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Comment by zasz | Hacker News Reader

Eh, just because females have advantages in some domains doesn't mean that their overall advantages in life are outweighed by the overall male advantages in life. Stuff like the salary gap, stereotype threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat), and being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids affect most adult women for most of their lives. Murder is a pretty rare event, and men, as the traditionally more risk-taking sex, could be bringing quite a bit of it down on themselves. I'd take the increased chance of murder, personally.

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On the other hand, stuff like the causes of the salary gap, stereotype threat, and being expected to give up contact with your kids to be the one raising money to bring them up affect most adult men for most of their lives. (There's support out there for heterosexual men giving up their careers to raise kids but only so long as this decision is made by the kids' mother based on what benefits her personally.)

The wage gap is also curious because these days it results mostly from men and women doing different kinds of work, and campaigners demand totally different solutions for high-status jobs than they do for low-status ones. For stuff like tech industry startups there are lots of campaigns to include more women. On the other hand, if you take street-side trash collection (another job which is also largely male) instead there are campaigns for women to get the same pay for doing "equivalent" jobs like office cleaning.

Now, trash collection of this kind is an awful lot more dangerous than cleaning offices and this is both why it's better paid and why there are few women doing it; for various reasons people get more upset about a woman dying in a horrific industrial accident than a man so employers have an incentive to discourage women, and there's not so much social pressure for them to get dangerous jobs. Equality would require making people care more about men dying or less about women, both of which benefit men rather than women, so feminists go for the unequal option of paying women for doing less than men instead.

Edit: For example, if you play video games take a close look at the gender of the mooks that you kill en-masse. That's just one of the subtle messages saying that men are disposable in mass media.

Actually, men in crappy, dangerous jobs is an evolutionary trait. It's also why they're (traditionally) the ones to go to war and why everyone thinks women and children are to be protected above all else.

If 90% of the males in a population die, it takes 1 generation to recover. If 90% of the females in a population die, it takes 5 generations to recover. Meanwhile, they are easy pickings for other competing populations.

Well, that's probably kind of true and it matters a lot if you're doing something like constructing a fictional matriarchal society. It's not exactly relevant in modern times though; we don't (or at least shouldn't) stop women from working because having other options might discourage them from having kids anymore, why should we allow other kinds of horrible gender-based discrimination in the name of population increase?

I'm not saying it's a justification for continuance of the status quo. I'm saying that it's our evolutionary heritage, and as such it has to be recognized as a problem for everybody, rather than saying "it's the white man's fault so the white man is responsible for fixing it".

Changing thinking requires someone to show that things CAN be different. Only then can the majority follower population even consider the possibility. This is why the constant complaints about how "things aren't the way they should be" result in no action, and we end up right back here with accusations flying and nothing getting done.

I think an immense amount has gotten done in the past 100 years, and quite a lot of it through complaining.

Most privilege comes from unconscious bias. Pointing out unfair situations and calling out biases drive hidden assumptions and reactions into the open, allowing us to consider and change them.

Of course, a lot of people would like to go right back to sleep: change is uncomfortable, especially when you realize that the change will remove an advantage you have.

Sure, it's sad men don't get to spend as much time with the kids, but the point is, they can have their career, and have at least some time with their children. Women very often just don't have that choice, and are forced to take just the kids. That sounds worse to me. (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/18616558/ns/today-books/t/why-...)

Also, women are actively punished for asking for more money, or being aggressive: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07... That has nothing to do with dangerous jobs, and that's a legitimate form of sexism that feminism has every right to address.

Do you have any figures for the "men are paid more because they take on more dangerous jobs" assertion? From the AMAs I've seen on Reddit, trash collection is not dangerous--just a low-status job, albeit a high-paying one with short hours.

Also, yes, I play vido games. I have not played Assassin's Creed, but my understanding is that historically, monks were men, so if you're going to assassinate the pope, he's going to be surrounded by men. I have, though, slaughtered a lot of male and female citizens of Vault City while playing Fallout 2.

The vibe I'm getting from your post is, "feminism isn't doing enough to eliminate the negative implications of gender roles for men, and it is therefore invalid." Or maybe it's something more like, "hey, men suffer a lot too, why are you spending so much time paying attention to women?" In which case, the simple reply is that while gender roles can negatively affect both genders, women seem to have the worst of it.

I mean, black men have this reputation for having gigantic dicks and being able to dance, which reflects badly on white men in comparison, but you'd have to be insane to prefer being a black man to a white man in America. I hear Eminem has a hard time being a white rapper in a black man's world, but it would be silly to feel sorry for him. And in a similar vein, I don't feel nearly as sorry for men as I do for women.

> they can have their career, and have at least some time with their children

Unless mommy divorces them and takes their kids away, at which point they can have their career, and they can pay for the kids, but they can't actually spend much time with them.

Yes, that's true, and that sucks. I won't deny that, and I feel terrible for any man that happens too, and I wish the courts were truly gender-equal in this respect. But the flipside of always granting women custody of children is immense social pressure for women to give up their careers to raise children, or to at least face huge energy expenditures in balancing both that men don't, and on balance, I think women are still getting the shorter end of the stick. It's within your control to avoid marrying a bitch or to maintain your marriage; it's harder to dodge societal expectations that because you're female, you'll be a poorer employee. Given the choice between two problems, I'll pick tackling the one where I have more control over the outcome. Wouldn't you?

Most feminists don't focus explicitly on making it easier for men to intrude into traditional female-dominated activities like childrearing, but hopefully, as it becomes more normal for women to enter the same spheres as men, the reverse will hold true too, and the courts will be more likely to see men as equal and not inferior caregivers. So even if feminism isn't explicitly about helping men, I think it's still on their side.

>Sure, it's sad men don't get to spend as much time with the kids, but the point is, they can have their career, and have at least some time with their children. Women very often just don't have that choice, and are forced to take just the kids.

That's false.

A) It is a woman's choice to have children.

B) The "Best Interest Clause" creates a power differential over the children. If she wants to work full-time she can, If she wants to be a house-wife she can. So what choice does the father have in this situation? If this works its way to family court the father will be legally bound to the "provider" role due to the "best interest".

C) Women in general are still seeking out men that have the potential to be providers. They have the choice to seek out men that will be house-dads and that is not happening.

Women by law and cultural norms have the choice to balance home life and career in ways that a man does not.

All the evidence points that women in general seek out a balanced lifestyle in ways that men do not have the freedom to.

To the extent which you are correct (which I personally think is modest), the problem is still a sexist system. Historically, most of the sexism has been blatantly anti-female. If we are getting to the point when it is now arguable that women don't have the short end of the stick, then that's great news.

However, if you would like the elimination of sexism to continue and solve some of the things that bug you personally, I think your tactics are poor. Right now you look like yet another guy clinging on to his male privilege. If you are interested in eliminating sexism on both sides, then I think you'll get better results jumping on the bandwagon of the last century or so.

The trouble is that the "bandwagon of the last century or so" has no interest in doing anything about this particular form of sexism. Pretty much everyone supports children being automatically treated as their mother's property - including feminists - to the point that if you stand up to this you'll almost certainly be accused of wanting kids to be their father's property. The accusation usually sticks too - it's such a deep-rooted assumption that everyone just talks about doing what's in the "best interests" of the kids without even stopping to think whether it is.

Not even if it involves an underage rape victim paying child support to his rapist to raise their kids. Not even if it means keeping the father of some kids away from them long enough for their mother to brutally murder them, ignoring the warning signs she was showing and just choosing the "safe" option of assuming their father is dangerous based on his gender. (Not hypothetical examples by the way.)

I have hard time believing you have actually read the comment you were replying to. Let me be more explicit:

The historical bias against women is giant and undeniable. Feminists, male and female, have had to fight vigorously to make it as far as we have. Women still face substantial sexism today.

It is also true that men face some sexism. One could argue (very wrongly in my opinion) that we have finally reached the point where harm due to sexism is about the same for men and women.

Regardless, if you leap into a discussion of anti-female sexism and male privilege by only talking about how gosh darned hard it is for men, you look like an ass. By not acknowledging the many decades of struggle, or all of the existing anti-female behavior, you give the impression that you don't care about it. People will assume you're of a piece with the people who've been acting similarly for the last 150 years.

That's entirely alienating, so you're insane to think that the people who have been busily fighting for equality for most of their lives are going to be moved by comments like yours.

Let's spell this out.

A woman can either have just kids, or just a career.

A man can have just kids, just a career, or a career and kids.

Who has more options?

Your assumption that women "choose" to always be the stay at home parent is questionable, too. As if the husband, and society in general, have no expectations that women are the best caretakers and should therefore be the ones to stay at home, and no additional influence on her choice.

"From the AMAs I've seen on Reddit, trash collection is not dangerous--just a low-status job, albeit a high-paying one with short hours."

A quick Google turns up information like this: http://earth911.com/news/2011/08/26/dangerous-jobs-garbage-c...

It involves working amongst traffic on a regular basis and operating dangerous machinery with very little in the way of safeguards, so the danger level shouldn't be terribly surprising.

> the salary gap

Men don't earn more money for being men (not any more at least, if it was ever true):

> according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....

Amazing what happens when you read the whole article: you discover that a) this is a market research survey guy, and b) his theory is due to the fact that the women are better educated, and therefore better qualified.

Which means that this is definitely not evidence that evidence that women get paid the same as men when all else is equal.

It's not just this one guy though:

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_detai...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DD1531F...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190345450457648...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvaQ0xxni8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow

Thanks. That's helpful. However, that first link, the only one from a neutral source, suggests that sexism and male privilege are indeed still problems.

They say that they couldn't account for 24-35% of the wage gap. And the portions they could account for were due to:

* more women work part time * more women take time off to care for children and the elderly * women value 'family-friendly' workplaces more

The first one isn't really an explanation; it says nothing about why that's the case. The second is at least partly due to societal policing of gender roles: talk to any couple where the guy stays home with the kid and you'll hear both partners complain about how they're treated. The man is unmanly; the woman, unwomanly. It's also self-reinforcing; the wage gap means that guys make more, so there's economic incentive for women to stay home. The third could be similar: ceteris paribus, it should be parents who value family-friendly workplaces more.

So I think this study confirms that there is a salary gap, and that a good portion of the reason for it is exactly what Zasz says: women "being expected to give up your career to be the one to raise the kids".

The study also suggests that what gap-closing has happened is due to changes in human capital. That is, women being more educated and more experienced in jobs typically held by men. That demonstrates to me that sexism was indeed a major problem in the past, that historical "women are just different" arguments are bunk, and that there's no particular reason to think that December 2011 is the month where we've solved the problems that come from millennia of oppression of women.

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