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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

“that, at least in Sweden and the occupations we study, hiring discrimination in entry level jobs is primarily a problem for men in female-dominated occupations,”

That's interesting. I work in a female-dominated occupation (libraries), but, it's only female dominated at the lower levels. Historically, at least, directors/managers and the upper level folks tended to be men, and those are of course the only jobs that pay very well. So while there's waaay more female librarians, there's way more male library directors. I think that's been slowly changing recently. I don't see that they look at libraries in this study, nor do they mention managers.

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The study in the article looked at hiring discrimination. The study focused on the tested and established method of correspondence testing to measure active discrimination, in this case response rates to job applications.

Gender segregation, ie what fields are dominated by which gender, is related but quite different. For Swedish numbers I can strongly recommend the primary source (https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/arbe...), collected by the Swedish tax agency and published by the government agency for statistics. The only major drawback is that it is a lot of information and its hard to locate the exact thing (Just choosing the right database interfaces can be hard).

That said, in this case, we can mostly identify the correct numbers. Librarian is a female dominated professions with a ratio of 2:1 (found through the database interface that lists profession and gender), with a similar gender ratio in favor of women for manager levels in the government sector (https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/arbe...).

It should be noted that Sweden has a very high level of gender segregation, and that segregation occurs based on multiple attributes.

I wonder how much of that is a factor of era-started for the directorial positions. Directors have usually accrued decades of experience in the industry, and thus started their careers earlier when culture was more sexist. I think male-dominated senior positions are going to be phased out much more slowly as a less homogeneous workforce matures.

The same is true for the art world. Female dominated in every art school I know, male dominated at the well-paying end of the success spectrum.

And I can safely say that I have not ever noticed any discrimination against male artists while studying it. Quite the contrary.

One factor that may be contributing to this, especially in the art world, is survivorship bias driven by higher male risk tolerances. Men have much more boom or bust outcomes in their lives and careers due to lower risk aversion.

What this could look like in the art world is a lower tendency than women towards a stable yet income-capped career like art teacher, and a higher tendency towards a risky yet unlimited potential path as an independent artist. A small fraction of independent artists become rich and famous, or even have a sustainable career, but you'll hear about the few that actually make it. In this scenario there may be more male success stories, but there will be an even greater number of failures.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741240/

Note the hypothesis about risk being a predominantly male trait is also consistent at the other end with men making up 90%+ of prison population in pretty much any form of government or society.

I haven't heard many feminists argue for a female quota in prisons yet.

Your comment is the kind of comment we have to stop if we are going to actually be able to push mens rights issues.

You're using divisive language with your second sentence and poison pilling the entire argument by attacking feminists.

This doesn't have to be a feminist vs whatever war, it needs to be a conversation around male issues and we need everyone at the table to make things better.

Speaking as a feminist - spot on. Feminism isn't about just swapping gender roles and just giving power to women. (As much as Sheryl Sandberg seems to believe it is)

Which means that yes, the incarceration rates are (or should be, it's not like there's a feminist cabal I speak for;) concerning for feminists

Not in the sense that we should simply incarcerate not women, but in the sense that we should desperately look for the systemic issues that result in this outcome.

There's a good chance that a strong gender binary and an idea that it's somehow "men vs women" actively contributes. (E.g. because we stereotypically assign more social behavior to girls, and reward/excuse antisocial behavior in boys)

Trying to frame this as an either/or debate is directly detrimental to ever achieving equitable outcomes.

Males are biologically more aggressive that females. Pick any random male and female and there is a 60% chance that the male will be more aggressive than the female. You can study this and speculate as much as you want but you are wasting your time. Last time I looked males can’t give birth to children but females can. Is that also a cultural bias that we can somehow change to be more “even”? Good luck with that.

> systemic issues [causing higher incarceration rates]

Anti-male bias in the justice system, which has been shown to be around 6x higher than the anti-black bias in the justice system.

> reward/excuse antisocial behavior in boys

We do not. Society strongly discourages not just anti-social behavior in boys, it nowadays discourage a LOT of boy behavior that isn't actually anti-social. Boys are seen as defective girls. And of course the education system hugely discriminates against boys. Unabashedly so.

> Feminism isn't about just swapping gender roles and just giving power to women.

That used to be true. It no longer is.

Nobody looks at the imbalance in incarceration rates and assumes that police and the justice system are systemically sexist against men, but they certainly draw that conclusion along racial lines based on the same outcome.

Funnily enough this has been extensively studied, the systemic sexism against men in the justice system is a proven fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentencing_disparity

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337844261_Sentencin...

https://crimsoc.hull.ac.uk/2020/06/18/gender-differences-and...

A proven fact that will be denied in most social justice conversations.

My theory is that nature runs experiments with males to varying degrees depending on species, mostly in mammals. The continuation of the species only needs men to provide sperm, so the species can afford for unfit males to not have offspring. Females have a more important role, so you should optimize for consistency and reliability.

Or workplace deaths, 10:1, or suicides 3.5:1 or higher.

Women attempt suicide two to four times more often than men. (However, men tend to use more violent, and effective, methods of suicide, so succeed more frequently than women.)

Are you suggesting that women are too incompetent to kill themselves?

The less sexist explanation is that women generally use suicide attempts as a way of asking for help while men generally use suicide attempts as a way of escape.

Stated in those terms, both groups are very competent at achieving the end goal.

Easy, tiger - you may want to consider switching to decaf.

Each component of what I stated in response to the comment above is accurate, and an appropriate explanation of the implied assumption in it that suicide lies more commonly with men than women (a common misconception arising from what I explain).

isnt this explanation even more sexist? ..

I wonder how true this really is, and how many attempts by women were mostly just looking for attention. Not to downplay the seriousness of it, it just might be a different class of self harm.

Claiming that feminism does not talk about these issues is at best a sign of naivety about feminism and at worst being disingenuous.

One may disagree with their conclusion that the origin of these problem also has to do with patriarchy, but to claim that these forms of suffering that disproportionately affect men are ignored by feminists is false.

Oh, usually when one corners them in a debate they will grudgingly mumble something about the draft, but find me a spontaneous protest that the draft only inducts men, or about circumcision! They can be badgered into it but they have no actual vigor for it. I did find the various -- when the idea that the draft would apply in the US to women -- responses of "This isn't the kind of equality I wanted" very amusing in a bitterly cynical way.

The draft is very low on most people's protest agenda because it's a coercive thing. Very few people will argue for more coercion, and especially not towards violence.

Meanwhile, women have fought long and hard to be accepted as equals in the (voluntary) military.

And you will find many supporters if instead the selective service, you'd support e.g a year of mandatory social service.

You'll also find support to abandon the draft. (it's a highly unnecessary measure in the face of a professional military). You might even find support to have an egalitarian draft if we move further away from a professional military and instead institute mandatory military service.

But "here's a really bad idea that disproportionality affects a specific group, we should double down to affect more groups negatively" just isn't a proposition appealing to many people - male or female.

> The draft is very low on most people's protest agenda because it's a coercive thing. Very few people will argue for more coercion, and especially not towards violence.

But this is pretty much the same reason that we don’t see outcry about the lack of women working on garbage trucks: it’s not a desirable thing.

Mainstream feminism and the activist reporters ignore the issue. It's inconvenient to the narrative they adhere to.

The Google gender pay gap lawsuit was covered extensively a few years ago. It's outcome (men were actually underpaid based on the data) that resulted in a large number of male employees at Google getting payouts and salary boosts was essentially ignored.

You're obviously right, as "feminists" is way too broad (as is "patriarchy", really).

It's still unsatisfying at some level though. Reading left-leaning news (say the BBC), you're far more likely to read a story about desirable equality that doesn't mention the undesirable side. To be clear, I'm not opposed to equality at all. The discussion often just doesn't seem to be nuanced.

Can you link to any examples?

A quick google search gave me these:

https://thefeministshop.com/blogs/the-feminist-shop-blog/why...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-the-patriarchy-is...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09589236.2018.15...

I'm sure someone with more time (or better yet: deeper familiarity with academic feminist analysis than I have) could find many more.

This is likely a factor, the other factor that tends to account for these differences in fields where individual performance directly determines outcomes is that men have a wider bell curve than women do, although there is significant overlap for individual performance on pretty much every facet, men have more outliers at both the best end and worst end of the curve. This is true against nearly every facet of human performance, the variance is just higher. Higher variance combined with survivorship bias means that the top-most performers in fields that are driven almost entirely by individual performance (athletics, independent artists, authors) are dominated by men at the top, even though the vast majority of men, even those with interest in that field, would fail or be average.

That risk can backfire.

My parents were independent artists, but did not understand marketing. Now we have hundreds of artworks and no money.

Education is completely the same: compare teachers to principals or education professors (and within universities, assistant to full professors)

Men tend to work themselves to death in much higher frequency than women. Women benefit from social fabric when they are at the bottom, even homeless women are housed (at unfixed address) while men really are on the street.

I’m of the impression that we can’t reduce gaps without introducing the threat of social declassment of women when they fail.

Did it occur to you that a better alternative is to provide a safety net for both men and women, instead of taking the response "if i can't have it, you can't either"?

Engaging in a race to the bottom, ensuring everybody is equally bad off, is maybe not the best strategy to ensure equal treatment. (yes, it works. It's just not very productive)

Yes. What if neither is possible?

- People do not want to provide this safety net for men,

- People psychologically resist to remove it from women.

Equality is not possible.

"do not want" isn't "isn't possible". It takes work to effect that change, but it isn't impossible.

As for the second statement: Removing a safety net from somebody else for equality's sake is the equivalent of a three year old smashing their toy so their brother can't play with it either. Yep, equal outcome is guaranteed now, but there's a more adult way to handle it.

Are you saying that men tend to take more leadership responsibilities?

Or at least men tend to _be given_ more leadership responsibilities.

I do get your point, but leadership is sometimes unique in that it requires an individual to take the role.

You can take a leadership role, but you cannot take a leadership position. That has to be given to you.

I don't think I've ever seen a well functioning organization that gives a leadership position to someone who hasn't already demonstrated leadership qualities by proactively taking on a leadership role.

Usually people get promotions like that after the prior leader has quit and they have spent some time filling in in the interim. Or they apply for jobs that have leadership responsibilities as the next step of their career ladder until they get one. In both cases seeking the role comes before actually being granted it.

It's very rare for organizations to grant leadership roles to anyone not already seeking it (usually by performing that role or applying for that job) in some capacity.

True, but from my experience, taking the role can lead to a position because it demonstrates qualities in a leader.

I don't think you're right. It has to be negotiated about, either I get this role or you will have to find a replacement for me.

That’s a strange thing to say at a domain that’s all about founders, who are exactly taking leadership positions.

Keyword being sometimes. Are we debating exceptions that contradict the existence of the problem at large ?

No, I'm confident there are gender-based biases. But the degree of the problem needs to be considered accurately, which means understanding all of the exceptions and how frequently they occur.

Library directors would look like the entry-level workforce 20-30 years ago, right?

One of the major faults in these analyses is to not account for cohorts — and so they discriminate against men in the here and now (fresh hires) to “balance” historic issues that haven’t aged out yet.

That purposeful (and misguided) bigotry is the basis of a lot of modern movements, like “anti-racism”.

For way more than 30 years women have dominated men in the librarian profession

https://blog.oup.com/2011/06/librarian-census/

There are at least a few spheres where purposeful discrimination is explicitly the intended goal, because advocates truly believe the solution will not be solved unless such things happen.

The example of this is affirmative action. If you could wave a magic wand that perfectly equalized yearly pay between all races of people in the US, you would still see wealth disparities persist for many years (possibly generations, and possibly not get any better), because wealth and financial literacy are passed down through families and interracial marriage is somewhat uncommon. Affirmative action (explicit discrimination on the basis of race) deliberately and purposefully seeks to counterbalance against this effect.

Now, I think that that issue is better solved by higher inheritance taxes, mandatory personal finance classes in schools, and more equitable school funding, but the point is that it's not always a lack of understanding of age cohorts that drives such policies. It's possible to understand the real logic behind such policies and still disagree with them.

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