Comment by tyjen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyjen | Hacker News Reader

Society is in the fuzzy space where discriminatory pressure men face exceeds the perceived privilege in many areas of society. When discrimination continues in excess of actual privilege (not perceived privilege), it's no longer about equality or equity and turns into corruption, because equality or equity would turn to support men in these cases of disparity.

For example, women are heavily overrepresented in the veterinarian field, in some cases representing 90 percent of current veterinarian students. When an Australian university decided to offer a single scholarship with preferences for rural and male students to try to balance representation. The female vet students were absolutely shocked and horrified, despite several female scholarships existing concurrently.

Privilege as an absolute, ubiquitous, end-all and be-all trait pegged to immutable characteristics is turning into a mythological construct to justify continued discriminatory practices benefiting groups allowed to collectively act in their favor. Even many of the numerous articles or studies supporting discriminatory behavior are often specious at best.

In reality, privilege is a holistic measurement that changes with localized community composition. Applying discriminatory policies with broad strokes at this point is unjustified and negatively discriminatory. Society could do better, but it's deciding not to.

Very well written, and I completely agree.

But how can we have this discussion as a society when anyone attempting to discuss it is shouted down as a bigot? (Which is odd because it’s unfair discrimination we’re trying to fix.)

In our workplaces it is acceptable to promote one side of the argument, which is declared by HR to be morally virtuous, but promoting the other side of the argument would quickly lead to termination.

Outside the workplace, any attempt to organize or speak out on this topic will similarly be intentionally misinterpreted and then the mob will demand the person be fired.

I’m not sure how we resolve this when only one half of the discussion is allowed.

At one job at a large company, several women were sitting at a nearby table during lunch discussing how much they love tall men and talking about how too many of the men in San Francisco were too short to be dateable. So I reported this to HR through the proper channels, not to get them into trouble but just in the hopes that someone would let them know that wasn't appropriate workplace conversation.

Net result: HR lady laughed about it, let them know I had personally made the complaint, leading to teasing and mockery and no disciplinary action.

Now, imagine if you had a group of men talking about how much they loved big boobs in the workplace and ranking the women in the company on the perkiness of their tits...

HR protects the company from discrimination lawsuits, not the employees from discrimination. Talk to a lawyer.

I usually agree, but the way HR responded here actually implicated the company more in the sexual harassment, not less. A self-interested company would have proceeded according to established procedure, not participated in it itself.

Not that that would be worth making a federal court case out of things anyway. I just wanted to be able to sit down and do good work for a generally tolerable company without distraction.

Stop being a pocket sized snitch.

I think he overreacted but what if it was two men talking about how SF women are too skinny?

It's the double standard that gets me. Either people don't objectify members of the opposite sex at the workplace, or they do. A quote that applies here:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

We need to strive for liberal egalitarianism, not the reactionary identity group politics that typify politics on both sides in the US nowadays.

It doesn't make much sense to try and have a general discussion about a topic that is very context dependent.

Collective action, studies and lawsuits.

The difficult part for men, is maintaining appropriate targeting and not supporting or even providing the appearance of supporting causes that could be easily construed as chauvinistic or patriarchal. The sooner collective action begins, the less damage current policies will inflict on the population in the long-term. The problem is as you described, it's tricky to navigate for fear of retribution of going against the current flow of interpretation. Special interest groups who benefit from current policies will ardently work against them to maintain their sort of market share of resources and political power.

For the case of men and women in particular, both face gendered discrimination in different ways and different contexts. But pop feminism had so thoroughly incorporated a shallow understanding of privilege that it's considered impossible that a man could face any kind of adverse discrimination because of his gender.

Ironically, this is because it coincides with a preexisting sexist concept: the idea that men have universal agency and women lack it, leading to attribution of hyperagency to men and hypoagency to women. And from that we get the idea that the entirety of gender is Men collectively victimizing Women, blasting away all of the layered subtleties and contextualities of gender roles.

> The female vet students were absolutely shocked and horrified

If you look hard enough, I'm sure you can find at least a few people "shocked and horrified" about absolutely any issue in the world. If you are building an entire argument on the alleged attitudes on some female veterinarian students in some Australian university, it could easily be taken down by a counterexample.

For example in this very thread, you have people arguing that it is "systemic discrimination" that men have to sit down concentrate (just like women understand they need to do) in order to achieve a higher education. So clearly the attitude that men should be privileged is alive and well in certain quarters.

It's apparent that men and women have different learning styles, as evidenced by their widely different outcomes as they go through school. We as a society have constructed an educational system that privileges women, which is ipso facto systemic discrimination that creates a disparate impact.

As a left handed person that has had to deal with a system designed for right handed people, can I also join the pity party, and call myself a victim of discrimination?

Do left-handed people attend university at a rate a third less than right-handed people do?

And, yes, if a school system required all students to write right-handed and that resulted in lower grades and worse outcomes among left-handed students, that would absolutely make you a victim of systemic discrimination.

My writing is slower and lower quality while using right handed desks, which I had to use many times in school. If you look hard enough everyone is the "victim of systematic discrimination"

But you don't have to look hard to see the results of discrimination against men: something like 60% of awarded bachelor degrees are to women.

I'd support requiring schools make left-handed desks available to students, and I'm more than happy to make it a major priority if there are statistics indicating that it seriously hampers left-handed students' outcomes.

> But you don't have to look hard to see the results of discrimination against men: something like 60% of awarded bachelor degrees are to women.

Why do you think this is due to discrimination? Isn't it more likely women are just more willing and able to put in the hard work necessary? If some men feel it is "unfair" that they have to put in the same amount of concentrated study as women to achieve the same degrees, then it is understandable these men are not as successful academically.

Same question for the CEO ratios. Are board of directors discriminating against women or is it that men are more likely to make the sacrifices to become a CEO?

Historically, more men got a higher education. So it seems those men back in the day somehow did manage to sit down and concentrate.

1) Pedagogy has evolved from the past, in ways that may have been broadly disadvantageous for boys.

2) Just because certain outcomes happen now doesn't mean it's some absolute, immutable state of the world. We can and should have an educational system that serves both boys and girls.

Politics is about making your opponents look like oppressor and your constituents looked like the oppressed. Both sides do this, and I'm not just talking about Republican vs Democrats it has been going on forever.

It looks like in the huge majority of metro areas, women still earn less than men. I'm not so sure that women outperforming men in some areas is cause for alarm.

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