Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

My issue is with the poster's intention to not work with women in light of the sexual harassment scandals. That response seems completely out of proportion.

Men don't get discriminated against based on the actions of a small minority. For example, male employees regularly download porn on work computers and expose the network to malware. Some store child porn on company networks, which can expose the organization to severe consequences (there are many court cases documenting this kind of behavior). Yet the risk of hiring a horny man never comes up in recruitment.

If women are portrayed as unreliable employees because they supposedly invent sexual harassment charges, it seems fair to avoid men because almost all child pornographers are male.

View on HN

It's not my intention to not work with women. I do collaborate with women. I am just saying if I am being put in a position of power in teaching, and I can choose between male and female undergrads, I would rather not be in a position of power over females in this current climate because we are at a hyper-sensitive stage.

There is no specific gain for them being taught by me instead of a female PhD student, and there is only risk for me, so all things being equal, I am suggesting that this is a stance many men might being to take or at least find themselves wondering about.

it seems fair to avoid men because almost all child pornographers are male.

Paedophilia is quite common amongst women, it just tends not be called that. Search the newspapers for stories of female teachers sleeping with under-age male pupils and you will encounter many such stories. So this claim seems rather outrageous and also false. If you can't find any such stories I will be happy to provide example links later.

...this claim seems rather outrageous and also false

My point exactly: it's a claim that is as ridiculous (as a hiring criterion) as the one that women routinely invent sexual harassment allegations.

That's your subjective opinion though. There are studies that report very high rates of false accusations. You may decide they aren't good studies or you don't believe them or whatever, but if other men don't write these things off immediately, it's not hysteria.

Many of these recent allegations would certainly not have been taken seriously in earlier times: the bar for a report to be considered false has been raised to stratospheric levels. Once, if a woman claimed she'd been sexually assaulted by a man, the fact that she didn't bother to report it, voluntarily chose to work with that man for years afterwards, was routinely photographed in public looking happy with that man, tweeted about what a great time she had that night, wrote him thankyou notes etc would all have been considered fatal to her case. Nowadays many people seem to believe that it's impossible for women to lie or exaggerate such claims and thus ignore any evidence to the contrary.

In such an environment, it does actually make a lot of sense for men to just avoid working with women. The norms of justice can't be relied on, so total exclusion is all that's left. Not that I'd do it. But I understand those who do.

> Search the newspapers for stories

Just want to point out that, while there are plenty of such stories, we can't use newspaper stories to quantify how many men versus how many women are found guilty of pedophilia. When a woman is guilty of pedophilia, it's newsworthy on a national level for being unusual. When a man is found guilty of pedophilia, it's treated like any commonplace murder or burglery.

The same is true for child molestation. Girls being victims of molestation is so commonplace the news barely covers it--and is even less likely to cover it if the victim is a minority, but boys being molested gets much more attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com