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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

> "Professional women often still carry with them some of this 1960's mentality and refuse to "date down.""

Which is the crux of it. Though I wouldn't say it's fair to consider it self-inflicted.

Even if a woman decided she was comfortable with the idea of dating a less-successful/educated man quite a few years younger than herself, few social circles would accept it without friction (far fewer than see any problem with the arrangement were genders reversed) and fewer (desirable) men are themselves comfortable with it.

So, sure, every 20-year-old woman is fairly well aware of these factors and ought to plan accordingly. But even if they shake the mentality at 30, while they can improve their pool, erasing the disadvantage entirely is simply not something that's under their control.

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I think this is a very important point. I know a woman who is around 40, attractive, successful, intelligent. Her fiance is a 28 year old man. He's attractive as well, but hes obviously less intelligent than her. As far as I can tell, they make each other extremely happy. They get very strange looks when they're together, much stranger than if the genders were reversed.

It seems like this is something that will self-correct over time; it's just a lag associated with the fact that our expectations are set during childhood but play out 20 years later as adults.

One thing that would help is if TV and other mass media stopped enforcing this stereotype so much - they always have the high-powered woman married to the high-powered man, and the high-powered man may be married to either a career woman or non-career woman, but you don't see the reverse. A few shows (Parenthood comes to mind) have gone against this trend.

A little bit, but the biological clock is still an inherent imbalance for those people looking for biological children.

A man in his 30s, dating women in their 20s will find more of them amenable to reproducing right away, and it's not much of a big deal to the man, if a prospective partner wants to delay that another 5-10 years.

A woman in her 30s, dating men in their 20s will find fewer of them amenable to reproducing right away, and there are significant, potentially deal-breaking costs to the woman associated with delaying another 5-10 years.

There are alternatives (adoption, surrogates, etc) and perhaps through some social normalization they'll further close the gap. But the social/financial/identity[1] costs of such arrangements are going to remain substantial for some time.

[1] that is, a person's (potentially strong) preference for traditional, biological children, due only their own pre-conceived notions of how they'd start their family. Women have definitely been known to 'settle' for a lesser mate to avoid challenging that preconception. And that willingness to settle is a profound disadvantage.

It's not a stereotype though, it's reality.

That's like saying TV should always make software engineers men, because most of us are. Simply perpetuating the existing bias limits our worldviews.

I suppose it depends on one's views on whether that is an injustice in the first place, and then if one thinks it is the responsibility of TV producers and writers to fix it.

Should it be the role of software engineers to fix social injustice as well? Perhaps our designs should be subject to review by some committee to ensure they meet certain criteria, as would likely be the case with The television industry if you wanted to ensure compliance.

Mass media usually trails, rather than leads, on these kinds of things. There were tons of gay parents before you saw any on tv shows as recurring characters, and they still insist on the stereotype of the nerdy male engineer. Unless you think those are good things, it seems like they should work to stay at least current.

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