, only about half of them were men, and little of their attraction had to do with helping me feel secure in my masculinity. So perhaps I'm just missing the point entirely.
hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
When I think about it, it makes sense. By the way, could you share some female role models who appeal to girls? What I noticed is that some people look good when viewed at a distance. But it sometimes happens that when you look closer, or time passes, the people who seemed very positive (Bill Cosby and many others) show some other aspects.
- watwut 2y ago
  Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo. Hell, even AOC or Kamala Harriss altrought not cool, they are not openly toxic. There is no female equivalent of Trump o, you have to be a man to consistently fail upwards and be enabled that consistently.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
Role models don’t have to be para social relationships with attention economy celebrities. Look within your own community, those are the people that can have a bigger more direct effect anyway. Camp counselors, teachers, neighbors, creatives, local government officials, coaches, etc. there are all sorts of people who don’t suck who are doing great things right near you, right now, who not only have time to mentor kids, but actually want to.
david-gpu 2y ago
Even if we accept the premise, which I do not, I still do not understand why a role model would have to be of the same gender as the child. Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa? Do they also need to have other matching traits, like skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation? I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  I also grappled with this issue until I lived in a community that was highly, highly gendered. Children naturally try to mimic the social behaviors around them. If these social behaviors are gendered, they will attempt to gender themselves and view these behaviors through the lens of social expectations of gender. Especially if they are proactively gendered by the adults in their community (i.e. socialized as male or female with explicit expectations), as most communities do. I don't really have any beef with gender roles, but sometimes the roles communicate simply antisocial behavior. One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads. And yea, maybe some people just shouldn't be around children, but once you observe how this passes down generations with your own eyes it's very difficult to un-see. In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community. What I don't get is that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are also, erm, not very masculine by the standards of many if not most communities here in america except in the sense of "thinking being an asshole is funny". Neither is Trump, for that matter. Something tells me that there are other factors at play here than just "masculine role models".
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    But the root of that problem is indoctrinating children that they are expected to follow certain paths because of their gender or skin color. Not the absence of role models that match those traits. My sister and I were educated in a gender-agnostic fashion and neither of us fell into the trap of thinking that we must do this or that because of our gender. As a result, we each carved our own different path. I don't see why my children will be any different, unless their own peers indoctrinate them with arbitrary gender roles.
maplant 2y ago
How can you say that no positive male role models exist when the most positive male role model Northernlion streams Monday through Friday from 12-5pm
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Any non bold role models?
  - maplant 2y ago
    No
anonym29 2y ago
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- api 2y ago
  I don't 100% disagree with this, but I think it's being way exaggerated. There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions. Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads. Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there. Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted. > This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action! This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real. Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too. It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it. Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better. Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance? BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.
deleted 2y ago
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Der_Einzige 2y ago

This is all the outcome of 4chans /pol/ and similar places rhetoric becoming fully accepted by normies. This got started at least as far back as the “original Q disclosure”. Men are from mars and women from Venus, and the rise of AI sexbots or relationshipbots is going to further fan the flames of the war of the sexes. Marriage rates will likely never go up again in human history. Get ready. This is the era of NEETs and Incels.

hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
I feel the "War of the sexes" as you call it is still a relatively fringe phenomenon. I mean, I see it discussed online, and I personally know people who have strong opinions on the subject, but, at least in my circles, I don't know anyone who is a model representative of the "incel/neet" male archetype on the one hand, and the "kill-all-white-cis-men" female archetype. I believe it's because social media amplify extremes.
- swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
  They exist IRL, I’d say more than 1/3rd of men are in the Incel/NEET category. They just are often isolated and rarely do social activities outside of video game. This “war” is more of a disengagement and ennui where nobody participates except for discourse.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    The idea that half or over half of all men are in this category in the next 10-20 years seems totally plausible. Many types types of "third spaces" and in person establishments are on the decline and its been this way for 20+ years.

DonHopkins 2y ago

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david-gpu 2y ago
Judging or punishing a large group for the actions of some individuals is neither fair nor constructive.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Then don't go around judging and saying that all women are whores. Edit: Define exactly which large group of people you're carrying the water and making excuses for, in spite of the fact that they are neither fair nor constructive themselves, and why you think they deserve to be treated so much better than they treat other people?
  - hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
    This is something a teenager (of both sexes) would say after a painful breakup. For an adult person, I'd expect that (1) that person apologises if they are stupid to say things like that online, (2) if they do that, other adult people don't hunt them.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    Have I done that? Or are you again judging all members of a large group based on the actions of a handful of extremists?
kstrauser 2y ago
My kid asked me if I'd ever heard of Andrew Tate back before I had. He informed me that Tate was this "piece of shit online guy" who says awful things about women. Do my kid and his friends who agree with him deserve to get bad jobs? I want good things for all my kids, regardless of their gender.

johntitorjr 2y ago

This is expected after using policy to close the wage gap artificially quickly. Fast movement towards a goal means overshoot (under damped). Letting the wage gap naturally close as societial enlightenment increases could've resulted in no overshoot (critically damped). We should strive to dampen the oscillation to a minimum around the desired setpoint (wage equity). If the oscillation grows rather than dampens, the instability will eventually break the larger system that it's operating in. Take the analogy of 'the pendulum swings both ways' for societal norms. If you apply pressure to the pendulum you could slow it to a stop, or you could speed it up enough that it breaks it's chain and becomes a cannonball.

ajross 2y ago
I think that's backwards, and not substantiated. The "policy to close the wage gap quickly" was primarily removing roadblocks: more access to high wage jobs and high-status educational paths, higher wages for traditionally "female" professions, etc... The problem detailed are actually endemic: women do better in primary education, and always have. So if you take the roadblocks out of their way they'd be expected to do better in early career paths that "look like school". I don't know that this is really that surprising. So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix? (Edit: the whiplash on the votes in this comment is dizzying, but I guess unsurprising. I do think that an awful lot of people on this forum aren't mentally prepared for the case of "What if women actually are better at entry level corporate work than men are?")
- avmich 2y ago
  > So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix? Yes. Why not?
- johntitorjr 2y ago
  Your libertarian perspective is missing the individual humanity of the issue. It's not about systemic roadblocks, it's about society's values. Our society has pushed a lot of messaging towards girls and women that encouraged academic and professional excellence. Media unabashedly points out examples of successful women. That's encouraged girls to dream and women to persevere. As a middle-class white man, the messaging I've heard is that success shouldn't be celebrated because anyone with my level of privilege should be successful. It's not uncommon for me to feel shame from national media. I second guess myself on my masculine traits being toxic. I'm NOT advocating to be less encouraging of women. But I think we should be more loving and encouraging of little white boys so they don't grow up to become NEETs, MAGAs, or DOGEs. Edit - Sorry to have not answered your question. >if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix? Maybe. Action could be useful, but only a delicate touch that doesn't exacerbate overshoot in the other direction.

spondylosaurus 2y ago

> In 2020-21, the average young man earned £24,032 and the average young woman £23,021. Those figures cross the following year. Then, as male wages virtually stagnate, female wages climb significantly. By 2022-3, the average young man earned £24,283 and the average young woman £26,476, which is 9 per cent more. Translated to freedom dollars: that's $30.2k vs $28.9k in 2020-1, and $30.5k vs $33.2k in 2022-3. Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period. But also: > The report blames the decline of traditionally “male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction” for causing a rapid fall in “secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated young men”. This, combined with the fact that the "most recent" time period of this study is still smack in the middle of COVID seems like there could be more to the story here. Were industries that traditionally hire a lot of women already bouncing back from the pandemic in ways that industries that traditionally hire a lot of men did not? Did COVID make some companies realize that they can get away with short-staffing/underpaying and we're seeing the effects of that here?

jandrewrogers 2y ago
> Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period. Those are pretty typical wages for the UK. American wages are in a universe unto themselves and aren't a useful comparison for these purposes (it would be less than the minimum wage in some regions of the US).
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  I always find of hard to tell was wages mean in terms of what they represent after taxes, retirement savings, and medical costs they way they're reported regardless of country.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    In the UK it is before income tax or national insurance (public healthcare), and also before pension saving. However most jobs give you an additional bit of pension on top of your salary (usually 5%).

Arubis 2y ago

The common adage is “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression”.

dietr1ch 2y ago
It's also that they are using a bad metric, as pay has always heavily depended on the kind of job and qualifications they require. I bet that being a male doctor still pays more than being a female one because employers are not forced to risk-balance men and women by giving both the exact same parenthood related benefits, even if men could be working around the birth period while women clearly shouldn't.

orange_joe 2y ago

Without trying to start a flame war... There's likely an element that's certainly cultural, or a biologically based differences, but it seems like there are some very straight forward explanations for this. There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?). There is also significant difficulty in even articulating these issues as its been broadly taboo to discuss biases that advantage women, such as a positive bias toward women in education[1]. That being said, the mere fact that this is now a publicly discussable issue seems to imply our standards for discussion are changing. [1]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2...

hellisothers 2y ago
Two things to consider when thinking on your points: On no initiatives to get straight men into HR, is there a great clamoring to get into the field of HR, or nursing (the other often cited example), do you perceive them as high prestige or high paying? You’re probably referencing subsidizing efforts to get into law, med school, finance, etc which are high paying and prestigious. Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men. Which to your final point of difficulty of discussion, the structural biases are well documented but often derided when brought up in a discussion against complaints about the overt support provided to women. We definitely need to address the issues about “the boys are not alright” but re-establishing old basis is not the way.
- deleted 2y ago
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- IshKebab 2y ago
  > deep structural support given to men Genuine question, obviously in the past men had an enormous advantage, but what is that deep structural support today (in the West)?

temptemptemp111 2y ago

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watwut 2y ago
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- temptemptemp111 2y ago
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desert_rue 2y ago
Or maybe discourse has an inertia and it takes time to change the conversation.
AlexeyBelov 2y ago
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- temptemptemp111 2y ago
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isoprophlex 2y ago

So, women, who've been second-rate players in the workplace since practically forever, are finally seeing some empowerment and wage equality, and it's a social crisis?! Call it an overshoot past intended targets, sure, but I'm having difficulty accepting the alarmist tone.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
The problem is women still contributed to/supported society in the past. Comments I've received here from these types of men (who are semi-successful tech types) jump straight to 'not my society' 'I don't can if it all burns'. It never works out well for society having large groups of young, indifferent, angry manboys.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  Agreed, good point... better to channel their energies into something that benefits society, and i agree that we're not really doing that right now

Glyptodon 2y ago

Is it a wage gap or a socialization gap? My spouse works in schools, and even in elementary school, let alone later grades, a surprising number of boys are exhibiting a lot of sexualized anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes. If a solid % end up basically toxic and unemployable, I'm not shocked.

stackskipton 2y ago
> a surprising number of boys are exhibiting a lot of sexualized anti-social behaviors and entitled attitudes. If a solid % end up basically toxic and unemployable, I'm not shocked. As someone totally clueless about this field, I think question is "Can we do something about this?" because writing them off isn't a great option either.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  I don't know. I continue to be surprised that there aren't more lawsuits from parents about some of the things I hear about. In general my personal opinion is that a lot of parents can't put enough personal time towards raising their kids, or refuse to (or mix of both). Like kid keeps doing stuff that by policy schools have to call about and the parents care less about what their kid is doing than that the school just stops calling them.
imtringued 2y ago
Your comment reeks of just world fallacy.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  Meaning you think they be more employable than I expect (because them not being employed would represent a just world or something else)? I mostly don't think they'll be employable because they don't seem like they can function very well, but obviously if they do end up more capable than I expect there's no reason to think that toxicity is enough to prevent accomplishment.
  - 2y ago

webdevver 2y ago

everyone in here arguing about women this, man that, meanwhile i'm just... ...jesus... £24k... £26k... honestly god bless every man and woman who wakes up in the morning and choses to go to work, cos they can't possibly be doing it for the money lol.

michaelt 2y ago
Note that this is specifically for people aged 16-24 in full time work. And people that go to university don't appear in the statistics until age 22 or so, as they're not in full-time work. Meaning people who leave school at 16 contribute to the annual statistics 8 times, while university graduates only contribute 2 times. And among those who leave school at 16 and become apprentice plumbers or electricians - they're not going to be making decent money until they're good enough not to need close supervision.
physicsguy 2y ago
£24k is minimum wage in the U.K as of this year

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Looking back at my own high school experience, the girls were way smarter than the boys. The boys at least in highschool were far more concerned with cracking a good joke and goofing off. The girls were actually studying. They had the best outcomes too in terms of professional success generally in my cohort. I think it is because girls mature emotionally a lot sooner than boys. Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. I wouldn’t be surprised if mentally they were years apart in highschool. Now today we have a society that is no longer so biased in terms of opportunities along gender lines. And what do you know, girls are generally eating boys lunch here. They are outnumbering them in college. They have higher GPAs. They are starting to outnumber them in post grad programs. And eventually in the workforce this will happen as well, as this cohort gets jobs and supersedes older male dominated cohorts from before the silent cultural revolution over the last 30 years. Eventually we should see this effect find an equilibrium where the number of women in high impact jobs vs men reflects the underlying intelligence bias women have over men.

stackskipton 2y ago
Something to note, most testing seems to show women/men are about average in intelligence but there is slight variability between the two. So thinking one gender is smarter doesn't bear out. I've read excerpts "Of Boys and Men" that indicate academic changes to assist girls may have harmed boys. For example, in schooling, it was shown that girls do better on homework while boys would do better on testing. So, teachers realizing this, would increase the homework mix into final grade which helps girls but harmed boys. Getting rid of recess or PE earlier may have had an impact as well. Something to note, these changes were not made deliberately to hurt men, it's just accidental on part of educators trying to fix what was clearly a flaw system. > Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  > Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;) Well that is the entire point of my thesis really. This is no fault of the boys character but just a realization of what is going on biologically that generally boys like cackling with the other tribsemen out on the hunt perhaps. Of course not every boy has that behavioral phenotype of being a sort of simple slackjawed chummy individual, but it is certainly present. Plenty of examples of such people both in terms of public people and probably people you personally know that fit this description to a tee, maybe without ever growing out of it truly. And of course not all women are perfectly smart. But I think in terms of the raw numbers of the sort of people who can make use of the vines of society and best swing to their own benefit, assuming they aren't encountering total bigotry hobbling them along the way, those people are more likely to be women. And indeed, as we see the old bigots age out and be replaced with more sensible generations in charge of hiring, we see more women in the workforce often outnumbering men these days in many knowledge work domains.

orwin 2y ago

In my country, we have the same issue. Historically, women low-wage jobs (retail, secretary, care) paid less than industry. That is equalizing. I think the "wage gap" between men and women (in my country) is ~20% for people aged 45+, and 8% between 30 and 45 (which could be explained by the years "lost" by maternity). For people working, aged 20-30, the wage gap is almost 0 (i think it still favor men, but i could be wrong, also the stats i saw was only about the mean, not the median, and high-class people could certainly skew the data[0]), but if you count NEET and exclude students, it favor women greatly (although men are more likely than women to work without declaring it) [0] I've read an article a few years ago about employement "test" for lawyers (with fake CV), it was pretty clear that both poor men (black, then white) and women from the bourgeoisie (CV with "horse, ballet" as hobbies, high-QOL address and "elite" school) were the most discriminated against. I wonder if that population skew the "wage gap" towards men a lot, as often bourgeois women don't have a well paying job (author, artist, but also volunteering and/or coordinating volonteers, pro-bono head of the family fundation) unlike their men conterpart (your chief manager who is 25 and dropped out of a big uni with a lot of legacy student and paid thrice your rate? His sister coordinate volonteer in a soup kitchen)

juniperus 2y ago

Women go further in school in the west because they are better able to keep track of and incorporate the miscellaneous social dogma one must peddle to advance in the academic world. Men are more “cocky” perhaps being the appropriate word, and are more repulsed by the idea of having to parrot certain things in order to gain social or academic capital. Hence you have literal geniuses working in blue collar jobs, maintaining farms or whatever. This, while high academia has huge amounts of people worried about something called “imposter syndrome” because they actually are imposters. This is part of the etiology of western decline in technology and innovation going back to the 80s and reaching crisis points now. The main issue is that schools don’t serve nonconformists well, and many geniuses and high IQ people are nonconformist, or simply don’t feel rewarded to have to lie to please social norms that they disagree with. This is generally what leads to the cyclical revolution. At a certain point, the most productive and innovative members of society are disincentivized thoroughly so that the economy collapses, because this occurs alongside the incentivization of compliance and anti-risk behavior which is stagnation. Those boys who aren’t geniuses, but just disengage from academia because they feel that there is no place for them in society also fuels this crisis because you are left with generations of young men who have no stake in the establishment. The conspiracy alarm in me suggests that the establishment is pushing this outcome by creating a system thoroughly repulsive that mobilizes the prerequisite sentiments for an anti egalitarian revolution in the future because such a system is very profitable (e.g. you can’t invade the third world and plunder their resources under the current regime, but sure can in a more “fascist” regime, and generally fascism is the penultimate phase of a socialist system that needs to coerce sufficient productivity to keep the system going before final collapse/revolution (this cycle has repeated itself countless times in the last 300 years since socialism became the primary organization of people as nations)).

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Dude, every non-conformist I knew in school was ridiculed, made fun of, and physically bullied by the "cocky" men you refer to.