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Comment by dave_wright | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed that my male colleagues are, generally speaking, outpaced by my female colleagues. The latter tend to have more drive to succeed, higher social intelligence, and are more competent.

I'm not sure why this is, but I expect it's because women and girls are now being given equality of opportunity to a greater extent than ever before, and it turns out they're just better at most things in our modern society.

So I'm not convinced that "male inequality" is the best term to describe this state of affairs. When women having more equal opportunities leads to worse outcomes for some men, is that really inequality for the men? Or are we just seeing natural differences play out.

Maybe the future for most men is work where brute force and strength is required, as that's the only edge they really have on women, comparing group to group.

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> my male colleagues are, generally speaking, outpaced by my female colleagues.

I've worked in academia, mostly the humanities, since the 1980s, and have observed a clear difference in how much effort women put into social networking and how this affects career progress. On the negative side, this can lead to cliquishness. I even once had a gay colleague who complained bitterly that his sub-field was dominated by lesbians who resisted male inclusion.

It seems to be a frequent observation, such that it may now be uncontroversial, that women generally approach things with a broader contextual awareness while men are in general more narrowly task-oriented. The implication is that we should expect women to generally lead in social advancement while men will tend to have a lead in technical prowess.

An illustration that has given me much cause for introspection, as a teacher and researcher, is my working library. I have about 200 books on a shelf near my desk, that I thought were of such quality that I wanted my own copy always at hand. On that shelf, there is just one book by a woman. I have often considered how it could be that there are so many women in my working life but so few on my shelf.

> I've noticed that my male colleagues are, generally speaking, outpaced by my female colleagues. The latter tend to have more drive to succeed, higher social intelligence, and are more competent.

To be a better person I have always had to be surrounded by better people. When those people have been women, my opportunities for improvement are much broader and more comprehensive.

To say that women have made me better is insufficient. I'd offer that women have been critical to making me a more worthwhile human being.

> So I'm not convinced that "male inequality" is the best term to describe this state of affairs.

I think "male immaturity" is more apt.

> So I'm not convinced that "male inequality" is the best term to describe this state of affairs. When women having more equal opportunities leads to worse outcomes for some men, is that really inequality for the men? Or are we just seeing natural differences play out.

We humans have a tendency to view pendulum swings with a skewed perspective, one that overblows the near and recent while obscuring and distorting the more distant. What we don't see, we may fill in with what we imagine or we may just fail to consider it. We also tend to forget what pendulums can do, given some time, patience and a bit good faith nudging that honors the original intent.

Continuing from my above post, below is a longish case in point about a ~related pendulum swing.

I was my wife's caregiver for a quarter century, primarily for mental health issues. During some periods of vulnerability she would disappear and odds were high she'd be in risky environments.

Getting cooperation with police (in whatever area I suspected she'd gotten to) during these periods was often difficult. The reason is that men that invented or leveraged mental health issues as a means to gaslight their wives/SO.

This was a thing that police ran into with some regularity. Conversely, men who had been a longterm and experienced caregiver to a spouse with mental health challenges was so rare, I might be their only example.

Me and these manipulative men present pretty much the same way - and police had necessarily been trained on the latter. There hadn't been enough of me to put me on the radar (and still aren't, afaict.)

The result is that police were generally unwilling to work with me and she stayed vulnerable a lot longer than she would have otherwise. The pendulum had swung to a place that made one woman less safe than it once would have.

The solution here isn't forcing the pendulum back to a place where police could be manipulated into helping men gaslight the women in their lives. The natural pendulum swing would be one where there's be a process where I could present myself to police as an authentic and trustworthy caregiver.

But that isn't a just-do-it-and-be-done solution. The reality that necessitated that police learn how to recognize and handle gaslighting men introduced a layer of complexity. Recognizing and working with me would be yet another layer of complexity - an even more complex one by nature of where it landed (atop what gaslighters created).

What actually (if indirectly) left my wife more vulnerable here wasn't police who failed to assess me. It was a culture where men learned how to gaslight their wives and could operate that way with some success.

The most useful and lasting solution should be one that addresses the creation men who harmfully manipulate others in gainful way.

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