It is almost never mentioned but most men won't respect other men who are stay at home parent. So there is also an expectation on the man to be the bread winner.
Also many women tend not to want men who earn less then them:
>> It is almost never mentioned but most men won't respect other men who are stay at home parent. So there is also an expectation on the man to be the bread winner.
That too, is sexism, of course. Sexism also harms men.
I don't agree it is sexism. It is the simple fact that our species is sexually dimorphic. This guarantees that there will be asymmetry between the genders regardless of the social engineering that is attempted.
There is about 4 billion years of evolution and the thinking that it can be socially engineered away is a folly.
> Sexism also harms men.
Yes it does. But this is not one of those circumstances. However that is a completely different conversation.
How is it not one of those circumstances? Men find it extremely difficult to make a career as a nursery teacher, for example, because nursery schools and parents of young children don't trust men as a nurturing caregiver. It's a clear cut example of how a sexist view of men - biologically inspired or otherwise - is harmful to men.
That isn't sexism. There is a far higher likelihood that a sex offender is a man rather than a woman. While unfair it isn't unfounded fear and parents are naturally protective of their children.
That doesn't justify that sort of systematic pressure. An African American is much more likely to be a [edit: convicted] murderer than a white American, but that doesn't make it ok to cross the road whenever you see one.
> That doesn't justify that sort of systematic pressure.
If I were a parent I would be trying to mitigate the risk to my child. As I previously stated it is unfair but not unfounded.
It cannot be sexism if it is based in fact.
> An African American is much more likely to be a murderer than a white American, but that doesn't make it ok to cross the road whenever you see one.
* I don't live in the US, I am from the UK. The term African American doesn't really mean much here.
* If there was a young guy dressed in sports gear and appeared to be somewhat of a lout, no matter what the colour of his skin I would cross the road.
It is unfair. Sure. But when I was a younger man (I am almost 40 now), I used to be followed about and stopped by police and security because I was simple 1) Male 2) Under 25. People are simply mitigating the amount of risk to themselves, business and family.
The statistic for how likely a sex offender is to be male strikes me as unjustified here in three ways.
Firstly, I doubt many parents actually do do their research on this and use such a statistic to inform their decision. More likely it will be based on gut feeling.
Secondly, the probabilities are the wrong way round. More relevant how likely a given man is to be a sex offender, vs the likelihood for a given woman. If both probabilities are very tiny then despite their relative magnitudes there are other things to worry about.
Thirdly, "sex offender" is an extremely broad term and the great majority of those offenses would not have involved nursery age children.
Oh, give me a break please. You explicitly brought up young, shadily-dressed men on the street as a subpoint in the context of talking about black people.
No you are accusing me of racism when I made no comment about race what-so-ever. This "well you are secretly talking about black men" is you inserting your own prejudices and assumptions into something I've never said.
This maybe be an American thing. I am not from the US, I've never been to the US so I don't know. There are plenty of groups of yobs in the UK in poorer areas. Outside of London and the big cities these tend to be white. In my own home town (which is 99% white) there are 4 or 5 problem areas where you don't walk through at night because you get surrounded by youths. It happened to me at least once or twice when I was in my 20s and I only got left alone because one of the guys knew my brother.
I get so bored of this "well you secretly meant something else because I want to label you a bad person".
> Of the 13,455 cases from last year in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims – or 52.3 percent – were black. That compares with 5,854 cases – or 43.5 percent – in which the victim was white, an increase of about 8 percent from last year.
> It's a disparity that becomes more pronounced in the context of population, as 2015 Census estimates suggest that whites account for 77.1 percent of the overall U.S. population of roughly 321 million, while blacks comprise 13.3 percent.
It isn't my assertion. The crime statistics in both the UK and the USA back this up. It is something like 96% of all prosecutions of sexual assault are men.
EDIT: In fact it is higher at least in the UK
> In 2011, males accounted for the vast majority of prosecutions for sexual offences
(98.2 per cent).
Bad take! There's no distinction between "biology" and "social engineering". Our biology underpins us having these discussions. Our biology underpins our society. Our biology underpins our thinking that things can be better. Our biology encourages us to improve our own quality of life and that of others in ever larger social groups. Everything we do is true to our biology.
Woman give birth, men cannot breastfeed. That are indeed biology. Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options.
But yes, many kinds of social arrangements come up naturally and woman taking care of house and kids seems to be one of them. Another one is "the powerful rule over the weak"... something we nowadays generally think should be kept in check to the benefit of society and thus spend effort doing so. But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad?
> Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options.
Define "Better". Why should we be trying to change it? Why should we be meddling with other people's lives? People aren't being harmed here.
> But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad?
Both men and women at least in the western world enjoy the same rights and discrimination by gender is not only frowned upon but can be brought before a court. I seems to me that they are already kept in check.
Well, the author is saying that she is considering giving up her career in reearch which she very much wants to pursue to have children because she can't find a way to reconcile the two.
That is clearly harmful and if it is affecting women at a large scale as the author suggests then it is definitely something that should be corrected.
> Well, the author is saying that she is considering giving up her career in reearch which she very much wants to pursue to have children because she can't find a way to reconcile the two.
I disagree. Unfortunately you have to make decisions in life on what you want to prioritise. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Also I don't consider having to make a choice harmful. Being harmed mean things like being assaulted, having your house robbed, being abused by your spouse. What it does not mean is coming to realisation that you may have to make a choice between family and career.
You know what does allow you to have both, wealth.
Not at all. I should have expected such a reply though tbh.
Many men work long hours and miss out on their family time. Also men typically work more dangerous jobs and are more likely to die on the job. They are also more less likely to win custody in separation. Men are more likely to commit suicide. Nobody has it easy and your sort of glib remark that ignores all the issues men currently face isn't helpful.
> I seems to me that they are already kept in check.
To a degree, yes. But are you really trying to pretend it's already perfect?
Though you seem to not believe in systemic injustice, so I doubt we will be able to find a shared consensus.
Custody is a more widely known example were us men fight an uphill battle. Obviously not everyone is unsatisfied with societies default roles, but I'd certainly consider this a harm, if I ever end up in such a situation.
Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
> To a degree, yes. But are you really trying to pretend it's already perfect?
Perfect is the enemy of Good.
> Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Everyone is trying to pin an opinion to me here because I am just questioning the underlying assumptions. I don't really have one other than "You can't have it all" unless you are extremely wealthy or extremely gifted.
> But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Neither do I. However there will never be a utopia. I find it actually pretty immature to think that you can make everything perfect, there are trade offs to everything.
Gender norms are partly genetic. Historically women were either breastfeeding or late-stage pregnant their entire adult lives and so to survive they needed men to work, so that is what our gender norms reflect. For example, men who doesn't take care of their women are still seen as scum. Not because there is any need for that any longer, but because our genes tells us that such men are trash and should be shunned. So you wont find any society which doesn't pressure men to become a provider and take care of women.
Some norms are generic indeed like breastfeeding, some are not like "being seen as scum". Do not undervalue the power of cultural norms, they shape us social apes as importantly as genes.
Indeed, it's been said (by paleontologists and ethnologists alike) that for humans (a social ape with complex language) cultural evolution have been more influencial than generic evolution.
So bad we learn so much about genetics at school and comparatively so little about sociology and/or primatology.
You're suggesting we should arrange society a specific way because of some connection to "biology". I am saying that the arrangements you seem to be for are no more rooted in biology than the arrangements you seem to be against.
You called the expectation of men to be breadwinners a natural consequence of sexual dimorphism, and said it was folly to "engineer" it away. That is a statement about how you think society should be arranged and why.
Also, if you believe _all_ arrangements of society will eventually fall, then wouldn't that make any arrangement acceptable to you? Including the one you were dismissing?
> You called the expectation of men to be breadwinners a natural consequence of sexual dimorphism, and said it was folly to "engineer" it away. That is a statement about how you think society should be arranged and why.
No it isn't. It is a statement of what I believe to be the truth. All the evidence and arguments around the topic I have seen and heard seem to lead in that direction. If you disagree with that conclusion that is fine.
However it doesn't mean that I believe that things should arranged in such a manner.
> Also, if you believe _all_ arrangements of society will eventually fall, then wouldn't that make any arrangement acceptable to you? Including the one you were dismissing?
I don't know. I wasn't saying anything about that. I was simply disagree that it is sexism. I don't buy into this the notion of "unconscious sexism".
The competitive aspect? Males in plenty of species compete for status and low status males are getting chased away from the pack, so evidently genes are expressive enough to encode gender norms.
You probably believe that your views about genders is coming from observations of "males in plenty of species", but have you considered that maybe your views about "plenty of species" could come from your views on genders?
How is competition between males a consequence of sexual dimorphism?
Note that males in species with low sexual dimorphism compete for mates as fiercely as males in species with high sexual dimorphism.
Also note that the human species has very low sexual dimorphism relative to other species. E.g. our females are not many times the size of males, as they are in Black Widow spiders, our males don't have different colours of body coverage, like many species of birds do, etc etc. And of course many humans can easily pass for the other sex by changing their hair-style and clothing as evidenced by numerous cases in history where females passed as males by cutting their hair short and wearing pantaloons etc.
It isn't seen as "real" work by other men. Men have been the bread winners for almost all of human history and thus other men don't think they are doing their bit.
Also many women tend not to want men who earn less then them:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/rich-women-like-rich-men-a...