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Notes -
Life offers a Better "Minimum Deal" to Women than to Men - Change my Mind?
Men are vastly more likely to be victims of the worst kind of violent crime: murder. In the US, 82% of total homicide victims are male, 18% are female. Women probably endure more sexual violence, but men definitely endure more violence overall given the 4:1 murder ratio.
Men do the overwhelming majority of the nasty, dangerous work, such as roofing in the summer, oil rig operation, management of sewers, garbage collection, etc.
Men are much more likely to be homeless (70%:30%) or imprisoned (93%:7%). I think this speaks to the greater competitiveness of the male world: If a man fails in life, he's judged a complete fuckup, and ends up a homeless low-status loser. If a woman fails, she can almost always just get married.
Men are much more likely to kill themselves (4:1). Although women attempt suicide more than men, men use dramatically more lethal means (hanging, gunshots, jumping). Because I'm not so sexist as to claim that women are too stupid to know how to actually succeed in killing themselves, I conclude that the difference in suicide methods reflects a difference in willingness to die. (And in any case, even when controlling for method, men manage to kill themselves more effectively than women.)
Men spend much more time on the job than women (41weekly hrs:36.3hrs/week). (This remains true well after the children leave the nest. And no, I'm not persuaded that childcare is harder than conventional employment.)
The law heavily favors women in child custody and child support disputes, and the institution of alimony transfers far more male wealth to women than female wealth to men.
Men are much more likely to die in combat; in fact, during serious military conflicts, they face military slavery (“the draft”). (In Iraq, women were 2.9% of all American combat deaths, men the other 97.1%; in WWII, of the 292,000 members of the US military who were killed by enemy fire, only sixteen were female. Women made up only 0.1 percent of the military's 405,000 war-related deaths.)
Our culture automatically cares more about female suffering and wellbeing than male suffering: "The ship is sinking! Save the women and children first!" Male job candidates are significantly more penalized for crying than women; subjects express that it appears that a woman in distress is taken more seriously than a man in distress.
The dating market is more competitive for men than for women; women are far more selective than men about sex partners. Imagine an attractive person of the opposite sex walking up to you on a college campus and saying, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I fnd you very attractive. Would you have sex with me?” How would you respond? If you are like 100 percent of the women in one study, you would give an emphatic no. You might be ofended, insulted, or just plain puzzled by the request. But if you are like the men in that study, the odds are good that you would say yes— as did 75 percent of those men (Clarke & Hatfeld, 1989). As a man, you would most likely be flattered by the request.
Women are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "sex objects" by men. That said, men are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "success objects" by women.
Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of enrollment in universities and colleges and men just over 40 percent.
The "minimum deal" of life for men is worse than for women. The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first. Yes, men make more money and enjoy greater prestige because men are overrepresented at both the top and the bottom levels of society. But the degree to which being at the bottom of society hurts you is greater than the degree to which being at the top helps you. That is, it's so much more bad to be at the bottom than it is good to be at the top. Just ask yourself: would you rather experience the greatest amount of pleasure possible for 20 seconds, followed by the greatest amount of suffering possible for 20 seconds? Our response tells us that there is not a 1:1 ratio of pleasure to suffering. How about 30 seconds of the greatest possible amount of pleasure for 20 seconds of the worst possible amount of pain? 40:20? 50:20? I think this is why men kill themselves more.
According to Christian legend, God told Adam and Eve before their ouster from the garden of eden: "man shall live by the sweat of his brow, and woman shall suffer the pain of childbirth." Modern technology has greatly minimized the pain of childbirth, but has it equally lightened the burden on men's shoulders?
I won't deny that men do much less childcare and housework than women, and non-custodial fathers provide little financial or parental support for their children. Also, men are the perpetrators, and women are the victims, of the vast majority of sexual violence. (Although I'm not sure what the stats at prisons do to this balance; apparently rape in male prisons is a huge epidemic and is vastly greater than rape in female prisons. Considering the ridiculously disproportionate number of men in prisons, it's possible that this balances out.)
Anticipated objection: "But men are often the primary perpetrators of the issues facing men." This is irrelevant to the post title, but in any case, I think this is like saying "it's not bad that humans are victims of murder because, after all, all of the perpetrators of murder are also humans." The identity group to which the perpetrators belong is irrelevant to whether an individual was treated unjustly if the perps and victims are different individuals. This simple-minded identity-politics is like saying "someone with red hair beat me up when I was 12. Therefore, it's okay for me to beat someone up today, so long as they also have red hair (regardless of whether they are the same person)."
For some reason copy/pasting my post over to this website deleted all of the hyperlinks. It would be a big time waster to fix that so I'm just going to suffer the blow to credibility that may or may not cause. (For what it's worth, a simple google search should give you all of the same ratios above.) I originally drafted this for CMV on reddit, but the mods took it down.
The minimum deal for both sexes is a congenital illness that kills you in infancy. I think we need to clarify what the minimum deal is for, say, a non-disabled, psychologically normal, non-hideous person who grew up in at least the lower middle class. I don't think this is an unfair winsorizing of the outliers since drawing a conclusion about the normal scope of human outcomes by resting your case on outliers is not good practice.
If you restrict your sample this way and think about it, you'll find that men have far more failure modes and far more agency than women. If you define life success very generally as career you enjoy + spouse you love + kids + financial security + friends (and therefore requiring you to have avoided the vice pits of life on your way through it), I'd say 50% of men fail to thrive. For women, maybe 40%? Still, a man has more agency to own his life and this alone makes the "deal" of being a man better than being a woman on balance. I think this is true in many facets of life. Dating and marriage for instance is pretty bad for the broad middle of women given the dearth of quality men. I do acknowledge that the broad expectations and behaviours of young women incentivize men to be low quality, but that doesn't help a normal woman finding a husband. Leave that aside though, lets just look at work:
Broad swathes of the job market are largely closed to women. Now I don't mean literally closed. What I mean is for the 80% of women who will one day become mothers, many jobs are simply impossible to juggle with that: Virtually every job worked outdoors, finance and law, construction, academia, etc. Not to mention that some of these professions make a woman less attractive a mate to a man because men don't value women for their incomes, but prize femininity and future capacity to have children and fit them into their lives.
Partly because balancing family and work is impossible for many job classes and being a stay-at-home mom means too large a blow to family incomes, women concentrate in just a handful of jobs. One in nine adult American women are either a teacher or nurse. Expand the top job titles to say 25 and that accounts for ~50% of total female employment. Women crowd into these fields partly because of innate biology, but also because these professions -- being dominated by women -- cater to women's fertility preferences. And what are these jobs like? Poorly paid drudgery for the most part. They trap you too with their small number of employers and receiving your compensation in the form of generous pensions. Again creating an incentive not to exercise agency and Keeping people in the same thing for decades. And what's more they require huge amounts of credentialling which pushes women into higher education to accumulate debt. How much of the 60/40 university sex balance is caused by the demands for lower middle class women searching for credential tickets to their job market? A lot I think. And while they are at university they naturally with look for a spouse and find they are at a significant demographic disadvantage -- there are 3 women competing for every 2 men.
All of which is to say there are big trade offs that women face that men do not.
I agree with the broader gist of this, but a few things to pick on.
I'm not sure that's true of law and academia, with some caveats.
And I think the passage below proves too much:
I thought nurses were paid quite well? They are, where I practice. Looking up American statistics, nursing pays 77k median and 82k average in the States; I would think this qualifies as pretty good.
Look at top job titles for both sexes and you’ll find that most work is poorly paid drudgery. It is true that on the male side you get jobs like finance and engineering that are male dominated and are high status/remunerated well, but this is by and large not the majority of work for either sex. I would wager at least – likely significantly more than – 50% of men work as some sort of tradesperson, construction worker, retail, transport, factory working, security, or farming. This even excludes the poorly paid white collar drudgery that you could count administration and most of “tech work” in (For what it was worth, I did check the statistics with at least one Anglosphere country.) (I suppose you could quibble with how poorly paid e.g. tradespeople are, given the meme of 100+k cushy plumber jobs etc, but my understanding is that on average they don’t outearn teachers – and they get to wreck their bodies for it!)
Conversely, looking at jobs that aren’t poorly paid drudgery, women don’t do that badly, especially given that the shift towards large-scale employment of women is only a few decades old. Younger doctors – as a complete cohort – are close to parity, women now outnumber men going to medical school, and female-dominated medical careers aren’t necessarily inferior in pay (and surgeons are predominantly male but also the life of a surgeon isn’t what most women or men want out of life); lawyers are at parity IIRC; accountants and auditors are now mostly women;…
Considering the above, I think the effect of women clustering into fewer types of jobs is less pronounced than you posit. Sex gaps still exist, of course, but sex gaps in favour of women are in as many professions as sex gaps for men now, and on the whole the female-dominant professions look only somewhat worse compared to the male-dominant ones, and that only because senior management and engineering are still male-slanted. (Like, would you rather be a psychologist/a physiotherapist or a bus driver/a butcher?)
On the other hand, I think it’s fairly well that women tend to cluster around the lower-paid strata of each industry, even if the sex gap amongst both the highly-paid and the lowly-paid isn’t quite a yawning gulf. Even if lawyers are at parity (or over parity) at this point, I’m pretty sure partners are still mostly men; and despite relative parity in the lower ranks of academia more men than women attempt to go for professorship, even if the actual tenure-track population is surprisingly close to parity at this point (I think 44-56 or something?). I think that’s probably partial evidence for
biological impulseslifestyle decisions having an impact on employment, amongside other factors such as the female workforce being much newer to the game than the male one.*edit to clarify ambiguous sentence
Nor finance. And I suspect that 'etc' is not very extensive.
Is finance at sex parity at this point? Colour me surprised.
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