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I dunno, I think men tend to have it easier than women. Mostly due to physical strength and social dynamics. I’d pick male social drama any day, and the less said about harassment the better.
Maybe discrimination is most socially acceptable against white and Asian men. I don’t feel like that actually has much impact on how much discrimination really happens. I’m not really competing against women for my job or for marriage.
It's not really about what we personally think. Statistically it's very clear that being a woman is better than being a man in the west. Especially when controlling for intelligence.
Really depends on what you mean by "better". Women get preferential treatment in hiring but still manage to undernegotiate their salaries and also have to face the undesirable decision of having kids or making money.
In a middle class western environment i'd way rather be a guy, but maybe thats just my solipsistic mind worms poking out of my eye holes again.
Despite undernegotiating their salaries, in an apples to apples comparison women make more than men on top of everything else in multiple professions. Moreover, men don't get to decide to have kids and have money. If you have children, as a man, you are either married, and will be paying for everything, or you are going to be paying alimony.
Again, this isn't about what we personally think. In a statistical comparison women have it better than men in the west. Inserting our personal biases, wills and wants into the equation is pointless obfuscation.
Theres no way to apples to apples compare being a man biologically and all the natural advantages we have versus the sociological advantages women have, unless i'm missing something.
The term 'apples to apples' here refers to job market comparisons. To reiterate: In multiple white collar professions women make more money than similarly experienced and educated men. The education and experience is the apple being compared. If being a woman was worse you would not see this.
ok, so because in some professions women get payed more, its "better" to be a woman overall than a man? i disagree and unless we nail down a definition of "better" that doesn't include physical fitness or pregnancy i don't see why an advantage in such a slim facet of life makes you think differently than i do.
No man. Maybe you have lost the thread of the conversation because it's been a day or two but the point being made was that statistically it was better to be a woman. There was no ambiguity in my replies to you about what 'better' meant.
I then made a point specifically addressing what you are doing now and have been doing, where you say that you feel that being a man is better without any qualifiers or definitions. The only argument here subsisting on a lack of definitions is yours.
Again, this isn't about what we personally think. In a statistical comparison women have it better than men in the west. Inserting our personal biases, wills and wants into the equation is pointless obfuscation.
ok so you are saying that men being more physically fit than women is just a feeling that i have. got it.
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Of course it bothers me. I’d rather not have any discrimination at all, and I certainly don’t want more of it against any population. (This does not preclude wanting to stigmatize certain behaviors.)
No, I’m suggesting that the level of discrimination faced by a white or Asian man is lower than for most other groups, particularly women—even though the social acceptability of discriminating against the former is much higher. There are obviously some jobs (childcare, nursing) where a woman gets a discriminatory advantage. There are, likewise, situations where an Asian man’s chances are relatively penalized, such as college admissions. How common are these scenarios? How much damage do they do?
I went to a rather white school alongside a bunch of pasty Midwesterners. Now I work a tech job with a bunch of white men. My girlfriend is not scoring other men by race, looking for one who’s otherwise equivalent. When have I been passed over for “losing” the genetic lottery? I’m not saying it can’t happen; on margin, encouraging more of it is a bad thing! But I’ve got it pretty good, and I suspect that all else equal, white men of comparable intelligence and background are likely to say the same.
It is possible that, as a population, the total harm caused to white men by this discrimination outweighs that for other groups. Given that I think the acceptability/amount link is tenuous, getting upset about rage-bait articles doesn’t seem very efficient. If it is, though...new EA cause area?
Oh, there are plenty of jobs where women get a discriminatory advantage, and not necessarily always in stereotypically female fields either. STEM for example is a good case study of a field which is thought to be discriminatory against women, but actually favours them.
This paper by Williams and Ceci finds that faculty members in STEM, when evaluating hypothetical applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology, "preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
This review in Psychology Today considering the evidence regarding gender bias in science shows that studies showing egalitarian attitudes or bias against male scientists are more common than those showing bias against female scientists. There were 4 papers showing bias favouring men, whereas there were 8 showing no gender bias and 6 showing bias favouring women.
The Williams and Ceci paper included in the review reported 5 studies, however, so if we shift our focus to number of studies instead of papers the empirical data shows that there were 4 studies showing bias favouring men, 8 showing no gender bias and 10 showing bias favouring women. On the whole, the evidence as presented in this review seems to lean towards "there is bias in favour of women in STEM".
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201906/are-scientists-biased-against-women-scientists-part-ii
The author goes on to state that "there was far more evidence of egalitarian or pro-female bias than there is of pro-male bias". He also notes that studies showing peer-reviewed science is unbiased or favours women tend to have larger sample sizes than those which show biases favouring men, but are cited much less (largely due to an ideological bias in academia in favour of the "discrimination against women" hypothesis).
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201906/scientific-bias-in-favor-studies-finding-gender-bias
There's also research with a more generalised scope, and a lot of that data does not support the idea that discrimination in the workplace is primarily a women's issue (rather, the findings often indicate the very opposite). For example:
"By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere."
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759?login=false
The notion that women are "disadvantaged more" is very questionable at best.
Relying on personal perception (which seems to be the main source that you and many other people here are drawing from) is a particularly unconvincing argument, since people have biases. White men in particular have been exposed to a narrative from a very young age that they do not face issues because of their race or sex, in fact they are told they are privileged because of it, whereas women and PoC get it hammered into their head that the society they live in is a white cisheteropatriarchal one that oppresses them. It's not hard to see how this is going to influence perceptions, and how this is going to lead to women and PoC interpreting more events as discriminatory against them than white men since it takes far more for white men to jump to the conclusion that they're being discriminated against because of their immutable characteristics. The narrative that endlessly circulates in society gears white men to perceive evidence of their privilege, not their disadvantage.
Furthermore, in the case of male/female dynamics there are also other factors that influence things. For example women score higher on neuroticism than men which obviously predisposes them to perceive more things as malicious than men do. Women can capitalise on claims of vulnerability in ways men simply can't due to our protectiveness towards women, and thus benefit from perceiving danger and expressing it to others in order to elicit nurturance and help (the opposite is true for men: Men who complain and present themselves as vulnerable and put-upon run the risk of inviting ire). This is obviously going to impact which sex is more likely to perceive slight and complain about that slight.
EDIT: clarity
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