Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The data are clear: The boys are not all right

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 1001 posts

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#321

Post by whatshisface »

UncleMeat wrote: post #77
commandlinefan wrote: post #29

> As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline. Conversely: as young men's potential future employability rises, their romantic prospects also decline. That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.

Is this actually true? This feels a bit like a post-facto generalization from specific situations. "I was a nerd and didn't go on dates. Being a nerd got me into software and now I make a lot of money. Therefore people who are on the path to high earning are not getting dates." My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer domi…

The meme is not about income or physical fitness, it's about psychological aggressiveness. Highly un-aggressive men are considered emotionally unattractive and don't get dates because, for one thing, they're afraid to ask, but they're nice and dependable and will take care of you forever. Highly aggressive men come across as dynamic and interesting, and turn out to have five mistresses in three states and a warrant out for their arrest in two of them.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#322

Post by Spooky23 »

tokamak-teapot wrote: post #99
Spooky23 wrote: post #26

Of course. We treat females like they are a marginalized minority. My son’s school has a “Girls Can Code” program. All collateral features women and girls. (Boys are welcome though) I worked at a place where a C-level executive hosted company endorsed dinners at her home for female managers to mentor them for executive roles. If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wo…

Girls and women are marginalised in the area of technology. This site in particular has hosted terabytes of discussion of this problem. If you look back at some of the stories about conferences and why codes of conduct have been set up, you will see at least part of the publicly visible part of this. This is why it’s perfectly socially acceptable to set up a specific group to give women and girls a chance to learn sk…

I think the culture that allows for the sexist torment that you see in conferences, in games, etc is disgusting and cannot be tolerated.

That’s a leadership and culture failure. When a female employee or student is marginalized or harassed, that’s an issue that needs to be dealt with unequivocally and swiftly.

In the school scenario I’m familiar with, my son is in 5th grade. There isn’t a gamergate environment there. We should be exposing kids to technology and coding, period. School clubs should be building that culture where the idea of bullying girls is both unacceptable and repugnant.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#323

Post by dang »

errcorrectcode wrote: post #276

Quoted post unavailable.

Sorry, but this is such obvious gender war flamebait as to be off topic here. Please don't post like this to HN.

Please don't post regional flamebait either, regardless of which region you have a problem with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#324

Post by luckydata »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #239
thrway99 wrote: post #61

My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t. Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics. Children are a lot of work and energy. I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen. I think…

I think the obesity problem is linked to the fact that many people have to work 60 hours a week to survive and don't have the time/energy to get in shape. Capitalism has taken a large swath of people out of the dating game just due to working to survive.

Obesity is largely linked to economic incentives and urban design. The USA for example is dead set on building car dependent cities, which has an knock on effect on both the amount of free time available to leisure and the activity.

In some countries people are slimmer without making a real effort cause there's a higher percentage of people walking to work, and there's less time spent in traffic so that can be redirected to leisure and exercise.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#325

Post by fusionbro »

chrisseaton wrote: post #236
thrway99 wrote: post #61

My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t. Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics. Children are a lot of work and energy. I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen. I think…

> Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen I don't think you need these things to find a partner and have children. Just go to a maternity ward. It sounds like you think everyone there is highly motivated, physically fit, and dedicated to working on relationships. They aren't. They're just normal people with a range of human flaws…

No post body was provided.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#326

Post by tasha0663 »

einpoklum wrote: post #34
Santosh83 wrote: post #2

Effect of dwindling & non-existent male role models and more importantly, fathers.

That is either a homunculus argument, or an excuse to blame social phenomena on individual moral/ethical failings.

> an excuse to blame social phenomena on individual moral/ethical failings

The aggregate of individual moral/ethical choices manifests as social phenomena.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#327

Post by c7DJTLrn »

recuter wrote: post #292
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck to you. I'm in the same boat and it's comforting to not be alone. I've sacrificed a social and romantic life to get to this point (20 year old, fairly well paid DevOps guy). There are days that I immensely regret leaving school at 16 and terminating my youth early but financially speaking it was the best decision ever. I just push onwards, hope for life to become fun, and hope that I won't become a cautiona…

Please please please try to find good outgoing non-techy roommates that you can tolerate while you are at this age. Even better if they are good with girls. Do not live alone just because you can afford to do so. Try to spend as little as possible of your salary and regardless of the market buy a house/apartment as soon as you can. Live in the smallest room. There are plenty of excellent places in the world where you…

Appreciate the advice. It is a bit harder than it sounds though. Building a friend circle from scratch is harder than any technical challenge I've faced before. I overcame my social anxiousness for the most part but that doesn't mean I can cold approach people and build a conversation up to a friendship.

Anyway, HN is hardly the place for this kind of topic but thanks again. I'm giving it my best but it's not a piece of cake.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#328

Post by Jtsummers »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #300
Jtsummers wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where "around here" is or even what "girls got extra points even on studies where they were massively over-represented" means. Are you talking about grades? "points" towards college admissions?

At least in the US, most schools practice either explicitly or implicitly (through adjusted admissions criteria) affirmative action towards women for STEM subjects. That's the case even for subjects like Biology where the gender ratio is already balanced or tipped towards women. One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber…

> One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x higher chance of getting in. That's just basic statistics.

This is a reasonable initial assumption (candidates are equally qualified), and so there is evidence that something is happening (by examining the initial figures). But it may or may not be a bias in favor of women (that is, in this case, something like giving "points" to female applicants either explicitly or implicitly). You'd have to examine the actual applicant pool to determine what was happening other than being able to conclude that something is happening. It is also plausible that the female candidates are, as a group, more qualified than their male counterparts.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#329

Post by friedturkey »

frankbreetz wrote: post #5

>>Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality ter…

Wild to me that data showing men are facing objective decline is called a win, just because the gender gap is smaller (or speeding in the opposite direction as before, with regards to college entrance rates) due to the situation being worse for men.

Society really loves to kick them while they’re down these days.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#330

Post by wolverine876 »

thrway99 wrote: post #61

My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t. Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics. Children are a lot of work and energy. I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen. I think…

> I think the ball is firmly in the woman’s court now. Women have most of the advantages (education, societal promotion, fit in better with our institutions)

I don't think we at all can define what individuals should do based on their gender; that is sort of the point. They can be who and what they want to be.

Maybe by some theory women have most of the advantages, but the outcomes clearly indicate otherwise. Look at the successful and elite in almost any field.

Post reply on HN