The lost boys: how a generation of young men fell behind women on pay
thetimes.com
thetimes.com
There's likely an element that's certainly cultural, or a biologically based differences, but it seems like there are some very straight forward explanations for this.
There's significant governmental and private assistance to young women not available to young men (educational scholarships, grants, support groups, etc.). Any field in which men continue to do well is considered a problem, whereas the converse is accepted as a natural order (have you seen any pushes to get straight men into HR?).
There is also significant difficulty in even articulating these issues as its been broadly taboo to discuss biases that advantage women, such as a positive bias toward women in education[1]. That being said, the mere fact that this is now a publicly discussable issue seems to imply our standards for discussion are changing.
[1]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2...
Regarding overt assistance given, this is to help balance the scales for deep structural support given to men. Which to your final point of difficulty of discussion, the structural biases are well documented but often derided when brought up in a discussion against complaints about the overt support provided to women.
We definitely need to address the issues about “the boys are not alright” but re-establishing old basis is not the way.
Genuine question, obviously in the past men had an enormous advantage, but what is that deep structural support today (in the West)?
I don't see much effort to balance scales in areas where women have had much greater assistance and support available for an extremely long time while men have had little if anything. Parental rights, domestic violence, criminal justice, and physical and mental health, etc.
In many of these areas the "old basis" was mainly favoring women and there's been little effort to change that situation.
Someone once asked something relating to a literal "diversity quota" that they had to specifically hire only minorities in order to meet, and I was removed from that entire community for raising concerns of preferential treatment. I believe my exact words were "isn't that just discrimination in the other direction?"
So I think, this is still very much taboo? Either that, or I just suck at communicating. (Which is fair.)
Your question demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of this, which could be obtained in half an hour of reading; from this perspective being kicked out of the room is not an unexpected response.
I do strongly agree with the principle that any discrimination is still discrimination, but reality is more nuanced than that.
(Also: sorry for constantly using the term minorities/non-minorities. I don't have a better word to use here. I know talking about things this way could be seen as being part of the problem.)
It's not always this dramatic, but sometimes you can chalk up the difference between two people's opportunities in life (at least partly) to the fact that Person A's great-great-grandparents had a thriving family business, and each generation was able to provide a safety net for the next, versus Person B's great-great-grandparents who weren't allowed to own property. There are other factors, obviously, but advantages or disadvantages can accrue over time like compound interest. If Person B gets a good job, that's beneficial for them, but it might be exponentially more beneficial for their own great-great-grandchildren down the line—it just takes a while to see that change!
Anyway, i'm largely against quotas, i'd rather have blind resume and have hiring stat done on really big companies to prevent them from gaming too much. If you want to hire diversity for diversity sake (which in tech is a good thing, you want multiple point of view), hire outside of your zone of control, seek people who won't send you a resume.
[0] I've been twice in the US, and visited both places, i guarantee the culture is extremely different, although the National Park crowd is the same (i.e: extremely cool and interesting) in both place.
Or we might no know of the efforts that is made to recruit more men for these female fields because most people on this site work in tech which is male dominated?
In education for example the lack of male teachers has been seen as a problem for years. Teaching here is a well paid job but men here don't want to do it, despite there being active measures to recruit more men for this profession. It's basically the opposite of tech.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/10/a-male-preschool-te...
But primarily, I've not seen a single diversity initiative for gay people in my life. Based on skin colour, sure, for women, always. But not once have I seen anything prompting or requiring hiring of gay employees ever.
I can't say if it was intended that way, but that's not how I read that comment.
I took it to mean that there's a popular cultural attitude that straight men (and more specifically straight white men) are "problematic" and undesirable generally, while gay men are considered different enough from straight men that they're often given a pass in certain circles. In my experience, how many "diversity points" being gay earns you vs the deduction you suffer for being born a man varies widely from setting to setting. It's also been my experience that being gay doesn't carry the same weight in those same crowds that it did decades ago.
I have seen workplaces that promote hiring for diversity which explicitly included LGBT folk as well as racial minorities. Depending on where you live these types of employers may be much harder to find, but a good place to start might be sites like this:
Let's not be obtuse. You're acting as if most gay men are completely straight coded in society. That's just not even remotely true. Most gay men I know are "obviously" gay to straight women because straight women find most straight men to be a threat. Code switching like that is very common within the gay community when present around women. Very much being more flamboyant than they would otherwise as to make women feel more safe and allied with them.
I have dozens of gay male friends (yes, dozens) and I have rarely ever met a man and thought, "wow, he's gay? I never imagined! Seemed straight to me!" It happens but it's very uncommon.
What do you mean by this?
I have many female connections and don't think any of them perceive me as a "threat".. my wife never indicated this either, yet I'm clearly heterosexual.
I don't think acting civil with the opposite gender has anything to do with one's sexual orientation.
The oldest of them is you go to college to meet men. It's the old 19th century reason. Send your daughter to college and next thing you know she's engaged to her roommates older brother a son of a wealthy industrialist.
Don't discount four years of college is four years of not being under anyones thumb.
College educated women have high social status. And job opportunities that don't involve gross low end work normally done by women.
Translated to freedom dollars: that's $30.2k vs $28.9k in 2020-1, and $30.5k vs $33.2k in 2022-3. Overall it seems like young people aren't making a lot of money, period.
But also:
> The report blames the decline of traditionally “male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction” for causing a rapid fall in “secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated young men”.
This, combined with the fact that the "most recent" time period of this study is still smack in the middle of COVID seems like there could be more to the story here. Were industries that traditionally hire a lot of women already bouncing back from the pandemic in ways that industries that traditionally hire a lot of men did not? Did COVID make some companies realize that they can get away with short-staffing/underpaying and we're seeing the effects of that here?
Those are pretty typical wages for the UK. American wages are in a universe unto themselves and aren't a useful comparison for these purposes (it would be less than the minimum wage in some regions of the US).
For many people they only started getting employer pension contributions with auto-enrolment which is 3% of qualifying earnings, not your whole salary. In 2013 only 49% of workers were participating in a workplace pension scheme but it’s over 80% now.
To add some context to that, the median salary in the UK is $47,596.
>Were industries that traditionally hire a lot of women already bouncing back from the pandemic in ways that industries that traditionally hire a lot of men did not?
Yes, probably. The difference could be due to health care jobs or restaurant jobs doing disproportionately well compared to construction or manufacturing during those two years, for example. And I think there may also be some effect related to getting laid off and rehired at a higher salary.
I remember hearing a lot of whining about how the pandemic affected women more because of the type of work they tend to do. So here's another angle. If you lost your job and got rehired at a higher salary, that could actually turn out better than keeping your job for those two years with all the inflation we've had.
Ha Ha 8-) That's funny!
Is it called that because those with the dollars get the freedom?
On another point, both in the original article, and in the above comment: the lack of trade based career opportunities.
I have doubts about this. Obviously much manufacturing was sent to China by ownership, so the balance is still probably in the negative overall, but many trade service operators are complaining about the inability to hire. Specifically trades like plumber, electrician, and handy man.
There have also been reports of agricultural operators offering over $20/hour and still being unable to hire workers.
I'm working with a couple of young people as electricians and plumbers on a project here. The cost is not small. They make good money, but still find it hard to hire.
Maybe if World of Warcraft, or Call of Doom could be replaced with a video game glorifying unstopping a toilet, we could get the kids to pay attention? (just thought I'd end with another laugh)
As someone totally clueless about this field, I think question is "Can we do something about this?" because writing them off isn't a great option either.
In general my personal opinion is that a lot of parents can't put enough personal time towards raising their kids, or refuse to (or mix of both). Like kid keeps doing stuff that by policy schools have to call about and the parents care less about what their kid is doing than that the school just stops calling them.
That is your bias against these boys, that isn't reality.
But when kids are doing things that would get adults jailed I don't think it's bias, though. It's more like a depressing probability.
Of course you don't want people to do that anyway, but being nice and being competent are two completely separate things.
This might be more advanced in the US, because this isn't seen in elementary school in my country yet (not until 11-12 at least), but in the last 5 years at least (pre-covid) people i speak with have definitely observed this behavior among teenage boys, a sort of anti-social personna they put on and never let go (helped by phones).
Bullying moved online mostly, which is a real issue in our country, because the school personnel are only taught how to spot and stop usual bullying, not the online one (spain seems to be better from what i've heard, but they do respect teaching more than us it seems, which help getting teachers who aren't total jackass). Overall, the school is worse for everyone, even in private education (public education isn't helped by spending "cuts" and 36+ children by teacher in some cases, but it seems the bullying is way, way less prevalent)
[0] I've read an article a few years ago about employement "test" for lawyers (with fake CV), it was pretty clear that both poor men (black, then white) and women from the bourgeoisie (CV with "horse, ballet" as hobbies, high-QOL address and "elite" school) were the most discriminated against. I wonder if that population skew the "wage gap" towards men a lot, as often bourgeois women don't have a well paying job (author, artist, but also volunteering and/or coordinating volonteers, pro-bono head of the family fundation) unlike their men conterpart (your chief manager who is 25 and dropped out of a big uni with a lot of legacy student and paid thrice your rate? His sister coordinate volonteer in a soup kitchen)
...jesus... £24k... £26k... honestly god bless every man and woman who wakes up in the morning and choses to go to work, cos they can't possibly be doing it for the money lol.
And people that go to university don't appear in the statistics until age 22 or so, as they're not in full-time work. Meaning people who leave school at 16 contribute to the annual statistics 8 times, while university graduates only contribute 2 times. And among those who leave school at 16 and become apprentice plumbers or electricians - they're not going to be making decent money until they're good enough not to need close supervision.
I'm sure I could look around, but the problem is that whatever I'd find probably wouldn't appeal to the kids. There seem to be at least positive-ish female role models with appeals to young people, and a variety of them with a variety of viewpoints and that model a variety of life paths. I don't see that with male ones.
Linus Torvalds famously loves to verbally abuse others working with him, just for one small example…
Doesn’t mean he can’t be a role model. Just don’t emulate all behaviour exactly from any person.
People have flaws. Every single one of them.
Many of the best role models are the kind of folks who large systems or structures refuse to teach about en mass because these role models are uniquely subversive. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr being the classic example of this.
Secondly, we need to be teaching emotional identification, regulation, and how to make yourself happy without comparing yourself to others. How to be a valuable member of a community. None of this is specific to men, of course, but the masculinity of that will reveal itself in how people choose to present themselves—nobody is saying men shouldn't try to provide for the people around them or shouldn't protect them or shouldn't be a basis of emotional stability. Notably, it's also masculine (to others) to abandon your family and community. Two very different conceptions that are equally real in our society. If you start from the assumption of some platonic ideal of "masculinity" you'll end up very confused.
If you can figure out how to sell this to a bunch of teenage boys you can conquer the world. Personally, I think men are gonna need to feel a generation of pain or two before the obvious incentives are going to align with boys learning to take care of themselves.
All of my role models as a child were fictional characters, only about half of them were men, and little of their attraction had to do with helping me feel secure in my masculinity. So perhaps I'm just missing the point entirely.
By the way, could you share some female role models who appeal to girls? What I noticed is that some people look good when viewed at a distance. But it sometimes happens that when you look closer, or time passes, the people who seemed very positive (Bill Cosby and many others) show some other aspects.
Hell, even AOC or Kamala Harriss altrought not cool, they are not openly toxic. There is no female equivalent of Trump o, you have to be a man to consistently fail upwards and be enabled that consistently.
Look within your own community, those are the people that can have a bigger more direct effect anyway. Camp counselors, teachers, neighbors, creatives, local government officials, coaches, etc. there are all sorts of people who don’t suck who are doing great things right near you, right now, who not only have time to mentor kids, but actually want to.
Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa? Do they also need to have other matching traits, like skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation?
I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
I don't really have any beef with gender roles, but sometimes the roles communicate simply antisocial behavior. One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads. And yea, maybe some people just shouldn't be around children, but once you observe how this passes down generations with your own eyes it's very difficult to un-see.
In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community.
What I don't get is that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are also, erm, not very masculine by the standards of many if not most communities here in america except in the sense of "thinking being an asshole is funny". Neither is Trump, for that matter. Something tells me that there are other factors at play here than just "masculine role models".
My sister and I were educated in a gender-agnostic fashion and neither of us fell into the trap of thinking that we must do this or that because of our gender. As a result, we each carved our own different path. I don't see why my children will be any different, unless their own peers indoctrinate them with arbitrary gender roles.
You can either get along with people or not, you can either communicate with people or not, it's really up to you. But this doesn't change the fact that kids will be raised in this environment, and it's our collective responsibility to care for them regardless of how you judge the parenting. That, or we collectively bear the consequences of shirking this duty.
Anyway, what is the idea of a role model if not a positive case of indoctrination? What are we even discussing here?
Unlike women, men don't have a say in the birthing process but are nonetheless saddled with the consequences. Unlike women, they have no recognized right to unilaterally relinquish parenthood and the costs associated with it. Being a "deadbeat dad" is the result of a lack of agency against the legal fiction of paternal obligation. It's not like these men would prefer to be deadbeats if availed the free choice of parenthood rather than the legal imposition of it. If there was a database of every abortion undertaken and every child given away by a woman, akin to the Federal Case Registry for child support, it would be evident that women are just as likely to be deadbeats as men.
> In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community.
In a world of 8 billion people and countless permutations of social cohesion, it takes a severe case of naïveté or hubris to believe that "healthy" is or could ever be a well-defined term and not a moving target only a small proportion of people have the wherewithal to live up to. Gender expectations are all simplifications and fictions that often put people into neat little boxes without accounting for their individual circumstances. This has done more to harm self-image than build it, especially when people fall short of these expectations and later resent themselves or the world for their perceived inadequacy to fulfill standards they never consented to.
Men don't have any say in whether or not they have unprotected sex? No. You've lost me. Not a single absentee father I've ever met has accused their baby mommas of sexual assault. That would obviously be a wildly different situation than the general trend I'm describing. It's also hugely offensive.
If you don't want kids, you have a responsibility to not have unprotected sex. Take some damn accountability for your actions and accept the consequences.
When did anyone say anything about sexual assault? Sexual assault isn't the only way to violate an individual's agency in matters of parenthood. But since you brought it up, there have also been cases where a male victim was raped and still had to pay child support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer
> If you don't want kids, you have a responsibility to not have unprotected sex. Take some damn accountability for your actions and accept the consequences.
There's more to birth than just unprotected sex. If you're suggesting that sex necessarily implies parental responsibility, that's on you to prove. The law already recognizes that sex is not an agreement to parenthood for women. However, the law is incoherent and inconsistent when it comes to men, a number of whom may not even be the biological fathers of the children they're "responsible" for.
The say is in not having sex. You have the individual agency to pay child support. If you can't, people will call you a deadbeat dad. Sorry.
Why is that unacceptable to say to women, but acceptable to say to men? When people say that to women they call them sexist, but the same people say that to men themselves, so obviously there is sexism here.
I think if you accept that for men, you should accept it for women, and vice versa.
Because this is typically in response to allegations of rape? I haven't really noticed any stigma associated with this sentiment outside of that context.
However, a teenager in a society with gender roles is probably going to explore which of those they're going to adopt and which they're going to ignore. Could be they'll want to adopt a male gender role, in which case it's good if they've got positive examples of how to do that.
I grew up in and around factories - where I saw that skilled workers can be incredibly gentle, careful, calm, thoughtful and honest at the same time as being hard-working, providing for their family, and having a unquestionably male gender identity.
Women can model all those virtues - but they can't model them as a way of being a man.
If your teen wants to adopt a male gender role but the only examples they've seen are from the entertainment industry, they'll have a rather blinkered view.
I believe, in life, girls can look up to men but boys do not look up to women. I suspect, but am not sure, that is built into the biology of each.
> I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
I agree. However, I think that we can make observations that show it does happen. E.G. the non-historical release of the Black Panther movie.
The problems facing the two sexes are different and the expectations of them are different, at least in many societies. The expectations of a young man have been around self-sacrifice, self-control, and self-reliance, and looking towards female role models for cues on that would lose a lot of nuance particular to the male condition.
Women do not have the same physical capabilities of men in either size or strength, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of restraint. Women have, by and large, a different way of processing emotions than men, and and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how to handle things like intense anger. Women are rewarded for consensus and co-support in a way that men are not, so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how and when to step out of line and take your licks. Women do not have the same utility in things like warfare or manual labor, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of patriotic duty or chivalry.
It's fine and well to have role models for other purposes, mind you--plenty of great examples of other qualities--but you can't look towards women for how to be a good man with the same efficacy you can look at men. The opposite argument is of course laughed at out of hand: nobody would seriously suggest that a young woman look towards men to learn how to be a proper woman.
If you find that laughable, perhaps we were raised very differently. The suggestion of learning "how to be a proper woman", as you put it, rather than "a good person" indeed suggests a degree of sexism that doesn't align with the values I embrace.
It's the parent's job to make sure it doesn't. Glorifying hyper-successful figures isn't healthy without understanding how they came to be hyper-successful (99% cases it's inheritance/nepotism/luck).
We should strive to dampen the oscillation to a minimum around the desired setpoint (wage equity). If the oscillation grows rather than dampens, the instability will eventually break the larger system that it's operating in.
Take the analogy of 'the pendulum swings both ways' for societal norms. If you apply pressure to the pendulum you could slow it to a stop, or you could speed it up enough that it breaks it's chain and becomes a cannonball.
The problem detailed are actually endemic: women do better in primary education, and always have. So if you take the roadblocks out of their way they'd be expected to do better in early career paths that "look like school". I don't know that this is really that surprising.
So I'll reframe the question in a more libertarian way: if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix?
(Edit: the whiplash on the votes in this comment is dizzying, but I guess unsurprising. I do think that an awful lot of people on this forum aren't mentally prepared for the case of "What if women actually are better at entry level corporate work than men are?")
Yes. Why not?
Our society has pushed a lot of messaging towards girls and women that encouraged academic and professional excellence. Media unabashedly points out examples of successful women. That's encouraged girls to dream and women to persevere.
As a middle-class white man, the messaging I've heard is that success shouldn't be celebrated because anyone with my level of privilege should be successful. It's not uncommon for me to feel shame from national media. I second guess myself on my masculine traits being toxic.
I'm NOT advocating to be less encouraging of women. But I think we should be more loving and encouraging of little white boys so they don't grow up to become NEETs, MAGAs, or DOGEs.
Edit - Sorry to have not answered your question.
>if women are better at getting entry level corporate jobs and education-focused career paths (doctors, lawyers), is that something we should fix?
Maybe. Action could be useful, but only a delicate touch that doesn't exacerbate overshoot in the other direction.
It's funny you put it this way. Feminists were never satisfied when men suggested that maybe men got paid more because they were more hard-working or talented, and maybe their success was simply the result of good choices and higher natural ability, or biological life cycle differences, or the preferences of women themselves to not work as hard.
To actually answer the question, I think the fix that should be put in place is to stop assuming that sex differences are because of discrimination, and immediately end policies that promote quotas on people based on characteristics like sex. It's clear that women have not been actually disadvantaged in general for a very long time, and pretending otherwise is harming men. Treat people equally as possible, and let the outcomes be what they must.
In my opinion I think men are also losing motivation because all the jobs they might like are being outsourced and undercut. They're told they are oppressors even though they have little real power in society. Most of them aren't getting any attention from the opposite sex either, because women don't want to date down. Demographic imbalances also make the dating pools skewed in favor of women.
In many/most cases women will regret choosing career over a husband and kids, or even be tricked into thinking they can have it all at 40. But by then it is too late.
How exactly is that not just DEI for men?
> In many/most cases women will regret choosing career over a husband and kids
And that's just plain sexist. Yikes.
Yes! I don't care that you gave a reference. Men invented practically the whole world around us and are more physically capable than women. They have been doing half of the work or more for millenia, and aspire to do great things (for women's benefit no less). You think some pissant DEI-funded result that only applies to modern times, where men are abandoning college because it's not worth it and women proceed because they are highly conformist and do what they're told, changes that?
>How exactly is that not just DEI for men?
What I said was to stop favoring women. If I was a woman I could have my pick of jobs or at least a leg up. I might have also gotten scholarships and other opportunities in school. That is not even possible for men. Try to make a scholarship or other benefit for boys and see how much shit you'll get. Even the Boy Scouts were forced to take girls. Somehow you think treating people equally according to their characteristics is DEI for men. I think you're a woman trying to justify discrimination against men.
>And that's just plain sexist. Yikes.
So, me acknowledging that women may regret letting 100% of their eggs fall out before trying to have a kid is sexist, but saying something as stupid as women are better workers than men in general isn't? Yikes indeed.
Is it? Girls do better than boys in school, period. Women are more likely to attend college and to graduate once they're there. The fact that they do better in school and not in early career earnings has, in fact, been a long time point of evidence that gender imbalance exists. Yet the instant it looks like that might be reverting to mean, we see men screaming that it's somehow unfair and we need to put the finger back on the scale.
This is what I meant upthread about people being mentally unprepared. Seriously: what if it's true? For myself, I think it's probably true that women are more valuable blue collar employees. It's the theory that fits the data best.
There are many reasons for this. They get more support at every turn, and they conform to rules and systems more easily than men who are inclined to think for themselves. They also believe in the narrative that college is necessary and if you don't do it you've missed out big time. That isn't necessarily true. Most of the degrees issued are overpriced and/or worthless now, and even 20 years back.
Most of the women who go to college now don't need a college degree. They would be better served by community college to do a useful job, or else taking that time to start a family. But they've been sold the lie that college always pays off, and they get lots of help to pay for it and survive it.
>The fact that they do better in school and not in early career earnings has, in fact, been a long time point of evidence that gender imbalance exists.
Men have to work hard in life to get the affection of a woman, and that skews everything. Then there is also the fact that women choose stability and flexibility to deal with children and their own social preferences (such as higher amounts of travel for leisure). A woman could literally be on the verge of homelessness and be able to find a man to take care of her.
If women are really such better and cheaper workers than men, why doesn't every employer hire women? They could quickly put everyone else out of business.
> Yet the instant it looks like that might be reverting to mean, we see men screaming that it's somehow unfair and we need to put the finger back on the scale.
There is no reversion to the mean here. I reject your claim that men are somehow inferior workers. Cut out all the DEI programs and go strictly based on merit, and you'll see how quick things turn around. Although I'm not sure that would necessarily happen. Women have not been disadvantaged in any area in at least about 50 years, but they've received preferential treatment the whole time.
This isn't a simple matter of fairness. Shitting on men constantly and propping up women is going to lead to a demographic collapse. Women don't want to date men who they outperform. They want men to provide for them so they can take it easy with the kids. That's fine but don't expect that while doing everything you can to make that as hard as possible.
>This is what I meant upthread about people being mentally unprepared. Seriously: what if it's true? For myself, I think it's probably true that women are more valuable blue collar employees. It's the theory that fits the data best.
Considering that blue collar jobs are the hard physical ones, women absolutely aren't preferred for those jobs by default. They might be favored by guys who appreciate having women around but they just can't do what men do (at least, with the same high level of output, in general). There are many better jobs that are naturally leaning toward women, such as waiting tables or tending bar in nice restaurants, certain sales jobs, nursing, teaching, child care. Good luck getting one of those jobs if you're a man. At the same time, you'll almost never see a woman welder or oil worker, or construction worker. The real high-pressure jobs that shave years off your life have no appeal to women because they don't need money that bad. Men do them because they need to support their families, or else their wives will hate them and/or leave.
(FWIW, I wrote "blue collar" when I meant "white collar", apologies.)
Maybe a little. Are you suggesting that discrimination against men is fine because you think men did it like a hundred years ago?
> Is there no moment where you maybe stopped to think that maybe there's a middle ground, but that when all is finally said that there (1) may indeed be a small divergence in gender performance but (2) it may not cut the way you want it to? Are you prepared to live in that world?
If there is a difference, it isn't the way you want it to be. Cut out the favoritism toward women and let's find out. You can't just rest on your laurels as women enjoy all the benefits of DEI and men are denied advancement due to quotas, and lecture me about how much better women are than men at stuff in general.
For my part I think men are slightly better at most things, but left to their own devices they are extremely competitive (as women DEMAND of them, as this is their role in society) and they will collectively outperform by a lot because they are motivated. If men are unmotivated, we're in deep shit, because things will fall apart without men. We will be defeated by some other society that doesn't treat its men like the scum of the earth.
And I repeat my point: there are a lot of men here on HN who seem unprepared to accept a world where women's performance in entry level career work is actually higher than men's, even though that would seem like an obviously extrapolation from well-understood data.
"Teachers are more lenient in their marking of girls' schoolwork, according to an international study.
An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60 countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared with boys of the same ability.
Researchers suggest girls are better behaved in class and this influences how teachers perceive their work.
Differences in school results can sometimes "have little to do with ability", says the study.
Teachers are said to reward "organisational skills, good behaviour and compliance" rather than objectively marking pupils' work.
The findings suggested that teachers needed to be aware of "gender bias"."
You jumbled your words, here's what the sentence should have been: policy to close the artificial wage gap quickly.
It's well known that at equivalent position, company and resume, there is no wage gap.
I said what I meant, but I agree, it could've been said more clearly.
The main issue is that schools don’t serve nonconformists well, and many geniuses and high IQ people are nonconformist, or simply don’t feel rewarded to have to lie to please social norms that they disagree with. This is generally what leads to the cyclical revolution. At a certain point, the most productive and innovative members of society are disincentivized thoroughly so that the economy collapses, because this occurs alongside the incentivization of compliance and anti-risk behavior which is stagnation.
Those boys who aren’t geniuses, but just disengage from academia because they feel that there is no place for them in society also fuels this crisis because you are left with generations of young men who have no stake in the establishment. The conspiracy alarm in me suggests that the establishment is pushing this outcome by creating a system thoroughly repulsive that mobilizes the prerequisite sentiments for an anti egalitarian revolution in the future because such a system is very profitable (e.g. you can’t invade the third world and plunder their resources under the current regime, but sure can in a more “fascist” regime, and generally fascism is the penultimate phase of a socialist system that needs to coerce sufficient productivity to keep the system going before final collapse/revolution (this cycle has repeated itself countless times in the last 300 years since socialism became the primary organization of people as nations)).
This got started at least as far back as the “original Q disclosure”.
Men are from mars and women from Venus, and the rise of AI sexbots or relationshipbots is going to further fan the flames of the war of the sexes. Marriage rates will likely never go up again in human history.
Get ready. This is the era of NEETs and Incels.
I believe it's because social media amplify extremes.
They just are often isolated and rarely do social activities outside of video game.
This “war” is more of a disengagement and ennui where nobody participates except for discourse.
Many types types of "third spaces" and in person establishments are on the decline and its been this way for 20+ years.
I bet that being a male doctor still pays more than being a female one because employers are not forced to risk-balance men and women by giving both the exact same parenthood related benefits, even if men could be working around the birth period while women clearly shouldn't.
Call it an overshoot past intended targets, sure, but I'm having difficulty accepting the alarmist tone.
I think it is because girls mature emotionally a lot sooner than boys. Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college. I wouldn’t be surprised if mentally they were years apart in highschool.
Now today we have a society that is no longer so biased in terms of opportunities along gender lines. And what do you know, girls are generally eating boys lunch here. They are outnumbering them in college. They have higher GPAs. They are starting to outnumber them in post grad programs. And eventually in the workforce this will happen as well, as this cohort gets jobs and supersedes older male dominated cohorts from before the silent cultural revolution over the last 30 years.
Eventually we should see this effect find an equilibrium where the number of women in high impact jobs vs men reflects the underlying intelligence bias women have over men.
I've read excerpts "Of Boys and Men" that indicate academic changes to assist girls may have harmed boys.
For example, in schooling, it was shown that girls do better on homework while boys would do better on testing. So, teachers realizing this, would increase the homework mix into final grade which helps girls but harmed boys.
Getting rid of recess or PE earlier may have had an impact as well.
Something to note, these changes were not made deliberately to hurt men, it's just accidental on part of educators trying to fix what was clearly a flaw system.
> Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college.
Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)
Well that is the entire point of my thesis really. This is no fault of the boys character but just a realization of what is going on biologically that generally boys like cackling with the other tribsemen out on the hunt perhaps. Of course not every boy has that behavioral phenotype of being a sort of simple slackjawed chummy individual, but it is certainly present. Plenty of examples of such people both in terms of public people and probably people you personally know that fit this description to a tee, maybe without ever growing out of it truly. And of course not all women are perfectly smart. But I think in terms of the raw numbers of the sort of people who can make use of the vines of society and best swing to their own benefit, assuming they aren't encountering total bigotry hobbling them along the way, those people are more likely to be women. And indeed, as we see the old bigots age out and be replaced with more sensible generations in charge of hiring, we see more women in the workforce often outnumbering men these days in many knowledge work domains.
I'd like to suggest that the difference was that girls were way better at school than the boys.
That is, school is an environment built such that the skills required to succeed are more likely to be found in a girl than a boy.
Schools aren't designed to give girls an advantage. They're designed to make productive workers and members of society. Boys may have more asocial, even antisocial, tendencies on average. That still doesn't mean the system is stacked against them. It just means they have to learn to work within it, not burn it down and rebuild it to oppress the 'other'.
Let's say that is correct. Wouldn't the observed failure of school to make boys productive workers and members of society then indicate that it should be changed to meet its goal?
Really no guys in your class became programmers or engineers? Its really common for guys to go into those fields, on average its a few per class depending on country.
Or do you mean success as in they have started families? Women do that much earlier, but that has nothing to do with competence.