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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

I have experienced this during university.

We were a very technical field of studies and had only a few woman enlisted. Bringing those few successfully through their time was valued quite high.

Requirements to their work were clearly lower than for us and getting an appointment with the professors was easier for them, too. All in all it was less of an overall-hassle for them.

But yeah, one might say this is some kind of survivorship bias or whatever, I don't care. It's what I perceived and it was also a recurring topic in "mens only"-discussions. So other perceived it that way, too.

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Women have been earning more degrees than men since 1978.

For the past forty years, there have been no male-only advancement programs, and (nearly) all sex-based funding has been provided to the majority sex, to advantage them in any field where they’re not currently dominant (and sometimes, just to advantage them in general).

It’s a willful and generational-scale violation of Title IX: that kind of sexist favoritism of the majority is blatantly illegal under discrimination laws.

For forty years, feminism on college campuses has been a majoritarian, sexist power movement — and now it’s spreading to the workplace, as a generation of entitled women graduate and demand the continuation of privilege.

If women have been earning more degrees than men since 1978, why are the majority of educated leadership still men? If women have been a majoritarian sex-based power movement for 40 years this should be plenty of time to replace professors, CEOs, business owners, presidents and vice presidents, grant reviewers, and significant, public-facing leaders of the world's top educational instutions.

Why is this not the case?

(For the record: I'm not denying your understanding of the situation. I'm trying to understand your position regarding feminism's role in empowering women and the disparate power between men and women that you're seeing.

The most obvious explanation is that there really are inherent differences between men and women such that (some) men drive themselves harder to attain these high level positions. Sadly, this is an area that's more or less forbidden to investigate and discuss due to politics.

This is fascinating.

I would describe myself as "burning for the job", to a level that is not really healthy sometimes. But I love what I do, it's more than a job for me and I will (maybe) stop looking for better jobs and giving 110%, once I reach a salary of 100k or more a year (this is still quite a number in Germany, I think).

While some male colleagues also really burn for their jobs and want to achieve great things, my female colleagues are really hard to motivate to go the extra mile. They value free time and work-life balance more than staying overtime, getting something done today and not tomorrow and things alike.

Maybe they are doing the right thing, work is not everything, but I think this might lead to men taking positions which require the aforementioned "mindset", no matter whether it's healthy or not.

I agree that the choice to not prioritize career need not be viewed in a negative light. The focus on everyone having a high powered career seems somewhat anti-human to me. It devalues the very important role of family in society. It also seems somewhat sexist to label what has traditionally been a stronghold of women (motherhood) as being somehow less important that working a full-time job.

Being a stay at home parent is very difficult and very valuable work.

Arguably, if it was the case there is a systematic push of women to dominate all levels of higher education, then only a minority of extremely hard working or talented men would achieve high level positions while the vast majority would be women who used nepotism and social networking to achieve their standing (via feminism-boosting).

So it still isn't making intuitive sense to me why most leadership is still male if it holds true that women should have the most power and have held the most power over the leadership pipeline for over a generation.

I would say because at the end of the day, the work must still be done and social networking and nepotism aren't producing the candidates that can do the job. They are just filling the middle to upper middle ranks with those who benefit from it but those at the top get there through some combination of competence, extreme dedication and ruthlessness. Some of which are qualities that we probably don't want highly represented in the general population.

Middle to upper middle ranks are still mostly men in many instutions, so much so that its well known that male nurses statistically advance faster than female nurses into middle to upper-middle nurse management. If one were to attribute it to competence and dedication, this would mean that by and large only men are capable of extreme dedication, competence, and ruthlessness. Is this the conclusion we wish to garner? That simultaneously men are systematically oppressed but also the only sexual demographic inherently capable of consistently achieving excellence?

It’s not about what anyone “wishes to garner”, it’s about being factual.

I don’t find it hard to believe at all that extreme dedication and ruthlessness are highly correlated with testosterone for instance. We already know it’s coupled with aggression.

Edit: And this isn’t to say women aren’t competent and can’t be leaders! There are females CEOs, just not as many as males CEOs. There are also more male inmates and homeless. The same traits can easily lead to opposite results.

Yes, however, we don't have facts here. We're speculating based on assumptions that have no proof (ie. that women are systematically oppressing men and also that men are by and large the default gender to excel in the job market due to their testosterone). I'm trying to ask that if the hypothetical is actually represent of reality, why there exists phenomena that intuitively makes no sense.

For example, it makes no intuitive sense that the vast majority of world leaders, CEOs, business owners, etc. are men if all men are being systematically oppressed by feminisim. This isn't how any other system of oppression works (race, class, physical ability). It also makes no sense that extreme dedication is correlated with testosterone but males are not correlated with child rearing, which requires arguably the maximum possible dedication.

There are very few CEOs in this world, there are millions of men in prison though. I'm not sure how many homeless there are, but definitely more than there are CEOs. I think there are a lot of other things you have to look at but by your logic that's evidence of oppression.

That pretty much doesn’t function like any sort of oppression that we know of. By this reasoning, poor people would simultaneously be overwhelmingly CEOs as well as homeless. Black people would be overwhelmingly POTUS multiple times over.

If there was a systematic push of men to dominate all levels of higher education, then only a minority of men would end at the bottom of society while the wast majority at the bottom would be women.

So it isn't making intuitive sense why the most people at the bottom of society is male if it holds true that men should have the most power and have held the most power over the success pipeline for over a generation.

It also does not make any sense looking at other system of oppression. If we model our theory based on the typical caste system with the oppressed at the bottom and the powerful at top, then men and women as either the oppressed or oppressor does not fit.

(Not parent poster)

Because many women don't want power over others, preferring co-op over hierarchical structure, while a lot of men don't want equality but to fight and climb the ladder (or die)?

I'm not asserting as univocally true, just musing that the environmental structures in which "normative" men and women thrive might be quite different.

In other words, are men collectively squeezing women out of the game, or are men playing each to the death for personal victory, not handing out free passes to the other opponents, male or female? While the former might regrettably happen, I feel the latter is really the common case.

It doesn't make sense that women don't want power over others but simultaneously are presumably actively oppressing the male gender.

This is a silly generalisation, but women want to live in a female world and men want to live in a male world. Male thoughts and drives are not acceptable in a modern mixed environment – at least openly – so the rules of mixed environments really become the rules of female conversation and social behaviour.

Oppression conjures images of physical force, so perhaps intolerance is a better word than oppression, by a small but very vocal group of women. You can control others without taking part in a hierarchical structure.

The underlying issue seems to be twofold:

On the one hand, women seem to be evolutionarily adapted to want to be cared for. At least a subset of them is going to complain about just about anything much like children and taking that seriously is beginning to have seriously adverse consequences.

On the other hand, there are sneaky males who try to get the attention of women by standing in for them. Such males are largely pushed to such strategies because they have been starved of physical affection because society denies the fact that women predominantly want men who emerge from dominance competition over them and ceased to cultivate this, which itself is a consequence of women's complaining taken seriously.

These two mechanisms form a feedback loop that is hard to break, especially in the current political climate.

%s/stand in/stand up/g

HN's 2 hour edit policy is ludicrous, btw.

Plenty of men want to be listened to. You just have to be the kind of person who they feel safe confiding in. If you believe in gender essentialism as you appear to, your male friends probably don't consider you safe to open up to.

All babies cry for help and attention. The bifurcation into two rigid binary genders with roles and expectations layered on later is cultural and varies through history. Evolution isn't that fast.

Human females always had a much lower economic output until recently. Even in the most matriarchal cultures, men were in charge of >90% of the agriculture, military, politics etc. Human matriarchies have never existed. Men have always been selected by dominance competition, though dominance is frequently very subtle; it's mainly about status, affiliation, competence, attire, ornamentation, art etc., but also ... pecking order.

At best, our picture of human history is incomplete. Historians routinely compress concepts to what they understand, and their compressions become The Understanding.

For example: historians often assumed all relationships between two men were platonic because they were raised in a society with enforced heterosexuality. Their lens became the story. Alternate explanations, like trying to read a character as queer, can fall victim to the same conformation bias. You can look to more recent times to, for example, see Native culture crushed legally and compressed until people believe running around in mass produced war bonnets while hollering respects the culture.

Loki, however, was definitely genderfluid and pansexual.

Only a small minority of cultures allowed homosexuality and even in those it wasn't very common. Even in modern societies, where it is socially acceptable only a small minority has deviant sexual preferences, probably less than 5%, so, no, this has never been normal and will likely never be. So enough of this already; the backlash is going to be harsh if natural sex roles will be stifled any further. It should be even in the interest of queers to let it cool off at this point.

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