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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

I've done a bunch of college tours this year with my daughter. Its kinda shocking to see so many homeless men on the streets, then the universities majority women. I'm kinda hoping she'll go to a school that is 50/50. Georgetown was at 62% female, I think Tulane is 64%.

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I don't think theres a coed university that is anywhere close to 50/50 right now.

It's only around 6000 students, but Missouri S&T (a mostly engineering and mining school) is still like 75% male.

There are a few. Harvard 51/49 F/M, UC Berkeley 52/48, Cornell 51/49, Princeton 47/53, Chicago 47/53.

Highly selective STEM schools are both coed and close to 50/50 for undergrads!

* MIT is 49/51 female/male

* Harvey Mudd is 50/50

* Caltech is 43/57 (the exception, I guess)

* Olin is 52/48

Of course, these schools are not feasible options for most people but it is still a relevant counterexample.

this is the way it has always been. men make up the majority of both of the tails on the distribution of outcomes. people look at one tail and say, this is inequitable! but they don't say much about the other tail.

This is not the way it has always been. Males dominated colleges and universities until anti-male DEI programs were put in place. And now we see 60-75% female colleges/universities.

But now 40% of the population (in the US) attends college, up from 4% a century ago or 0.4% two centuries ago. College no longer represents the extreme right tail of the population, but essentially the above-average.

>Its kinda shocking to see so many homeless men on the streets, then the universities majority women

This is a strange juxtaposition. Are the women in universities making men homeless? Why are the two sides contrasted with each other when there's seemingly barely any relation between the two? How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms barely making ends meet, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?

> How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?

Realism, to be frank. Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males. That's why there's not anywhere near as many homeless males than females.

Women still have a cultural option to retreat to the role of a housepartner. Very few men have that option.

Long term homelessness comes down to mental health, substance abuse, or both – not what many men are looking for in a domestic partner.

Sure. I'm just explaining why more men are homeless than women:

>Sixty-seven percent of all people experiencing homelessness within the 2018 Point-in-Time (PiT) Count are individuals. There are 260,284 men compared to 106,119 women. Thus, men are the majority of individuals experiencing homelessness (70 percent) followed by women (29 percent).

https://endhomelessness.org/demographic-data-project-gender-...

From what I see, there is no state that skews so far that women are even close to a majority. The worst cases still almost have a supermajority of homeless men.

Oh, sure, I think the disparity is real. I just don’t think it’s because otherwise equal men and women are cohabiting at different rates - I’d look more at things like the disparate rates of imprisonment (itself a complex problem) or how things like substance abuse patterns or social behaviors affect someone’s ability to stay housed.

To be clear, I think those are all real problems, all hard to solve, and we should be doing a lot better at them. I just don’t think gender _explains_ homelessness as much as it correlates with some of the root causes.

>Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males.

This doesn't make sense. The ratio of men to women is roughly equal (there's slightly more men at younger ages, but they tend to die younger so after middle age there's slightly more women). The odds for either sex should be roughly similar, though it could differ more based on geography since sex distribution is not geographically equal (rural areas tend to have more men, as women tend to leave for the cities more).

If you only count those actively looking, like you do for unemployment, it can be extremely different. Lets say only half of women are looking while all men are, the half who looks quickly finds a partner, but you are still left with half of men who can't find any while the remaining women don't look, creating massively more men who can't find any than women.

I see, this does add another dimension. It seems the OP was assuming that women are more frequently opting out of the dating pool, but that's probably not a bad assumption based on what I've read in popular media lately.

in addition to the reply previously left, it also comes down to age demographics. Women are a lot more likely to "date up". Or perhaps men date down.

Either way, when you have some portion of the 18-24 women dating men in the 25-34 demographic, that skews the portions for 18-24 men. Men who obviously can't date down and are much less likely to date up.

As another bit of trivia (but not likely to change major statistics), women are slightly more likely to be gay than men.

It's merely noting that the majority of homeless are men and the majority of college students are women.

It doesn't imply any causality or relationship.

>It doesn't imply any causality or relationship.

So you'd be fine with the above statement about single moms and tech bros?

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