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Fucking hell, it's clearly over for men in medicine. Somewhere in the ballpark of 80-90% of my new juniors and peers are women. I've observed the same thing in specialties that aren't psych, which was even, before becoming one of the first to end up lopsided.
And keep in mind this is a lagging marker. If I see someone who isn't a blonde girl as a med student, I need to rub my eyes. This is, to the best of my knowledge, true everywhere, and I lived through the immediate aftermath of the flip while a med student in India, a lifetime ago. Fewer blondes, of course.
I'm not complaining too hard, it suits me, to a degree. I get along with them, I'm half woman on my mother's side. And I'm sure @faceh and @Sloot will nod approvingly of what being a slightly older and reasonably successful man entails in that environment. I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism. It helps that I see most of them as responsible professionals, and they are as informed as can be desired about what their profession implies for their fertility goals. It's such a shame that British medical training seems tailor-made by Satan to ensure we can't reproduce.
I offered to show anyone new the secrets of our staff kitchen - telling them that drinking more than my fair share of cheap NHS instant coffee and semi-skimmed milk was just about the one perk of the job. I thought it would be just the odd person or two interested. Lo and behold, I had a train of six women behind me, in single file, heading down the ward. It felt as ridiculous as it looked, but at least they can fill whatever has replaced Stanley cups in peace.
I love women. Definitely in the abstract, and plenty of individual ones as well.
My boss is a woman, the majority of the attorneys and staff in the firm are women.
My best paralegal is a dude, it does so happen.
But I'm just too tuned in as to the sort of trends you're observing and what they mean to feel completely comfortable about where this is going.
Similar with law school.
And there's been an absolute rash of female judges behaving quite badly and unbefitting of their role in the Judicial system. Its annoyingly hard to try and maintain faith in said system in light of this. Justices Barrett and Kagan testifying in congress that they feel unsafe due to the heat brought towards them and their families for doing their job doesn't help.
Oh, and I am currently running a case where my client is a neurotic woman, the opposing party is a neurotic woman, who was previously represented by a neurotic woman, and is currently represented by a neurotic woman who has a neurotic woman legal assistant. I am dragging this case forward by my fingernails and billing appropriately, but its absolutely ridiculous that this whole thing could have been resolve six months ago if the people involved were willing to sit in a room together and hash it out. But that appears to be a literal impossibility due to the personalities involved.
I keep myself sane by working on my classic muscle car and driving it on the weekends to restore my testosterone reserves.
Organisational culture across all Western institutions is changing to be more feminized and I think you can see its effects if you look for it. More consensus 'popular' decision making. More misdirected empathy. More neuroticism. Less appetite for risk.
What's worse is the deliberate unstated discrimination against boys and men in meeting their psychological needs in education (think of who teaches our boys and how), and also in employment opportunities. I think future generations will look back on the blatant sexism with disgust.
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My sibling was fairly neurotic and I believe it’s one of the major reasons we never got along, so I know the feeling; and they inherited that from our mother. When they would go on one of their insane and anger filled tirades or crazes, the only way to get ahold of the situation was to absolutely scream at them because they would endlessly beat a dead horse, kick you while you were down and constantly rag on your ass. I always had a much more stoic and martial attitude that I inherited from my father, which naturally made our personalities almost completely incompatible with each other. The most extreme arguments we ever had always reminded me of this scene in Rush Hour; which is exactly what I wanted from them. Stand still, quit moving, sit down and shut the fuck up, or I will twist the knife as hard as I can until I make you stop it. They had no capability to control and moderate themselves and just Did. Not. Know. When. To. Stop.
In your case though, I’d imagine this is somewhat more common. Aren’t most of the people that need legal assistance precisely those kinds of people that possess problems with others and the law?
I'm fairly neurotic at a baseline. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years progressively addressing both the symptoms and the root causes. I also inherited it from my mother. My dad is stoic in the extreme. I'm currently playing a mix of hawaiian slack-key guitar music, some classic exotica, and Spanish New Age Flamenco music (Govi is AWESOME) because its soothing without making me sleepy.
I sympathize with the neurotics, but if they're not at least trying to be better and curb their worst tendencies... I want them far away from me. This includes some of my family members.
YES.
And more to the point, those are the cases that by definition tend to drag the longest. So they're the 'stickiest' clients. Which means even if it starts out where only 10% of my caseload is those types, eventually, if I don't filter, those cases become 50% or more simply because they fill all my time and crowd out new clients and I slowly close out matters for the more reasonable clients.
I've adjusted my intake process to account for this and I quote a significantly higher retainer if I suspect you'll be that type of client.
Have you watched any of YouTube's police bodycam channels? I find it amazing how people will needlessly escalate mild situations with police and ruin their lives in the process. Absolute madness some of things that they do.
That said, I also watch civil libertartion lawyer channels which show (
chinese robbers) cops going crazy on innocent law abiding citizens, so I guess it balances out.More options
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Damn. Are you sure we aren’t related and have the same parents? Whatever I have I above the neck I definitely inherited from my father, but even so, nowhere near the frequency he had it; as I couldn’t keep up with him. He had them in the extreme, extreme. My more natural joyful aloofness and temperament I took more from my mother, but I did have very hard boundaries in certain places that I took from my father.
I’m also above average in neuroticism but I never had it to any crippling degree. It’s not a ‘bad’ thing intrinsically like people think, and it also poses problems that are known in the scholarly literature of the five factor model; namely that all the negative emotions load together on a single factor. I tend to remember negative experiences more strongly than positive ones, but it leads to being introspective and provokes one to learn from their encounters. Letting those emotions consume you is always a bad thing, but if I think of neuroticism I think again of a Nietzschean aphorism:
“One needs a little chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”
My mother and father were very different people with very different backgrounds. My sibling and I naturally followed their steps in being equally dissimilar, though the associated dysfunction between us was still strongly sibling in nature, despite its intensity. Not in a rivalry sense; we just objectively did not like each other. We always got along more the less we had to interact and the greater the distance was between us. They also had problems throughout though. They were very bullying (and I mean that in the direct and literal sense) and a pathological liar among other issues they dealt with. Perhaps it’s a good sign that I don’t get along with people like that. I don’t usually talk about my sibling out of respect for them. If I draw from my own experiences I don’t have a lot of positive things to say. Better to preserve their memory by not speaking on it.
Is the economics of your job more volume based or particularly case based depending on if you land some big fish/problematic client? I can’t imagine getting paid is all that fun either, if these clients are so erratically beset with issues; I’m sure it can be like pulling teeth, because they never want to pay you your fee or can’t get it together. Makes me have more sympathy and pity for public defenders. Lol.
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I work in a very different field but consistently find that those of my clients which are least profitable are also by far the most troublesome.
Tax accountant here. Also true in this industry. The ones that are least likely to be able to pay our fee are also the ones that are least likely to be able to pay for a proper bookkeeper to get their accounts in order, and also can't pay their tax debts. Their information all comes in late because they're disorganised and time-poor and they tend to have far less leeway with the tax office to ask for an extension. You end up spending a significant amount of time fixing their errors, and negotiating with the tax office on their behalf trying to make sure that they don't bring the Legal Hammer down.
Working with these clients is like fighting a losing battle. Soul-destroying experience, business failure just compounds and compounds and compounds to the point that keeping anything afloat becomes a herculean task.
Its always a bit funny when I have a consult with a client with a lot of unsecured debt, and they've been dodging collections for years, and I advise them they can either figure out a way to pay the debt (maybe get the amount owed reduced), wait decades for it to become noncollectable, or declare bankruptcy. There are minor asset protection strategies but the debt will not just disappear if you hide your property.
Then they want me to take on a case for them and be like "can I pay you later? Maybe on installments?"
Oh honey. You just spent a half hour explaining to me that you can't be trusted with credit.
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Yes, although in my particular specialty, getting paid is usually not that big a problem.
There's definitely a mismatch between how their their demands are and how easy they are to work with. For me, the big concern is that they're slightly more likely to file a professional complaint than average.
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I don't think you're being unreasonable. I just think I still like women more. Both in theory and practice. Case in point, I wouldn't particularly feel inclined to write on gender-war adjacent topics, even if I appreciate the ones you do put out.
They tend to be softer, kinder, and more empathetic than the average man. Less likely to be an emotional brick than us, but not me I suppose. It makes me a good psychiatrist, even if I'm perfectly masculine in other respects. They are both more interested in, and better at, the emotional and daily logistics. I play to my strengths, and they cover my weaknesses, and I appreciate that greatly.
Somebody has to, and no-one else will.
Well, more specifically, few people will do one focused directly on the facts and not solely to grift on gender wars discourse.
Its not something I enjoy, but I get a very deranged sense of gratification when people challenge me on it and then completely fail to bolster their arguments.
Ultimately it's not the healthiest outlet, so I try to actively spend time around the women I enjoy the company of to counterbalance it.
Agreed! Nothing drops my blood pressure like being around a smiling, pleasant woman. Even irrespective of the desire for kids and the financial benefits, having a reliable companion to come home to who makes your day instantly brighter is a benefit I would pay thousands of dollars a year for.
Its a strong barbell distribution. Tons of women whose mere presence will spike your cortisol, and many who will instantly relieve even the worst stress, and not too many any between.
I do that, and I used to engage in this kind of wrongthinking way more in a very rigorous source-driven manner, but I've been saying the same things so many times and pointing to the same ever-growing corpus of information (that everyone conveniently ignores) so much that I ended up feeling like writing on gender wars discourse was a waste of my time and an act of egregious self-mutilation worse than actual self-harm. Sense of gratification completely went to shit after the 6th straight year of doing it.
Keep fighting the good fight though, indeed somebody has to do it.
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